France’s Zone Rouge – A Forbidden No Man’s Land Poisoned by War (2015)

I used to live in the area of the Battle of the Somme. Red zones are not common, nearly all the land of the former battlefield is now cultivated. In fact, after the war, the red zones were quite extensive, but there was an intense lobbying to reopen these lands to agriculture. In the 20ies, a farmer detonated an unexploded ammunition was not an uncommon occurrence. Nowadays, this is a really rare event, I think there was a case in…

In my family there's a story about some relatives who lived in a village near Ypres. Their living room had a big iron stove. When the Germans invaded they they hid some jewelry in a hole under that stove, and fled like everybody else. After the war they returned to the village, wanting to retrieve the jewels. Not only were they unable to locate the stove, or the house. They were unable to locate where the street had been.

"...in the land of Mordor, where the Shadows lie" Tolkien's War - http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/11/tolkiens-w...