The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916

France #2

by Alistair Horne

The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 is the second book of Alistair Horne's trilogy, which includes The Fall of Paris and To Lose a Battle and tells the story of the great crises of the rivalry between France and Germany.

The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles. Its aim was less to defeat the enemy than bleed him to death and a battleground whose once fertile terrain is even now a haunted wilderness.

Alistair Horne's classic work, continuously in print for over fifty years, is a profoundly moving, sympathetic study of the battle and the men who fought there. It shows that Verdun is a key to understanding the First World War to the minds of those who waged it, the traditions that bound them and the world that gave them the opportunity.

'Verdun was the bloodiest battle in history ... The Price of Glory is the essential book on the subject'
  Sunday Times

'It has almost every merit ... Horne sorts out complicating issues with the greatest clarity. He has a splendid gift for depicting individuals'
  A.J.P. Taylor, Observer

'A masterpiece'
  The New York Times

'Compellingly told ... Alastair Horne uses contemporary accounts from both sides to build up a picture of heroism, mistakes, even farce'
  Sunday Telegraph

'Brilliantly written ... very readable; almost like a historical novel - except that it is true'
  Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery

One of Britain's greatest historians, Sir Alistair Horne, CBE, is the author of a trilogy on the rivalry between France and Germany, The Price of Glory, The Fall of Paris and To Lose a Battle, as well as a two-volume life of Harold Macmillan.

Genres: History, World War I, Nonfiction, Military History, War, France, Military Fiction

388 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Sir Alistair Allan Horne was an English journalist, biographer and historian of Europe, especially of 19th and 20th century France. He wrote more than 20 books on travel, history, and biography. He won the following awards: Hawthornden Prize, 1963, for The Price of Glory; Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize and Wolfson Literary Award, both 1978, both for A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962; French Légion d'Honneur, 1993, for work on French history;and Commander of the British Empire (CBE), 2003.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

About a month or so ago, I attended a theme party to celebrate a friend’s birthday. This was the third or fourth theme party I’d been to in the past twelve months. For whatever reason, as we get older, my social circle has decided that nights of raging drunkenness need some patina of class. Thus, the period costumes.

During the party – celebrating the speakeasy era of gangsters, flappers, and moonshine – we started planning other theme parties for the future. Mostly, this conversation consisted of me trying to convince everyone how much fun a lumberjack-themed night would be. (Beers, bacon, flapjacks and flannel!). As we talked, we hit upon the idea of a One-Hundred-Years-Ago-Tonight party that would celebrate the fashions, foods, drinks and dress of people who walked and lived this day a century before.

The idea stuck in my head, and I pondered it the next day, while I battled a raging hangover. One hundred years ago from right now (this moment, already fleeting) would place us in 1913. The last year of peace and hope of a fresh century, about to turn into the bloodiest years in human history.

Next year, of course, means the one hundred year anniversary of the start of World War I. That’s kind of crazy. One hundred years. No living memory of the first totally modern war.

Even before its centennial, World War I existed in the shadows of its bigger, bloodier brother, World War II. Despite its importance, it is usually relegated to a footnote, that footnote being: World War I is the reason that World War II, the war we actually care about, ever happened.

World War I has lately come to fascinate me. I have been circling the subject for awhile now, plucking books here and there, imprinting the story’s broad strokes in my mind. Alistair Horne’s The Price of Glory, about the infamous battle of Verdun, marks the point at which I start to narrow my reading, focusing on specific details.

The Price of Glory turned out to be a great way for me to dip my toe into the gory specifics of the Great War. It is a slim, brisk telling of a bulging, complicated battle, a battle that came to define the wastefulness of World War I.

The battle took place between February and December of 1916, on the rough ground north of the French city of Verdun. It began with a German offensive designed not for a breakthrough, but to draw French troops into a slaughter pen. The Germans’ initial forays were unexpectedly successful, leading to the capture of strategically valuable French positions. Instead of letting that territory go, the French decided to take it back. Seven hundred thousand casualties resulted. All from a battle the Germans started with no intent of winning.

Horne focuses his telling on the human element. He is not overly concerned with troop movements, of the alphabet-and-roman-numeral soup of corps, regiments, and companies marching this way and that. It’s just as well, because the maps that are provided are essentially useless. If you are a reader concerned with orders of battle, you should probably look elsewhere.

This is a bird’s eye look at Verdun, presenting the biggest picture possible while often swooping in low for a detailed look at a person or situation.

Horne pays close attention to the generals, of whom he creates some indelible portraits. Of Petain:

What manner of man was this amorous general who was soon to earn from his countrymen so much honor and love, that would later be replaced by so much hatred and dishonor? At the time of which we write, Petain was a bachelor of sixty, with commendable vigor for his age…With the commanding posture that was the unmistakable and indelible mark of St. Cyr, and clad in the uniform of ‘horizon blue,’ there was no more impressive sight on a French parade ground. To have seen him and de Castelnau together, one might well have assumed that Petain was the born aristocrat, the squat and rather swarthy general the peasant; though in fact it was the reverse…

However, unlike many histories that tell their stories from the top down, Horne does not neglect the infantrymen in the trenches. To the contrary, his look at the common soldier is exceedingly intimate, and bolstered by the fact that Horne was able to interview many of them while they still lived. This results in a lot of impressive first-person testimony of the nasty, close-in fighting among the French fortresses surrounding Verdun.

Horne is a highly respected historian and writer. He was educated at Cambridge and this book is best read with the voice of a British professor stuck in your head. The prose is witty, erudite, at times strangely beautiful. He can be at times maddeningly broad, while at other times sharply incisive. There are certain pomposities built into the text – namely Horne’s frequent use of foreign phrases that he wouldn’t deign to translate – but that is part of its charm.

The tragedy of World War I goes a long way towards explaining France’s ignominiously early exit in World War II. This was a country and a culture psychologically ravaged by the German occupation between 1914 and 1918. Four percent of the total population of France died. Four millions soldiers were wounded. Untold millions bore the haunted memories. It’s enough to explain the reason the Maginot Line was built, and also why it didn't matter.

When The Price of Glory was originally written in the 60s, memories of Verdun were still strong. The battlefield was still extremely dangerous and potted with unexploded ordinance. The landscape had not been altered. The participants still walked the earth. This book benefits from all that. It has the lingering horror of Verdun coursing through its veins. It creates a vivid impression of yesterdays that keep getting farther away.

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a Sick Child right now, which means I'm currently running on less than three hours' sleep. This feels to me like total exhaustion. Still, things could be a lot worse. It's been instructive to remind myself that French soldiers in the line at Verdun not uncommonly went eleven days without any rest at all. Although when I cheerfully reminded my wife of this fact at 4 a.m. she didn't seem to find it very reassuring.

Eleven days though! Imagine trying to confront an armed Brandenburger with that level of sleep-deprivation. Luckily, such an eventuality rarely came up: one of the most striking things about Verdun was the fact that you were unlikely ever to face up to the enemy, or even see him. All you had to do was wait until your turn in the front-line trenches, and then endure as much shelling as you could before you were eviscerated.

This perhaps sounds like some grimly comic exaggeration, but in fact the French commanders were quite explicit about the pointless deaths they expected from their men. General Nivelle's orders were to ‘Ne pas se rendre, ne pas reculer d'un pouce, se faire tuer sur place’, while one colonel told his troops: ‘On the day they want to, they will massacre you to the last man, and it is your duty to fall.’

As pep-talks go, that's not exactly the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. In fact it's only a couple of rungs up from ‘Men, why don't all of you fuck off and die.’

What was it all about? Well, the Germans guessed rightly that France would never surrender Verdun, which was a key fortress-town near the front lines. They therefore reckoned that by attacking it continually, they would force the French to sacrifice themselves in order to prevent its loss: ‘the forces of France will bleed to death,’ in the words of the famous German memo, ‘whether we reach our goal or not.’

This subtle plan had, as Captain E. Blackadder would later put it, just one tiny flaw: it was bollocks. The problem was that the Germans attacking Verdun were compelled to haemorrhage troops almost as fast as the French. So you had both armies hurling great bodies of men at each other, both sides constantly decimated by extremely heavy artillery fire, all over an objective that the Germans never even seriously expected to win.

