The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - FREEMIUM： Epochs #234 ｜ The Battle of Verdun

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome back to Epochs. If you remember over the last few episodes we've been in the

00:00:25.500 16th century with that long series I did about Magellan and then that one off about Sir Walter

00:00:29.980 Riley. So I thought we'd do a complete change. We'll move on from the 16th century for a while

00:00:35.260 and so this time I thought we could talk about something in World War I. Now I'm almost surprised

00:00:42.060 at myself that I haven't done more World War I and World War II and just 20th century content in

00:00:48.140 general on Epochs because I am absolutely fascinated like any history nerd with World War I and World

00:00:53.700 War II, particularly World War I. My great loves in history are the ancient world of course,

00:01:02.020 some parts of the medieval world and World War I. I think for me anyway World War I is such a pivotal

00:01:09.620 thing. Our modern world now in the 21st century, 2025, is still living in the echoes and the ripples

00:01:20.020 of World War I. I'm one of those historians that thinks, makes the argument that World War II was

00:01:26.500 simply a continuation of World War I. The interwar years, the 20s and 30s, were just a hiatus, just an

00:01:33.860 interruption in between that one long conflict. And you can also make the argument, can't you? I do.

00:01:40.340 I do. The Cold War is another extension of World War II. So in other words, I think World War I is

00:01:49.780 absolutely pivotal. But on top of that, just me personally, I find it fascinating, always have, ever since

00:01:56.340 I was old enough to sort of start really learning, learning about it properly, you know, really properly,

00:02:01.860 reading adult books about it. And I was, I don't know, 15, 16, maybe even a little older. I'm genuinely,

00:02:09.220 genuinely interested in it and can actually learn about it and deal with it with something approaching

00:02:14.900 an adult mind. And in adulthood, I've just kept reading about it and watching films and documentaries

00:02:21.940 and reading fictional novels and all sorts of things. So I'm a big World War I fan. It's a funny

00:02:28.100 word. That's not the right word, is it? To be a fan of it. For my money, the greatest war.

00:02:34.340 Sorry, that's an Alan Partridge quote. But yeah, it's called the Great War for a reason.

00:02:39.540 It's called the Great War for a reason. They thought it would be the war to end all wars.

00:02:44.420 Of course, it wasn't. But yeah, so absolutely fascinated by World War I. Should really, by rights,

00:02:50.820 if it's a reflection of my own historical tastes, have made a lot more World War I content by now.

00:02:56.260 But okay, so I thought we'll move on from the 16th century. And I just wanted to do something

00:03:01.220 about World War I because I haven't done anything for that in a while. So one of my favorite things,

00:03:06.980 again, favorite is the wrong word, isn't it? It's such a horrific, horrible thing.

00:03:10.340 Saying it's your favorite is odd. But one of the things I'm most interested in, let's say that,

00:03:15.940 from World War I, is the Battle of Verdun. Now, if anyone out there doesn't know, I'm going to pitch

00:03:25.620 this epoch to people who might not know anything about it. So if you do already know a lot about

00:03:33.060 the Battle of Verdun, apologies if this is a bit surface level stuff. Especially as I'm not going

00:03:39.460 to do a multiple, multiple part series. It might be two, maybe three parts, but no more than that.

00:03:44.580 I'm not going to do 20 parter on it. So it'll be sort of fairly high level stuff. Sort of overview,

00:03:51.140 almost stuff. But I'm going to pitch this as though you don't really know anything about it.

00:03:56.420 So just to begin with, it's a bit odd, perhaps, that me as an Englishman,

00:04:01.140 it's so fascinated by Verdun because it's an entirely French and German affair. Lots and lots

00:04:09.220 of battles from World War I could potentially involve all sorts of nations and peoples, even

00:04:15.780 just on the Western Front. You would think that an Englishman would be interested in first and

00:04:20.420 foremost in the Battle of the Somme, or various parts within the Battle of the Somme, Passchendaele,

00:04:27.460 or the various battles that go on around Ypres. Ypres. I can't try to pronounce Ypres correctly.

00:04:35.860 Wipers. People at the time, Englishmen would call it Wipers. And a lot of people pronounce it Ypres.

00:04:44.980 I think the French pronounce it Ypres. Anyway, lots and lots of Englishmen lost their lives around the

00:04:51.060 Ypres salient. So you would think that as an Englishman, that would be one of the first

00:04:56.660 places I go to do an epochs. And of course, I am fascinated by the Somme and the various battles

00:05:03.620 at Ypres and all sorts of other places where the English fought. But Verdun, for me, for some

00:05:10.500 reason has always been, again, since I was very, very young, has always been a thing of absolute

00:05:16.820 fascination. Because it's sort of, for various reasons, it's so dark, it's so twisted and terrible.

00:05:29.140 Terrible is the word. It's one of the most gruesome, grim battles of World War I. And that is saying

00:05:36.660 something. Because it was four years of grim, grim warfare. Almost as grim as it gets. So for Verdun to

00:05:46.980 be up there, arguably the worst, is quite saying something. Now, in terms of just pure casualties,

00:05:55.060 there are worse battles in World War I. The Battle of the Somme, far more people died in that.

00:06:00.980 Almost twice as many. Something approaching twice as many. So there are bloodier, there are bloodier

00:06:10.180 affairs that went down in World War I. But still, the figures, the casualty figures are absolutely

00:06:16.900 astronomical. So the French suffered something like 400,000 casualties. Now, the exact numbers

00:06:24.580 aren't known. These battles are so big that the exact number can never properly be calculated. What a crazy

00:06:30.420 thing that is. That data point in and of itself. You don't even know quite how many men were cycled through

00:06:35.620 there and how many died. Because some are just blown absolutely to smithereens. Blown into nothing.

00:06:41.380 You know, whole raiding parties that just disappear. Things like this. We don't know the exact number.

00:06:45.780 But the French had something like 400,000 casualties. Now, that does include the wounded. They had something

00:06:51.860 in the order of 160,000, 163,000 men killed. Another 215,000, 216,000 wounded. You know,

00:07:01.220 a lot of these are terrible maimings. You know, a limb blown off or blinded. Something terrible.

00:07:07.380 And the Germans, not much less. They had something in the order of, well, 340,000, 350,000 plus casualties.

00:07:16.740 Something like 143,000, 140,000 dead. So the French lost a bit more, or thousands more, thousands and

00:07:24.820 thousands more. But still, in the scheme of things, on the scale of World War I, that's pretty close.

