The Germans were also heavily engaged in defeating a Russian offensive on the Eastern Front. It is sometimes forgotten that the battles of Verdun and the Somme overlapped between July and November 1916. From April, the Germans were stopped, only to advance again, be pushed back, and advance once more, before eventually being repulsed. The initial German assault captured a handful of forts and advanced about four miles. His intention had been to break through, and to destabilise the Allies before the new Pals regiments of Kitchener’s British volunteer army could enter the war further west. This is now thought by many historians to have been a lie by von Falkenhayn to explain his defeat. Moaning and suffering atrociously, one begs me: ‘Lieutenant, don’t let me die.’”Įrich von Falkenhayn, the German Chief of the General Staff, claimed after the war that his aim had been not to break through at Verdun but to kill French soldiers, and “bleed the French army white”. “The second has no face, an arm blown off and a horrible wound in the stomach. It is German infantry advancing in packed formation… They look like a big grey carpet being unrolled over the country… “Beyond, in the valley, dark masses are moving over the snow-covered ground. From time to time, an aerial torpedo passes, making a noise like a gigantic motor car… Men might be killed instantly but without apparent damage by concussion blown to tatters by direct hits cut up as if by some malicious butcher crippled by flying fragments of their comrades’ bodies or shocked into babbling incoherence by a capricious hit which left them unscathed among the remnants of their friends.”Īn anonymous French officer left an account of the first days of the fighting: “Thousands of projectiles are flying in all directions, some whistling, others howling, others moaning low, and all uniting in one infernal roar. “The front was so narrow (less than 15 miles).

Richard Holmes, the great British historian of the Western Front, also points out that there was “something particularly dreadful” about the distilled horror of the tiny battlefield of Verdun.

Verdun before and after