Ypres resident and World War 1 historian Charlotte Descamps gave a lecture at the University of Otago in Dunedin yesterday, about the everyday reminders of some of the most grisly battles in history.
She lives on a 1745 farm, re-built in 1922 by her husband's great-grandparents, after the Flanders Fields were left a muddy wreck and the Belgian government had to entice people back to the wasteland from France, where they had led s refugees during the war.
Bodies and live ammunition were piled in muddy craters and covered over by repatriated farmers, who spent years living in makeshift barracks as they levelled and developed the land around them.
Mrs Descamps, like so many in the area, regularly discovers battle relics, including live mortar bombs, toxic gas shells, 18-pound British shrapnel pieces and bones.
"What was buried is now rising up again and WW1 is still part of our lives, almost 100 years later," she said.
Each year, between 20 and 30 live shells surfaced on her 16ha farm and nationwide up to 200 tonnes of war ammunition was collected.
Between 1970 and 1998, about 27,000 live toxic gas shells were stockpiled, then individually dismantled and incinerated.
By 1918, there were hundreds of cemeteries in the salient, and those with fewer than 50 bodies had to be exhumed.
In September 1921, about 150 Allied cemeteries and 130 German burial grounds were given temporary licence by the Belgian government, which ordered the German cemeteries to be exhumed 30 years later. The Allied cemeteries remained.
Each year, the remains of about 30 soldiers were discovered on the Western Front.
"There must still be soldiers buried in the Flanders mud," Mrs Descamps said.
The latest New Zealand soldier was unearthed in the salient last July and identified as an Allied serviceman by a Mounted Rifle badge.
He could not be formally identified but received a proper burial at an Allied cemetery.
In 2006, the bones of five Australian soldiers were found and identified by their DNA.
Mrs Descamps said handling war ammunition was a part of daily life for Ypres farmers, although only one had died as a direct result since 1960.
The Ypres Salient measures about 10km at its widest point and stretches from Belgium's North Sea coast, about 60km to the French border.
It was devastated in World War 1, when German troops invaded Belgium in an effort to take French harbours.
"There was not a tree still standing, or house still standing, or road still complete, once the battle of Passchendaele was over. More than four million shells were launched in that small area and every square metre of earth was turned up, time after time," Mrs Descamps said.
Her second lecture will take place at the Dunedin Public Library today, from 5.30pm.
