21 February 1916: The longest battle of the war began with a massive German artillery bombardment (over 1,000,000 shells were fired); the plan was to "bleed France dry," to incense the French into committing all their reserves into a series of suicidal infantry attacks that would be annihilated by the gathered German heavy guns; the French knew the attack was coming, but dismissed it as a feint.
Lest we forget.
Commentary: Verdun was fought between the French & the Germans, so it does not occupy the same place in the Anglophone imagination as the contemporaneous but British-fought Battle of the Somme. Yet Verdun was every bit as much the First World War in microcosm: helmeted infantry attacking out of trenches across shell-cratered No Man's Land, throwing themselves against barbed wire & machine-gun fire while clouds of poison gas drift across the weird, treeless moonscape. I won't lie to you: Things are going to get much, much worse before they begin to get even a little better.
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