Who cleaned up after the war?

[Amitmis]

Hi guys,

I was wondering: after the war was over, did anyone 'clean up'? Took down the trenches, take out the doors and the pipes from the ground, tear out the wooden planks and improvised toilets? Did anyone collect the empty shells and bullet casings from the ground?

I know the bodies of dead soldiers were searched and buried, but what about the rest of the mess, everything left behind after years of war? Did anyone tend to that? And if not - are the trenches still there? Were they somehow naturally or manually buried in the ground?

 

Thanks a lot in advance!

Amit.

[michaeldr]

The Labour Corps continued working on the battlefields for two years after the armistice. Their work included battlefield clearance, salvage, burial of the dead and repairing infrastructure, such as roads, etc, etc.

See pages 154 to 162 of Starling & Lee's book "No Labour, No Battle"

Edited 23 December , 2022 by michaeldr

[WhiteStarLine]

2 hours ago, Amitmis said:

after the war was over, did anyone 'clean up'?

In fact, it started as soon as it was safe to do so - well before the war ended.  A large swathe of this land was agricultural and the farming continued up to a few kilometres from the front line.  As the front shifted, farming started but the villages took many years to rebuild.  Plenty of photos of villagers living in dugouts and Nissen Huts while farming.

When the Hindenburg Line was breached in 1918 and the Australian Corps was withdrawn, my grandfather noted that he couldn't recognise some of the ground they had fought so hard over just a few months ago: "Everything had been cleaned and straightened up so thoroughly."

[stevenbecker]

Mate,

A lot of the AIF spent a lot of time in France clearing up.

This came in a few forms like battlefield clear up of stores, filling in trenches and such, but also burial parties collecting and burying all those bodies.

Grouping them in cemeteries or centralizing those burials.

Some of your men stayed until 1921 doing all those jobs

S.B

[chaz]

as has been said, the land was agricultural before, If you get a chance to look at the fields, you will see many are larger than in the UK. Hedges gone, many individual farmers dead so their land taken over by others. Food production was a necessity so land had to be reclaimed ASAP.

If you go to Thiepval area you get to see the trenches cut into the land on the Ancre side at certain times of the year, the infill soil is a different colour. Also in the area, Mill Road Cemetery has most of its headstones laying down as the trench system under the area make the ground unstable. 

Obviously, from views in books and postcards most trees were killed off or used so any wood, doors, window frames, carts etc would have been salvaged to build temporary shelters and fires to keep warm, especially as the war ended in November so the following season was the coldest of the year.

it would have been too time and labour consuming to pick up bullet cases but the larger shell cases would have been collected right up to the armistice as they would have been refilled just in case.  Many of the munitions in the ground are still coming to the surface today, some live some spent, its reckoned that 500 years may be the time schedule for the majority to finally come to the surface.

[kenf48]

7 hours ago, Amitmis said:

I was wondering: after the war was over, did anyone 'clean up'?

Over 100 years later soldiers in Belgium and France are still being killed by WW1 munitions, bodies of the fallen are still being discovered (sometimes controversially) and France has the "Zone Rouge" still considered too dangerous to enter and the environmental impact so great it will probably never be habitable or productive again.

https://www.messynessychic.com/2015/05/26/the-real-no-go-zone-of-france-a-forbidden-no-mans-land-poisoned-by-war/

There is still much to be seen on the battlefields, albeit over the last few years it seems to have become a more proscribed and 'touristy' experience than just twenty years ago. As Chaz notes above the 'iron harvest' is still piled up on the edges of the fields of France.

[ianjonesncl]

The Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) were part of the effort of clearing the battlefields and begining reconstruction. 

At the end of the war there were over 120,000 men of the CLC in France, of which 90,000 were working for the British. They continued on after the Armistice being involved with the cleaning up. By October 1919 54,000 remained, the last of the Chinese returning home in September 1920.

 

[Uncle George]

Captain Mainwaring! He didn’t qualify for any medals, but after the Armistice he served in the army of occupation As he explained, “somebody had to clear up the mess!”

[depaor01]

I'd like to reemphasise the role of the Chinese Labour Corps. I've visited the Chinese Noyelles Sur Mer cemetery and the postwar dates on the headstones tell their story. Disease and consequences of dealing with undetonated munitions took their toll on a pretty much uninvolved nation in the war

Dave

[303man]

This book give quite some detail albeit expensive.

After the Ruins:

Restoring the Countryside of Northern France After the Great War (History) Hardcover – Illustrated, 1 Sept. 1996 by Hugh Clout

[chaz]

a precis of the book

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/view/17775/22221

[Amitmis]

Thank you, everybody! Once again you guys come through to help me with my research for my novel (which is almost finished, by the way!).

[Don Regiano]

18 hours ago, 303man said:

This book give quite some detail albeit expensive.

Yes the book can be quite expensive.  I guess its target readership was the academic world from looking at it.  I was lucky and picked up a copy a couple of years ago for £3. 

It's interesting to see how our place on the Somme fits into it.  The oldest part of the house was rebuilt in the 1920s.  I remember when we were buying it the surveyor said that it was typical of the period in many ways.  In particular, the lintels over the doors and windows were made of metal rather than wood.  Wood was still scarce at the time and, although metal was expensive, the building was being financed from reparations.

[MaureenE]

On 24/12/2022 at 05:09, 303man said:

This book give quite some detail albeit expensive.

After the Ruins:

Restoring the Countryside of Northern France After the Great War (History) Hardcover – Illustrated, 1 Sept. 1996 by Hugh Clout

After the Ruins is available on the Internet Archive (Archive.org) as a "Book to Borrow" .  Download is possible I believe for the 14 day option.

https://archive.org/details/afterruinsrestor0000clou/mode/2up

Happy Christmas to all.

Maureen