An old French couple visiting their former house in the devastated region, vacated by the Germans, find a mass of stone and debris, representing what was once home to them. The Zone rouge (Red Zone) is the name given to about 460 square miles of land in northeastern France that was physically and environmentally destroyed during the WWI. Because of hundreds of thousands of human and animal corpses and millions of unexploded ordnance that contaminated the land, some activities in the area such as housing, farming or forestry, were temporarily or permanently forbidden after the war by French law. Halftone from Le Monde Illustre., circa 1916.