00:07:30.740 One side didn't annihilate the other side to the tune of 5 to 1 or 10 to 1. And as I say,

00:07:39.620 there were bloodier battles. The Battle of the Sommets, like one point between both sides,

00:07:44.820 something in the order of 1.1 to 1.3 million men died there. But the pure casualty figures don't

00:07:52.180 tell the whole story. And anyway, between the Germans and the French, it's still something like

00:07:58.820 three quarters of a million men. It's difficult to get your mind around what that is, what that means.

00:08:05.220 Three quarters of a million men casualties. 300,000 of them dead. 300,000. You can't really

00:08:13.460 understand it. It boggles the mind, doesn't it? It boggles the mind. Three quarters of a million

00:08:17.380 families ruined. 300,000 families absolutely devastated. Life's cut short. You know,

00:08:23.940 these are mostly young men as well. And they're very young, often in the prime of life. Artists,

00:08:30.500 poets. I mean, it's just, France never recovered demographically from World War I. Never, never

00:08:36.740 truly recovered. It's a terrible, terrible, almost absurd, well, not almost is, absurd tragedy. Words

00:08:45.140 almost can't really do it justice, how frightful it is. And as I say, even the casualty numbers,

00:08:52.340 as monstrous as they are, don't really tell the whole story. You know, so the reason why Verdun is

00:08:58.340 so fascinating in a macabre way, a terrifying way, is how grim it was, how relatively small the

00:09:08.100 battlefield was, how intense the fighting was, and for how long it went on. So one thing you can say

00:09:14.660 about Verdun is it was the longest battle of all of World War I, the longest battle. It went on for

00:09:21.380 something in the order of nine to ten months. It takes place entirely in 1916. It starts with the

00:09:28.500 German offensive in February 1916, and doesn't finish until the snow starts falling in December 1916.

00:09:36.020 The Germans do a counter-offensive, which lasts three or four months, again, sort of depending on

00:09:40.820 how you measure it. And then the French do a counter-offensive, which lasts for another

00:09:47.940 four or five months. And so this is something that is quite new for World War I, for the 20th century.

00:09:57.460 A battle which lasts essentially day and night, 24-7, for months on end. So for example, in the

00:10:04.100 Napoleonic era, a hundred years, almost exactly a hundred years before, even in giant battles where

00:10:09.620 there might be thousands and thousands of casualties, a battle rarely lasted more than one day. It's

00:10:14.500 usually like one afternoon or one morning. If a battle lasted into two days, that was extraordinary.

00:10:19.940 That was a giant battle. If it lasted three days, the Battle of Leipzig lasted three days. That was

00:10:25.300 incredible. A siege is something slightly different. In the American Civil War, sometimes there were very,

00:10:31.700 very long sieges that could last weeks or even into months. But a siege is a slightly different thing.

00:10:36.660 But a full-blown battle, there would be ebbs and flows in it, but it's basically the battle is just

00:10:40.980 going on and on and on for day after day after day, day and night. This is something that World War I

00:10:47.220 saw for the first time. And not even just World War I, but later, by 1915, 1916, 1917 is when this really,

00:10:55.380 really happens. Because what you need in order to sustain that are one giant armies, of course,

00:11:00.660 armies that are just much bigger, much, much bigger than they had been even 50 years before,

00:11:05.860 100 years before, bigger than ever before in history, millions and millions of men per side.

00:11:11.060 So you would have to have that before you could have battles that lasted months. And then you would

00:11:16.340 also need industrialization and production lines, the ability to keep making cannon or artillery pieces,

00:11:25.300 rifles, grenades, mortars, and all the ammunition for it, on an industrial scale. You'd need both

00:11:32.420 sides to be able to do that before you could even dream of having a battle that lasted for months on

00:11:37.620 it. But of course, that is what we've got by the early 20th century. By 1916, both sides are doing

00:11:44.820 exactly that. Cycling millions of men to the front line, and millions of shells, and rounds of ammo,

00:11:52.020 and guns, machine guns, mortars, artillery pieces, and on and on and on. And so you can get three

00:11:57.700 quarters of a million men, 300,000 odd, killed. A monstrous thing is industrial warfare. The lives

00:12:06.340 themselves, or even the elan, the bravery of the men, counts for very, very, very little. What counts

00:12:15.300 is how many guns and heavy guns and ammo can you get to the front. That counts much more than

00:12:22.500 the bravery of the men. So a whole different way of doing war from previous times, and completely

00:12:29.380 industrialized and dehumanized in all sorts of senses. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about

00:12:35.700 World War I up until this point. Again, I'll pitch this at people that might not know much or anything

00:12:41.540 really about it. So I'm just talking about the Western Front here. Of course, World War I,

00:12:46.020 as the name suggests, is a world war. There's all sorts of stuff going on all over the world,

00:12:51.940 actually. World War II is much more a global conflict than World War I. Nonetheless, there is an

00:12:57.140 Eastern Front. There's an Italian Front. There are, in fact, things going on out in the Far East.

00:13:02.980 But, okay, so we're just talking about the Western Front here, which is in between Belgium,

00:13:09.460 France, and the German armies coming straight from France, and they've already taken Belgium.

00:13:16.660 And so Verdun is located, the town, there's a town called Verdun. The town of Verdun is located in the

00:13:23.940 east of France, the sort of fairly extreme east of France, i.e. very close to the German border.

00:13:30.260 It's right there. And it's an ancient town, right? It's been there. The archaeology shows that there's

00:13:36.740 been a settlement there since like 400 BC, plus 450 BC. So it's a truly ancient site. And it's one of

00:13:46.340 those places in the world, we've talked about this on Epochs a number of times, haven't we? It's one

00:13:50.180 of those places on the world where, just geographically speaking, where there's likely to be

00:13:55.460 conflict, right? There's places like a particular valley passes, like the Khyber Pass, for example,

00:14:03.220 where it's no wonder there's been lots and lots and lots of conflicts and engagements and battles

00:14:07.620 there because just the geography funnels people and armies through the exact same place, right? So Verdun's

00:14:14.980 a little bit like that. Not necessarily entirely, but it's a little bit like that. More broadly

00:14:20.260 speaking, you know, there's a reason why the deserts of Mesopotamia have been, that there's been

00:14:26.260 battles and wars there from ancient Sumer up until the war in Iraq with George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

00:14:33.380 There's a reason. Geography just sort of dictates it. Okay, so Verdun's got an element of that to it.

00:14:39.140 Certainly once 19th century France and Germany were established, if they were ever to go head-to-head

00:14:45.460 again, it's likely that somewhere in and around that region, in and around near Verdun, it was likely

00:14:52.180 to be a flashpoint. Okay, so it's difficult sometimes to know exactly where to begin a story properly.

