International Journal of Heritage Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rjhs20 Remembering the red zones: heritage-making in the more-than-human-worlds of modern conflict Matthew Leonard To cite this article: Matthew Leonard (05 Sep 2024): Remembering the red zones: heritagemaking in the more-than-human-worlds of modern conflict, International Journal of Heritage Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2024.2386699 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2024.2386699 © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published online: 05 Sep 2024. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 19 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjhs20 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2024.2386699 Remembering the red zones: heritage-making in the more-thanhuman-worlds of modern conflict Matthew Leonard School of Historical Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY The First World War created landscapes in which people and the natural world became deeply entangled through conflict in a never-ending cycle of destruction and rebirth. Soldiers renegotiated their understanding of the natural world to survive, which in turn led to empathy for its suffering. After 1918, these more-than-human worlds of war became sites of pilgrimage and remembrance, strictly human places in which nature’s warlife was not acknowledged, influencing the post-conflict heritage process to focus on the human cost of war. Nevertheless, some areas could not be salvaged and were designated as ‘zone rouge’ (red zones), places heavily destroyed and contaminated with war-waste, unfit for human beings. Today, isolated sections of the Western Front retain this status, as do many post-1918 conflict landscapes around the world, with ecologies of violence managed by people, but not controlled. This paper critically analyses the memorial landscape of Vimy Ridge in northern France, comparing its adjacent section of zone rouge with the more manicured publicly accessible ritualised space. In doing so, it suggests these forbidden places can act as memorials to the more-than-human cost of modern warfare and thereby play a pivotal role in the Authorised Heritage Discourse of remembrance as heritage practice. Received 12 April 2024 Accepted 28 July 2024 KEYWORDS Heritage; more-than-human; conflict landscapes; memory; red zones Introduction On 9 April 1917, four Canadian divisions, fighting for the first time as one cohesive unit, attacked the entrenched German positions atop Vimy Ridge, a prominent crest in Northern France. In three days, the Germans were routed. It was a stunning victory that came to define a nation. Accordingly, in December 1922 the French gifted approximately 100 hectares of Vimy Ridge to Canada, creating a site of pilgrimage visited by thousands every year to this day. In 2023, the Vimy Memorial Park was given UNESCO protected status under the Funerary and Memory Sites of the First World War (Western Front) scheduling (UNESCO 2023). Parts of the park were protected, and the remainder awarded ‘buffer zone’ status. Unmentioned is an approximately 15-hectare swathe of forest on the western edge of the site. Essentially closed off to the public since 1918, today it’s an almost untouched area of battlefield, a repository of unexploded ordnance, human remains, tunnel entrances, mine craters and trenches (see Robinson and Cave 2011, 230). It is also a recovering natural habitat, thriving despite its wartime trauma, a more-than-human world of conflict, entangled memories and legacies that speak of the brutality and supreme violence of late Great War battles, on both people and the environment. CONTACT Matthew Leonard m.leonard@bbk.ac.uk School of Historical Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, 28 Russell Square, London, UK WC18 5DQ © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. 2 M. LEONARD While it is appreciated that the ‘more-than-human’ incorporates any and all other-than-human aspects, including, but not limited to, animals and environments, this article primarily focuses on landscape and flora, comparing the Vimy site of remembrance accessible to tourists and pilgrims with the secluded forest, a place invisible in plain sight, separated from the public by only a small fence. In doing so it builds on Nixon’s (2011) notion of slow ongoing violence and theories of negative (Meskell 2002) and difficult (MacDonald 2008) heritage to propose that the Vimy forest similar areas along the Western Front (and elsewhere) could act in conjunction with traditional conflict-related places of memory, creating living memorials, more-than-human sites of remembrance, hybrid landscapes of warfare that embody modern conflict’s inherent cycle of life and death and rebirth, in the natural world as well as the human (see Amat 2015 on history memory and the cultural heritage of Great War forests). In so doing, it asks what the more-than-human worlds of conflict can contribute to the memorialisation of warfare, and what new approaches are required to negotiate this entangled post-conflict world. Conflict landscapes of memory The First World War fundamentally changed the way in which war dead were commemorated (Davidson 2014; Fussell 2000; Gough 2008; Winter 1998), bringing a new lexicon to the centre of political and cultural life (Winter 1998, 5), absorbing this