It was very quickly obvious that the whole affair was pointless; but, because of astonishingly limp leadership on both sides, it went on for fully ten months. At the end of which, the front line was in roughly the same place it had been at the beginning and three hundred thousand boys were dead.

As Paul Fussell has pointed out elsewhere, to call Verdun a ‘battle’ – as though this relentless endurance of shelling were remotely similar to Blenheim or Waterloo – is to give entirely the wrong impression. Men did not fight men at Verdun, or very rarely; instead, men were pitted against heavy artillery. They heard little but screaming shells and lived – if they were lucky – half-underground in trenches where the water was often waist-high. The ground had been churned up so many times that corpses were (to borrow a cooking term) folded in throughout, and body-parts protruded from the trench walls or confounded your spade when you tried to dig in.

The psychological effect of this on the soldiers is…well, it can hardly be imagined. One priest, Sergeant Dubrelle, wrote home with some decidedly un-Catholic feelings:

Having despaired of living amid such horror, we begged God not to have us killed – the transition is too atrocious – but just to let us be dead. We had but one desire; the end!

Alistair Horne – rising to the peaks of desperate irony that Verdun demands – comments: ‘At least this part of Dubrelle's prayers was answered the following year.’ Horne's tone and command of his material really is excellent throughout; he is very good on the political side, he offers outstanding character sketches of the major players, but he is also determined to make clear the experience of the regular soldiers who, amidst the horror, enacted ‘countless, unrecorded Thermopylaes’.

Many of the peripheral details here are fascinating. I knew of course that cavalry was still considered a strong tactic at the start of the war, but I had not previously appreciated how proportionally undeveloped was the use of motor-cars. In 1914, there were only 170 vehicles in the entire French army, and the Senegalese troops brought in to the service depots at first ate the grease.

One of the most riveting aspects of learning about the First World War, for me, has been the extent to which it is inseparable from the Second, so that whole period of 1914-1945 can be understood (as one historian said) almost as another Thirty Years War. This element comes across strongly in Horne as well, in unexpectedly tragic ways. It was Verdun that convinced French commanders of the vital necessity of strong forts, leading to their later over-dependence on the Maginot Line; indeed, ‘more than any isolated event of the First War, Verdun led to France's defeat in 1940’. While on the other side of the lines, it created ‘a vacuum of leadership in Germany into which rushed the riff-raff of the Himmlers and Goebbels’.

The most prominent symbol of this trajectory is poor Pétain, who emerges here as one of the great tragic figures of the century. Deeply protective of his troops, by far the most humanitarian French general, he would almost certainly have evacuated the whole Verdun salient if he'd been allowed; instead, he was forced to preside over a protracted slaughter. His resulting defeatism and pessimism were the first steps on the road that led inexorably to Vichy France.

In terms of raw numbers, there were probably more outrageous encounters; 20,000 British alone were killed on just the first day of the Somme, for instance. But what made Verdun uniquely horrific was how long it went on for. Even academic, judicious Horne finds himself concluding that ‘It is probably no exaggeration to call Verdun the “worst” battle in history’, and a microcosm of the wider conflagration:

It was the indecisive battle in an indecisive war; the unnecessary battle in an unnecessary war; the battle that had no victors in a war that had no victors.

One feels deeply that what happened from February to December 1916 was a ghastly mistake for the species as a whole. Then again, perhaps the most appalling thing is the possibility that this is not so. ‘War is less costly than servitude,’ writes the French novelist Jean Dutourd, in a comment that Horne quotes twice and that I found utterly chilling: ‘the choice is always between Verdun and Dachau.’ Now there's a choice to keep you up at night.

[Helga · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Price of Glory is the second book in Sir Alistair Horne’s ‘France’ series and focuses mainly on the battle of Verdun which was fought in 1916 between the French and German armies, leaving behind many casualties.
The book was well-written and detailed, but at times, because of the focused subject-matter, the reading about the technicalities became laborious. But as it is part of a series and having read the first book The Fall of Paris, which was also excellent, and also because I have a mini OCD, I persevered.

[happy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this a superb look at the iconic battle of World War I. In spite of being written appox. 50 yrs ago, Alistair Horne’s look a Verdun stands up extremely well. Mr. Horne looks at the battle from all levels, from the poor infantry soldier in mud to the highest general in his chateau.

In looking at the commanders, the German commander, Falkenhayn, comes off extremely poorly. He is presented as being overly cautious, overly secretive, excessively stingy with troops, having a flawed strategic vision, and probably his worst fault - indecisive. In fact Mr. Horne has almost nothing good to say about him. The French commanders don’t fare much better. With their over reliance on "Spirit of the Attack", they let the defenses around Verdun decay to the point that they were almost inviting a German attack. Of all the major French commanders, Petain comes off the best.

In looking at the French commanders, the author also looks at the culture of the French Army. He looks at how the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war affected the development of the army's culture and tactics. This culture embraced the "Spirit of Attack" as the only approved method of war and led to many needless deaths in the trenches along the western front. The picture painted of Petain, the accepted hero of Verdun, is an officer completely out of step with the prevailing attitudes in the army - a defensive specialist. He was the right man, at the right place, at the right time.

In addition to giving an excellent understanding of overall flow battle, the author also does a commendable job of telling the reader the experience of the men who had to make the battle plans work. The story of the poor infantry soldiers, both German and French, is in my opinion the best part of this work. His telling of the fall of Ft. Douaumont to the Germans in the early stages of the battle is very well done. The author also tells of the emotional toll the battle took on the men fighting there. By the end of the battle entire French battalions were baaing like sheep as they moved to the front. Yet, in spite of the horrendous loses and living conditions, there were no major break downs in discipline

Mr. Horne also lets the reader know of the new weapons and tactics used in the battle. These include the first use of flame throwers and phosgene gas by the Germans and rolling barrages by the French as they pushed the Germans back in fall of 1916.

In addition to telling the story of the battle itself, the author looks at the effects it had on the army's both sides, both in its immediate aftermath and how it affected the developement of tactics that were used in Second World War.

About the only problem I had with the book is rather nitpicky, but as with many other authors of books on the Great War, Mr. Horne’s uses many quotes in French and the translations sometimes leave a little to be desired.

Overall, this is one the best books I’ve read on the Great War. I highly recommend this to anyone with even a passing interest in the events that occurred some 100 yrs ago. My rating - 4.75 stars, for Goodreads - round up to 5

[Sweetwilliam · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an outstanding book by Alistair Horne about the greatest battle in the history of mankind. Verdun reminds me of the books I've read on Stalingrad. In fact, Verdun was the Stalingrad of WWI with the exception that it lasted 10 months compared to Stalingrad’s 5 months. It sounded every bit as awful and there were amazing parallels, too numerous to list in a review. The funny thing is that Alistair Horne argues that the leaders of both armies didn’t really intend for the battle to unfold the way it did. Joffre had given up on fixed fortifications and he realized that Verdun was a salient. Prior to the German offensive, The French commander, had ordered the forts stripped of their heavy artillery and planned to withdraw French forces out of the salient. This was the prudent thing to do. The German Commander, Falkenhayn, attacked Verdun to establish a foothold. His goal was to draw the French in to attack entrenched German positions with the goal of bleeding France white with superior firepower. Falkenhayn never cared to conquer Verdun. But as Mike Tyson used to say, “Everybody’s got a plan until he gets punched in the mouth.” The two commanders forgot that Verdun, like Stalingrad, was a symbolic city. The Germans were drunk with early successes and the Kaiser wanted Verdun conquered by his son the Crown Prince. On the other side, it became a matter of stubborn French National pride.

There are a few passages that I will not ever forget from this book. I like the way the author describes the French in 1914 at the Battle of the Frontiers. The Germans wore feldgrau and the British wore olive but the French showed up to the party in colorful uniforms with red pants that stood out. That was the point! They wanted to be seen. Their enemies would be terrified by their overwhelming numbers. The French considered themselves the warrior class of all of Europe. Also, French high command disdained the machine gun and heavy artillery. They would stick to the light 75mm gun and the bayonet and they would attack to excess and never let the enemy gain the initiative. This was the doctrine attributed to Colonel De Grandmaison and the cult of the offensive. Only Petain rejected this nonsense, teaching instead that firepower could break up such attacks. The De Grandmaison doctrine would cost the French dearly throughout the war.

