The Battle of Verdun opened on the morning of February 21, 1916, with a German artillery barrage that lasted ten hours and expended two million shells. It concentrated on the forts of Vaux and Douaumont, which the French had built after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. By the time the main battle ended ten months later, nine villages had been pounded to nothing. Not even their sites are detectable in aerial photos of the time. The heavy artillery shells ploughed the ground to a depth of 8m and, although much of it is now reforested, there are parts even today that steadfastly refuse anchorage to any but the coarsest vegetation.The most visited part of the battlefield extends along the hills north of Verdun, but the fighting also spread well to the west of the Meuse, to the hills of Mort-Homme and Hill 304, to Vauquois and the Argonne, and south along the Meuse to St-Mihiel, where the Germans held an important salient until dislodged by US forces in 1918. The only really effective way to explore the area is with your own transport. The main sights are reached via two minor roads that snake through the battlefields, forming a crossroads northeast of Verdun: the D913 and D112. The former branches left from the main N3 to Metz, 5km east of Verdun; the latter leaves the same N3 opposite the Cimetière du Faubourg-Pavé on the eastern outskirts of Verdun and is soon enclosed by appropriately gloomy conifer plantations. If you take the D112, on the right you pass a monument to André Maginot, who was himself wounded in the battle and under whose later stewardship at the Ministry of War the famous Maginot Line was built. Shortly afterwards a sign points out a forest ride to the Fort de Souville, the furthest point of the German advance in 1916. The site is not on the main tourist beat, and is a very moving, if rather frightening, twenty-minute walk over ground absolutely shattered by artillery fire, with pools of black water standing in the now grassy shell-holes. The fort itself lies half-hidden among the scrub, the armoured gun turrets still lowering in their pits, the tunnels to their control rooms dank and dangerous with collapse. A little way beyond the fort, where the D112 intersects the D913, a stone lion marks the precise spot at which the German advance was checked. To the left the D913 continues to Fleury, 1km from the crossroads, and on to Douaumont, before curling back round to the D964.
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