00:14:58.260 But I must mention the war of 1870 and 1871. Same war, straddled 1870 and 1871. Now what happened in

00:15:07.220 1870 to 71 was that Germany, although it had a Kaiser, was essentially being run by a Bismarck,

00:15:16.580 Otto von Bismarck. The real sort of cockpit of power and policy, decision-making military, big military

00:15:23.860 decisions and things, were being conducted by a Bismarck. And the leader of the French Republic

00:15:28.500 at that point was Napoleon, and Napoleon III, not THE Napoleon, not Napoleon I, it's his nephew,

00:15:36.020 Napoleon III. And France and Germany go to war in 1870. And very, very long story, very, very short on

00:15:43.780 that is Germany wins. Okay, it wasn't as bloody as World War I, or nowhere near as bloody as World War I,

00:15:51.140 and horrific. But still, relatively bloody war, full-scale war, you know, hundreds of thousands

00:15:56.260 of men going at each other. Many, many, many, many, many thousand casualties on both sides.

00:16:01.220 But ultimately, the Germans march through France, right? They're not stopped. It doesn't bog down

00:16:07.140 in a stalemate where both sides build trench lines. Nothing like that. You know, it's a war of movement.

00:16:13.860 And ultimately, Bismarck's armies win. There's a big battle at Sedan, a place called Sedan in France.

00:16:21.380 And ultimately, just to cut that short, the Germans win. Okay, they march all the way into Paris.

00:16:26.020 Right after the Battle of Sedan, the French armies are broken. Napoleon III's armies are broken.

00:16:29.940 The Germans march all the way to Paris, ultimately march into and through and past Paris, go down to

00:16:35.940 Versailles. France, politically speaking, sort of goes through true, true turmoil. And they have all

00:16:44.660 sorts of communes and all sorts of things happen politically to France. It's a real sort of

00:16:50.180 psychological scar, a wound to the Frenchmen of that generation, that ultimately, the Tuton,

00:16:57.220 the German, had utterly beaten them. Utterly, right? Their divisions are marching,

00:17:02.820 flowing in and through and around Paris and occupying Versailles and making the French sign

00:17:09.620 a humiliating peace treaty at Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors. Okay, so that happened. Now, that's

00:17:15.620 actually quite an important thing to understand, the French psychology and attitude during World War

00:17:23.060 I and after World War I. At the 1919 Versailles peace treaties, for example, explains why the French

00:17:29.140 French was so, well, vindictive really, so harsh and cruel on the Germans in 1919, because they were

00:17:36.340 finally getting their own back for 1871. There finally is revenge time. So, okay, back to Verdun in 1916.

00:17:44.020 Now, one of the first things we need to talk about is why the Germans did it, because at least to begin

00:17:49.700 with, it certainly starts with a German offensive. So, the Western Front is something like 400 miles long,

00:17:55.780 all the way out to the North Sea. Okay? And at various points on that 400 odd mile long front,

00:18:02.900 are much more active than others. So, sometimes the German position will be, or often actually,

00:18:09.860 the German position will be extremely strong. They will have high ground. And so, it's truly,

00:18:15.300 truly suicidal, kind of pointless for the Allies to mount attacks on them. So, that portion of the

00:18:22.180 line is relatively quiet. They're still shooting and sniping at each other and mortars and artillery

00:18:28.580 fire from time to time, but there's no giant offensives one way or another. Okay? And the

00:18:33.300 opposite is true. Sometimes the Allied position is sort of so strong that the Germans never or hardly

00:18:41.220 ever bother attacking it. There's no giant offensive from the Germans in that area. And very, very broadly

00:18:47.700 speaking, a broad, broad trend is that the Germans, certainly in 1915 and 16 and 17, don't attack much.

00:18:55.940 It's much more the case that the Allies are on the offensive and the Germans are on the defensive,

00:19:01.140 on the Western Front for most of the war. But then also, there are other places where it's the hot

00:19:07.060 spot, right? There'll be battle after battle after battle there. I mentioned the Ypres salient. I mentioned

00:19:12.580 the Somme, right? So, there's some places where it sort of goes on and on and on because both sides

00:19:19.780 think they can do something there. There can be a breakthrough. Now, Verdun, up until 1916, had been

00:19:26.820 one of those places on the front that was quiet, relatively quiet, because the French had massively,

00:19:34.420 massively reinforced it to the point where it seemed to strategists, to most German planners,

00:19:41.540 it seemed that it was impregnable, that it was so strong that there's no point sort of trying to

00:19:46.980 attack there, right? The French had surrounded Verdun, the town of Verdun, and the villages

00:19:52.900 surrounding it. They'd fortified it massively. They'd built giant, giant defensive works and bunkers

00:19:58.980 and faults, lines of sort of rings of concentric, mutually supporting faults and positions. So, to the

00:20:07.140 German mind, it's like, well, we're not going to attack there because that would be folly. We'll just get

00:20:11.060 ourselves wiped out. Let's not do that. And the reason France have done that is because they

00:20:17.460 considered Verdun to be something like a massively strategically important position on the front,

00:20:27.540 on the front line. If Verdun fell, the Germans punched through Verdun, it would be quite easy for their

00:20:34.820 armies. If divisions and divisions of German men and materiel broke through at Verdun, they would be

00:20:41.220 able to get to Paris, right? Again, the geography, just the way the geography is. It would be quite

00:20:47.140 difficult to stop them at that point. So, again, the French planners that see this on a map think that,

00:20:55.460 and they're almost certainly correct, think that if Verdun, Verdun just cannot be allowed to fall

00:21:00.340 because it would be a disaster. It might be game over if the Germans ever took Verdun. So, obviously,

00:21:06.980 then, we, the French, will just massively, massively reinforce it. We'll make it like a fortress. We'll

00:21:12.900 make it many fortresses strong. We'll make it as strong as you possibly can. Because the Battle of

00:21:19.060 Sudan in 1870, Sudan's a fairway north and west of Verdun, but still vaguely in that area. The same

00:21:26.500 thing happened at Sudan, the Battle of Sudan. The French thought, you know, we can't, we can't lose

00:21:31.860 at Sudan. We can't afford to, because then it's kind of game over, right? Again, just the geography,

00:21:37.860 the tactical strategic position of it all. If that, if that domino falls, there's not much we can do then

00:21:44.020 to stop the Germans. Okay, so they see in the interwar years, i.e. between 1871 and 1914, they see

00:21:52.100 this about Verdun, and so they massively fortify it. But there's a little bit more to the story about

00:21:58.420 Verdun than that. The French saw it as a kind of a matter of prestige, a matter of sort of national

00:22:08.420 identity or sort of a symbolic place. Not just of strategic importance, but of symbolic importance.

