Battle of Verdun: points of interests

Monday morning, February 21, 1916. It is a quarter past seven in the morning when the German army opens fire on the forts north and east of Verdun in France.

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.

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.

Around 620, a community of monks founded an abbey atop the hill of the French village of Montfaucon d'Argonne. 

A stone's throw from the Douamont fortress meanders the Boyau de Londres, a World War I trench.

Hidden deep in the woods near Verdun, France, lies Camp Marguerre, where the German army tested the use of concrete during the First World War.