Places Charles WV Wants to Go

Tour part of the Maginot Line bunker system built to defend France against a German invasion.

This building’s ghostly exterior reflects its former lives as a prison, school, and funeral home.

This striking fort on the Maginot Line looks just as it did after being destroyed in the Fall of France.

A towering baroque basilica jutting out of the French countryside.

The remains of 40,000 humans, meticulously stacked in a tiny churchyard shed.

A World War I German experimental concrete plant, hidden deep in a French forest.

A swath of France so devastated by war it is still forbidden to go there.

This modern French ossuary contains the jumbled bones of 130,000 WWI soldiers.

A museum preserving the remnants of three villages submerged by Der Lake.

Bits of architecture from a town destroyed in World War I now decorate this hotel garden.

Hundreds of dwarf beeches create an unusual, haunting forest in the north of France.

This "social palace" housing complex created a relatively stable and self-contained worker's society... for a time.

The somewhat misnamed 'Garden of Shells' lovingly built from found objects.

This small commune with an even smaller name appears to have an unlikely amount of dead ancestors.

The largest Commonwealth memorial to the missing and dead of the Battle of the Somme.

A sublime medieval path adorns the marble floor of one of the most beautiful Gothic cathedrals in France.

A centuries-old complex of hand-dug stone chambers has sheltered locals in times of trouble.

Deep in the limestone cliffs of the Alabaster Coast, a German fortress built during World War II.

These ruins reveal the remarkably intact layout of a Roman marketplace.

Museum in a swimming pool where the water still flows.

This former cannon foundry and castle for the Counts of Flanders is now a public garden.

An underground city of ancient quarry tunnels hid thousands of Allied soldiers in WWI.

A monument to the thousands of Canadian soldiers who died capturing the French ridge during World War I.

The 16th-century church was kept in its ruined state as a reminder of the casualties of World War I.