new concept of national remembrance into Britain’s post-war heritage, both at home and on the former battlefields abroad. The construction of war memorials in almost every village and town in Britain, as well as by different nationalities on the former battlefields after the war, not only contributed to this language of remembrance but also reinforced the scale of losses, ensuring communities and the nation could sustain a recollection of the war’s events and the ‘sacrifices made’ (Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker 2002, 184; see also Gough 2008). There was a duty to remember the cost on a national stage, too (Harvey and Wallis 2018, 4), although this was driven by the need to address private memories of loss at scale (Moriarty 1999, 125). The creation of an Authorised Heritage Discourse (Smith 2006) began before the war ended, initially through local associations and individual efforts to process such loss, before expanding nationally so that by the early 1920s ‘the nation’s grief had been sculpted into a broadly agreeable form’ (Dyer 2009, 11) that aimed to justify the enormous losses but also provide a historical knowledge of the war, or a version of it. As Lowenthal notes, memory is ‘collectively produced and shared’ (Lowenthall 2011, 213; for collective memory see also Apfelbaum 2010; Halbwachs 1992; Radstone and Schwarz 2010; Russell 2006), and the newly memorialised landscape ensured that although this recent past may have largely taken place in a foreign country it was not in itself foreign. This reorganisation of the grieving process led to a reification of the dead, imagining them as heroes, something amplified through the thought processes of those who designed the memorials that would so transform the landscapes of post-war Britain and beyond (Black 2004, 147). Such were the losses, returning the dead home was not practical, and in 1915, the War Office banned their repatriation (Moriarty 1997, 126). The dead would remain where they lay, buried as close as possible to where they fell. A memorial often stood in for a headstone, something demonstrated by the 400,000 people that walked past the London’s Cenotaph in the three days after its unveiling in November 1920 (Gough 2000, 213). Death was elevated from the horror of modern warfare, a process of forgetting while remembering, which involved transforming the dead into symbols (Mosse 1991, 80). Initially a German initiative, the Cult of the Fallen Soldier (70–106) sought to envisage the dead as transcending life, becoming something ‘more than human’ in the process. In Germany, they were said to have been reincorporated into nature, reborn as something greater. Cemeteries often took the form of Heroes’ Groves, places at one with the natural world, and this would be carried over to the memorialisation of dead more generally as hundreds of cemeteries arose across the former Western Front (Gough 2000). INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 3 The entanglement with nature in twentieth century warfare (Breithoff 2020, 2–3) was well known by those who endured the appalling battlefield conditions (see Das 2008; Fussell 2000; Leonard 2019). The conflict’s ferocity forced men closer to the natural world, remembering their place in it, not abstract from it. This involved a proximity with landscape, blurring the boundaries between human and non-human as people ‘crawled, crept, burrowed and slithered through the sucking, clutching mire’ (Das 2008, 44–45). ‘Landscape (was) not understood in terms of maps, places and names, but geography as a process of cognition, as subjective and sensuous states of experience’ (73). Soldiers anthropomorphised the natural world, fearing it had become a sentient, vengeful, clawing creature pulling people into bottomless shell holes, cloying at the body, osmosing the skin (See Das 2008; Fussell 2000; Leonard 2019), ‘At night, crouching in a shell-hole and filling it, the mud watches, like an enormous octopus . . . for humans die of mud as they die from bullets, but more horribly’ (Quoted in Das 2008, 35). This was problematic for the post-war heritagisation of the conflict – sites of reverence and mass sacrifice could not be set amongst the muddy hell of war. The post-war years saw a boom in battlefield tourism and pilgrimage, initially subsidised by government and local organisations (Gough 2008; Lloyd 1998, 39). Many famous sites were described as ‘sacred places’ (Lloyd 1998, 34), recycled versions of their former self, inscribed with new meanings born from their destruction (Saunders 2004, 8). In the wider Commonwealth and Empire countries, visiting France and Belgium was challenging, which led these nations demanding their sacrifices be acknowledged and concretised. France and Belgium duly acquiesced, offering land to Canada and Newfoundland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the United States in perpetuity for the construction of memorials and cemeteries. Remembrance became part of the landscape (Winter 1998, 1) impressing a cultural imprint on the recent past, as has been the case following more recent conflicts (e.g. Holocaust sites of the Second World War see Beorn et al. 2009; Cole 2014; Legg 2022, burial and memorial practices in Spain after the civil war see; Encarnación 2008; Graham 2005; Renshaw 2016, and sites of genocide in the Bosnian wars of the early 1990s