VERDUN 1916

Verdun — The most iconic battle of the First World War, today a symbol of peace for humanity.

In the ecosystem of Great War battles, Verdun stands as an exception — but not because of the casualties, the subject of every fantasy, nor because of the number of shells fired, the violence, the new tactics and a thousand other superlatives: this confrontation is neither more nor less " violent " nor more deadly than others.

And yet it does stand apart for the intensity of the artillery fire, the massive concentration of men and the accumulation of material resources. From this perspective, Verdun already displays all the characteristics of a hyper-battle. Yet it is the small groups of fighting men who tip the balance or reignite one of the longest and deadliest confrontations in history. Emblematic of immobile trench warfare, Verdun is nonetheless in constant motion on land and in the air: a war of movement in an impossibly confined space.

Modest in its spatial dimensions yet colossal in the material resources mobilised to destroy nature and kill men, this battle — a military stalemate — is a towering lieu de mémoire. A true metaphor for war for the French, both in the Franco-German duel it represents and in the dynamics of the offensive.

Verdun deserves its full history: dusted off, renewed and demythologised, connected to political, social, economic, technical and cultural history, yet with its own specific features rooted in the structure of the armies, their operational objectives and the intra-military relationships involved.

This book approaches it at the level of the men themselves, from the corporal's perspective to that of the general, from the trenches to the general staffs — without reducing itself to a transcription of accounts, and without setting a history from below, that of the soldiers and officers who fight, suffer and die, against a history from above, that of the generals and decision-makers. One cannot exist without the other.