In France’s Somme valley last week, it was a second harvest time. Fields were in flower with what looked like turnips, and everywhere there were also giant piles of sugar beet, already harvested and awaiting transport. These are what are known as “catch” crops, which can be sown and reaped quickly between the main products of this rich farmland, typically wheat.
But there and in the Flanders region of Belgium, an hour’s drive to the north, another kind of crop continues to sprout annually, spring and autumn. The “iron harvest” is the ongoing yield of first World War weaponry still excavated by farmers, sometimes fatally, 111 years after the first of it was fired.
Explosions are not as frequent as they used to be, for example as recently as 2003, when a farmer sowing a crop near Ypres set off a trench mortar that destroyed his seed drill and badly damaged the tractor. The man himself was unhurt (perhaps because he had improvised armour plating behind his seat as it’s said many farmers do).
But 1.5 million shells were fired on the Western Front in WWI, most of them in densely concentrated areas like the Ypres Salient.
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In Flanders alone, 200 tonnes a year are still uncovered, and it may take centuries for some areas to be completely cleansed. In an otherwise fertile part of the Somme, our tour guide pointed out a forest plantation in the distance, something that would not exist except that the land is designated zone rouge (“red zone”), written off for agriculture or habitation.
Then there is the even grimmer harvest of human remains lost in the war, which continue to surface wherever soil is disturbed. Even when the conflict was at its height, circa 1917, the English poet Edmund Blunden described how, in the trenches, bones stuck out everywhere and “skulls appeared like mushrooms”.
Soldiers quickly became inured to such sights, he wrote, the horrors of the present being too overwhelming to worry about the past. Arriving at the front in 1915, Blunden learned to think of anything before that as distant history. Dating old shell-holes, or the skeleton of a German officer, he would attribute them to a battle from “ancient days – perhaps in 1914”.
But in 2025, the earth is still giving up its dead. Despite systematic searches of battle sites after both world wars, the Commonwealth Graves Commission investigates 150 new discoveries every year, many of them in Northern France and Flanders.
The fuss that follows such finds can be a nuisance for farmers: it’s rumoured that they sometimes turn a blind eye and plough on. Even so, body parts are still being found, exhumed, and if possible identified, prior to reburial in the official war cemeteries, of which there are hundreds in France and Belgium alone.
There, the keynote is uniformity: the same headstones, side by side in straight lines, with names, regiments, and date of death if known; or, if remains cannot be identified, with the inscription “A soldier known to God”.
The ongoing discovery of bodies is reflected by such memorials at the great arch at Thiepval. Designed by Edwin Lutyens and completed in 1932, it holds the carefully etched names of more than 72,000 men killed on the Somme, whose bodies have not been located.
But about 1,000 of those originally listed have since had remains discovered and reburied in GWGC cemeteries. As they gain a gravestone, their names are excised from the monument, leaving small gaps in the still-vast ranks of the lost.
Amid the annual excavations of farming, some areas remain permanently ploughed by the violence of the first World War. ‘Bombturbation’ is the ungainly word to describe land pockmarked by shell-holes or mines. Trenches too, now long grassed over unless preserved in the official tourist sites, have left scars on the landscape.
At the Newfoundland War Memorial park, you can see both features: the Allied and German trenches still facing each other over an intimate stretch of no man’s land, and the series of hollows left behind by shells as gunners homed in.
Both have been partly reclaimed by nature, or at least by grass. Speaking of mushrooms, I was struck by the proliferation of tiny ones – some hallucinogenic, I suspect - among the trenches. But even here, where school tours are now a daily feature, there are areas still off-limits, with red signs warning: “No entry. Undetonated explosives.”
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One of the finest memorials on the Somme is the round tower at the Ireland Peace Park in Messines, erected in the late 1990s. The decision to recreate one of the relics of early Christian Ireland was a compromise to unite the two traditions for which Irish soldiers fought on the Somme.
This too is surrounded by rich agricultural land. But tour guides sometimes introduce a sobering note. The Ireland park looks across the fields towards a place called Bethlehem Farm, where seeds of another war may have been sown. Among the German soldiers who were billeted there in 1914-15 – suffering heavy losses – was a 25-year-old corporal named Adolf Hitler.
