Things to discover in France

You bump into this brick obelisk at the edge of a forest in northern France. The monument was erected more than two centuries ago.

The thousand inhabitants of the French village of Ornes, on the edge of a forest in the early 20th century, were awoken from their idyllic lives at the outbreak of the First World War.

The bayonet trench in Douamont, France, is a war memorial on the Verdun battlefield that rests on a war myth.

Of the six blast furnaces that the Uckange steel factory had in the early twentieth century, today, only the 71-meter-high blast furnace 4 remains.

Bunker 'Ermitage Sud' was part of the Maginot Line, a series of fortifications erected by the French army along its border after the German attack during World War I.

The French military cemetery and monument of Notre-Dame de Lorette, close to Lens, commemorates the thousands of soldiers who lost their lives in one of the heaviest battles during World War I.

The two 30-metre-high pylons of the Canadian War Memorial in Vimy, France, commemorate Canadian soldiers who died during World War I.

At the foot of the French side of the Zwarteberg lies a series of bunkers from the Maginot Line, including this example from 1938.

Fort Douamont near Verdun had barely been completed in 1886 or was already obsolete.

Fort Vaux in Verdun has become a symbol of the heroism of the French soldiers who braved days of siege and shell attacks by the German army during the First World War.