That’s because it was an entirely Franco-German affair, re-running an old and bitter rivalry between those two nations, particularly over the border area in the east of France where the fortified city was sited. British histories tend to pass over Verdun in a few pages. Toller’s words remind us what is too easily forgotten as we look back: that each and every one was a living, breathing person, cut down and cut short in his prime.Īs he also noted: ‘We were cogs in a great machine which sometimes rolled forward, nobody knew where, sometimes backwards, nobody knew why.’įrom the other side of the no-man’s-land that separated the two armies, a French counterpart, Albert Joubaire, summed up his experience at Verdun: ‘What a bloodbath, what horrid images, what a slaughter! Hell cannot be this dreadful.’ All those noughts can blind us to the reality of what they mean. The numbers of casualties are so huge that our eyes glaze over. In the 303 days of this so-called ‘meat-grinder’, close to 750,000 men died, were wounded or simply disappeared, pulverised to tiny, unrecognisable bits by shelling from as far as 17 miles away, or eviscerated on the end of a bayonet in man-to-man, whites-of-their-eyes grappling. German and French soldiers fought for every last metre of ground, making it the longest battle of the war, almost twice as long as any other encounter. One hundred years ago, on February 21, 1916, a Monday, the first shots were fired in the battle for the French fortress town of Verdun. Here, French soldiers are moving into attack from their trench during the Verdun battle German and French soldiers fought for every last metre of ground, making it the longest battle of the war. ‘And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you?’ Ernst Toller’s words should give us all pause for thought as we mark - not celebrate, never celebrate - another grim milestone in that blood-drenched, pointless war. After that, I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. ‘All these corpses had been men who breathed as I breathed, had had a father, a mother, a woman whom they loved, a piece of land which was theirs, faces which expressed joy and suffering, which had known the light of day and the colour of the sky. They choked my throat and chilled my heart. But now the words closed upon my brain like a vice. ‘Until then, I had seen the dead without really seeing them, like figures in a waxworks. On the end were human entrails - all that was left of a dead man buried there by a previous bombardment. He was digging a trench when his pickaxe became entangled in a bundle of slime. Above all we have helped the French immensely by relieving the pressure on Verdun’.The truth hit home for the German soldier with all the impact of one of the millions of artillery shells buzzing through the air at the Battle of Verdun during World War I. will smash him in his deep dug outs… Anyhow we have shown the Bosche that we can rush his line on a wide front and I think we shall penetrate the second line if the ammunition holds out. We are going to beat the Germans by heavy howitzers and trench mortars as they. I was promised 200 of these but have only received 25. We are not too well off for ammunition for our heavy howitzers and we require more heavy trench mortars, which have performed invaluable service to the French in this attack. It speaks well of the courage of the New Armies, but had they had more time to devote to training they would have been able to hold on to many points from which they were driven by a few enterprising German machine-gunners. 29 Brigades (about 100,000 men) were taking part in the first assault the percentage is not so high… I cannot speak too highly of the spirit and self-sacrifice of the rank and file. ‘The casualties have of course been heavy and the figures look large, but when one considers that.
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