We were on a trip through Germany, visiting historic WWII sites, and ventured into France to see…read morethe Maginot Line museum at Fort Schoenenbourg. When we realized how close we were to Verdun, we decided to add a day to visit this area. We weren't sure where to go first, so we thought we'd start here at the Memorial. MOST AMAZING stop ever! This museum is very recently created, as the exhibits were very modern, and had a lot of video and other effects. All the exhibits offered multiple languages (English, French, German) and had great content. The displays were all around you - there were areas with glass floors with displays underneath, displays that you could walk on to view, etc. We were there easily 2+ hours, and could have stayed longer except that we had a lot of Verdun to see in a day! One plus - free parking!! One minus - not the greatest gift shop, just a modest display of some books for sale. I would highly recommend a stop here - it is a museum that can be appreciated by children as well as adults. Also, in the area around the museum along the road there are areas with trenches that you can walk through, and sites up in the trees that you can park roadside and walk to as well which were very interesting. The terrain is very unusual - the bomb craters are very visible even today. So keep your eyes open for those!

From the owner: Le Père de l'Europe Robert Schuman, né en 1886 à Luxembourg et décédé à Scy-Chazelles en septembre…read more1963, est une illustre figure de l'histoire de l'Europe : négociateur de tous les Traités majeurs (Conseil de l'Europe, Pacte de l'Atlantique Nord, CECA,...) puis 1er Président du Parlement européen de 1958 à 1960).En 1926, il devient propriété à Scy-Chazelles en pays messin, devenu aujourd'hui le musée Robert Schuman. Ce musée retrace la vie de l'homme et son oeuvre politique ainsi que plus généralement l'histoire de l'Europe. Un lieu simple et austère, dans un charmant parc. Robert Shuman repose dans une église du XIIème siècle située à quelques pas de la maison. Depuis le 9 mai 2009, la maison de Robert Schuman a agrandi sa collection permanente et met ainsi en valeur sa contribution à la construction européenne dans un espace muséographique étendu, divisé en cinq thèmes.

I was traveling with my two college-aged children, and we had just visited the Memorial Museum and…read morewere heading to Fort Douaumont when we see a large field of crosses. There were other cars that had pulled over on the side of the road, so we did too. I knew from my trip research that we were at L'Ossuaire, and I knew there was a fee to enter, but I wasn't sure about the grounds. As it turns out, you can tour the grounds for free, it is just a fee to go inside the building. The grounds were beautiful and well-kept, it was very moving to walk along the gravesites. I'm glad we took a few minutes to stop and visit.

I was traveling with my two college-aged children, and after touring the Memorial Museum we headed…read moreto the Fort to see more. First benefit - free parking! Yay! There was a fair amount of parking spaces, so that made things easy. When you enter the fort, you are given the option of paying for the headset audio guide, or getting a laminated handout for free that you return at the end of your tour. We decided on the handout, and it worked just fine for us. Occasionally we lost our place on the handout, but from an informational standpoint it presented lots of great information and allowed us to travel through the fort at probably a quicker pace than if we had to stand and listen to everything. This fort is very old, and quite frankly in disrepair. This is not a polished museum - you really see it as it was when it was used. The walls/floors are damp, and the ceiling does a fair share of dripping so be prepared! We really enjoyed exploring inside the fort and looking through all the gun vantage points, and then went outside and spent a fair amount of time climbing all over the fort exploring the outer areas as well. The landscape still shows the bomb craters from all the bombing, which makes the battle so much more real. It is definitely worth a stop!

This village northeast of Verdun in the Meuse is a "non-place", a former community of 422 farmers…read moreand woodsmen that was utterly destroyed during the World War I Battle of Verdun, from February through October, 1916. The hero of Verdun, Henri Pétain, was a hero in part because he favored artillery over human bodies as a defensive strategy. So for all the frightful casualties of this campaign - 100,000 bodies were later found littering the fields of this sector alone - things might have gone worse for the French poilus, if Pétain had not used artillery to hold the German advance. But the cost was the complete obliteration of nine villages, Fleury-devant-Douaumont among them. Today, you reach the village by a road through a forest where not one single tree pre-dates the battle. On the right, there is a restricted zone where tank crews train. Where the road peters out, you come upon a moonscape with markers for streets and houses and young trees sprouting out of shellholes. It is a sobering place, to say the least. After the war, the French Premier Henri Poincaré came through here and thanked the villages of "la Zone rouge" for their sacrifice. When you stand at the junction in this ghost village, Poincaré's gesture rings well-intentioned but a bit pointless.