Of those, as many as one third failed to explode in the wet clay, notorious to the men who served and died there. But six ordnance teams, operating from the nearby Steenstraat barracks, still receive 3,000 calls a year and remove hundreds of tonnes of shells, trench mortars, grenades and other weapons left over from the world's first industrial-scale war. In Zandvoorde, the farmer, a Mr Verhoest, has even helpfully sketched directions on the back of an envelope on how to find the shells in his field. The detritus of battle is part of this bleak landscape, routinely unearthed when people plough their land, plant vegetables, build extensions - or dig graves for newly found human remains in Flanders' many war cemeteries. Except in winter, when the ground is waterlogged, the shells are blown up twice a day in special pits in a field next to the Steenstraat base.
Toxic ammunition containing poisons like phosgene are x-rayed and treated separately.
CPO Baelde is a local lad from Messines, and remembers happy boyhood hours collecting shell fuses. He joined the Dovos, an all-volunteer unit, after 22 years as a navy diver. But protective gear is almost non-existent. Belgian bomb disposal and mine clearance experts operate as far afield as Cambodia, Kuwait and Kosovo. But it is on these first world war battlefields at home that the bulk of their work is done.