Grand Est Defenseless Fort Douamont Fort Douamont near Verdun had barely been completed in 1886 or was already obsolete.
Grand Est Heroic defence of a fortress 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.
Grand Est Abbey ruins of Montfaucon Around 620, a community of monks founded an abbey atop the hill of the French village of Montfaucon d'Argonne.
Grand Est Fortified trenches in Verdun A stone's throw from the Douamont fortress meanders the Boyau de Londres, a World War I trench.
Grand Est Bitche train station Until 2014, you could still see trains passing in the French-fortified town of Bitche. From then on, train traffic on the route section between Niederbronn via Bitche to Sarreguemines was discontinued.
Grand Est Walking through trenches and past machine gun posts in the Vosges During the First World War, the top of the Linge, a 987-metre-high hump in the Vosges, was the scene of a bloody trench war that claimed the lives of 17,000 French and German soldiers in just a few months.
Grand Est Battle of Verdun Monday morning, February 21, 1916. A quarter after 7 in the morning, the German army opened fire on the forts north and east of Verdun, France.
Grand Est Slate quarry Saint-Quentin in Rimogne With the closure of the Saint-Quentin headframe in 1971, slate mining in Rimogne, France, ended.
Grand Est Collapsed WOI observation tower At the end of the First World War, an observation tower was built on top of Tête de Raves in the French Vosges.
Grand Est A forest full of fortifications In 1926, the French Ministry of Defense unveiled plans to fortify the country's eastern borders against possible surprise attacks, such as during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
Six blast furnaces you can visit today In the early nineteenth century, the industrial revolution swept across continental Europe and one steelworks after another rose from the ground. Europe had hundreds of blast furnaces, but since the mid-twentieth century, Europe's steel industry has been slowly going downhill.