After four long years of war, a vast area of France was left devastated by the conflict.

This was the Zone Rouge. It seemed to be part of a past, but re-emerged in the press reports of the Great War centenary.

So what are the myths of the Red Zone?

And what are its truths?

When the Great War on the Western Front ended in November of 1918,

huge swathes of France were left devastated after four long years of war.

The French examined how affected their countryside had been from a material point of view,

how much that destruction had destroyed the landscape

where the fighting had taken place.

And they viewed that in what was called Le Billin de la Guerre,

kind of the bill of the war.

And the Billan de la Guerre was a huge poster with all kinds of statistics on it.

A lot of it to do with the dead, but it also contained some information on the material losses of the

Great War within France on that landscape. So this document stated that almost 1,700 communes across France

had been completely destroyed in the Great War.

What does this mean completely destroyed?

Now when we read the memoirs of soldiers who fought in that conflict,

they often describe the level of destruction that they see.

Ernst Junger, in Storm of Steel, talks about coming onto the landscape of the Somme,

and they realise that they're coming into an area where they'd once been a village by the stain of the ground,

the bricks and the stone of buildings that have been pulverized by artillery bombardments

have stained the soil. And that stain indicates together probably with the biggest part of rubble

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