Verdun — Fort Douaumont

Fort Douaumont was the largest and highest fort ringing Verdun, a colossus of reinforced concrete and steel turrets thought impregnable. Yet on 25 February 1916, four days into the German offensive, a handful of German soldiers infiltrated the near-empty fort—the French garrison had been stripped to a skeleton—and captured it almost without firing a shot, a humiliation that stunned France. For eight months it became the pivot of the battle; a French counterattack finally retook it in October 1916. In May 1916 an internal explosion of stored munitions killed hundreds of German soldiers, who were sealed into a bricked-up gallery that remains their tomb. The scarred, grass-covered fort can still be entered today.