see; Biserko 2012). This was an uneasy process of heritagisation, rendering much of the old Western Front difficult to interpret, ‘heritage can end up being as much about remembering the past as avoiding the past in the here and now’ (MacDonald 2008, 51). Conflict landscapes are always in a state of flux (Benton 2010, 2; Breithoff 2020, 7; see also Bender 1993, 276) through what Gonzalez-Ruibal terms ‘the production of destruction’ (2008, 254), and as much of the devastated land was reclaimed as soon as possible from being a ‘desert, a zone of death, assassination and devastation (Doumer 1919, quoted in Clout 1996, 3) to something inhabitable and productive, but even today, the former battlezone ‘remains a fact in the geography of northern France’ (Flatres 1980, quoted in Clout 1996, 1). In France, places deemed too heavily contaminated with unexploded ordnance were labelled zone rouge (red zones), toxic landscapes (see Kryder-Reid and May 2024; Wollentz et al. 2020), which soon became forms of negative heritage, the type of place Meskell might describe as ‘conflictual site(s) that become the repository of negative memory in the collective imaginary’ (Meskell 2002, 558). Largely, this was due to the slow violence they embodied (Nixon 2011), refusing to conform to post-war understanding and that some things needed forgetting. Many no longer wanted to be reminded of ‘the pain the war had unleashed’ (Lloyd 1998, 105), leading to a cultural transformation of landscape as the physical scars of war were supplanted by a memorialised present more befitting pilgrimage and reverence. This new landscape became a major element of what Sharon MacDonald (2008) calls ‘Museum Europe’ and visitors soon flocked to these ‘real sites’ of war hoping to experience something from the time. Today, red zones exist all over the world, a continuing, insidious legacy of modern conflict. The more potent the weaponry, the greater the damage. Rob Nixon (2011) used the 1991 Gulf War to coin the term ‘slow violence’ to describe the effects of depleted uranium rounds on the environment and the living things that occupy it. The DMZ between North and South Korea (Kim 2016) has become a ‘weaponised post-war landscape in which landmines . . . continue to go and lie in wait’ (162). Rather than the area being returned to nature, locals see it as a new ecosystem, not one 4 M. LEONARD renewed, a place defined by its entanglement of human and non-human life and the agents of destruction that give it its lethality, weapons once deployed by people and now ‘owned’ by the hybrid world it has become (170). The Vietnam War officially ended on 30 April 1975, yet almost fifty years later many of the former battlefields are still highly contaminated. In neighbouring Laos, a country not officially involved in the conflict, yet contaminated all the same (see Breithoff forthcoming), these places have become known as bomb ecologies, ‘zones in which war profoundly shapes the ecological relations, political systems, and material conditions of living and dying’ (Zani 2018, 528). Particularly contaminated villages are known as bomb villages, places first destroyed by war and then rebuilt using war materiel; defused shells as foundation pillars, fences made of cluster munitions (529). Bombs are referred to as ‘fruits’, a definition that perfectly encapsulates the morethan-human worlds created by modern warfare (for comparisons with more recent ‘red zones’ e. g. Chernobyl see Kalmbach 2013; 9/11 see; Micieli-Voutsinas and Cavicchi 2019). Heritage involves combining the ‘tangible and intangible traces of the past to both materially and discursively remake both ourselves and the world in the present’ (Harrison 2015, 35). After 1918, Lowenthall’s (2011) ‘imagined past’ solidified and made real through the physical construction of monuments and official mourning practices, helped to create an Authorised Discourse Heritage (Smith 2006) for remembering the dead. Central to this was that these modern conflict landscapes (see Audoin-Rouzeau 1992; Clout 1996; Saunders 2004) would now become reflections of the cultural milieu (Van Alstein 2014; see also Daniels and Cosgrove 1992), socially constructed places where the horrors of war were replaced with a clean and manicured place fit for the sacrificed and those who mourned them (see Lowenthall 2011; Melling 1997; Moriarty 1997; Winter 1998). For the most part this was achieved, but not everywhere. The zone rouge didn’t fit easily into the authorised discourse, a reminder of an unacceptable past, a counterpoint to the accepted cultural tools used to create heritage (Smith 2006, 4; see also Wertsch and Rupert 1993), in this case post-war remembrance practices. As a result, it was often hidden in plain sight, forested over or fenced off (see Clout 1996; Filippucci 2020; Ford 1920), a more-than-human reminder of something deliberately forgotten. Heritage can be conceived as a ‘physical object: a piece of property, a building or a place that is able to be owned and passed on to someone else’ (Harrison 2010, 9), and as the national and cultural sites of memory grew across the former battlefields (Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker 2002, 184), they sought to embody the values and authorised discourse of the countries in question. This process inevitably involved the prioritising of pasts, emboldening and simultaneously