00:22:16.740 If we can't defend Verdun, if we give up on Verdun, it's like giving up on France in some ways. You

00:22:22.980 know, there's this idea very often that we can't allow our capital to fall, because if our capital

00:22:28.740 falls, it's all over. There's some countries where that doesn't necessarily apply. For example,

00:22:33.620 if Madrid is captured by the enemy, Barcelona doesn't care and we'll keep fighting on, right?

00:22:37.700 If Moscow falls, or sorry, if St. Petersburg falls, Moscow will keep fighting, right? There's some

00:22:43.780 countries where that's not the case. But for a lot of countries, most countries, if your capital falls,

00:22:49.140 that's the end of the story. Well, in the French mind, in a sense, people have argued, historians have

00:22:55.060 argued that maybe this isn't as much the case as I'm about to say, but many have said this. In the French

00:22:59.620 mind, the French political and military leaders, if Verdun falls, it's all over. That'd be too

00:23:06.900 humiliating to take. It'll be another Sudan. So we cannot allow that to happen. It's a matter of

00:23:13.220 principle to them. So now let's talk about the Germans, the Germans at this point. The head of the

00:23:19.860 German army, well, the head is the Kaiser, but in terms of actual strategic and tactical thinking,

00:23:27.620 you know, the guy that actually ends up moving divisions around on a map and deciding where

00:23:31.700 they are or aren't going to attack was von Falkenheim, chief of the German staff,

00:23:36.740 Eric von Falkenheim. Now, the Germans had gone through a few changes at the very,

00:23:41.620 very top of their military since the war had begun. So he wasn't the guy that had been in charge of the

00:23:46.980 German army since 1914. Anyway, by 1916, he's the man. He's the man at the top who is making the actual

00:23:54.900 decisions. Now, he sees how the French view Verdun, right? He knows, he knows that the French will do

00:24:04.820 anything to prevent Verdun from being taken. Now, that's actually a weakness, right? If you know what

00:24:12.980 your enemy will do, that gives you an advantage, just like in boxing or MMA. If you know what your

00:24:19.940 opponent is going to do, that's just an absolute giant advantage. You know, if you can tell in MMA

00:24:27.460 that your leg kicks have massively damaged your opponent's knee and that he can't circle to the

00:24:33.300 left now or whatever it is, then that's a giant advantage. Or in boxing, if you know you've busted

00:24:39.780 one of his ribs and he's going to keep defending his ribs and not his head, you can keep throwing

00:24:45.700 those right hooks at his sort of almost undefended head, right? So it's exactly the same even in war,

00:24:51.140 even on giant scales, giant strategic scales. If you know what your enemy will do, then you can use

00:24:59.220 that to your advantage one way or another. So von Falkenhayn sees, knows that the French, even though

00:25:05.380 Verdun itself is massively defended, many have said, surely correctly, that it's the most defended

00:25:11.940 position on the entire Western Front. Even though that's the case, Falkenhayn makes a calculation

00:25:17.460 that what we can do there though, is we can force the French to throw everything in, everything

00:25:24.580 they've got, every last man, every last piece of ammo and artillery they've got. We can force their hand

00:25:30.820 to do that and we'll wear them down and defeat them that way. We can force them, we can suck them

00:25:37.780 into Verdun where they can be crushed. He thought he could bleed the French army dry, bleed them white.

00:25:44.420 Because World War One, like any industrial war where both sides are industrialised, is a war of attrition.

00:25:52.900 Now there's whole books just written about this, right? That it's no longer about a superb cavalry charge,

00:26:00.340 right? It's no longer about that. It's no longer about a clever manoeuvring of a few cannons on one afternoon,

00:26:06.980 like in the polionic times, right? It's no longer about brilliant individual acts of tactical brilliance,

00:26:16.180 or a bayonet charge that breaks the morale of the enemy and which causes a rout, and so on and so on.

00:26:23.140 No, we don't live in that world anymore in the early 20th century. As I said earlier, it's just,

00:26:28.740 who can bleed the other side white first, right? So von Valkenheim appreciates this. That is true,

00:26:35.700 that is true. As horrific as that is, World War One was a war of attrition, certainly on the Western

00:26:40.900 Front, certainly once it got bogged down into trench warfare. It was basically who can last the longest.

00:26:47.380 And so viewed through that sort of strategic lens, tactical lens, how can we best make the other side

00:26:54.820 tap out as quickly as possible? So this was von Valkenheim's calculation. He'll force the French,

00:27:02.500 every last man jack of them, to go into Verdun where he'll slaughter them. Later in his memoirs,

00:27:08.100 he said that we seek to wear down an army, not to make a gap, to break the heart of a nation,

00:27:14.260 not to break a hole in the lion." So something to be said about this, this idea that von Valkenheim

00:27:22.980 didn't necessarily even want to take Verdun itself, the actual town of Verdun, at the heart,

00:27:28.820 at the centre of all these surrounding faults. He didn't even want to do that. It wasn't about that.

00:27:34.180 Again, it wasn't about breaking through and getting to Paris, like in 1871. It wasn't about that. It was

00:27:40.020 about bleeding the French army to death. So if anything, he actively doesn't want to take Verdun,

00:27:45.940 because that would defeat the point of what he's doing here. He wants the French to keep

00:27:50.420 desperately pouring their army in to defend it. Now, there's one thing that needs to be said about

00:27:55.780 this, because I listened to a very, very interesting audio book, where I've done lots and lots of reading

00:28:00.900 and listened to a fair few audio books and documentaries and things for the run up to this,

00:28:05.860 as well as half a lifetime of reading about Verdun. There's one particular audio book I listened to

00:28:11.620 about a month ago, which said that all of what I've just said there about von Valkenheim's calculation

00:28:17.300 might not be correct. The idea that he wanted to make Verdun just a trap for the French,

00:28:22.820 that it would be an attritional trap for them. So von Valkenheim, after this battle, which is

00:28:30.740 ultimately a stalemate, but that's actually a win for the French. That's a tactical win, a strategic

00:28:36.260 win for the French, the fact that it was a stalemate and the Germans never did take Verdun or punch

00:28:42.420 through or bleed the French army entirely to death. So that's actually really a win for the French.

