The 26-year-old victim of the First World War

[oldironside]

Maité Roël is just 26 and she is the youngest victim of the First World War. And when she walks to meet me past the old churchyard in her village of Bovekerke, she limps, ever so slightly, on her left leg, the living ghost of all those mutilated, long-dead men whose memory the world honoured on Armistice Day earlier this month. She even holds a First World War veteran's card – "mutilée dans la guerre" – and when she shows it to the local railway ticket inspectors for reduced fare train trips, they suspect her – with awful inevitability – of stealing it from dead grandfather or great-grandfather.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-26yearold-victim-of-the-first-world-war-1824135.html

[Anarcho-Socialist]

1. In 1996 I was in Year 9 on a field trip to the area encompassing Arras and its surroundings

there were definite no-go areas sealed off where WW1-era unexploded bombs lay.

[oldironside]

2. Yes, it's surprising the amount of unexploded ordnance still there.

I remember reading a very interesting article about it showing a pile of shells and grenades turned up in one season by the plough and pointing out that around half a dozen Belgians are still killed every year by explosions like this. Even after nearly a century it's still lethal and given the percentage of shells and bombs that didn't go off (the mechanical fuses were very unreliable, even more so because a lot of skilled tool makers had volunteered for Kitchener's army) this is not going to stop tomorrow.

And that's without taking into account anything left over from WW2. German building sites tend to be nervous places when they're doing the foundations.

[Libertas1776]

3. On occasion,

they still find live ordnance from the American Civil War. Nearly 150 years may have passed, but those damn things are still volatile and have killed people. With that in consideration, you can only imagine how long those relatively more modern ordnance from WWI and WWII will last.

[oldironside]

4. A few years ago...

... I was working in a language school in Germany when they found an unexploded bomb on a building site in the city centre. It was a big one - 1000lbs. Two factions arose in the staff room, with both the Brits and Americans wishing to claim it as 'theirs', until I pointed out that it hadn't actually worked. Suddenly they both did 180 degree turns.
"Nothing to do with us."

As it turned out, it was American.