I'm Dylan Thoris and this is Atlas Obsgira.

Usually we call this show a celebration of the world's hidden wonders, but today it's

not quite that.

We're going to explore a stretch of France with a violent history, a place that no one

who experienced it is alive to remember, but where the land itself bears the scars.

The area is known collectively as the Zone Rouge, or Red Zone.

It's filled with World War I battlefields that witnessed unimaginable destruction, destruction

so bad that in some cases, humans have never been allowed to return.

The Zone Rouge, after this.

When World War I ended, French authorities went to the north-eastern corner of the country,

and bit by bit they surveyed a massive chunk of land for damage.

The war had decimated more than 1200 square kilometers, or 460 square miles of land.

That's a region bigger than Paris, Kyoto, or Chicago.

They divided it into three colors, and the most badly damaged was Colored Red, so that's

the Zone Rouge.

Tom Iset is a journalist who's travelled through the Zone Rouge, and he's seen first-hand

what was left behind by some of the biggest, most devastating battles of World War I.

Included in the Zone Rouge were the battlefields of Passiondale, Conbray, the Somme, the Aine,

the Argonne, Verdun, and Sunmi Hell, so all of the significant battlefields of the First

World War came within the Zone Rouge.

At Verdun alone, roughly 300,000 people were killed during a ten-month battle, the longest

of the war, and over the course of the entire war, more than a million soldiers lost their

...