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First World War battlefield in Verdun still a danger with thousands of exploded shells 100 years on Nearly 100 years since the end of the First World War and there are still areas of France unsafe to be visited because of unexploded shells. Some 300,000 soldiers were killed in the Battle of Verdun between France and Germany from February to December 1916. During the onslaught, around six million shells - including many containing mustard gas - were fired by the opposing sides. One million of those failed to explode. Dozens of unexploded shells are unearthed every day. At the end...

Images of thousands of laughing children jogging through one of the most sacred Great War battlefields in the world have caused outrage. They were taken on Sunday during commemorations at Verdun - scene of one of the bloodiest battles in military history. The Battle of Verdun between German and French troops lasted over 300 days, and saw the deaths of more than 300,000 soldiers on both sides in 1916.

There is no quick route by which one may approach Verdun. No superhighway passes through this sleepy town, nor do any of France’s fabled “Trains de Grande Vitesse” stop here. There is only the local line, and even that humbled creaking route terminates in Verdun. In the end, one can only come to this hallowed ground slowly, by a small four-car train or by narrow two-lane road. This is as it should be. Some 250,000 men died in these few square miles of turf, and one should not rush into a graveyard.

There is something hard, cold, and brutal about the structure. It looks like a concrete airplane hangar and rising above it is what is called the “Lantern of the Dead." The shape suggests, appropriately, an artillery shell. When you walk around the outside of the building you find small windows, and when you look through them what you see are bones. Human bones and skulls. Piles of them. They are the remains of more than 130,000 men who were killed here and whose bodies could not be recovered or identified and so remained in the mud, blown apart again and...

A massive artillery bombardment on the morning of February 21st 1916 signalled the start of the German attack on Verdun, the longest single battle of the First World War. More than 1,200 guns opened fire before German troops began their assault on fortifications of major symbolic inportance to France. Even by the standards of the Great War, the Battle of Verdun was a particularly brutal campaign of attrition, fuelled by the determination of both sides not to give way as the struggle wore on. The battle was to last 300 days, almost until Christmas, on a narrow front stretching no...

<p>On the morning of December 19, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower strode into the gloomy school building in Verdun that housed the main headquarters of General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group. He had called a meeting of all the senior commanders under Bradley. More than just the building was gloomy; the weather outside was a dark gray, and the tactical situation facing the American Army in Europe was also dark. Adolf Hitler’s gigantic Ardennes counteroffensive had been launched three days before, and German Gen. Hasso von Manteuffels’s Fifth Panzer Army was about to surround the all-important road junction at Bastogne. The news had reached the United States, and near panic reigned from across the ocean.</p>

Children cheered, bugles sounded and the Prince of Wales inspected the French guard, but an air of improvisation tinged the pageantry today at President Sarkozy's ceremony at Verdun to mark the Great War armistice. It would have helped if Mr Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, his wife, had arrived on time to mark the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. But the silence came at 11.10 after their helicopter brought them late to Douaumont, the hillside monument at the site of France's most murderous battle of the Great War. Other hiccups ruffled the smooth flow of a...