Meuse is best understood through its layers of military memory. The battlefields around Verdun — the Ossuaire de Douaumont, the Fort de Vaux, the Mémorial de Verdun museum — are the defining sites and easily fill a full day. Further south, the village of Vauquois is preserved as a shocking First World War mine-warfare site, while at Saint-Mihiel the American Monument and the surrounding US battlefield commemorates the 1918 offensive.
Beyond the war sites, the Château de Hattonchâtel is a romantic 13th-century hilltop château restored by an American philanthropist in the 1920s. Lac de Madine, in the south of the department, is a large reservoir popular for sailing and birdwatching. The Voie Sacrée, the road that kept Verdun supplied, runs the length of the department and is itself a route worth driving.