Verdun was over at last. For months the battle had been little more than a struggle over a symbol. No one seemed capable of asking why the French were attacking or the Germans were bothering to defend. The crown prince, in his postwar memoir, offered the German rationale. To have walked away from ground over which so much blood had been spilled, he wrote, would have been politically impossible—would have caused explosions at home. The French in the end were fighting for nothing more substantial than glory—not France’s so much as Mangin’s glory.
