Day 59 Thursday 2 July 2026
Continuing our journey eastward we stopped in Vouziers to do a bit of shopping and a top up with fuel. We drive through lovely fertile countryside along the way.
Further on we went to have a look at The Trench of Chattancourt which is located where the Battle of Verdun took place. It has been rebuilt at the precise spot where 2 trenches met in 1916, the Trench of Toulouse and the Trench of Chattancourt. For €5pp we could relive how WW1 French soldiers underwent life in the trenches as well as where they had their time off in the rear detachment.
The limestone caused us a lot of problems and digging with shovels and pick-axes was quickly abandoned and they needed to use a special machine to dig trenches.
For more information on the battle here and the town’s history click here.
We then drove around the Verdun battlefields (2013). The Battle took place between 21 February and 18 December 1916 on the hills north of the town of Verdun. French and German troops fought for ten months. The scale and the violence of the battle have made it one of the war’s most notable events. It encompassed all the different aspects of the First World War, making Verdun the most emblematic place of remembrance.
The Baïonnettes Trenches memorial has an interesting story: French soldiers who, standing upright in their trench with fixed bayonets, ready to repel a German attack, were buried alive by the nearby explosions of several shells. As evidence, the tips of the said bayonets could be seen, in the alignment of a filled-in trench, protruding from the tortured soil. Thus was born the legend of the Tranchée des Baïonettes. On 8 November 1920, a stirring eulogy to the men of the 137 th Infantry Regiment who were assumed to lie there, was pronounced on the site, in the presence of none other than the President of the Republic.
A rich American was sufficiently impressed to contribute out of his own pocket for the construction of a monument over the supposed trench to protect it and its occupants. The truth, revealed by Army investigators, is far more prosaic. In fact the bodies were found to have been buried laid out horizontally, and the Germans had used the bayonets as temporary grave markers. Nonetheless, the monument still stands today, and deserves visiting for what it actually does represent, namely a monument honouring brave soldiers, and witness to long-standing Franco-American friendship.
The Ossuaire de Douaumont is a memorial building with an adjoining cemetery, forming part of the French national remembrance for the dead of the First World War. After the horror of over four years of dreadful war, the remains of 130,000 French and German unknown soldiers were gathered from the devastated battlefield of Verdun and given a final resting place together in the Ossuary vaults. The first stones were laid in August 1920 by the Bishop of Verdun, Mgr Charles Ginisty, and Marshal Pétain; the ossuary was inaugurated in 1932 by President Albert Lebrun.
In Neo-Romanesque style, the building consists of a 130-meter-long horizontal structure, with a 46-meter-high tower in the center offering a panoramic view over the former battlefields. The monument's façade is adorned with the coats of arms of the towns that contributed to its construction, and on the bronze door, the word "Pax" (Latin for "peace") is engraved above a sword and two palms.
As we had visited here in 2013, we just had a walk around.
The destroyed Fleury village was among the eight other villages with the categorisation of Zone Rouge, an area declared uninhabitable by the French government after the devastation of the First World War. The land was contaminated, as along with the remains of the dead, poison and other dangerous gases had soaked into the soil along with lead and mercury, with impossible to calculate amounts of unexploded ordinances littered across the former battlefields.
It was sad and eerie walking around, reflecting on the cost of war.
Along with other memorials scattered around the forest, The Monument Maginot was erected to the memory of the politician and soldier André Maginot (1877-1932) and inaugurated in 1935. Maginot served in the French army during the Great War and was badly wounded near Verdun – an event depicted in the sculptured group placed in front of the central symbolic shield. Maginot served as Minister of War three times between 1922 and 1932 and he was the principal advocate of a new line of impregnable defences against a future German invasion. These were completed after his death and bore his name. In the event, of course, the Germans bypassed the Maginot Line in 1940.
We found a spot on the Meuse Canal in Haudainville, just 6km south of Verdun for the night. The canal runs from Belgian border to the Canal de la Marne au Rhin at Troussey, a distance of 272km.
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