00:28:49.220 So after the battle, von Valkenheim is dismissed from his position as chief of the general staff,

00:28:55.380 and he's, he's packed off to, he's still a general and he's not disgraced or hung or anything, but he's,

00:28:59.700 he's just sent off to go and be a much, much more junior commander general in like Romania,

00:29:05.380 on the Romanian front, something like that. Okay. Bit, bit disgraced because he'd, he'd got,

00:29:09.860 you know, 150,000 German boys killed for essentially nothing. Um, after the war, he wrote a book,

00:29:18.740 right? He wrote a memoir, uh, uh, which he's trying to explain himself, right? He's trying to say,

00:29:24.660 he's trying to say why he did what he did, why he made the decisions that he did. And of course,

00:29:29.140 as you can imagine, he's trying to say, you know, I did nothing wrong. I made, I made the right

00:29:33.220 decisions at every point. That's a sort of, he doesn't really take any real responsibility for,

00:29:39.060 I mean, he does take some, but he doesn't say I was entirely wrong. It was mad to do what we did at

00:29:44.020 Verdun. He doesn't say that. He says, no, no, we, this is why we did what we did and it could have

00:29:48.260 worked. It nearly did work. It sort of did work. It's all that sort of stuff. Okay. And it's in that,

00:29:53.620 it's in that memoir where he makes the argument about, about bleeding the French army dry that he

00:29:59.780 knew he calculated the French would never allow Verdun to fall. Well, some people have said now,

00:30:05.140 the one audio book I was listening to the other, the other week, uh, was saying that that may well be

00:30:11.060 just him coping. That may well be just him making that up after the fact that may just be sort of pure

00:30:17.700 copium because lots of things suggest that that wasn't the case, that that wasn't going on. Now,

00:30:22.660 lots and lots of historians ever since have always gone with that, but that's just true.

00:30:27.060 That's just the reality. The Germans decided to try and bleed the French white at Verdun,

00:30:32.980 but it may not be the case because, well, for a number of reasons. One is that it's very,

00:30:37.700 very hard to keep attacking a place like Verdun and not take it if you can. It's like deliberately,

00:30:46.340 it's like having a fight and not trying to knock the other guy out, right? Pulling your punches at the

00:30:53.940 very last moment. So you don't quite knock them out, but that's difficult to do. It's like racing a

00:30:59.700 race car, not at race speed, right? That's actually harder than just going at race speed. It's actually

00:31:06.500 difficult. Um, I mean, maybe those analogies aren't perfect, but you, you sort of get what I mean.

00:31:12.340 Like you, you, you tell an army to take this position, this fault, this hilltop, this hamlet,

00:31:20.100 but then, but then stop at exactly this moment and dig in and allow yourself to be shelled back

00:31:26.260 endlessly. That's difficult. That's difficult for men and, uh, middling officers to accept,

00:31:32.900 right? For example, there's a bit later, I'll probably get to it in the next, well,

00:31:36.900 we'll get to it in the next episode. Uh, there's a very, very, very famous fault, arguably the most

00:31:40.580 important fault of Fort Douaumont, um, outside Verdun. And in the end, some Brandenburgers,

00:31:46.580 I will do this in detail next time, but some Brandenburgers take it, take this fault without

00:31:51.380 any orders from the senior, senior staff. They see that there's like a really, really important

00:31:57.380 position there. And it's possible to just take it if we just act right now. And so relatively junior

00:32:02.660 officers, guys at sort of level of, of captain and major, they just take the initiative and go

00:32:06.980 and do it, right? The colonels and the generals didn't want, didn't necessarily want them to,

00:32:10.980 not at that particular moment anyway, but this is what it's like. This is what men are like in armies,

00:32:16.180 you know, especially in the early 20th century that they just go and do it. They act on their own

00:32:21.140 initiative. Um, it's like being in a real fight. If you've ever been in a real fight where the other

00:32:26.020 guy's trying to knock your head off and you start throwing punches at like 70%, it's, it's, it's difficult.

00:32:32.500 It doesn't make sense. It's hard to do. It's hard to, you know, okay. I think you get,

00:32:36.180 I think you get the, uh, the idea here. So there's that. Could von Falkenhayn ever have

00:32:41.300 really been trying to push on Verdun, but only to a certain extent? Does that even really make sense?

00:32:49.860 The other thing is, as you remember at the beginning of this episode, the casualty figures,

00:32:53.940 if the whole point was to bleed France to death, uh, then they didn't do a very good job of that

00:33:00.580 because the Germans lost almost as many men as the French, very nearly almost as many,

00:33:05.700 you know? So if, if that was the tactic, if that was, well, the grand strategy rather,

00:33:11.540 then you're going to want to have a big disparity between how many Frenchmen you kill and how many

00:33:16.260 you lose from the German point of view. Um, you're going to need, need it to be five or 10 to one,

00:33:22.340 or hopefully way more than that. 50 to one, 100 to one. Otherwise, what are you doing here? How does

00:33:27.780 that make sense? Aren't you going to bleed yourself to death at the same time, right? So as some

00:33:33.780 historians have said, when that's been noted, I've said, yeah, well, there's one thing that it was the plan

00:33:39.460 in like January, February, 1916. It just turned out that the plan didn't work very well, right?

00:33:45.940 That really was from Falconhine's idea, but it failed as a concept. Okay. Maybe, possibly, or maybe

00:33:53.460 that was never the concept. He just, they were just trying to take Verdun, old school fashion,

00:33:58.580 punch through. And so they can, there's another war of movement and you can get to Paris, old school,

00:34:03.940 19th century, 1870 style, and simply failed to do that. Okay. So we don't really know. We've got

00:34:10.340 all the data. We know what actually went down at Verdun in tons and tons of detail. And we've got

00:34:14.340 from Falconhine's, uh, memoir after the fact where he claims what he claims. And then you've got some

00:34:19.700 revisionist historians that say, well, that was just copium. That doesn't really make sense. Um,

00:34:24.260 it's up to you to decide, uh, what you think is true. Okay. Let me read you a little quote,

00:34:29.380 actually relatively long quote, a few paragraphs from a book just called Verdun, 1916, the deadliest

00:34:35.380 battle of the first world war by a William F. Buckingham. And it's, uh, it's just, it's from

00:34:40.660 the introduction. Um, so a little bit of an overview before later, probably, you know, next episode,

00:34:47.220 we'll get into the exact details, like the, the, the tactical details of which divisions moved,

00:34:53.620 where, and took which Hamlet and town and hilltop and fought when in what order and the true details

00:35:00.740 of the combat and all that sort of thing. This is what historian William F. Buckingham says,

00:35:05.220 quote, the 1916 battle of Verdun is widely regarded as a uniquely awful low point in a conflict that

00:35:12.500 was by no means short of such woeful milestones. The very name has become synonymous with Pyrrhic

00:35:18.340 victory, i.e. a victory that costs you so much that you actually have lost. Um, as exemplified

00:35:24.340 by the tag, Verdun on the Volga applied to the battle of Stalingrad 26 years later in a different

00:35:30.100 war. This reputation is not simply due to casualty figures, which are notoriously difficult to pin

00:35:35.300 down with certainty. The combined figure of around 681,000 French and German killed, wounded and missing

00:35:42.180 at Verdun is only around half of that of the 1916 battle of the Somme, which racked up a combined

00:35:48.180 British, French and German casualty toll of somewhere between 1.1 and 1.3 million. Despite this,

00:35:54.340 Verdun's reputation as the worst of the worst is well deserved. The Battle of the Somme lasted just

00:35:59.700 over four months, while Verdun ground on for just over five months before the Germans finally

00:36:04.820 abandoned their offensive, and nine months if the French counter-offensives that restored their line

00:36:10.100 to something like the pre-battle status quo are included. The nearest British equivalent to this

00:36:14.980 longevity was the dogged occupation of the Ypres salient, but that particular trial was overwhelmingly

00:36:21.060 a matter of sitting and taking whatever the Germans chose to dish out, rather than withstanding months

00:36:26.580 of heavy and sustained attack, followed by a heavy and sustained counter-attack. Unlike its British

00:36:32.020 counterparts, the Battle of Verdun also had the potential to make or break the Allied war effort.

