Verdun: Douaumont, Fleury and the 300 Days of 1916

Required Activities

• Walk the full 130 m of the ossuary cloister, one alcove for each of the 52 sectors of the battle under red glass, then go outside to the windows through which the bones of the 130,000 unknown French and German soldiers can be seen, and climb the 46 m tower to the orientation table to put names on the ground below

• Go through the Mémorial de Verdun, opened in 1967 on the site of Fleury's railway station and built to hold the French and the German memory of the battle together, and find the German exhibits set beside the French ones rather than opposite them

• Walk the marked street lines of Fleury-devant-Douaumont, taken and retaken sixteen times in two months in 1916 and never rebuilt, and go into its chapel to find the statue of the Virgin whose mantle is a European flag

• Go down into the Fort de Douaumont and find two things: the Galopin turret, 37 tonnes of armour balanced against 37 tonnes of counterweight and cranked up to fire by four gunners on capstans, and the eastern counterscarp coffer, where on 25 February 1916 a German sergeant squeezed in through a firing slit and the fort fell without a fight

• Cross to the national cemetery in front of the ossuary, 16,142 French graves, and find its two smaller memorials: the Muslim square of 592 headstones with its white stone ambulatory, and the Jewish memorial of 1938 at the western edge