dispossessing, and as conflict lieu de memoires (Nora 1989) were constructed across France nations staked ownership of place, impressing their own histories onto highly contested landscapes even though battlefields such as the Western Front are not single historical entities, nor fossilisations of four years of war (Saunders 2004, 7). Multiple landscapes occupied the same space (7), but as they were culturally appropriated to serve the needs of grieving nations, areas of zone rouge were considered anathema to the heritagisation of grief and had to be reclaimed or disguised (Clout 1996, 28). Reclamation and commemoration prioritised human recovery, ignoring the catastrophic effects the war had on the natural world. Colin Sterling describes how post-humanist thought recognises people as assemblages, ‘co-evolving with other life forms’ (2020, 1030), emphasising the ‘entanglement of humans and non-humans in every dimension of earthly affairs’ (1030; for more-thanhuman sociality see also Tsing 2013). Scholars studying the idea of more-than-human worlds are spread across the disciplines, not least archaeology (Ingold 2000), anthropology (Tsing 2013), philosophy (Latour 1996), heritage studies (Harrison 2015; Sterling 2020; see also Breithoff 2020) and warfare (Breithoff 2020; Das 2008; Leonard 2019), but together they are united in ‘the idea that the world comprises skilful, embodied and affective entanglements between people and nonhumans’ (Ginn 2023, 420). Christina Fredengren (2015, 125) suggests that instead of viewing heritage as a social construct we should see it as a ‘phenomenon’ crossing human and non-human worlds, yet, in the war’s immediate aftermath the more-than-human world of industrial war would neither be used as a cultural tool in the authorised heritage process nor given recognition for its suffering. Instead, nature was condemned to soften the reconfigured warzone, co-opted to landscape INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 5 memorial parks, beautify cemeteries, or simply bulldozed to facilitate a return to ‘normal’ life (See Clout 1996, 28; Filippucci 2020). Reconstructing Vimy Ridge In late 1914, the Germans occupied the heights of Vimy Ridge, an imposing plateau some 7 km in length that rises to 145 m at its peak. Found in the Pas de Calais region, approximately 14 km north of Arras, the ridge dominates the rich coal fields and farmland of the Douai Plain. To the Allies this was untenable, and the ridge and its surrounding high ground were the focus for sporadic attacks which achieved little. Two concerted attempts made during 1915 (the Second and Third Battles of the Artois) ended in disaster, costing the French over 250,000 casualties (Robinson and Cave 2011, 17–18). The fighting was strikingly violent. By 1917, the British had incorporated Vimy Ridge into their line and prepared the ground, quite literally, for a further attempt on the ridge, driving 13 long ‘subway’ tunnels ten metres beneath the surface to within striking distance of the German positions, creating secure passages from which infantry could attack. To protect these a labyrinthine system of deeper fighting tunnels was constructed creating a subterranean battlefield in which both sides attempted to outflank the other. The Canadians had joined the British during 1917 (Cave 2009, 112), and on the morning of 9 April 1917, after enormous logistical preparations and intense, prolonged artillery barrages, four Canadian infantry divisions, fighting for the first time as a single force, poured out of the tunnels into No Man’s Land and the German trenches beyond. Within three days the ridge was taken, and the Allies would hold it unchallenged for the remainder of the war. The Canadians suffered over 7,700 casualties, just under half of which (3,598) were fatal (127), but nevertheless it was a stunning victory, and one that would cement the Canadians’ reputation as an effective fighting force, as well as the fledgling country’s identity and place on the post-war world stage (for a fuller account of the 1917 battle see Cave 2009). By the end of 1917, the villages of Vimy, Souchez, Thelus and Neuville St Vaast had ceased to exist. Things were similar across the front as mechanised destruction ensured only scant remnants of human habitation remained (for comparison see Navaro et al 2021, 9; for a wider discussion see also see Kreike 2022). The landscape was transformed rendering everything unrecognisable, human-made or natural, entwining one with the other (see Figure 1). The water table didn’t function, nothing would grow. Enormous mine charges and hundreds of thousands of high explosive artillery rounds had turned the ridge inside out, consuming people and nature on an unimagined scale. Years of constant war had created a place where human beings lived in the earth, crawled in the mud, burrowed in the infected ground, surviving amongst the dead, the pollutants, the lice and the rats, ‘In what way have we sinned, that we should be treated worse than animals? Hunted from place to place. Cold, filthy and in rags . . . in the end we are destroyed like vermin’ (unnamed German soldier, Quoted in Leed 2009, 140). The pollution was staggering, ‘organic wastes; industrial debris, iron scraps and rotting flesh’ were everywhere, infecting everything with war’ (Fussell 2000, 39). The damage caused went far beyond ‘person-to-person’ destruction (see Navaro et al. 2021, 3). On Vimy Ridge, and all along the front lines, the natural world was dying. How to deal with this devastation was considered by the French before the war ended. A government circular of October 1918 asked the Genie Rural (dept responsible for agricultural services) to create new cartographies, classifying land in all the zones affected by the war into three categories: Blue – land that could be returned to cultivation or other normal use; Yellow – areas that would require considerable restoration; Red – land that was beyond repair, where the costs of attempting such would outstrip the intrinsic value of the space (See Clout 1996, 24). Much of Vimy Ridge fell into the zone rouge, a place where ‘not only had the buildings been destroyed but also the ground itself’ (Bechman 1917, quoted in Clout 1996). Traumatic destruction of landscape can act as a potential cultural tool in constructing the heritage process (see Storm and Olsson 2013), and as early as 1921, in Canada, plans were being considered for a memorial park at 6 M. LEONARD Figure 1. An aerial photograph of Vimy Ridge taken during early 1917 around a month before the Canadian attack. Much of the bottom half of this image is today part of the zone rouge (Courtesy of Phillip Robinson). Vimy. As the French intended to forest the site, it was decided instead to gift the land to Canada in perpetuity. The intended use was spelled out in the final agreement, signed on 5 December 1922: The Canadian Government pledge themselves to lay out this land into a park and to erect thereon a monument to the memory of the Canadian soldiers who died on the field of honour in France during the war 1914–18. The area is about 107 hectares . . . which the government of Canada has decided to utilize as follows − 10 hectares for the monument and approaches and 97 hectares to be planted with trees. (Hucker 2009, 101) Vimy was to become a place (perhaps a tool) of cultural heritage where modern Canada was mythically born as an independent and strong nation. Pilgrimage to Vimy would become an aspiration for most Canadians. An obligation for many. The centrepiece of the park would be a memorial designed by Canadian architect Walter Allward. Sited on Hill 145 and costing $1.5 m, it took 11 years to complete. The result was an edifice 27 m tall, built from 6,000 tonnes of Croatian limestone, sat atop an 11,000-tonne concrete foundation. Although a monument to all who served, it bears the etched names of 11,285 Canadian service personnel who died in France – but have no-known grave. It imbued Vimy with (inter) national significance and mythological power (see Figure 2). Between 1923 and the memorial’s inauguration in 1936, the battlefield was transformed again. Most of the site was cleared of munitions, although otherwise largely left alone, replete with shell holes, mine craters and fading outlines of crenulated trenches. Thousands of trees were planted to improve sightlines for the memorial, and to soften the landscape, ameliorating the grim reality of why so many names were carved into the memorial’s plinth. Many of these trees were not local species, rather, initially, along with 650 maples imported from Saskatchewan (Coombs 2016), thousands of Austrian pines were planted, chosen for their shape and quick growth. Wood was appropriated in other ways too as the crosses erected at Vimy by Canadian troops on 11 November 1918 to commemorate the Armistice were burnt, and the ashes scattered across the ridge (Coombs 2016, 99; for a wider discussion on wood in war see; McNeill 2004). The irony of planting Austrian species on land considered sacred to Canadians was lost on most. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 7 Figure 2. The Canadian National Memorial at Vimy Ridge which bears the names of Canadians who died in France during the First World War but who have no known grave (Copyright Author). Elsewhere, a span of trenches was preserved in concrete, and a section of the Grange Tunnel (one of the 13 used in the battle), uncovered in late 1926, was renovated, widened and reinforced, then equipped with electricity and opened to the public the following year. Once complete, the memorial park presented a deliberately sculpted landscape in which the more-than-human aspects were used to create an entirely human-focused place. As the thousands of trees took root, a rumour swirled in Canada that one had been planted for every soldier who fell at Vimy. It was erroneous, but still pervades to this day. Here, trees stood in for the dead (for a comparison at e.g. Verdun see Filippucci 2020, 395), coerced into the human process of remembering. Nature was conscripted, not considered. Everywhere, that is, apart from a small, approximately 15-hectare area adjacent to the preserved trenches. It would not be cleared or made accessible to the public. It too was planted with trees but otherwise left largely to its own devices, gently managed by Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) gardeners, becoming a place mostly devoid of human interaction. Here, biodiversity now thrives, although it’s managed, less it overrun into the manicured adjacent world. The dichotomy of Vimy was (and still is) perhaps at its most intense where the two parts of the memorial site meet. As pilgrims mourn amongst stone and concrete, behind the opaque, treelined