Europe Is Digging Up Its Own Graves

I spent a fair few years of my working life around ordnance. Not defusing it, that was somebody else’s specialism- but standing near enough to it, briefed on it, trained to respect the particular silence a live shell demands. You learn quickly in that line of work that the past doesn’t stay buried just because you’ve stopped looking at it. It waits. It corrodes. And every so often, given the right conditions, it lets you know it’s still there.

Which is why this summer’s news out of Europe landed somewhere personal for me, even sat here in a cave in rural Spain with the sort of view that makes you forget continents can still hurt each other.

The wildfires tearing through France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands haven’t just been burning trees and evacuating villages. They’ve been waking the dead. Literally, in places. Bomb disposal units have been called out alongside firefighters because the ground itself has started detonating: shells and mines from the First and Second World Wars, some buried since before my grandparents were born, cooking off in the heat like the continent’s own memory finally reaching boiling point. Naval mines have surfaced in the Danube as the river fell to historic lows. A WWII bomb turned up at the base of a bridge in Budapest. Seventy-five shells were pulled from scorched earth near Bordeaux, several of which had already gone off, one punching clean through the wall of an evacuated house.

A researcher at SOAS put it in a way I haven’t been able to shake since I read it: climate change is doing the work of unburying and reactivating what was previously stable. I’ve read a lot of dry academic lines in my time. That one has teeth.

Here’s the bit that gets me, though, and it’s the bit nobody in the official statements seems keen to sit with. This isn’t really a story about munitions. It’s a story about what happens when a continent spends eighty years telling itself a comfortable lie, namely that the wars are over, filed, closed, safely fossilised under decades of topsoil and national mythology… and then discovers the ground was never actually listening to the narrative. Europe built car parks and cycle paths and nature reserves over its own killing fields and called that closure. Turns out closure was just a very patient kind of denial, waiting for the right heatwave.

I think about that a lot, off-grid as I am, a long way from the country that trained me to think in terms of threat and containment. Out here you learn that nature doesn’t do denial. It doesn’t do polite forgetting. The land remembers everything you put into it, whether that’s a WWII shell or a wrong turn in how you’ve farmed a hillside, and eventually, on its own schedule, it hands the bill back. We like to imagine ourselves as separate from the ground we stand on. The ground disagrees.

And there’s a wider, uglier point buried in here too, if you’ll forgive the phrase. Europe has spent this century congratulating itself on having “moved on” from its wars. Museums, memorials, solemn anniversaries, the whole respectable apparatus of remembrance that lets a continent feel it has done its grieving properly and can now get on with the business of prosperity. But actual, physical remembrance, the unglamorous kind, the kind that involves knowing where every shell and mine actually is and dealing with it, has been chronically underfunded and quietly deprioritised for decades. The mayor of one French commune said, almost sheepishly, that his municipality had no record the munitions near Bordeaux were even there. No record. Not “we knew and managed the risk.” No record at all.

That’s not a wildfire problem. That’s an institutional one. It’s what happens when the unglamorous, unphotogenic work of actually clearing up after a war loses out, year after year, to the better-funded work of commemorating it. We are, it turns out, considerably better at building monuments to our violence than we are at finishing the job of cleaning it up.

Now climate change has arrived to do the accounting nobody else wanted to do. It’s not sentimental about it either. It doesn’t care about VE Day speeches or the tone of a memorial service. It just applies heat and pressure until whatever’s underneath gives way, and lets the consequences fall wherever they fall, on a firefighter, on an evacuated house, on a bridge full of Friday traffic in Budapest.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion for you here, and I’m not going to manufacture one just to give this piece a bow to tie. Some situations don’t resolve themselves in the reading. What I’ll say is this. Every one of us is carrying buried ordnance of some description, the unresolved thing we’ve told ourselves is dealt with because we haven’t looked at it in a while. Old wars, old wounds, old versions of ourselves we thought were safely under the topsoil. The ground doesn’t forget just because we’ve stopped checking on it. And when the conditions change, when the heat rises high enough, for a country or for a person, it has an uncomfortable habit of telling you exactly what it’s been holding onto all along.

Europe’s finding that out one forest at a time. I suspect most of us will find it out our own way eventually too.

Until Next Time