Le Mort-Homme — literally "the Dead Man" — is a ridge on the left bank of the Meuse, the focal point of the long, attritional left-bank fighting that was as terrible as the better-known battles of the right bank. The summit was fought over from March 1916 onward; some estimates put the dead on this hill alone at 150,000.
The monument at the summit is a stark skeletal figure of a soldier in a flapping shroud, inscribed with the defiant French response to German propaganda. The site is much less visited than the right-bank monuments and accordingly more powerful — empty, silent, surrounded by the regrown forest of the Red Zone.