The Iron Harvest

The so called "iron harvest" continues to amaze and appal in equal measure. The visitor to the Western Front has enough on his or her plate just getting their heads around the body count without contemplating the idea that this dreadful war might still be taking victims today.
A battlefield trip to the Somme with journalists from papers such as the Telegraph and Mirror led to a chance meeting with farmer Claude Samain, whose fields regularly yield piles of rusting munitions a hundred years on. In 1916, his fields were crisscrossed by a maze of communication trenches, filled with the flower of North country menfolk. Lads from Leeds and boys from Barnsley would have awaited their fate out on Claude's land. The ill fated Accrington Pals too. These were Kitchener's volunteers, who joined up in the breathless excitement of the late summer of 1914. They had trained hard, and were desperate to impress. This was their town's chance to make a mark. The Accrington Pals would become famous for the role they would play in the great breakthrough, they hoped. Tragically, they have become synonymous with the blood letting of July 1st, 1916. Accrington is forever associated with a strangely named football team and the fact that out of 700 men who went over the top on that sunny morning, 585 of them were dead or wounded just minutes later. They were, as a witness said, "mown down like meadow grass".
Claude's land is peaceful now. He showed us rusted heaps of metal, plied up against the brick wall of a barn. The weight and sharp edges of the shrapnel makes you shudder - what these red hot pieces of flying metal could do to a human body doesn't bear thinking about for too long. Venomous coils of barbed wire, spent cartridges, shell fuzes and bent rifle barrels had all been collected by Claude over the past few months. And around the corner, the dangerous stuff. Unexploded shells, some no doubt containing poison gas, stood to attention in neat rows waiting for the army truck to arrive. There didn't appear to be any rush.
Claude and his fellow farmers can be forgiven for being a little blasé about it all. He recalled his time as a child in these fields, exploring a nearby copse which had been used a medical post. He would chase around, hunting amongst the shredded pieces of tarpaulin for treasures in a place where  wounded men, some screaming, some at the very point of death, would have been carried in by sweating stretcher bearers. Suffering on an unimaginable scale has always formed the backdrop to his life in this quiet, rural corner of France.

 

STA Neil - kia July 1st 1916

Leeds Pals