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The Abomination of Houthulst
In a forest in Belgium, not 45 kilometers from the border of Holland, stands an enormous stockpile of poison gas out in the open, rusting, and barely guarded. The stockpile grows every day. An accident here would have unimaginable consequences.
By Rob Ruggenberg
(Translated from the Dutch by Ron Rowell)
It is spring in the Houthulst woods. Birds sing in the trees, rabbits hop over the path. It's a lovely picture that doesn't go with images of spitting, suffocating, and dying soldiers.
The high trees don't stand far from the place where in the afternoon of April 22, 1915 soldiers were attacked with poison gas for the first time in history.
It was Germans who had thought up these weapons. When the greenish-yellow cloud blew away, five thousand allied soldiers lay blue and dead in their trenches and there were ten thousand disabled for life.
The trees of Houthulst conceal even more. Hidden among the budding greenery is an open space with ten concrete platforms, each surrounded by a low earthen wall.
There they lie, piled up on wooden pallets, and sometimes just lying on the ground: tens, hundreds, thousands of shells, still filled with deadly chlorine, mustard, and phosphate gas.
Eighteen thousand duds from the First World War. Three hundred thousand kilos. Sufficient for the eradication of millions of people. And every day, more is added.
Most of the gas shells are heavily rusted. Some have partly burst open. Dozens of shells are leaking. Those have been temporarily encased in a container.
We ask Commander Philippe Pille (picture right) why these things aren't stashed away safely in concrete bunkers. His answer is upsettingly simple: "We don't have any bunkers."
Legacy
Poison gas is a particularly frightful legacy of the First World War. Only Belgium and France are affected, since the Western Front lay in these countries: a ribbon of trenches from which the Germans and the Allies attacked one other over and over for four years. Altogether 1,500,000,000 shells were shot. Thirty percent did not explode.
In West Flanders around the city of Ypres, the front was turned into a muddy wasteland. "The mud was so soft that falling shells met insufficient resistance to explode. The shells went completely through the puddles like it was butter. Blup! And the greasy clay closed in above them," Pille says.
He is the head of Explosives Clearance and Destruction and a Belgian military official. The number of live shells that now-80 years after the date-are still found daily, is not declining. Quite the contrary: 72 mine removers work at it daily, twice as many as ten years ago.
Here in the area around Ypres 200,000 to 250,000 live shells rise to the surface each year. Pille euphemistically refers to 20,000 kilos of them as "problem munitions." They contain deadly gas.
All these shells come to the surface due to the dynamics of working the ground. They are ploughed up by farmers or found by construction teams. Like in the village of Harelbeke, where construction workers dug up 78 poison gas shells.
"People think that this stuff is no longer dangerous after all this time. Nothing could be further from the truth. The charge has become chemically unstable and therefore sensitive to shocks and friction. With some shells, there is only a little spring one millimeter thick that is restraining the pin. What do you think would happen if that spring were to rust through? Each year it deteriorates more."
Full article at link below.
http://www.greatwar.nl/