Horne writes the following:

All along the frontier The infantrymen in their red trousers and thick blue overcoats, carrying heavy packs [the French kit weighed 85 lbs] and long, unwieldy bayonets, broke into the double behind their white-gloved officers. Many sang the Marseillaise. In the August heat, the heavily encumbered French attacked from a distance of nearly 1/2 mile. Never had the machine-gunners had such a heyday. The French stubble-fields were soon transformed into gay carpets of red and blue. Splendid cuirassiers in glittering breastplates of another age hurled their horses hopelessly at the machine guns that were slaughtering the infantry. It was horrible and horribly predictable, in that superb, insane courage of 1914 there was something reminiscent of the lemmings swimming out to sea. But it was not War.

On page 65, Horne wrote a few outstanding paragraphs about the horrific use of artillery in WWI. At Verdun, the Germans employed calibers as large as 420 mm and later on in the battle the French introduced a 400 mm mortar.

Of all the factors that had contrived to the education of the novices of 1914, obviously none was more fundamental...than the sickening effect that the new weapons of the industrial revolution had on the bodies of men. It was bad enough to be wounded at all but at least a bullet was a relatively clean agent. If you were hit by rifle or machine gun, the chances were that you were killed outright, or eventually you returned to life more or less in one piece. However, in contrast to World War II, bullet wounds were the minority; the greater part of casualties were caused by the terrible effects of shell-fire. Also, by 1939, the march of civilization had advanced metallurgy to a point where shells and bombs burst into smaller fragments; they killed more men with each burst but they did so more tidily. In the First World War, the crude iron of the shells (most of them many times bigger than anything used in the land battles of 1939-1945) shattered into huge ragged chunks that sometimes two men would be unable to lift. The effect on the soft human carapace of impact with these whirling fragments could be imagined....Men squashed, cut into two, or divided from top to bottom, blown into showers by an ordinary shell, bellies turned inside out and scattered anyhow, skulls forced bodily into the chest as if by blow with a club. It was only astonishing how much of such mutilation flesh could suffer and survive.

This was the Stalingrad of WWI. After the war was over, the crown prince said The Mill on the Meuse ground to powder the hearts as well as the bodies of the troops. It was at Verdun that the seeds were sown for the French mutinies of 1917. Conservative estimates are 700,000 to 800,000 casualties combined during the 10 month battle but this is probably understated. There is a French estimate of 420,000 Frenchmen died and 800,000 were gassed and wounded on the Verdun battlefield during the entire war. However, they will never be sure. That is why they round off in the tens of thousands. Imagine that?

My hero during the entire book is Petain. It was his innovation of the rolling barrage that allowed the French to retake lost ground and reclaim forts Douaumont and Vaux. In a war led by leaders that were dinosaurs, Petain was an innovator similar to Ludendorff and more importantly, he was quick to understand when enough was enough. The lesson of WWI was that an innovation worked outstanding the first time used and was less effective during subsequent attacks. The phosgene gas attack and the rolling barrage are great examples. Falkenhayn was too cautious to exploit a break through and thus, squandered opportunities. His counterpart, Nivelle, was too rash and attacked at half strength. Petain understood all of this.

After Verdun, Nivelle was promoted over Petain. He led the French Army in the disastrous Chemin Des Dames offensive which led to mutiny of half the French divisions. Only Petain could quell this rebellion. He did so not by mass punishment but by improving the conditions for the French soldier and restoring confidence. For God's sake a hospital with 3,500 beds had only 3 thermometers!!! Do you think that there was room for improvement?

Petain's decision was to wait for the Americans to arrive and finally when Ludendorff was over extended in similar fashion as the German Army of WWII in the Battle of the Bulge, Mangin was brought back from disgrace to lead a massive counteroffensive that was successful.

Today, many of the small villages around Verdun were never repopulated. The land is said to be haunted by the massive loss of life and needless pain and suffering by the flower of a generation of French and German youth. Human skeletons continue to be discovered. In some areas the topsoil has vanished due to the massive artillery bombardments and nothing will grow there. In other areas the battlefield continues to claim casualties as when a plow strikes un-exploded ordnance or a relic hunter gets more than he bargained for upon uncovering a find. There is more danger of infecting a small cut, more tetanus than any other part of France.

The book was excellent and I almost got down on my hands and knees to thank God that I did not have to partake in that mass slaughter of a war. In the news today we will undoubtedly watch someone whine over some trivial matter and call themselves survivors because they had been offended. This book puts such things in perspective. The death and suffering of Verdun can only be imagined by fellow Americans. We lost 3,000 at Pearl Harbor and another 3,000 or so in the World Trade Center. A helicopter goes down and we lose a SEAL team. These are tragedies but collectively, they don’t amount to the ante of the devastation of Verdun.

The author ends the book recounting a story about a French officer invited to Ecole De Guerre to attend a seminar of the lessons learned during WWII but the officer notices that an inordinate amount of the time was spent discussing the glories of the previous war with an emphasis of Verdun. The author explains that while years following WWII the British were seen bowing to the inevitable but in contrast, the weak French government, goaded on by an Army desperate for glory and anxious to win a war – any war - continued to apply military solutions in their territories with disastrous results. The author says that even today (the book was written in the 1960’s) that all Jr. and Sr. officer of the Ecole De Guerre continue to go to Verdun to attend lectures even though the instructors freely admit that it has no relevance to modern warfare. The Ghosts are not allowed to die. The author inferred that Sadly, the strong minded French will continue to make the same errors in judgment that date back to the Franco Prussian War of 1871.

I want to say never again but only the dead have seen the end of war.

Enjoy the book.

[David Eppenstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never has an author irritated me like this one has. In the biographical material included in the book it mentions that the author, now deceased by the way, was fluent in both French and German. I thought that an odd bit of information to include in an author's bio then I started to read the book. By the end of the first chapter I was a bit miffed; by the end of the second chapter I was irked; by the end of the book I was really aggravated. It started with author including in his text quotations and expressions all in French without translation or even a hint of meaning. This was annoying but these inclusions had no affect on the narrative so I dismissed them. The author, however, did not stop there. As the book progressed so did these French inclusions but the author was now adding the words of combatants describing conditions on the field and he was also including orders given by officers during the battle situations. All of these statements were in the native language of the speaker and no translations provided. This material definitely affected the reader's understanding of the events being portrayed. Why in the world would the author of an English language book offer significant details of the described event in a language other than that of his reading audience? Talk about a way not to sell books this is certainly one of them. I had hoped this practice would fade out by the end of the book but it didn't. I found this practice to be nothing short of elitist and insulting and it took effort for this not to affect my evaluation of this book.

Regardless of my annoyance with the late author the book is quite compelling. While it is in no way is a reflection on the writing I found the book exhausting. The author has done an exceptional job of portraying the demoralizing nature of this 10 month long battle and how it drained the life force of the troops on both sides. The author's treatment of ordeals faced by all the combatants was so vivid that it can even affect the reader; it certainly affected me. Verdun exhausted the material resources and manpower like no battle in any war up to that point and, as the author points out, influenced the shape of the war to come as no other. While the book covers the lives and decisions of the major military personalities involved it hardly ignores the efforts of the common soldiers and frontline officers. The living conditions, the hardships, the cruelties, the dehumanizations, and the casualty numbers are all there in detail. One day's casualties exceeding the total casualties of an entire campaign in other wars. The ineptitude of military thinking at the time is certainly on display but so is the ineptitude of preparation and logistical support for men thrown into frontline situations. The lack of an efficient mechanism for supplying ammunition, water, food, and medical attention is an astounding failing that is difficult to accept regardless of the time of the conflict. And all of these things were lacking while the general in charge sat in luxurious splendor 150 miles away ordering attacks that were nothing short of suicidal missions for the soldiers so commanded. This was a brutal battle in a horrific war fought on an unimaginable scale even when compared to WWII. That we know so little about it is unfortunate because WWI shaped the history for the rest of the 20th century and is responsible for a great deal of the world's problems today. The book is more than worth reading but it will help if you are more conversant in the French language than I am.

