3 minute read
The Iron Harvest
After 100 years of official remembrance, the First World War may be fading from memory, but LUKE BOWLEY and ISABEL CALDER discover battlefields that still throw up poignant reminders of ‘the war to end all wars’.
Their stories are now told by what they have left behind, reminding us perhaps of a freezing and terrified young man who held a pocket watch with numb fingers. I n this landscape of pain and death, over time many scars have been unveiled. Local people live with knowledge of the ‘iron harvest’, tonnes of shells, bombs and bullets uncovered every year by farmers and construction workers. But it is the smaller items that are most haunting. Pocket watches are not unusual. After 100 years in the earth the metal glimmers in the mud, a trickle of chain still attached. Mint-green verdigris fogs up the cracked glass like a shield from further trauma. Their fragile hands are stopped in time. It is hard not to wonder about the secrets they hold. Were they parting gifts from wives and girlfriends, mothers and fathers? Were they passed down through the generations? Did their owners make it home? Looking at the empty farming fields today, it’s hard to understand the blood, sweat and tears they’ve witnessed. Birds scatter from the trees when mud squelches under tractor tyres. Otherwise there is stillness and quiet in these foggy acres. Yet the earth guards a story. Shells smeared with blood-red rust slowly rot away; many are still deadly a century on. Smothered in clay, battered and heavily punctured steel helmets decay. The leather from soldiers’ boots survives remarkably well, although the boots are often torn apart. Dull, grey marbles of shrapnel hide among the dirt. After rain they shine. Bursting from shells in the sky and scattering wildly in all directions, this deadly hail would claim the lives of scores of men in an average, uneventful day on the Western Front. Even fragile medicine bottles can be found, their tinted dark glass cracked from head to toe. The bent remains of rifles are pulled to the surface by ploughing. Often, their damp and rotten wood is still intact. They look like fallen branches. On the battlefields of Northern France and Flanders, agriculture is still a dominant way of life. Ploughing and the building of new roads, homes and supermarkets will bring them once more into the daylight. In these places brave men risked all. Some were rewarded with their lives, while others weren’t so lucky. The sad truth is that not one man who fought here is still alive today. And so their stories are now told by what they have left behind, reminding us perhaps of a freezing and terrified young man who held a pocket watch with numb fingers while he served his country and thought of home.
With Climate Change top of the agenda, BLANKA KUZNIROWSKA knows one thing: by felling the forest we doom ourselves.
890 square miles of forest are burned every year. That’s eleven football pitches a day. But forests such as the Amazon Rainforest are home to all kinds of species of exotic and rare animals and plants – in fact, the plants from rainforests, not just the Amazon, are used for all types of medication that can help fight diseases such as cancer. But when the demand for palm oil and roads expands, so does the scale of deforestation. At its present rate we will soon no longer have such extraordinary biodiversity. Brazilian model and businesswoman, Gisele Bundchen, says, ‘Deforestation leads to ecosystem losses that damage our livelihoods.’
The human race can no longer disregard what’s happening to our forests. Soon, my children, your children or maybe even your grandchildren will grow up in a world where they can see the mighty Orangutan only in pictures. These animals are suffering greatly because fewer trees means fewer habitats, and food sources are becoming scarce, which leads to numerous species becoming endangered since they have not adapted to conditions outside the forest.
Despite everything, opportunities surface through the burdening negatives. Deforestation has allowed most people of Brazil, Colombia and Peru to be offered jobs that provide them with a minimum wage.