barrier, the more-than-human battlefield flourishes despite its trauma. One a world of death and the past preserved in stone, the other of life and the present embodied in wood. 8 M. LEONARD Figure 3. Pilgrims visiting Vimy Ridge for the inauguration of the Canadian National Memorial in 1936. Many of the scars of war are readily apparent and young trees begin to sculpt the site (Copyright Open Source). Pilgrimage Vimy’s transformation from more-than-human battlefield to human world of reverence and sculpted memory reached a turning point in 1936, the year Allward’s memorial was inaugurated. The legacy of Vimy was by now firmly embedded in Canada’s cultural identity, and in 1928, the Canadian Legion announced a tour to Vimy for the memorial’s unveiling, expected in 1931–32. Postponed several times, not least due to the Wall Street Crash, plans were finally consolidated, and a date set. In mid-July, some 6,200 pilgrims gathered at Montreal, boarded four ocean liners and set sail for Europe (Brown and Cook 2011, 42). There is no record of any First Nation travellers, the sea-going pilgrims were all white. The docks were lined with well-wishers, and the atmosphere was party-like. To some, it recalled the fervour with which soldiers left for war in 1914. On 26th July, the pilgrims arrived at Vimy and were joined by at least 100,000 others, mostly British or French. The morning was spent walking the trenches and visiting the Grange Tunnel. Vimy veteran John Mould commented in his diary how: Huge craters, shell holes and barbed wire were there, the same as they had been left on those April days nineteen years ago. . . It is the same old clay we used to get during our trips into the trenches, and the continuous walking in and out of the shell holes and over barbed wire made the women rather tired. I heard one woman say: “No wonder they called it No Man’s Land, I can understand it now. (Mould Quoted in Coombs 2016, 102) Aerial photos from the inauguration show hundreds of young trees beginning to sculpt the park (see Figure 3), and around the preserved trenches, adjacent to the nascent forest, people stick to the allotted pathways, perhaps made aware of the hidden dangers. The atmosphere was jovial, celebratory even, but to those who had experienced the battle, feelings were more personal. The ridge still bore the scars of war, as did many former soldiers on the pilgrimage. It could still be sensed, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 9 corporeally recalled. The 19 years since the battle hadn’t been enough to erode its memories, soften the landscape or dull the recollections of living as one with it. The Canadian Veteran recorded that during the ceremony, The mists of time momentarily (lifted), and once again (Veterans stood) in the jumping off trenches waiting for the zero hour . . . Even the soft splash of snow and rain on steel helmets (could) be heard – then that crashing crescendo of a tornado of bursting shells, with the obligation of a thousand machine guns the attack began. (Quoted in Brown and Cook 2011, 49) It recalled William Longstaff’s The Ghosts of Vimy Ridge (1931), a haunting oil painting depicting the dead of Vimy rising from the mud to return to camp, guided by the memorial’s illuminations. A central tenet of the pilgrimage was peace. In 1936, war clouds were again gathering, and it was hoped such a highly publicised reverential journey to Vimy might help fend off another conflict. Regardless, during the Second World War the Germans once again occupied Vimy Ridge, although this time not in trenches and tunnels. An honour guard protected the memorial and it remained undamaged. The 1936 pilgrimage became a defining moment in the journey of Vimy Ridge from a more-than-human battlefield to a solely human site of memory, a First World War mnemonic ingrained into the Canadian psyche. Cultural heritage and national identity So integral is Vimy to Canadian personhood that until May 2023 an image of the monument appeared in the national passport. Its removal prompted the Vimy Foundation to state, The images we choose to convey Canadian stories internationally are important, and the Vimy Memorial is a visual touchstone which highlights unity, achievement, and leadership. The First World War victory at Vimy Ridge in April 1917, was a milestone where Canada came of age and was recognised on the world stage and acts as a symbol, to this day, of this rich legacy. (Vimy Foundation 2024) Despite its undoubted significance to Canada, as the image’s removal shows, neither landscapes nor heritagisation are ever static. Vimy Ridge is a complex and dynamic conflict landscape in which modern war and its consequences for humans and non-humans are richly entangled, while simultaneously remembered and forgotten. In reverence to the dead, it is immaculate; the memorial glistens, overlooking the shell-cratered battlefield mown daily by an army of sheep. The cemeteries are perfectly tended, the trees evenly pruned. The recently built Visitor Education Centre has floorto-ceiling windows offering a view of the preserved trenches and mine craters, grounding the visitor in their perceived surroundings. Vimy is about remembering, but there are rules to remembrance. Those lost in war are envisaged as they were in life, not death. The authorised heritage discourse requires cleanliness, order and a past set in stone, but in