[Jonny · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It is probably no exaggeration to call Verdun the ‘worst’ battle in history; even taking in account man’s subsequent endeavours in the Second World War. No battle has ever lasted quite so long; Stalingrad, from the moment of the German arrival on the Volga to Paulus’ surrender, had a duration of only five months, compared with Verdun’s ten. Though the Somme claimed more dead than Verdun, the proportion of casualties suffered to the numbers engaged was notably higher at Verdun than any other First War battle; as indeed were the numbers of dead in relation to the area of the battlefield. Verdun was the First War in microcosm; an intensification of all its horrors and glories, courage and futility."

Alistair Horne's examination of "one man's monstrous vision"; Erich von Falkenhayn's experiment in "bleeding France white" - is a readable, even nearly 60 years after it first saw print. Telling the story from the point out view of the humblest Poilou or Landser all the way up to French and German headquarters, we're taken from the devastating first German blow, to the absolute nadir of French hope as it appears Falkenhayn's plan may succeed in breaking the French army, to their eventual partial resurgence after the Russians and British step in to relieve the pressure with offensives of their own.

All the elements from my childhood introduction to the battle (reading Charley's War, Volume 4: Blue's Story) are there; the Trench of Bayonets, the dreadful subterranean battles in Fort Vaux, the Germans first employment of Phosgene, the troops bleating like sheep on their way to the front and especially (to a nine year old) the callous employment of colonial troops in the latter stages of the battle:

"The capture of Douaumont itself had been allotted to General Guyot de Salins’ 38th Division, composed largely of Mangin’s beloved African troops. Among them were two untried battalions of Senegalese; big, tough, fearless soldiers, profoundly dreaded by the Germans because of their summary way with captives. These arrived at Verdun in September, were entranced like children by the novelty of the ‘firework display’, and then propelled into a minor attack to see what they could do. At once they ran amuck, beyond all control of their officers, captured some German positions and butchered the survivors. Then the Germans recovered their nerve and set up a machine gun. The wretched Africans, never having been under such fire before, incapable of understanding where all the bullets were coming from, all grouped together in their bewilderment. Those that escaped the massacre that day were quickly pulled out of the line for further intensive training."

The book ends with an examination of how the "lessons" of Verdun were interpreted by the French and Germans, leading to the development of the Blitzkreig and the Maginot Line, and also the fates of some of the participants (it's nice to see that the hapless Feldwebel Kunze, single handed conqueror of Fort Douomont, eventually got some recognition).

This stands with The First Day on the Sommeas one of the best books on World War One. Highly recommended.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

On my recent trip to France, I stayed for a time in a village called Gigny, situated on a plateau of farmland where Upper Burgundy meets Champagne; a town of about 30 houses total, close-knit, yards cordoned off by tall stone walls overgrown with lilac and ivy. The entire countryside was dotted with similar clusters of ancient towns, each of them radiating from a small square dominated by a church bearing dates of construction beginning in the fifteen or sixteen hundreds. The roads connecting these anonymous hamlets were often only a lane and a half wide, dusty, skirted on each side by sloping fields brilliant with rapeseed in bloom, or emerging sunflowers, young wheat undulating in the breeze, or channels of dense, deep green forest; the wind running across the stalks of plants would culminate in a sound not unlike hearing the ocean break from across a bluff. In our rental car, we would pass through one of these farm towns in a matter of minutes, sometimes less, and then be again amid the ranging expanse of fields- it was a beautiful, enchanting desolation. We would comment now and then on that peculiar desolation, on what seemed to be the lifelessness of these towns secluded in the foothills east of Paris that spread on toward Switzerland and Germany and the heights of the Alps, populated by buildings that looked, from the exterior, as if no one had tended to them for a century; and then we were out again across another broad expanse, another village, a spire, an agglomeration of terracotta-tiled houses and unpeopled streets.

A common feature of these towns, besides the tiles and the spires and the stone walls and the little gardens, quickly became apparent- a tall obelisk set on a stone base, engraved with the dedication “Pour les morts” and the years 1914-18, and on the reverse side the same inscription followed by the years 1940-45. Sometimes, even more affecting, “Pour les enfants morts”. Every one of these villages had a monument to their war dead, still tended, with wreaths and flowers decorating them, sometimes set in the church square and sometimes erected on a well-chosen overlook, so that one could contemplate the sacrificed and the landscape that was sacrificed for all at once. Considering that seventy percent of the French Army at one time or another found themselves involved in the battle of Verdun, more likely than not a great number of these engraved names bore witness to that horror. It also came as no surprise to find, in the opening pages of Alistair Horne’s book, a familiar reference to the strange isolation of these towns in Champagne-Ardenne that we had observed, towns whose very topography, very essence, spirit and form, were grievously altered by their proximity to the front lines of the World Wars. Part of it can be explained by the simple fact that their children never returned, and even a hundred years later the landscape of France is being influenced not only by what occurred in Verdun during those ten months in 1916, but by everything that followed in the first half of the 20th century- everything that Verdun gave birth to.

The cottage where we stayed in Gigny had a small enclosed yard with a stone barn and a well, in the morning magpies and doves would fly from tree to tree above and sing, a truck selling fresh bread would sound its horn as it paused on its route, and the wind would make a constant song; in the evenings owls called out and the hours were accompanied by the regular tolling of bells resonating from the church spire. It is so difficult to imagine, after these idyllic impressions have taken hold, a century ago the sound of artillery echoing over these same places like the mad beating of muffled drums, or the thought that farther eastward, on the other side of the Meuse, French observers watched as these same style of church spires, usually visible along the horizon, disappeared morning by morning (they were leveled so the Allied guns had fewer sighting points), and that this lush, verdurous landscape that I experienced was at one time long ago so immolated that one aerial observer compared it to the “humid skin of a monstrous toad”.

The particular tragedy of WWI, and holocausts like those that occurred at Verdun and the Somme, is the fact of their being wars not of men against men, but as is so often reiterated in this book, of men against material. What is flesh and bone and blood supposed to gain against multi-ton iron-encased shells, whose shrapnel fragments alone took two men to lift and pulverized instantly the bodies that weren’t incinerated by their initial blasts? What could lines of bodies do marching into the firing zone of hundreds or thousands of well-barricaded machine guns? What use rifles against Big Berthas and what resistance does flesh and reason hold to flame throwers, phosgene gas that penetrated masks, and beyond that, the simple lack of food and water and sleep in a landscape barren and burned, bereft of hiding places and forests reduced to smoldering splinters, and unremitting shelling that so churned the earth that bodies were interred and spat up and interred again, so that when forces dug into their trenches at night, in the morning they beheld that their walls were lined with corpses? This was the first instance in history of mass armies colliding with the new death machines of industrialized war; in some ways it was a grand experiment in mass murder; for the first time air forces were formed, machine guns utilized to their full extent, flamethrowers and gas attacks and unimaginable long range artillery barrages employed- it was a grand preview of what progress was to make of the battlefield in the 20th century- and the wretched souls who walked into it did not know what was waiting or quite what to do about it. Eric summed it up very well in his review of this book, that “disparity, that failure to come to grips with a merciless new order, that suspension in a bypassed culture... a powerful image of human bewilderment before change, and time passing.”

Old Europe was being obliterated on the mill of the Western Front, and you get the sense that not even those in command had anything approaching a full appreciation of the changes that had come over tactical battle. A quarter of a million people died at Verdun, many of them in missions that were suicidal from the outset (toward the late periods of the battle, battalions took to cynically bleating like sheep on their way to the front lines), many of them meeting their death simply because of poor planning, or incomprehension at the consequences of the new technologies. For a time it seemed that the battle itself had become some malevolent force, independent of those fighting it, some kind of “Moloch” or “Minotaur” or “Ogre” (as soldiers began referring to it), that demanded more blood, whose raison was no longer some tactical positioning or the possession of some particular fort or tract of land, but the ritual of death itself; the Totentanz enacted in February of 1916 was sustained of its own inertia.

As the summer of 1916 dragged on, the strategic importance of a victory at Verdun became less and less relevant for both sides, but the symbolic importance of maintaining the battle rose in inverse proportion. Disastrously, for the fates of countless souls, Verdun became the all-important symbol of vitality and tenacity for both armies, for the success of the War in general, and as Horne observes “In all man’s affairs no situation is more lethal than when an issue assumes the status of a symbol. Here all reason, all sense of value, abdicate.” Thus the butchery grimly dragged on through Autumn.