00:36:37.140 Had the Germans succeeded in breaking through at Verdun, as they almost did in February and July 1916,

00:36:43.540 there would be little between them and Paris, and the morale impact of losing Verdun might well have

00:36:49.140 been sufficient to knock France out of the war, as the architect of the German plan and some of its

00:36:54.180 French opponents predicted. Be that as it may, the intensity of the fighting at Verdun was also more

00:37:00.500 tightly focused. The original attack frontage at Verdun was approximately seven miles wide, only half that

00:37:07.700 of the Somme. And in the latter climactic stages of the German offensive at Verdun in July 1916,

00:37:14.420 entire corps, army corps, were being compressed into attack frontages of three miles or less.

00:37:21.380 By that time, the Germans had abandoned any pretense of tactical finesse and were simply trying to bludgeon

00:37:27.380 through the French defence by sheer weight of numbers, with an attack density of up to two men for every

00:37:33.700 metre of front. The result of such quote-unquote tactics in the face of modern weaponry can be

00:37:39.940 easily imagined, and the battle left an indelible mark on the French too. Their Noria replacement

00:37:45.940 system meant that 70 of the 96 French divisions on the Western Front passed through what became dubbed

00:37:52.500 the Mill on the Meuse, because it's the Meuse River that runs through that whole region and through Verdun.

00:37:58.660 The Mill on the Meuse, like milling men, terrible. And the deleterious effects of this exposure

00:38:06.180 lay at the root of the widespread mutiny that gripped the French army from April 1917,

00:38:11.540 and arguably underlay the French defeat in 1940. However, the most graphic evidence to support Verdun's

00:38:17.940 inevitable status are the physical scars the battle has left on the ground over which it was fought,

00:38:23.860 with the exception of a handful of fragments, such as sanctuary wood near Ypres, the memorial parks at

00:38:29.860 Vimy and Beaumont-Hamel on the Somme. There is little trace of the monumental struggle that took place

00:38:36.340 along a 400-mile strip of Belgium and France. Without the immaculately maintained military graveyards,

00:38:41.860 memorials and occasional museums, there would be little to no clue at all. The exception to this is Verdun,

00:38:48.340 with the addition of large-scale conifer planting and the erection of memorials, almost 200 square

00:38:53.780 kilometres have been left largely in the state they were in in 1918. This was not generally a

00:38:59.860 deliberate policy to preserve the battlefield for posterity, but was obliged by the fact that the

00:39:05.300 intensity of the fighting had literally blasted away the topsoil and poisoned the ground to an extent

00:39:11.380 that defied post-war attempts to return it to its former use. Thus the conifer plantations that

00:39:17.220 blanket the battlefields have preserved a moonscape of shell craters, trenches, and the sedately crumbling

00:39:24.020 remains of permanent fortifications like Fort Douamont and Fort Vaux, the latter being the scene of

00:39:30.500 hellish underground fighting on a scale and intensity that occurred nowhere else on the western front."

00:39:36.740 End quote. Okay, so hopefully you can see in that quote I read out why I and a lot of people are so

00:39:41.860 fascinated with Verdun. Well, in those paragraphs he described it as the worst of the worst, right?

00:39:50.100 There's a few places during Verdun, and again we'll get into it next week. There was a place called

00:39:56.740 Hill 304. There was another ridge line or hill called Dead Man's Hill. Some of the fighting around

00:40:03.380 a couple of the different faults. Vaux again mentioned there. So the quintessential horror

00:40:10.740 of World War One plays out there. Flamethrowers, gas, just slaughter on an unbelievable scale.

00:40:19.540 Unbelievable scale. Often very, very, very, very pointless. You know, like there'll just be one

00:40:25.060 relatively minor push somewhere. One relatively minor tiny part of the front and just 5,000 men are just

00:40:33.140 mown down in an hour. Just something like that. Again and again and again and again. For no gain.

00:40:37.700 Not just a few feet of gain, a few yards of gain. One tiny position taken. No, for nothing.

00:40:42.980 Absolutely nothing. You know, the rats, the lice, the lack of sleep and food and water and the cold and

00:40:50.660 just all the horrors of World War One sort of dialed up to 11 at Verdun sometimes. You know, it's the

00:40:57.860 the extremes of the human condition. Dan Carlin talks about that. Why are people fascinated by

00:41:03.780 such horrors? Well, because it's so far outside our everyday experience, right? That it becomes

00:41:09.940 fascinating. That morbid fascination. You know, what is one of the worst places ever to have been in all

00:41:15.140 of history, right? The Battle of Verdun is one of them. One of the absolute, true nightmare places.

00:41:21.860 Trying to fight over Hill 304 for the 10th time. You know, every foot of some of these places

00:41:30.180 has been shelled over and over and over and over again. The superlatives like horror and

00:41:36.740 terrifying and monstrous, you know, doesn't even really do it justice. But then that's why we're

00:41:43.540 fascinated by it, isn't it? That's the human condition, isn't it? You're much more interested

00:41:48.740 in the biography of a serial killer than in the biography of someone who didn't do anything of

00:41:54.980 note. As terrible as that is, it's just the way it is, right? Someone who just went to work every

00:41:59.060 day and was a good family man and paid his taxes and then died quietly. You're not interested in that.

