The French département of the Oise, between Amiens and Paris, was occupied by German troops from September 1914 to March 1917. In some parts of the region, the retreating army haphazardly burned the towns in their path, but in other areas the destruction was more thorough and systematic. In the neighboring Somme, the devastation was mind-boggling; on returning to his native town of Péronne, one shocked resident exclaimed to a journalist, “Pompeii is better preserved!” (L’Ouest-Éclair, 27 November 1917)
La Vie reprend dans les régions libérées shows the struggle of Oise communities trying to get back on their feet while the war still raged in other areas of the country. An older woman refuses to leave her ruined home; some residents take advantage of temporary housing provided by the British, while others begin rebuilding. Elsewhere, train tracks are repaired and unexploded shells removed from fields – the “iron harvest,” as it’s known, has never stopped, and the figures remain staggering. In 2011 alone, for example, 274 tons of ordnance were dug up in France and Belgium, and people are still killed each year by explosions from buried First World War shells (not to mention the disturbingly high levels of arsenic in the soil and water). Also seen in the film are British engineers constructing a bridge, prisoners of war working the fields, and children going back to school, albeit in open-air classrooms. As the film’s title suggests, life was meant to return to a semblance of normality in the liberated territories, though for the men fitted with prosthetic devices and learning a new trade, “normality” would always be a relative term.

Jay Weissberg