ABSTRACT
The Western Front is one of the world’s best-known and most-visited ‘conflict landscapes’. Ever since the end of the Great War of 1914–1918, ‘the places’ where the war happened have attracted visitors. Locals, however, also use the reconstructed landscape and builtscape to evoke the local civilian experiences and losses of the war, not explicitly commemorated, and to explore imaginatively and articulate the relationship between place and the discontinuity, displacement, and disruption caused by mass death and destruction. The battlefield landscapes of Argonne and Verdun are very different from those of the northern stretch of the Western Front because they are dominated by forest, although in Verdun it is parkland. Similarly, local war heritage promoters, when they exploit the power of the local landscape to provide a ‘heritage experience’ for visitors, point out that this is not just ‘Disney’ but is motivated by a moral obligation.