00:42:03.620 You want to know about John Wayne Gacy, right? Well, that's just the way it is. Okay, let me read a

00:42:09.860 couple of paragraphs from a different historian, Paul Jankowicz, who wrote Verdun, the longest battle

00:42:14.340 of the Great War. And he wrote this, quote, On the 21st of February 1916, 18 months into the First

00:42:20.580 World War, German forces attacked French positions north and northeast of Verdun, the ancient stronghold

00:42:26.900 on the Meuse River in eastern France, and opened what the novelist of the war, veteran Maurice Grenoble,

00:42:33.380 called the battle symbol of the entire 1914 to 1918 war. The 10-month long positional battle called

00:42:40.820 Verdun conferred grandeur upon the place, and even before it had ended, the ruined city and its

00:42:47.220 environs were giving off intimations of posthumous fame. Some cities in wartime transcend whatever

00:42:54.580 strategic significance they can boast and acquire the enduring quality of legend. Saragossa in 1808,

00:43:01.620 there was a big siege in the Peninsular War in Spain. And Stalingrad in 1942 to 1943,

00:43:08.180 each endowed their defenders with the aura of national saviours. So did Verdun, a place where

00:43:14.100 so many French and Germans died, 300,000 in all, that the vast ossuary, which is a place where bones

00:43:20.500 are kept, like a charnel house, some sort of giant crypt or something, that the vast ossuary that went up

00:43:26.580 there, after the war, could hold only a fraction of their shattered and scattered remains. Grenoble did

00:43:32.980 not need to explain what he meant. No one would wish to pierce the consensual halo that surrounded the

00:43:38.900 martyred city. At first sight, the stature of Verdun among the French appears unimpeachable. It lasted

00:43:45.460 longer than any other battle of the war, at least until December 1916, when the French recaptured most of the

00:43:51.460 ground they had lost in February. Even then, the fighting did not stop. The battle reflected

00:43:56.180 the interminable and monotonous bloodletting of the war itself. Second, it was a defensive battle,

00:44:02.020 well, from the French point of view, one the French had not started, which seemed to capture their

00:44:07.300 position in a war they had not started either. And third, it was a solitary battle fought by the

00:44:12.740 French without any allies. The British were preparing their own offensives in a different sector

00:44:17.540 of the Western Front. The Russians and the Italians were fighting on distant fronts,

00:44:21.540 and the Americans did not enter the war until months after the Battle of Verdun was over.

00:44:26.500 This set it apart from most of the other great battles, and incarnated another reality of World

00:44:31.620 War I, that being, during its course the French lost far more men than their allies on the Western

00:44:36.820 Front, almost twice as many as the British, and more than a dozen times as many as the Americans.

00:44:41.780 Verdun was indeed emblematic of the French experience of war, i.e., just a meat grinder.

00:44:47.220 An absolutely inhuman meat grinder, for no gain. Embedded in French victory,

00:44:54.020 Verdun's stature transcended it. Verdun will go down in history as the slaughterhouse of the world,

00:44:59.540 an American ambulance driver wrote after arriving there in August 1917. Was that Hemingway? I don't

00:45:04.820 know. Paul Jankowicz doesn't say whether that's actually a Hemingway line or not anyway. As the French

00:45:10.020 re-captured the crests of Côte 304, Hill 304, and Le Morte Homme, the Dead Man's Hill, from the

00:45:16.980 Germans for the last time. Yet a more dispassionate gaze makes its celebrity seem a little surprising,

00:45:23.460 even from a French perspective. It was not a decisive battle, not a Waterloo, a Sedan, a Kursk,

00:45:29.860 each representing a moment when one side lost the initiative, never to retrieve it. The earlier

00:45:35.060 Battle of the Marne had ended more decisively and saved the country more dramatically. The

00:45:40.340 miracle on the Marne at the very beginning of the war, when the Germans were stopped from just

00:45:43.700 taking Paris right away, basically right away. It had stopped the invading German armies in their tracks,

00:45:49.140 and even pushed them back. So did the counter-offensives of 1918, which fathered as well

00:45:54.660 the country's post-war military doctrines, envisioning long war and methodical battle in

00:45:59.860 ways that Verdun never did. The modern strategic importance of the place appeared doubtful to some

00:46:05.300 of its defenders, even as they were defending it." Yeah, there's this idea, you know, that the French,

00:46:10.660 the planners, decided that Verdun must not fall at all costs, and that the Germans knew that,

00:46:16.420 and that's why they attacked there. It's like, is that even right? Like, does that have to be the

00:46:20.500 case? Is it really the case that Verdun cannot be allowed to fall? Why have we pumped in 400,000,

00:46:28.980 well, sorry, millions of men, 400,000 of which become casualties, 150,000 of which died?

00:46:34.820 Need that have been the case, from the French point of view I'm talking about? Do we have to defend

00:46:39.620 Verdun at all costs? Couldn't we have created a line behind Verdun if we absolutely had to? Well,

00:46:45.780 the answer to that is, is yes, they could have, they could have, right? Did the French really need

00:46:51.940 to do a months-long counter-offensive to take back Fort Duomo because it was a matter of pride

00:46:59.060 to them? Did they need to do that, costing tens and tens and tens of thousands of men's lives,

00:47:04.580 maybe even hundreds of thousands of casualties? Did they need to do that? Well, almost certainly no.

00:47:08.980 You didn't have to do that. And people knew that and saw that at the time, you know, questioning,

00:47:14.340 why are we attacking Dead Man's Hill for like the 20th time for no gain? Sorry, why are we doing this

00:47:20.900 again? Why are we being led quite literally like lambs to slaughter? Why? Well, hopefully I'll get in to

00:47:27.780 try and answer all those questions for you next time. But I mean, I won't necessarily give you the

00:47:33.460 definitive answers because no one has them. Sort of a matter of opinion in various ways.

00:47:38.900 Different historians argue about all of that, but I'll present you with the arguments,

00:47:43.300 if nothing else. Okay, to finish up with this Jankiewicz quote, he says,

00:47:47.780 neither the French nor the Germans ever recovered from their losses at Verdun. Nonetheless,

00:47:52.340 in war, everything is relative. Had the battle weakened one side more than the other? The answer,

00:47:57.860 supposed to come in later years on the Somme, turned out to be less than obvious. It was not

00:48:02.900 the bloodiest episode of the war either, elevated above others by the magnitude of the carnage.

00:48:08.740 Many more died in the war of movement around the Ardennes and the Belgian border in August and

00:48:13.700 September 1914. French casualty rates during their offensives before in Champagne in 1915 and after the

00:48:21.540 Aisne in 1917, at times exceeded those of Verdun. For reasons that are not very difficult to find,

00:48:28.180 as Jules Romain put it, had placed Verdun at the narrative center of Men of Goodwill,

00:48:33.940 his immense historical epic of a novel. The closer you look at it, however, the harder it is to locate

00:48:39.620 those reasons and the preeminence of Verdun can appear anything but self-evident. Again, need it be

00:48:45.620 held at absolutely all costs, regardless of the slaughter. The human misery and suffering that

00:48:53.620 went down there, could at least some of that have been avoided? Again, in hindsight, it's easy to

00:49:01.380 say, isn't it? In hindsight, the perfect 2020 godlike view kept in hindsight. Yes, yes, a lot of that

00:49:08.020 could have been avoided. Well, there you go. That's the tragedy of it all. Jankiewicz continues.

