Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and Military History

This guide to the Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and Military History in Brussels follows one obsessive curator, a young officer named Louis Leconte, who assembled about nine hundred objects for the 1910 Brussels World Exhibition and then refused to let the collection be packed away. It traces how the German occupation and 1918 withdrawal reshaped what he gathered, and how King Albert the First later gave the growing museum a home in the vast northern halls of Cinquantenaire Park. Listen for how an old fairground shed built for balloon festivals became the Aviation Hall you can walk through today.