Coming Home to Nothing: Flanders Fields After the Armistice

For thousands of Belgians, 11 November 1918 was not the end of the war but the start of a struggle that lasted decades, and its casualties are still being counted today.

Originally posted November 2018; updated October 2026

Peace without a homecoming

Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, ended the fighting of the First World War. It is easy to picture the relief and optimism that must have swept Europe: families returning to their homes in formerly occupied territory, greeting loved ones, restocking the shops and getting “back to normal”, while citizens and soldiers danced in the streets to the sound of church bells.

For thousands of Flemish people returning to Flanders Fields, the reality was brutal. There were no pealing bells, no dancing and no full shop shelves, because there were no churches, no shops and no streets. There were no villages or towns. Nothing remained of the land they had known.

A battlefield without a landscape

For most of the war, Allied and German forces were locked in trench warfare along the Western Front, which ran from the North Sea to the Swiss border. Despite the efforts of both sides, it barely moved. In Flanders the front line ran from Nieuwpoort on the coast, along the once-picturesque River IJzer, past Diksmuide, around the medieval town of Ieper (Ypres) and past Mesen to the French border. The zone of destruction along it was between two and ten kilometres wide.

The land between the lines was a monstrous hell. In this long, narrow strip of West Flanders, more than half a million soldiers were killed, wounded or went missing, and tens of thousands of civilians fled for their lives. Towns, villages, farms, woods and fields were obliterated. When peace came, virtually nothing was left of the original landscape. The area became known as the Verwoeste Gewesten, the Devastated Lands. How it was restored is a remarkable story of Flemish perseverance and opportunism.

Two urgent tasks: The dead, and the ground

After the Armistice, two action plans were hastily put in place. The first was to recover, identify where possible, and bury the soldiers who had died at the front. Many had lain unburied for years, their identities lost. Others lay in temporary graves and were exhumed and reburied in permanent cemeteries.

The second was to level the ground. The British Army’s Chinese Labour Corps played a key role. Shipped from China to dig trenches and latrines and support the fighting troops, its members stayed on after 1918 to clean up the war zone and did not return to China until 1920. German prisoners of war were also put to work. Trenches, craters and shell holes were filled in, and eventually civilians were allowed back into the war zone, with a warning to expect the worst.

It was a traumatic return. One farmer found nothing recognisable of his farm and took his own life. Another man from Ieper could find no trace of his property until he came across the tap of an underground water pipe he had installed in 1914. It was all that remained.

Rebuilding from scrap

The first priority was shelter, and the ingenuity of the Flemish came to the fore. Huge dumps of wood and scrap iron lay scattered across the battlefields, and people used them to build basic huts and sheds. Other families took over abandoned Nissen huts, the prefabricated portable shelters designed by Major Peter Nissen of the Royal Engineers in 1916, of which at least 100,000 were produced during the war. The Belgian government also supplied temporary wooden huts.

Clean water was a problem. The IJzer and the two lakes that supplied Ieper were contaminated and undrinkable, so local breweries drilled deep boreholes and shared the water with residents.

Reviving the land

Next came redevelopment, not only in the war zone itself but up to ten kilometres on either side. Chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas had been used extensively in the region, killing livestock and vegetation as well as people. The Belgian Ministry of Agriculture supplied seeds and plants, and farmers from the Netherlands, particularly the province of Limburg, donated cattle, horses and even chickens. Slowly, life returned to the Devastated Lands.

The danger beneath the soil

Working the land in the early 1920s was dangerous. One estimate suggests that a quarter of the roughly one billion projectiles fired in the war failed to explode, which would mean some 250 million live shells. Farm labourers were repeatedly maimed or killed by unexploded ordnance, and it became clear that the first clean-up had been too superficial.

Opportunists appeared. For a fee, “deep diggers” would dig out a hectare of land, remove the shells and declare it clean, and some family fortunes were made this way. Scrap metal merchants also grew wealthy by collecting shells from battlefield to battlefield and selling the iron and copper. Both trades cost many their limbs or lives.

As the first crops grew and herds recovered, farm buildings could be rebuilt, often to the same design, since one architect was frequently commissioned for many farms.

Reconstruction ended in 1967. The danger did not

The official Period of Reconstruction lasted until 1967, when the final annex of Ieper’s Cloth Hall was completed. Yet the trauma is not over. Each year DOVO, the Belgian army’s bomb disposal service, still recovers well over 150 tonnes of munitions in the Westhoek alone. About one in ten of the projectiles found has toxic contents, still potent enough to kill. Locals call it the “Iron Harvest”.

Accidents and deaths still occur. Recent incidents reported in the press include:

• March 2014, Ieper. Two construction workers were killed and two injured when a shell exploded on a building site. They had uncovered it and were trying to remove it from the ground when it exploded. One man died instantly and the other later in hospital.
• 25 May 2018, Tielt. A wartime shell, probably from the First World War, exploded and killed a 38-year-old employee of an earthworks firm. It had been found during groundworks in Oostrozebeke, and he had taken it back to the company yard and apparently tried to cut it open with a grinding disc.
• April 2021, Langemark-Poelkapelle. A farming family was planting potatoes when the planting machine hit a WWI shell. The mother suffered shrapnel injuries and burns and her son inhaled smoke, but neither was in life-threatening danger.
• November 2024, Langemark. A farmer moving a bale of straw into his barn triggered the detonator of a WWI mustard gas bomb hidden inside it. The explosion badly damaged farm machinery but injured nobody, and firefighters neutralised the gas that then leaked.
• July 2025, Diksmuide. A farmer was seriously burned after picking up a shell that leaked rather than exploded. It was filled entirely with mustard gas, and his burns appeared about 72 hours after contamination.
• September 2025, Diksmuide. A 47-year-old man was found seriously injured in his garden after a shell exploded. Prosecutors said he appeared to have been handling it himself, and more shells were found in his home. It was identified as a German 17 cm mortar shell containing 15 kilograms of explosive.

The legacy shows up in other ways too. In January 2026, about 40 First World War shells, stripped of their copper, were dumped in a ditch in Zonnebeke, and in February 2026 DOVO removed 350 shells from a WWI munitions dump found during farm renovations in Wortegem-Petegem.

More than a century later, the legacy of this episode in European history is still in the ground of Flanders.

Could it happen again? In places, it already is.

In Gaza, after nearly three years of war, displaced residents have been returning wherever access allows to neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. The United Nations estimates some 61 million tonnes of debris, and the UN Mine Action Service has estimated that 10–12 per cent of the munitions fired failed to explode. Incidents involving unexploded ordnance are recorded weekly, and the UN says clearing the rubble could take between seven and 14 years.

A century on, the lesson of Flanders is the same: when the guns fall silent, the war does not end for those who come home to the ground it was fought on.

(Photos copyright of In Flanders Fields Museum)

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Denzil Walton

I created Discovering Belgium in 2011 to share the country’s hidden stories, fascinating places, and remarkable people. Through articles, photography, and audio walks, I share discoveries that reveal Belgium beyond the obvious. Hope you enjoy this site.