More than a century after the guns fell silent, the earth of the Western Front still yields deadly remnants of World War I’s most prolific killer: artillery. Hundreds of millions of unexploded shells remain buried in the soil of Belgium and France, and they are still claiming lives today.
Specialist clearance teams in France recover roughly 900 tons of unexploded munitions each year. Farmers plowing fields or construction crews digging foundations routinely unearth rusting shells that remain volatile after a hundred years of corrosion.
The scale of the problem is staggering. During the First World War, over 1. 5 billion shells were fired, and estimates suggest that up to 30 percent failed to detonate.
That leaves a legacy of hundreds of millions of live ordnance lurking beneath farmland, towns, and forests.
Artillery was the dominant killer of the war, responsible for 70 percent of all casualties. The sheer volume of fire transformed the battlefield into an industrial slaughterhouse. At the Battle of the Somme, the seven-day preliminary bombardment alone consumed more than 1.
5 million shells.
The evolution of artillery technology made this horror possible. The French 75 mm field gun introduced a hydro-pneumatic recoil system that allowed it to fire 15 to 30 rounds per minute, far outpacing earlier guns. This weapon turned artillery from a support arm into the primary instrument of destruction.
When the war began in August 1914, Germany shocked the world with its secret super-heavy howitzers. The 420 mm “Big Bertha” fired shells weighing over 800 kilograms, obliterating Belgian fortresses that had been designed to withstand months of siege. Within days, entire defensive works crumbled.
The race to outflank each other ended at the sea, producing an unbroken line of trenches stretching 450 miles. Attacking troops faced a curtain of shellfire that could 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁, maim, or bury them alive. Soldiers learned to identify incoming rounds by their sound: the whiz-bang of German 77 mm shells gave almost no warning.
Different shell types inflicted distinct horrors. High-explosive rounds sent razor-sharp fragments scything through bodies. Shrapnel shells burst in the air, raining hundreds of lead balls onto 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 troops.
Gas shells delivered chlorine, phosgene, and mustard agent, burning lungs and skin.
Phosgene was 18 times more potent than chlorine and responsible for about 85 percent of gas deaths. Symptoms could be delayed up to 48 hours, so soldiers often did not know they had received a lethal dose until it was too late. Mustard gas caused chemical burns and blindness, designed to disable rather than 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁.
The human cost went far beyond physical wounds. Shell shock, now recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder, affected over 250,000 men. Symptoms included uncontrollable shaking, paralysis, nightmares, and hysterical blindness.
The term was coined in 1915, but by 1917 the British Army banned the diagnosis because the numbers had become alarming.
Forty percent of British casualties at the Somme were shell shocked. Treatment at the front consisted of brief rest, sleep, sedatives, and rum—not the psychiatric care we would expect today. The constant, random terror of bombardment broke minds as surely as shrapnel broke bones.
The 1916 Battle of Verdun exemplified the meat-grinder nature of artillery warfare. Over ten months, 1,400 German guns fired more than a million shells in a single day. The landscape became a moonscape of overlapping craters, and bodies could not be recovered.
Men fought among the rotting remains of their comrades.
At Third Ypres—Passchendaele—the massive bombardment destroyed the drainage systems of the low-lying Flanders fields. When rain came, the battlefield turned into a sea of mud. Soldiers, horses, and tanks drowned.
Artillery guns sank with each shot, unable to be moved forward.
By 1918, the Allies had finally learned to coordinate infantry, artillery, tanks, and aircraft in precise, sudden attacks. The creeping barrage placed a curtain of fire just ahead of advancing troops, shifting at a fixed rate. But the rigid schedule meant infantry sometimes outran the barrage or fell behind, and friendly fire casualties of 10 percent were considered acceptable.
The legacy of that firepower endures. Unexploded shells still 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 and injure people. In 2018, archaeologists found the remains of 21 German soldiers who had been buried alive when a shell exploded above their shelter.
They were still sitting on benches, exactly where they had been when the earth came down.
Chemical shells remain especially dangerous. Mustard agent can still burn skin and lungs after a century. Clearance teams treat every find with extreme caution, but accidents happen.
Farmers have been killed by shells that detonate under their plows. Hobbyists digging for relics have triggered explosions.
The sheer number of duds means the work will continue for generations. France’s Département du Déminage handles the harvest year after year, but the stockpile is so vast that the cleanup may take centuries.
Artillery shaped the First World War and every conflict since. The lessons learned in the mud and blood of the Western Front—about industrial killing, about the psychological toll of sustained bombardment, about the enduring danger of unexploded ordnance—remain relevant today.
More than a hundred years later, the guns are silent, but the earth still holds their deadly payload. The horrors of WWI artillery are not just history; they are a present and ongoing threat.
