No Man's Land: From the Domesday Book to Ukraine's Drone Kill Zones

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The phrase no man's land did not start in the trenches. In the Domesday Book of 1086, William the Conqueror's surveyors recorded contested scraps of refuse-strewn ground outside London's walls as belonging to no man, and by 1320 nonesmanneslond described land locked in legal dispute. Such extra-parochial strips sat outside the reach of both church and lord, and one beyond London's north wall served as the city's execution ground. On square-rigged ships the term named the storage space between the forecastle and the mainmast, owned by neither officers nor crew.

Soldier and historian Ernest Swinton used it in a 1908 short story, The Point of View, then carried it into his dispatches as a war correspondent in 1914, and it spread during the Christmas truce. The episode follows the space from Western Front gaps as narrow as 10 meters to Cold War borders, United Nations buffer zones, and Ukraine, where Colonel Andrew Milburn compared Bakhmut to Passchendaele and drones have turned the gray zone into a kill zone where moving a few meters in the open can be fatal.

The Zone Rouge near Verdun remains sealed off, its soil poisoned with arsenic and gas residue and planted over with black pines.
Peter Fechter was shot and killed by border guards while trying to cross the Berlin Wall.
In 1961 Cuba planted a 13-kilometer cactus barrier around Guantanamo Bay, and roughly 55,000 landmines made it the largest minefield in the Americas.
Bill Clinton ordered the American mines replaced with sensors in 1996, while Cuba's minefield stayed.
Gaps left by the 1949 Rhodes armistice lines created no man's lands in Jerusalem and near Latrun until 1967, and Varosha in Cyprus has stood abandoned since 1974.

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