What Horne does so well in this book is to give a heartbreaking, human picture of those that participated in the battle, along with a virtuoso recreation (that belies phenomenal amounts of research) of the ebb and flow of the battle. Individuals are so carefully and lovingly recreated, heroes and villains, brave men and fools dropped into the narrative of the battle so fittingly that you would think Horne was inventing; alas he was not. Single sentences describing individual soldiers could easily be expanded into book-length portraits, and the Great Leaders of the armies on both sides are not spared when they were ridiculous or cruel, blind, bull-headed or prophetic, and even occasionally noble. Perhaps the great achievement of this book is that it takes one of the most distinctly inhuman events in history, and fills it to overflowing with humanity.

[Buck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some selfish but ultimately healthy mechanism insulates us—most of us, most of the time—from life's horrors. Without a mental carapace to protect us from the sheer awfulness of things, we’d be reduced to masses of quivering, suicidal jelly before we even got out of bed. Take this humdrum little factoid: a quarter of a million men died in the Battle of Verdun. A quarter of a million. The mind refuses to assimilate such a statistic. Sure, you can understand it, but its full significance doesn’t register; it couldn’t possibly, because if you ever managed to grasp the immensity of suffering concealed behind that cold, round figure, you’d go insane.

Something very, very bad happened at Verdun in 1916. Not just bad in the trite war-is-hell kind of way, but cosmically, apocalyptically bad. Those who experienced the battle groped instinctively for religious or mythological analogues: ‘Moloch’, they called it, or ‘Minotaur’, or simply ‘the monster’. All these nicknames attest to a feeling shared by nearly everyone who was there: a sense that the war had finally exceeded the reach of human control or comprehension. As the editor of the German Reichsarchiven put it:

...Verdun transformed men’s souls. Whoever floundered through this morass full of the shrieking and the dying, whoever shivered in those nights, had passed the last frontier of life, and henceforth bore deep within him the leaden memory of a place that lies between Life and Death, or perhaps beyond either...

But ordinary soldiers could be no less eloquent. A French sergeant—who had once been filled with ‘the patriotism of the warrior’—wrote to his wife:

I have changed terribly. I did not want to tell you anything of the horrible lassitude which the war has engendered in me, but you force me to it. I feel myself crushed…I am a flattened man.

Or there’s the Jesuit priest who had enlisted in the ranks and who found himself expressing, in the words of the author, ‘singularly un-Catholic sentiments’:

Having despaired of living amid such horror, we begged God not to have us killed—the transition is too atrocious—but just to let us be dead. We had but one desire: the end.

Military history per se doesn’t really interest me: I couldn’t care less how many meters XX Corps advanced or how the 9th Hussars effected a sweeping pincer movement. And in the vast, chaotic abattoir that Verdun became—troops being marched up to the line would sarcastically bleat like sheep—such tactical details are even less relevant than usual. Alistair Horne knows this, and though he’s very good at the ‘big picture’ stuff, his true forte is the telling close-up, where he zooms in on a solitary individual to show you the grime on his face, to let you hear his cynical jokes and—all too often—witness his final moments.

The Price of Glory contains dozens of these inset portraits, many of which read like novels compressed into a single paragraph. They give an overwhelming impression of the variety, intensity and plain oddness of all those vanished lives. Here’s Horne describing Jean Navarre, a French fighter ace:

The son of a wealthy paper manufacturer and something of a playboy, Navarre loathed killing and claimed he flew only because he had to. He took poorly even to relaxed airforce discipline; he was incapable of keeping a log-book, and was at one time placed under arrest for disobedience. The men in the trenches adored him because when there was no enemy in the air he would ‘distract’ them by hurling his red plane…into terrifying—and strictly forbidden—aerobatics over the front line. In all he fought 257 combats at Verdun, most of them against heavy odds, and shot down eleven planes. Wounded, he displayed violent bad temper in hospital; shook Paris by his wild debauches on convalescent leave; and finally ended the war in a mental home, suffering from chronic depression into which he had sunk after the death of his brother. In 1919, while preparing a stunt to fly under the Arc de Triomphe, he was killed in collision with telephone wires under circumstances that suggested suicide.

Isn’t that amazing? You couldn’t invent such a fascinating character if you tried. I don’t think they even make people like that anymore.

Well, I feel I’m on the verge of one of my tiresome anti-fiction rants here, so I’ll calmly remove my hands from the keyboard. But let me say that if you have any desire to understand the series of collective psychotic episodes known as twentieth-century history, you could do worse than to start at Verdun. It’s pretty much the primal scene. No wonder the last hundred years have been totally FUBAR.

[Nadia · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing book about one- if not the most tragic battle in modern history. The battle of Verdun stands to this day as the longest battle ever fought with its ten months filled will atrocities and evil that even today are difficult to imagine. Alistair Horne writes that no matter how you count (sources vary), it is clear that more 700,000 lives were lost in this battle. And even if the battle had ended, it stayed imprinted in the minds of the French to such an extent that years later in Indo-China battle cries from Verdun were heard in the bunkers. In Algeria, "De Gaulle Ne Passera Pas" was the favourite slogan of the french nationalists in O.A.S.

The strategy of Erich von Falkenhayn was to 'bleed the French army white' and in months the landscape of Verdun was transformed into ghastly fields where the shells had blast away every last bit of life, trees and forests were gone, horses and men lay dying in the mud. The conditions of the soldiers where horrible, many did not sleep for days and in the forts, water supply was cut off on many occasions. The wounded couldn't be tended to and often lay suffering in craters created by the shells, their comrades not able to leave the trenches to aid them. The use of phosgene gas, heavy shelling, mud, bad weather conditions and the inhuman conditions all contributed to the sheer terror of Verdun.

"The Price of Glory" is an amazing insight into the battle of Verdun as well as into some of the key figures (French and German) on the Western front during the Great War. Alistair Horne shifts from the generals: Joffre, Falkenhayn, Pétain (who I'm eager to read more about) and so on- to the regular soldiers in the trenches, forts and on the front line and doesn't shy away from including snippets from first-hand sources. He goes into great detail and covers many aspects of the battle, as well as the aftermath and what impact Verdun had on the collective mind in both France and Germany. His writing is beautiful and even poetic at times (especially in the epilogue which includes some very beautiful and melancholic, nostalgia-invoking pages) and I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in the battle of Verdun. This is the second book in his trilogy and I will be reading the 2 others soon. Alistair Horne is a great historian and a great writer.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the author’s words “Verdun was the First World War in microcosm; an intensification of all its horrors and glories, courage and futility.”

This book is considered a classic for a reason. Well written, at times almost poetic, this does a good job of retelling the battle of Verdun, using witness accounts from both sides, from the lowest to highest levels, and also locating it within the wider context of WW1 and WW2.

Just a couple of niggles - the author’s continual quoting of untranslated French annoyed me, and the maps were too few and poor.

['Aussie Rick' · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a classical piece of military history, well written and presented. This would be the best book that you'll find covering the terrible slaughter that is known as 'Verdun' during WWI. The author is one of the best English authors who covers French history and he writes his stories well. Take the time to read this book you wont be disappointed!

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Usually I just breeze through military history, but this was very affecting. Horne has that novelistic eye for the pathos of everything human--for even something as dry-sounding as the fluctuations of French army tactical doctrine 1870-1940. Horne shows you the sadness and helplessness behind the old cliche, 'generals are always fighting the last war.' The French army is bottled up and surrounded in fortress towns like Sedan and Metz by the Prussians in 1870--so in the years between then and 1914 a mindlessly aggressive, chauvanistic faith in the holiness of attack, and a contempt for fortifications or defense or even tactical retreat, holds sway among the French officer class--and you can guess how successful those ideas were against machine guns and massed artillery, once WWI started. The incredible carnage and loss of manpower of WWI then swings the pendulum the other way, and France re-commits to fortresses and static defense, and builds the Maginot Line, a relic that is then simply driven-around by the German panzer corps in 1940.