doing so it elides the devastating horror and violence on which those memories are built. Across the dividing fence, in Vimy’s forgotten forest, the ongoing legacies of modern conflict are very real – a past that will not go away and a future that threatens the present, standing in defiance against the now manicured lieux de memoires (see Nora 1989). It is a repository of unpalatability (see Saunders 2010, 48) replete with human remains, vast mine charges lying dormant beneath the surface, thousands of rusting, unexploded artillery rounds and innumerable decaying poison gas shells. It covers the deep and complex tunnel systems, the burrows where human beings lived and died (See Das 2008; Fussell 2000; Leonard 2019), while nature’s apparent recovery shrouds everything in a veneer of peace and calm. Whatever the appearance, here, this hidden war-waste continues its slow, violent afterlife (See e. g. Nixon 2007, 2011), embodying the complexities of modern conflict landscapes. It’s dangerous and inaccessible, kept in check by humans, but not controllable. It’s both visible and invisible to all who visit. Former Head Guide at Vimy Ridge, Joshua Dauphinee (pers. comm. May 2023), explained to me how many visitors would ask what lay across the park’s boundaries, but seemed unwilling to press further when told. Perhaps not really wanting to know. Even the guides are only 10 M. LEONARD taught in vague terms. It’s as though the forest is lying in ambush, waiting not to destroy, although it’s perfectly capable of doing so, but to force us to remember the dark, hidden costs of war, of life and death in the mud, metal and what’s left of the natural world. The things we want to forget when we try to remember. Discussion Modern conflict landscapes have only existed since 1914. They are places created through an industrialised mode of destruction beyond the ability of its creators to control (see GonzalezRuibal 2008), so cannot be understood solely in human terms. More-than-human worlds are created from, into and because of this never-ending maelstrom of destruction and rebirth, becoming, and seemingly remaining, highly contested spaces. Nevertheless, as the heritage process picks and chooses our collective pasts, when it comes to memorialisation, we consistently override the natural with the cultural. It is not that damage to the natural world is not admitted, at Vimy Ridge the shell holes, craters and trenches are there for all to see, but this is portrayed as the setting for human tragedy, not tragedy itself. The memorial park, at least the publicly accessible parts of it, is highly effective at transporting the present back to an imagined past. It is the site of a hugely significant battle only just out of living memory, a place where a nation was born, and many died to ensure it happened. The dead are assembled in pristine cemeteries, forests of trees create sightlines as well as add to the overall atmosphere, as do the knowledgeable guides that wander the site helping people better understand what they see. But it is a place in our imagination (see Gough 2004), a cultural construct, as are all preserved battlefields, which often struggle for authenticity. In some places along the old frontlines, such as at the Douaumont Ossuary near Verdun, the unsensitised violence of Great War battles is deliberately visceral. Here the remains of more than 130,000 soldiers are visible through small viewing windows, reminding visitors as to what lies beneath the many headstones and still-shattered landscape across Verdun and the wider Western Front. At the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Peronne, the ‘moisson de fer’ (iron harvest) display demonstrates the volume of rusted (sometimes still-lethal) metal dug up each year by farmers, highlighting the extent of the industrialised destruction. Nevertheless, these examples are few and far between. Even the areas of zone rouge that still exist along the Western Front are not entirely authentic representations of the past, all have been managed to some extent; forested, replanted, cultivated, contained. Yet, red zones such as the Vimy forest are ‘armed and dangerous landscapes’ (Nixon 2007, 169) replete with the power and agency to remind us that an anthropocentric view of war is now flawed. In Vimy’s secluded forest modern war’s slow violence is still intense as ageing gas shells leech toxins into the earth, mine charges slowly decay, and millions of artillery shells lie quietly hidden in ambush, waiting to fulfil their purpose. This paper posits that red zones can be used in conjunction with more traditional remembrance practices and that these more-than-human conflict worlds can contribute to the memorialisation of warfare and the way we understand its complex legacies, which go far beyond just the human. Despite the fear they hold for us, red zones still encapsulate the more-than-human aspects of modern conflict landscapes, something lost from battlefields as they are cleared and brought back into human use, and so should be re-considered as part of the authorised discourse. The cultural tools we have employed in the West to remember recent wars have done little to affect the way they are fought. In January 2023, Deputy Secretary-General at the United Nations, Amina Mohammed observed that people’s, Sense of safety and security is at an all-time low. . . Six out of seven