“ One element that marked out Verdun as being exceptional was the sense of impotence felt by the soldiers out in the mud and squalor under the endless fury of the guns” (page 238). There’s less focus on the symbolism of the battle for France than in Ian Ousby’s “ The Road to Verdun ”, and more focus on the nature of the battle as an experience - horrific, dehumanizing and, ultimately, totally alienating.īrown’s argument, cogently threaded through his narrative, is that neither the Germans nor the French fully recovered from Verdun before the end of the War owing to the uniqueness of the battle’s intensity and heavy casualties. With extensive extracts from contemporaries, Mr Brown positions Verdun as a battle set apart – a war within the larger War. Chapters 18 (The Closedown), 19 (The Experience) and 20 (The Legacy) are the best in the book in my view by a long way. I felt that the book did not really stand out and grab my attention for most of the chapters. Unfortunately, these graphic images stop short of describing the micro-terrain features which both sides exploited vigorously throughout the fighting. To James Rogers McConnell, one of the American airmen of the Lafayette Escadrille, the battlefield was reduced to a “ sinister brown belt, a strip of murdered nature…The woods and roads have vanished like chalk wiped from a blackboard of the villages nothing remains but grey smears” (page 240). There are a number of useful references to terrain (Mort-Homme being “ originally partly wooded but now no more than a few blackened trunks are left visible, and there isn’t a green leaf or a blade of grass”, from the account of Leutnant Christian Bordeching). I cannot find words to express my feelings. What massacres! What scenes of horror and carnage!. People are suffering from the madness of death and destruction. It is two blocks of nations which are fighting, two civilizations which are in conflict with each other. It is no longer a case of one nation struggling with another. I wonder if it will end simply for lack of fighting men. “ But for how long is it going to carry on? You wonder with anguish when and how this unprecedented struggle will end. ![]() Here’s a frequently quoted passage from Lieutenant Alfred Joubaire of the French 124th Infantry Regiment, no less grim for all its familiarity: ![]() Copying some of these passages and handing them around a table before a wargame is perhaps one of the easiest ways of setting the scene for any wargame based on the battle. The passages are lengthier than in Horne’s “ The Price of Glory ” and Ian Ousby’s “ The Road to Verdun ”. Many of these are remarkable and pay testament to the uniqueness of the experiences of the fighting at Verdun. ![]() On the positive side, there are lengthy and very helpful passages from contemporaries present at the battle.
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