“Those villages were considered a casualty of the war,” Hupy says. The government moved people out of the area and created the Zone Rouge. Rather than attempting to remove all the shells and munitions in the area, the government ultimately decided on a minor forced relocation. “All of these villages were destroyed by these explosive munitions, and the area was abandoned.” When the war ended in 1918, the French government considered the time and cost of rehabilitating the land. Before the war, he says, the area of the battlefield was an agricultural landscape dotted with small villages. Any trees were smashed, and men took shelter where they could, in shell holes and in holes in the ground.” Joseph Hupy, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire who specializes in military geography, agrees with Holstein. “The ground was just completely churned up. ![]() “At the start of the battle, there were trenches, but as the months went by with shells falling all the time in many places, there weren’t any trenches at all,” Holstein says. “Millions and millions and millions of artillery shells were fired.” Even the trenches, where WWI soldiers famously took cover, were transformed by the constant shelling from both sides. “During that time, the shelling never stopped,” she says. Holstein says the conflict at Verdun was the first of the great artillery battles of the war. By 1916, French and German forces had amassed significant munitions in the area-millions of rounds of ammunition and heavy, cannon-size guns. It was not heavily forested.” That changed with the onset of war in 1914. “There was a very big garrison in Verdun, a peacetime garrison with 66,000 men, so they had to be fed. “It was farmland,” says British historian and author Christina Holstein. Before World War I, the landscape of Verdun was different. The Zone Rouge is a 42,000-acre territory that, nearly a century after the conflict, has no human residents and only allows limited access. The environmental destruction left by the battle led to the creation of the Zone Rouge-the Red Zone. The battle, which lasted 300 days and cost more than 300,000 French and German lives in 1916, was also one of the bloodiest of “The Great War.” The intense fighting and shelling near the tiny town of Verdun has permanently altered the region surrounding the Meuse River in northeastern France. CD version comes in deluxe gatefold tip-on wallet.The Battle of Verdun was the longest sustained conflict of World War I. One of the few current industrial collectives (or the only?) that follows in the tradition of the early avant-garde while expanding further into chemical ambience delivered with the neutrality of a doomed soldier's field side doctor. Creating hand-made metal percussion and crude art brut electrical conductors. The follow-up to the acclaimed and collectable Hiroshima/Nagasaki double-LP, Verdun, 1916 expands heavily into the precise combination of martial sound collage and cold mechanical noise fog, supposedly created through archival interviews with veterans, members of GOH traveled to the old battlefields for field recordings, scraping war objects along the side of the old bullet holed pill boxes and collected fragments of shrapnel, helmets, belt buckles, rations, casings etc. ![]() Members of Geography Of Hell are rumored to have relatives who fought in the hills, trenches, and bunkers where the longest battle in WWI was campaigned. The voices of survivors now departed and the vacuum of the dead.
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