worldwide are plagued by feelings of insecurity, the world is facing the highest number of violent conflicts since WW2 and 2 billion people (a quarter of humanity) live in places affected by conflict. (United Nations 2023) INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 11 President Zelensky of Ukraine declared recently that he was fighting ‘World War One with drones’ (Sixty Minutes 2023). On 6 June 2023, the huge Kakhovka dam in Ukraine was destroyed, deluging water into the Dnipro River. It has been decried an ‘ecocide’, a crime against the environment. It also demonstrated the more-than-human character of modern war. The raging floodwaters swept away masses of mines, artillery shells, military equipment, flora, fauna and human beings, creating further lethal conflict landscapes far from the original ‘battlefield’. The floods also disgorged human remains from the Second World War, likely from the Battle of the Dnipro fought between the Germans and the Russians in 1943 (The Guardian Newspaper 2023). Skeletons littered the mudflats, one skull replete with a German helmet. Much of the area is now a red zone, as well as an active warzone. Conclusions This article has demonstrated that the way modern warfare is remembered, heritagised and built into our Authorised Heritage Discourse has done little to either prevent further conflict or acknowledge how industrialised war refuses to distinguish between human and nonhuman matter. The need to exhume the memory of those who die on modern battlefields from the wastelands of their demise has deliberately overshadowed the circumstances of their war-lives and deaths, creating places in the imagination free of the muddy hell of war (see Gough 2004). Modern conflict landscapes are more-than-human worlds, ‘warfare ecologies’ in which ‘biophysical and socioeconomic systems’ are intertwined (Machlis and Hanson 2008, 729) and remain so once the fighting stops, despite our attempts to deny them agency. Our reticence to accept this conscripts the natural world into our remembrance practices, when it should be an ally, forcing it to soften traumatised landscape, beautify cemeteries and amplify the power of memorials. Yet red zones around the world embody the power that modern conflict landscapes have to retaliate, to remind us that warfare creates new entanglements between the human and the non-human, complex interactions in which people have to renegotiate their understanding of the world around them and the effect they have on it. How to incorporate these places into heritage discourse is an undoubted challenge, as demonstrated by the recent UNESCO scheduling of sites on the Western Front (UNESCO 2023). Not a single red zone was given protected status, although some, including the Vimy forest, were incorporated into ‘buffer zones’, places given a measure of protection to better protect those officially scheduled. Yet again, these more-than-human worlds, of a conflict over a century passed, have been denied agency, interpreted as natural landscapes and not cultural, ignoring a distinction long since dismissed by heritage scholars (i.e. see Harrison 2010; West and Ndlovu 2010) and by association the ability to teach us lessons on the entangled dynamics of modern war. Nevertheless, the Vimy memorial park could benefit from including more about the ‘contents’ of the secluded forest in the visitor experience, but it can never be somatically experienced by the public without intense landscape alterations and inevitable political and social conflict, which would defeat the purpose of doing so. Perhaps technology can be utilised, in the form of virtual reality, live video feeds, 3D-mapping and LiDAR techniques. However it’s achieved, rather than fear the red zones, we should embrace their otherness, their stickiness, their dangerous and threatening character because these are the very cultural tools that can help nudge the heritagisation of modern warfare out of the past and into the future, where it belongs. In a world still full of war, yet also becoming more conscious of anthropogenic hegemony, a better understanding of how humans and the natural world become entangled in and by modern conflict, and destroyed the same in the most violent of ways, may yet help to prevent its onset, or at least make us pause for breath. 12 M. LEONARD Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the help of Dr Esther Breithoff in this research and for the guidance provided for this article. I would also like to thank Veterans Affairs Canada for allowing me access to the Vimy forest, and in particular John Desrosiers and Ocel Dauphinais-Matheson for their continuing support. I’m also grateful for the help and support of Malcolm Caiger of the Durand Group for generously donating his time to help with data collection and research support. I would also like to thank the two reviewers of this article for their guidance and advice. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Funding This work was carried out as part of a postdoctoral position on the Ecologies of Violence: heritage and conflict in more-than-human worlds project, funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship Renewal (MR/X014991/1) and led by PI Dr Esther Breithoff (Birkbeck, University of London) and supported by Co-PI Dr Layla Renshaw (Kingston University). 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