World War I

Once a country house set in lush parkland just outside Ypres, Bedford House was blown to bits during the First World War. The ruins were then used as a field hospital and brigade headquarters, among other things.

During the excavation work for the railway construction between Ypres and Kortrijk in 1854, a sixty-metre-high hill was created.

German soldier Peter Kollwitz was not yet 18 years old when he was killed on 23 October 1914 while attempting to cross the Yser near Diksmuide.

Langemark in Belgium has the dubious honor of being the place where chemical warfare made its debut: on April 22, 1915, German soldiers opened gas bottles from which 180 tons of chlorine gas hissed away. At least a thousand soldiers died in a blind panic.

Tyne Cot Cemetery is the largest British military cemetery in continental Europe. More than 10,000 soldiers who died at the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917 during the First World War were buried in the monumental cemetery in Passchendaele.

Half hidden underground on a hillside along the First World War battlefield in West Flanders, the German army built a reinforced concrete command post bunker.

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.