The defining choice of the battle of Verdun was General de Castelnau's decision to defend the city, to pick up the German gauntlet, a choice Horne doesn't see as very wise--but de Castelnau was a young officer in 1870, had witnessed the headlong rout of the French army and was fearful of what might happen if he ordered a retreat from a city of great symbolic importance to French history. There is something so poignant about how military officers are shaped by the traumas of their early careers, when they are young and powerless witnesses of defeat and incompetence. One thinks of Colin Powell's doctrine, which states that the US should only commit itself to war when it has overwhelming force, a definite political goal and an exit strategy. A junior officer in the 1960s, Powell wanted to avoid another Vietnam; they heeded his doctrine in 1991 but, as we know, in 2003 even Powell seemed to forget it.

All war is sad, but there's something about WWI (and the American Civil War) that strikes me as especially tragic. I think it's just how unprepared Americans in 1860 and Europeans in 1914 were for what was about to overtake them. They spent years grimly performing quaint, outdated, "heroic" tactics with industrial weapons that had rendered the use of such tactics nothing short of suicidal. That disparity, that failure to come to grips with a merciless new order, that suspension in a bypassed culture, is for me a powerful image of human bewilderment before change, and time passing. Horne is very well placed to represent this as he was an officer in WWII, and one of his recurring themes is how differently things were conducted (when it came to infantry tactics) in the war he fought in. They had finally faced up to the bottomless destructive capacity of modern war.

[Mikey B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a searing account of the battle of Verdun. The relentlessness and remorselessness of battle are illustrated in this book. The battle - meaning the killings, became self-perpetuating. It was only Petain on the French side who was able to "slow" this murderous momentum. The Germans introduced phosgene gas to increase the attrition.

As the author suggests Verdun may be a reason for the French collapse in 1940. The soldiers were not fighting each other, but were fighting artillery - and were maimed and blown to pieces by it. The Verdun battlefield was small and concentrated and the duration was long. The entire area was constantly being shredded by artillery.

The only objection I have is that the author analyzes characters too much by facial features, like Falkenhayn. Also sometimes we are waded down with military positional descriptions - this division on the left flank, that division posted...

Nevertheless this is well worth reading.

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

What Was It All For?

The Battle of Verdun in 1916 is synonymous with the First World War. A huge waste of life for little gain in a pointless war. From reading this book, this has reaffirmed this perception for me. Originally written in the 1960s, when the memories of this conflict were still fresh in the minds of the generations that followed and the veterans were beginning to die off. This book is able to offer something that cannot be done today. Interviews with veterans and those who knew the figures of this book. The author, Sir Alistair Horne also visited the battlefield 40 years after its conclusion. Still scared with the sites of the war, with skeletons, helmets and rifles still being regularly uncovered; the landscape much changed again, although one still sees the last vestiges of another world.

Horne tells a great, balanced story. He brushes away the caricatures of those involved, such as Phillippe Pétain or Crown Prince Wilhelm and shows what decisions men made and seeks to answer why they made those decisions. As Horne himself exclaims, this is the more interesting inquiry. The other dominating figure in all of this is of course Eric von Falkenhayn, who as a ‘westerner’ (ie looked to win the war in the west) masterminded attacking at Verdun, famously saying ‘to bleed the French white’. This of course failed, after the initial successes as the battle cost both sides around 700,000 casualties, with the French loading slightly more.

So why did it fail? Some say the war was lost after the First Battle of the Marne in 1914, as once Germany failed to win a quick victory they could never sustain a long war. Verdun was the second chance of a German attempt at a decisive victory, to take away French morale by seizing the important fort structures in the Verdun area. However, they had not yet the technology of tanks or the tactics of a creeping barrage to break through. The heavy bombardments destroyed the land, killed the soldiers, but the machine gun nests were still devastating and the counter bombardments and counter attacks simply took back what was taken. Only in the Spring offensive of 1918 did the Germans bring up duck boards to push the heavy artillery along a battlefield as to shell new positions once their men went in. The Crown Prince was hamstrung by his aid de camp Otto von Knoblesdorff who was believed in the Verdun mission alongside Falkenhayn and was unable to convince his father, the Kaiser of its futile nature. Falkenhayn became more and more obsessed with taking Verdun, before finally loosing interest. His lack of communication with his peers or even the Austrians who knew nothing about the attack was fatal. The other cause of the failure was the allied response. Namely the British attacks on the Somme to relieve the pressure. This engaged the Germans further north where more men had to be sent.

What did the battle achieve? This is also an interesting question posed by Horne. The downfall of Falkenhayn and the raise of Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. It also paved the way for early feelers of negotiated peace from figures in Germany such as the Crown Prince. More intriguing, the fall of France in 1940. As Horne explains, Verdun broke French hearts and destroyed a generation. Never again would the lives of young Frenchmen be so needlessly sacrificed. It had a huge influence over the leadership in France and of course Pétain. The French lost the war in 1870 through being too defensive and relying on fortifications, they were broken by being too attacking in 1914 and so reverted to a defensive strategy in the inter-war years. The Maginot Line was cut through by the German blitzkrieg by a France unable to find the right balance.

The battle is one of tragedy and ultimate bleakness. From the air duels where aces burnt to death to the tragedy waste of horses. Men sat in waterlogged trenches, next to piles of bodies, starving to death in the cold. None of it is positive or heroic. A true anti war pamphlet in the ilk of All Quiet on the Western Front. No one can say war is not hell after reading this. Times have moved on from when the book was written. We are now starting to see the ‘lions led by donkeys’ narrative changed, which Horne actually doesn’t prescribe too all that much, the book doesn’t feel out of date or a new history is needed. I enjoyed this and recommend to the First World War enthusiast.

[A.L. Sowards · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first WWI battle-level book and it was very informative. Sad, too, because Verdun is among the worst battles in history. (Horne makes the case that it is the worst battle in history, even worse than Stalingrad, and he might be right.)

Faced with stalemate on the Western Front, Falkenhayn, German chief of staff, came up with a plan to bleed the French army white. He would attack a target they had to defend, like the forts in front of Verdun, and then let attrition take its toll. There was fighting around Verdun before the battle started, and there was fighting after, but the main campaign started with the German attack in February of 1916.

Of course, for the German front-line soldiers, the goal was to take Verdun—not just to attack it and force the French to defend it—so the early months of the battle consisted of German breakthroughs that never got as far as they could have, because Falkenhayn wouldn’t provide enough troops to exploit front-line successes. The lack of honest communication on strategy between Falkenhayn and his generals cost the German Army dearly.

And naturally the French defended their territory tenaciously, through new weapons like phosgene gas and flame-throwers, through mud and shells and more shells, usually while hungry and thirsty and surrounded by corpses.

What Falkenhayn didn’t realize was that attrition would hit both armies. By the year’s end, the French and German armies were exhausted. The German army would not recover during WWI, and it’s easy to argue that the French army never recovered at all. Yet the longer the battle went on, the more important victory became for each side, and so the battle continued.

It’s easy to picture WWI as a horrible series of men in trenches, suffering huge casualties to take only a few yards of territory, commanded by officers that kept repeating the same mistakes over and over. That’s true for Verdun, in part, but that might be an oversimplification. German storm troops had good success with their new techniques early in the battle. Indeed, the French learned from them and French troops, mimicking their enemy, had some early success in the Somme. Toward the end of Verdun, Nivelle perfected the rolling barrage technique with artillery, and the French were able to recapture most of their lost territory at what, compared with the rest of the battle, seemed like lightening speed. Naturally the Germans quickly adapted, so the rolling barrage technique didn’t work the next year and stalemate returned to the trenches.

Horne concentrated on the leadership at Verdun, but included information on the grunts involved in some of the heavy fighting, especially that surrounding the forts. After reading this book, I find myself reluctantly respecting Petain. Most of my knowledge about Petain prior to reading this involved his WWII actions, but during WWI he was the right man at the right place, a rare general who saw men as men. Most other WWI-era generals seemed to see men in the same way they saw bullets and shells—go ahead and use them up; they’re expendable; we’ll find more somewhere. Horne quotes another writer who says War is less costly than servitude . . . the choice is always between Verdun and Dachau. But in 1940, Petain didn’t know about Dachau, he only knew Verdun, and I can understand his desire not to repeat it. (He was also very old and may have been slightly manipulated during WWII. And he was handed a mess he didn’t make and I don’t think anyone could have fixed it at that point. My prior contempt for Petain has been transferred to Laval. Who knew this book would turn me into a Petain apologist?)

