A commuter suburb, a fishing beach, a farm-country crossroads, a plain of olives and a rice valley — five ordinary places whose names were borrowed for a single day's or a single season's fighting and never given back.
Wellington wrote his victory dispatch in his lodgings on the town's main street and headed it with the village's name, so that is what English calls the battle. The Prussians called it Belle-Alliance and Napoleon called it Mont-Saint-Jean; most of the fighting was several kilometres south, in what are now Braine-l'Alleud and Lasne.
William landed at Pevensey on 28 September 1066 and camped at Hastings; the fighting on 14 October happened some nine kilometres inland, at the spot now simply called Battle, where he raised an abbey over the place Harold fell. The name that stuck was the port town's.
Three days of fighting on 1–3 July 1863 produced more than 50,000 casualties — the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War — and ended Lee's second invasion of the North. Neither general picked the ground: the two armies groped into each other because the roads dragged them in, to a market town James Gettys had laid out in 1786 and named for his father Samuel's tavern.
In 490 BC an outnumbered Athenian and Plataean force drove a Persian landing army back to its ships on this plain; the 192 Athenian dead were burned and buried where they fell, under the mound that still stands. The legend of a runner carrying news of the victory to Athens gave the modern race its name, and the dam in the hills above — faced in the same Pentelic marble as the Parthenon — was Athens' main water supply from its completion in 1931 until Lake Yliki was tapped in 1959.
The garrison surrendered on 7 May 1954 after a fifty-six-day siege, and the Indochina session of the Geneva Conference opened the very next morning; the accords signed that July partitioned Vietnam at the 17th parallel and finished French Indochina. The French had chosen the valley precisely because it was nowhere in particular — a remote frontier prefecture the Tai had long called Muang Thaeng — and the name it was given now belongs to the whole surrounding province.
Think you'd have found them? Play today's expedition, or replay this one from the archive.