00:49:12.020 Verdun did not have any drastic political impact. It did not save or dispatch a regime. It was no

00:49:19.300 Bouvines of 1214, you know, when the French booted out John and the English. Look back in the epochs

00:49:26.420 for the episode about King John, if you're interested in that. Which strengthened one French monarch,

00:49:33.220 Philippe Auguste, or Rosebach in 1757, which helped weakened another, Louis XV, or Waterloo in 1815,

00:49:41.620 or Sedan in 1870, which dethroned two others, Napoleon and then his nephew. As a regime,

00:49:48.020 the Third Republic, or France that is, remained much the same after the Battle of Verdun as before.

00:49:53.780 The Prime Minister, or Presidente du Cancel, as he was then called, Aristide Briand, held on,

00:50:00.100 and so did the Head of State, Ramon Pionquier. The battle did weaken the position of General Joseph Joffre,

00:50:06.660 Chief of the General Staff, accused by his critics and the Chamber of Deputies of having left Verdun

00:50:12.980 poorly defended. We'll get into that next time for sure. Yet in the end, the disappointed Franco-British

00:50:19.700 offensive on the Somme in the summer and autumn of the same year did more to send Joffre on his way

00:50:25.060 than Verdun. Verdun did briefly advance the career of General Robert Nivelle, who succeeded Joffre,

00:50:31.060 but who remained at the helm only until his disastrous offensive at the Chemin des Dames

00:50:36.660 in the spring of 1917. Politically, the long battle was neutral. It didn't force the French government

00:50:43.860 to fall, and surprisingly, perhaps, perhaps. If Verdun, quote, made France, it was not through

00:50:50.420 any immediate military or political impact, a capitulation or a resignation, a crisis or an

00:50:56.340 upheaval from which a new and different country emerged. It happened slowly over the decades,

00:51:01.700 with the accretion of meanings that succeeding generations bestowed upon it. Its hold on national

00:51:06.740 consciousness developed over time because only gradually did it emerge that Verdun would be the

00:51:12.260 last great victory in battle of French arms. Nothing like it would ever happen again, not in 1917 or 1918,

00:51:20.660 not between 1939 and 1945, and certainly not during the messy wars of decolonisation that followed.

00:51:27.460 Such standing elevated it even above the Great War itself. The messengers that transmit or mediate what

00:51:33.700 is loosely termed collective memory, more precisely public history, consistently transfigured Verdun,

00:51:40.180 extracting it from its temporal context. The school books, political speeches, press and audiovisual

00:51:46.020 reports, commemorations, popular histories, films, novels and songs, the vehicles that convey the sense

00:51:52.420 of an event to the millions who knew little of it, spoke of union, people, fatherland, resistance,

00:51:58.900 soil, as though of a moment of regeneration. Verdun became a higher point of reference for anyone

00:52:05.220 attempting to argue, as many did in the years and decades after 1918, that the country was losing

00:52:10.660 its way. The country, France, of course. No other battle, recent or remote, served such a purpose.

00:52:16.740 In this sense, asking how Verdun, quote, made France, is tantamount to asking what France made of Verdun.

00:52:23.460 A special question by Verdun was so important, so pivotal, so symbolic, at least for the French,

00:52:29.780 if not for anyone that looks at World War I, but particularly for the French. It was so symbolic

00:52:34.420 that it really matters how it's viewed, you know, the histories that are written about it,

00:52:40.020 the place it holds in French consciousness, even, really matters. I'll finish up with Jankovic saying this.

00:52:46.980 A second question would be, how far did this construction depart from the battle itself, i.e.,

00:52:52.660 you know, how much is at least semi-fictionalised? How true are all the accounts and the histories?

00:52:58.660 How close can we get to the real truth? Has it been distorted by layers of revisionism? Can we really

00:53:04.900 get at the real Verdun? He goes on, the Germans dwell on Verdun too, almost brood over it, more than the

00:53:11.620 Somme, where the outcome was more to their advantage. They suffered almost as many casualties

00:53:16.500 there as the French, under conditions just as harrowing, if not more so. Their soldiers,

00:53:21.780 unlike the French, had few faults in which to take shelter from the shell fire, the shrapnel,

00:53:26.740 and the weather. No less than the French, the Germans extracted from the slaughter a parable of

00:53:31.780 human resolution. Verdun, unlike the Somme, produced no Ernst Junger, author of the celebrated trench

00:53:38.500 memoir Storm of Steel, and across the Rhine it never generated anything like the literature

00:53:43.460 and documentation it did in France, making for a poverty of sources worsened for the historian

00:53:49.380 by the destruction of the archives of the Imperial German Army in an Allied bombing raid over Potsdam

00:53:54.820 in 1945. But it nonetheless inspired a heroic literature of its own, mythologising the common

00:54:00.580 soldier there. Fictional and semi-fictional accounts celebrated this resolution, or his comradeship,

00:54:06.180 or the inner voice of the nation resounding above the din of battle. Sometimes, unlike the French,

00:54:11.860 these accounts did not so much celebrate union as castigate betrayal of the common soldier by the

00:54:17.060 high command, or the home front, and sometimes official rhetoric, nationalist, revanchist, or more

00:54:23.540 ominously national socialist, eagerly seized on such themes. Through them, for the Germans too,

00:54:29.460 Verdun was a symbol of the entire war, of tragic or of noble failure." So for the Germans too, Verdun has

00:54:36.740 got some sort of mythical standing. It's something like the war, the entirety of World War I, on the

00:54:43.540 Western Front at least, in microcosm, although not a very small microcosm actually, still hundreds of

00:54:49.380 thousands of casualties. But it's symbolic. Both the Germans and the French decided they would try and

00:54:56.260 win the war there. They would try everything they could, you know, use up the flower of their, of their,

00:55:02.820 the youth, the male youth of their country to win there, to finally beat their, their, their ancient

00:55:09.860 enemy, the Gaul versus the Tewtong. It would all be decided at Verdun. They both tried their hardest,

00:55:15.700 and it sort of came to nothing. You know, at the end of 1916, the battle lines were more or less where

00:55:20.980 they'd started in February. You know, unbelievable, an unbelievable thing, an unbelievable showdown.

00:55:27.780 Okay, so I'll leave it there for today. Now I've set everything up. Next time I'll start talking about

00:55:35.780 the actual, the actual events of, of the battle. You know, which divisions moved where and which hill

00:55:42.660 was taken and all that sort of thing. All right, let me know in the comments any of your thoughts

00:55:48.260 and feelings. And so until next week, take care.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - October 26, 2025

FREEMIUM： Epochs #234 ｜ The Battle of Verdun - Part I

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