Horne’s writing is good, though it was written for an audience that reads far more French than I do, and he rarely provides translations. He sums the battle up with these words: Neither side ‛won’ at Verdun. It was the indecisive battle in an indecisive war; the unnecessary battle in an unnecessary war; the battle that had no victors in a war that had no victors.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alistair Horne's The Price of Glory brilliantly recreates the First World War's longest and most destructive battle, the Siege of Verdun (February-December 1916). Horne discusses how this long, sanguinary campaign began as an effort by Germany's General Erich von Falkenhayn to break the will of France with an overwhelming attack on their largest military position. A few early tactical victories (including the near-bloodless capture of Fort Douaumont by a small team of German scouts) convinced Falkenhayn that complete success required just one further push. As generally occurred in World War I, this hope degenerated into bloody attrition, as the French high command overcame their initial mistakes, poured more troops into Verdun and countered German stormtrooper tactics with advanced counteroffensives of their own. Horne effectively shows the squabbling of France's generals, with Philippe Petain and Robert Nivelle overcoming the poor command decisions of Joffre and Castelnau, mounting a stubborn defense that inspired France to keep fighting, even as their armies suffered horrifying costs. The effects of the campaign spread to other fronts, as Germany committed so many forces at Verdun that Russia launched its punishing Brusilov Offensive in the East, while France goaded the British into their suicidal attack on the Somme to relieve pressure on Verdun. Nor does Horne skimp on the gruesome details of trench warfare, the nightmare of gas attacks and the horrifying, soul-shattering ordeals of endless artillery barrages. Horne argues that neither side truly won the battle - the French held the position, but suffered such heavy losses that they were forced to lean on British, and later American troops to maintain the Front; across the trench, Falkenhayn was sacked and replaced by the more competent Hindenburg and Ludendorff, but Germany had themselves exhausted their military resources so much that victory on the Western Front was no longer possible. And France's embrace of Verdun as their ultimate triumph led them to adopt defensive strategies for the next war, and to make Marshal Petain an unassailable national hero - two developments with baleful consequences a quarter-century later. A strikingly written, engrossing work of military history.

[Betsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What makes Verdun even more tragic is the idea that the British Army needed to take some of the pressure off the French by attacking on the Somme, and more men died.

One more thing about this book's title; it says so much in a few words. What a price the soldiers and the world paid.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading "The Fall of Paris" earlier this year I was keen to follow up with this second part of Alistair Horne's trilogy about the Franco-German conflicts of 1870 - 1940. This is a comprehensive analysis of the immense Verdun battle of 1916, with a particular emphasis on the strengths and weaknesses of the generals on both sides - Joffre, Pétain, Nivelle, Falkenheyn, the Crown Prince, Knobelsdorf; and others. It's also strong on the experience of the battle for the ordinary soldier. Obviously no mere book can convey the horrors of war, but this one will leave you wondering how on earth human beings could have withstood being caught in the maelstrom of Verdun.

Broadly speaking I had known the events and outcome of the battle before reading the book, though I had not realised just how close the French had come to disaster on more than one occasion. I suppose that realistically battles between evenly matched armies will often be decided by very narrow margins. As with "The Fall of Paris" though, the author sets out the influence of the battle on subsequent events. Crucially, he concludes that the French and German armies drew opposite conclusions, and that those conclusions decided the outcome in 1940. For the French, the heroic resistance at Verdun, based on strong fortifications, led to the adoption of the fatally defensive "Maginot Mentality". For the Wehrmacht, a large number of whose WWII generals had fought as junior officers at Verdun, the lesson was about how to ensure an attack did not lose impetus, and how to avoid attacking infantry being slaughtered by enemy artillery and machine guns. Horne went on to write a third book about that outcome, even though as a Francophile and a WWII veteran himself, he describes that outcome here as "almost too painful to recall."

[KOMET · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive, well-written history of one of the First World War's most bloodiest battles, which raged from February to December 1916. Codenamed 'Unternehmen Gericht' (Operation Judgment), Germany attacked the fortress town of Verdun in its bid to break the backbone of the French Army and so demoralize France that it would feel compelled to sue for peace.

[Matti Karjalainen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Menin sinne mukanani 175 miestä ja palasin johdossani enää 34 ja heistä monet mielipuolisuuden partaalla. Ja meidän paikallamme on nyt joukkueen verran vähäisiä jääkäreitä. He ovat seuraavana ruokalajina, ja vielä yksi tarjotaan aika pian, sillä hirviön ruokahalu on kyltymätön... Voi omia mies parkojani. (s. 219. Kapteeni August Cochinin kirje äidille, 14. huhtikuuta 1916.)

Loppukesän lukuteemaksi on sattumalta muodostunut ensimmäinen maailmansota. Lukemani Elokuun tykkien jatkoksi oli nimittäin helppo tarttua Alistair Hornen palkittuun teokseen "Verdun 1916" (Werner Söderström, 1966). Se on englantilaisen historioitsijan ns. Ranska-trilogian toinen osa ja samalla hänen ainoa suomennettu teoksensa.

Vuonna 1916 käyty Verdunin taistelu oli eräs ensimmäisen maailmansodan kammottavimmista ja verisimmistä yhteenotoista. Saksalaisten tarkoituksena oli vuodattaa Ranskan armeijan veri kuiviin kulutustaistelussa, joka venyi lopulta kymmenen kuukautta kestäneeksi verilöylyksi loputtomine tykistökeskityksineen ja raivoisine taisteluineen Vaux'n kaltaisten linnakkeiden (jonka puolustustaistelun yhteydessä, muuten, ansaitsi eräs ranskalainen kirjekyyhky Kunnialegioonan merkin) omistuksesta. Saksalaisten tavoite jäi lopulta saavuttamatta, mutta ranskalaisten joukot saivat nekin niin pahasti siipeensä, että mahdollinen taktinen voitto jätti kovin kitkerän maun.

En ole riittävän suuri asiantuntija kommentoidakseni sitä onko tutkimus ehtinyt tuoda kuudessakymmenessä vuodessa paljonkin uutta aiheeseen, mutta joka tapauksessa kirja on tavattoman kiinnostavaa ja vetävästi kirjoitettua sotahistoriaa. Verdunin juoksuhautojen kauhut heräävät henkiin vaikuttavalla tavalla. Näkökulma vaihtelee niin, että taistelun kummankin osapuolen sotilaat pääsevät ääneen, kenraalien esikunnista aivan tavallisiin rivimiehiin saakka. Jos siis olet pitänyt esimerkiksi Antony Beevorin kirjoista, niin tutustu ihmeessä myös tähän!

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Western Front battle books can be hard to read. They often quickly dissolve into an indistinguishable shell-pocked moonscape (mudscape?), littered with bits and pieces of thousands of soldiers. Horne's history of the great 1916 battle has plenty of those elements, but he elevates the story by focusing on various individuals (French and German), from warlords to common soldiers. He also does an admirable job explaining the questionable Why of the battle (both French and German). On the German side, the intent was not so much to gain a smashing victory as it was to bleed the French army. To some extent that was accomplished on a physical level, but both sides bled. The French army, though it was considered the winner, was damaged to the point of being broken. The final break would occur with, after Verdun, a new French offensive that would (again) needlessly sacrifice French lives in pursuit of victory and glory (the title of the book is meant to be ironic).

The German army was also staggered, but in a different way. As bad as Verdun was for the German army, it was never quite the national crucible that it was for France. (A majority of the French army would cycle through Verdun's hell hole.) But Germany's losses were irreplaceable, making her ripe for the coming American intervention and the allied offenses of 1918. The long-term consequences for the French would extend (Horne argues) up to that devastating year of 1940. On surface that may seem a bridge too far, but Horne establishes a national context through France's enormous suffering at Verdun - and beyond. Military lessons were not learned, but repeated, while the suffering always remembered. The book's rather long (but eloquent) coda, especially as it pertains to Petain, is a tragic one. A national scar that may have faded, but will never totally go away. Highly recommended. (Though I was often annoyed by Horne's frequent use of French without supplying a translation.) A must read for Lost Generation junkies. The haunting quote from F.Scott Fitzgerald's from Tender is the Night that fronted Price of Glory blew me away, and left me feeling that I need to revisit that FSF effort.

