Poppy growing on the old Somme battlefield in France.ДЄgainst the odds, new life did also occasionally come into being in the battle zones. Of the trenches only broken, half-obliterated links are visible.вЂќ On the brown band the indentations are so closely interlocked that they blend Woods and roads have vanished like chalk wiped from a blackboard of the villages nothing remains but gray smears Every sign of humanity has been swept away. Now there is only that sinister brownД«elt, a strip of murdered Nature. Peaceful fields and farms and villagesДЄdorned that landscape a few months ago - when there was no Battle of Verdun. вЂњImmediately east and north of Verdun there lies a broad, brown band. He describes the front line as a вЂњbrown belt, a strip of murdered NatureвЂќ: He recorded a vivid description of the destroyed landscape below him as he flew over the 1916 battlefield of Verdun. James McConnell was an American pilot who had volunteered to fight in the war and was flying with the French Escadrille Lafayette. Soldiers' accounts write of how birds, and most particularly larks, could be heard twittering high in the sky even during the fury of an artillery bombardment. Sometimes, however, the sounds of nature could be heard through the fog of battle. Living things they might see on the ground during tours of duty in front line trenches were scavenging rats, mice and lice. Little choice but to live in an underground network of holes, tunnels and trenches. Few elements of the natural world could survive except for the soldiers who had In the fighting zones the devastation caused to the landscape over a period of years while in a state of static warfare created a wasteland of churned up soil, smashed

German soldiers carrying ladders through trenches in a smashed up wood on the Ypres Salient battlefield, 1915.

Remembrance poppy fields