The blood-soaked earth of the battlefields of Verdun bear witness to the heroism of the soldiers in the trenches. All along the Meuse river stand open-air memorials of the war in the form of "destroyed" villages, trenches, mounds, military cemeteries, the forts of Vaux and Douaumont and the Memorial which reminds us of the fighting that took place between February 21 1916 and August 20 1917. Nearly 600,000 French, German, and American soldiers lost their lives in the terrible trench war.