[Sleepy Boy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Horne's history of Verdun is excellent, the amazing first hand accounts coupled with his intense examination of the battle made for exquisite reading.

[Jerome Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written, well-researched, and insightful history of the battle of Verdun. Horne covers pretty much every aspect of the battle in a readable style, from the life of the soldiers, individual actions on the battlefield, technology, tactics, and the character of the commanders without ever bogging down. He also looks at the wider war in some detail and its general conduct.

The narrative is intelligent and sensitive. While he could benefit from hindsight, Horne rarely makes use of it, and it's not such a bad thing. At one point Horne writes that the Germans could have used air power during the battle to cut the French supply line (they basically relied on only one). Horne then quotes a German commander saying that his side simply didn’t understand how to use air power. Throughout the whole narrative, Horne does a great job capturing the battle at the tactical level as well as the machinations among the army staffs.

Horne does cover the experience of pilots, but there is little on the air battles. Horne often uses French words that you may or may not know (it feels like he does it at least once every single page), even in lengthy quotations. A few personalities are referred to by their rank and last name, even though Horne never introduced them before. Some more maps would have helped.

A few statements made by Horne seem questionable; they do show the book's age, for sure. He blames Moltke for tinkering with Schlieffen’s “master plan” (Horne’s words), but doesn’t mention any of the plan’s flaws or Schlieffen’s own doubts. Nor does he mention other issues Moltke had to deal with, like a more formidable French army, or the fact that the original Schlieffen plan was meant for a war with France alone and not, as in 1914, a war on two fronts. Horne briefly mentions that Joffre ordered Verdun’s abandonment in 1914 but that the order was disregarded. In fact, Joffre had authorized his Third Army commander to retreat if necessary, but he declined because of the difficult terrain and strong defenses. Conrad von Hötzendorf is called “as a general and strategist far superior to Falkenhayn. He was one of the most outstanding on either side.” A lot of older works on the Great War have said the same, though readers today may not necessarily agree. Horne also writes that Falkenhayn and the commanders of Fifth Army disagreed about the attack's targets. They actually agreed, and Falkenhayn assumed that the French would try to reconquer the hills. The sources don't really make clear whether the army commanders assumed, like Falkenhayn, that the French would try to recapture the hills.

Still, an insightful, vivid, and engaging history.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm completely hooked on Horne's readable, clear approach to history.
I've been wanting to understand Marechal Pétain for a long time, why it was that many French were so devoted to him as a leader during the Occupation, and Horne begins here to provide the answer.

The history of the battle of Verdun is complicated and excruciating to read about, but Horne succeeds in describing it with the aid of some very good maps (I'd have loved to see them in color though). His descriptions of the personalities of the military hierarchy of the day are vivid and to the point - one could understand exactly how things went awry on both the German and the French sides. And sometimes, how they went right, and how some of the carnage could have been avoided or mitigated. This book was published in French in 1964 when these battlefields still bore the scars of the conflict; I am curious to know if birds have begun to sing there now, or if the silence of death still prevails, along with the pock-marked, bone-filled earth which hides the buried villages...

It seems that myths are always created to hide certain realities of history and the sentimental obsession of many with this war is no exception. One may disagree with Horne's generalized description of "national characters" - there are always exceptions to any rule - but it must be admitted that the French desire to optimistically plunge ahead in search of glory without proper preparation or taking into account probable cost had disastrous consequences in this war. In contrast, German over-planning and indecision were equally at fault, as was the English hesitation to commit to actual engagement. Horne gives no side preferential treatment, they all managed to create god-awful messes in their different ways. But the contrast between the quality of military leadership in the first war and that of the second world war is undeniable.

I'm looking forward to reading more about the latter in the third book of this series, "To Lose a Battle: France 1940." Horne never taught history, he was a journalist during the 50s after fighting in the second world war, but his research is detailed and impressive. If he had taught - what a teacher he would have been.

[Mickey Mantle · Rating 5 out of 5]

On a human level, it is difficult to imagine a more inhuman endeavor than World War I. This battle epitomized nothing but slaughter, misery and suffering on a grand scale. The military leadership on both sides was incompetent. The German plan to bleed the French white is a war crime in my eyes.
As to the military actions at Verdun, the book lacks maps. Maps would have been a huge plus in decifering where the "strategies" were aimed.
The suffering of all the paricipants....how this war and this battle shaped future European history can not be understated.
Utter madness is a perfect description. The battle and the War.

[Mike Fendrich · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book on an absolutely horrible subject. How many more? Even so, come quickly Lord Jesus.

[Brad Steele · Rating 5 out of 5]

A riveting account of what is probably the worst place to have been in all human history. Very distressing at points, though thankfully written without bias towards either side of the conflict

[Steve]

Fought ten months between February and December 1916, the battle of Verdun, the Stalingrad of the First World War, accounted for an atrocious number of killed and wounded, German and French. Germans were motivated to bleed the French, though they too bled; the French were motivated by glory at all costs, though no glory was to be had. Reading this history reminds me why I’m allergic to the concept of leadership. Seldom do leaders appear to carry the best interest of the commoner at heart. For sure, leaders exist who do care for the general welfare, however, leadership, it seems to this outsider, is mostly the embodiment of selfishness, fashioned in pursuit of aggrandizement or enrichment, or both. In the narrow case of Verdun, where was the leader who said, “You know what, guys? This battle is a really, really bad idea, and rather than seeing y’all get slaughtered, I think we’ll try Plan B.” If someone is telling us to do something that appears contrary to our best interest, like getting killed, for example, how about we just don’t do it? Isn’t the true leader that person who rises to prevent the state from ever putting us in that position to begin with? For the French in particular, this seems an unappreciated lesson throughout time.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend and I recently visited Verdun, one of the devastating slaughterhouse battle sites (for both the French and the German adversaries) of World War I, and as preparation for the trip, I read this excellent account.

You visit the site, now mostly woods, and you see little to indicate the ferocious fighting that went on for ten months in l916 to capture this strategic location. There is one notable exception, though, the huge French Fort Douamont, built on a hill and almost entirely underground. The hill, now a grassy knoll, is a crazy mass of small holes and larger craters where the earth was churned up by huge German artillery shells trying to penetrate the fort, and then later by French artillery trying to recapture it.

Where a sense of the war is best captured is a nearby new museum, full of exhibits with films and sound tracks that evoke the sensory horrors of this site, horrors that consist of a no man’s land were wounded soldiers died unattended, the poison gas that was used, the deafening sounds of bombardments, and in rain and cold a sea of mud. The casualties were staggering, three quarters of a million, and four hundred thousand dead, almost equally distributed equally between the French and the Germans.

What Horne’s book does best is give some context for one of the most destructive battles in history. It was a turning point in the war and the Germans’ last real chance to have won the war. If they had broken through, as they nearly did, their path to Paris would have been unobstructed.. But initial advances were cautious ones with no rapid followup, German generals feeling their gains had to be consolidated. It gave the French generals time to set up defenses, and from the spring of l916, a series of zig-zag battles followed with neither side gaining.

The question arises of why both sides persevered in this incredible waste of human lives. For the Germans, one general felt it would “bleed” France to death and it would ultimately succumb. On the other side, Horne argues that the French could have made strategic retreats that would have left them in better positions, but the generals agreed that a successful stand here would be a huge morale boost. A German breakthrough disastrous for morale. And a retreat would have meant a sea change in the “attaque, attaque” mentality of French military thinking.

At the same time, the French kept waiting for signs of British success on the Somme, the other great battle of 1916, and hoping that it would relieve some of the pressure at Verdun. In the end, though, it was the Germans who retreated, and in subsequent French propaganda the idea was promoted that a great victory had been achieved at Verdun.
True, the German advance had been stopped, but the war was far from over, and Verdun should go down in history as a senseless and meaningless waste of human life.

The repercussions of Verdun led, of course, to the construction of the Maginot Line, a series of French fortifications in the area t designed to prevent Germany from ever breaching this strategic border of France again. Ironically, in a backhanded way it succeeded as Germany had no inclination in WW II to get bogged down again in a morass like Verdun and used lightning speed to go around the line.

Horne’s book was written in 1962 when there were still many World War veterans alive, and it has an immediacy that makes it compelling reading. At the same time, I think its overall conclusions are valid, sixty years on.