209 14 15 16 17 18 The GreatWar Missing No Longer By John Goheen The Great War’s deadly legacy casts its long shadow well into the 21st century. Even after more than a hundred years, reminders of the conflict continue to be discovered in those areas of France and Belgium that once marked the battlefields of the former Western Front. With each spring thaw, the fields yield dark secrets. An Iron Harvest of old rifles, grenades, jagged scraps of exploded shells, and a seemingly endless number of unexploded shells of every variety come to the surface. About 1.5 billion shells were fired along the Western Front between 1914 and 1918; about 25 percent of them did not explode. In more recent decades, clearing of these old munitions in preparation of new road works and land development unearth further and far more chilling reminders of the Great War. The bodies of the missing are still discovered at a rate of one per week; with more than one half million British Empire soldiers, including almost 20,000 Canadians, still missing from the Great War these regular discoveries are not surprising. In July 2017, in preparation for a construction project, near Lens, France a munitions clearance team was brought into an area to remove unexploded ordinance. This is a necessary part of the modern site preparation process in these former
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