Mémorial de Verdun Lorraine

The village of Fleury, wiped off the face of the earth in the course of being captured and recaptured 16 times, is now the site of this memorial. It tells the story of ‘300 days, 300,000 dead, 400,000 wounded’, with insightful displays of war artefacts and personal items. Downstairs you’ll find a recreation of the battlefield as it looked on the day the guns finally fell silent. In the grassy crater-pocked centre of what was once Fleury, a few hundred metres down the road from the memorial, signs among the low ruins indicate the village’s former layout.