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Comment by maxbond | Hacker News Reader

I've heard this is still true in France [1]. I wouldn't be surprised if it was still true in Italy as well. And England, Germany, all over the place really.

Photos of truly massive piles of spent artillery shell casings helped this click for me [2]. Even if the artillery detonates 99% of the time, we're still talking about hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of unexploded shells.

People will be stumbling into unexploded butterfly mines and cluster munitions in Ukraine for generations.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNIBE64CAgs

[2] https://64.media.tumblr.com/37a01168a1c386fa1657ae35ce0d0508...

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In 2014 in Belgium there were two casualties.[1] I still have family in that region. When I was a child, one of things I was taught was to never ever touch anything rusty / iron found in the fields close by when we visited them.

Seeing small stacks of rusted ordnance neatly at the entrances of fields is a common sight. Farmers dig them up each year, and put them aside. Bomb disposal does regular rounds.

You'd drive through the region, and the most noticeable remnant of the Great War are the graveyards. However, the War itself is still very much there, just a few odd centimeters buried in the clay soil.

[1] https://www.france24.com/en/20140319-wwi-shell-kills-two-nea...

I grew up near Auschwitz and there's a completely unremarkable field not far from the site of the camp, surrounded by fields and forest, there's a small gravestone near one of the trees and it just reads "on this site, remains of approximately 100k people are buried, please be respectful". Local farmers finding "bits" of human remains is a very common thing in the area unfortunately.

Just wanted to add to the point that the history is all around us, it's not neatly cordoned off and put in museums.

There's still a lot of it in the ground, and the regular digging up of shells and other war metal is nicknamed the iron harvest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest

Choice quote "The French Département du Déminage (Department of Mine Clearance) recovers about 900 tons of unexploded munitions every year."

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