France fenced off roughly 1,200 square kilometres of its former World War I front after 1918 because the land was too devastated and littered with unexploded ordnance to farm. Parts around Verdun remain closed a century later, and disposal teams still lift hundreds of tonnes of wartime explosives a year

France fenced off roughly 1,200 square kilometres of its former World War I front after 1918 because the land was too devastated and littered with unexploded ordnance to farm. Parts around Verdun remain closed a century later, and disposal teams still lift hundreds of tonnes of wartime explosives a year

A century after the guns fell silent, France still can't reclaim the scarred earth where a million men died—not because cleanup is difficult, but because it may be impossible.