Here's a few photos from my recent trip to France, this time from our stop in Verdun to see the battlefields of World War I. The photo below looks out over the battlefields outside the Fort de Douaumont, the fog eerily rolling in as we stopped. In the battlefields of Verdun hundreds of thousands of French and German soldiers lost their lives. The ruins of Fort de Douaumont were harrowing and austere, with the Verdun Memorial having a haunting, horrible, beauty to it that I doubt I will ever get out of my mind.

The Fort has been turned into a historic site so that the Battle of Verdun will be remembered

Below is a view from inside the Fort's tunnels.

The Chapel in Fort de Douaumont - remembering the fallen.

This is the officers latrine inside Fort de Douaumont, with our guide describing the horrors that the soldiers experienced while trapped within the Fort during the battle. The confinement, the disease, the stench, the despair, the death.

After we finished visiting Fort de Douaumont, we drove to the Verdun Memorial. Below is a photo of the exterior of the Verdun Memorial. The grave markers represent a small fraction of those hundred of thousands who lost their lives at the Battle of Verdun.

A closeup of one wing of the Verdun Memorial. Notice the similarity in feel to the photo of one wing of Fort de Duoaumont below it.

Inside the Verdun Memorial. Yes, it really looks like that, beautiful and horrifying, with the bones of the dead interred within.

The Verdun Memorial Chapel.

Verdun Memorial, and the names of those that perished.

The victims of war are recorded on the walls of the Memorial.

Images of the fallen.

The bones of those who cannot be identified rest in the crypts of the Verdun Memorial. From the outside of the Memorial, you can look in through the windows, and see the interred bones. Sobering and horrifying.

Let there be war no more. Thanks for stopping by.