![]() The same question hovers over Falkenhayn’s decision. If Verdun was of strategic value, why was it mostly ignored by the French high command during the first year of the war? But what exactly were they defending at such tremendous human cost? Advances in artillery warfare had made the fortifications at Verdun mostly redundant, and the city sat in a nearly indefensible salient, vulnerable to attack on three sides. The French forces re-established their defensive lines under the leadership of General Philippe Pétain. “Imagine if you can,” wrote one French officer, “a steadily growing storm raining only paving stones, only building blocks.” After a million-yes, a million-of these building blocks fell on French lines, German troops advancing toward Verdun, many with their rifles still in their slings, captured the massive fort of Douaumont without firing a shot. The brainchild of Germany’s new chief of staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, the attack began with an unremitting artillery barrage that pulverized the wooded fields into a lunar landscape. ![]() In the early morning of February 21st, 1916, the German army launched an assault on the eastern French city of Verdun, recently recreated in the remake of All Quiet on the Western Front. The war’s longest and deadliest episode is its most strategically meaningless but also its most symbolically meaningful.įor more than seven months, such a battle has been raging in Ukraine’s eastern city of Bakhmut between Russian and Ukrainian forces, and it has come to resemble one of the most infamous military campaigns of the First World War. ![]() The battle stretches from days into weeks and then months, and in the process, it undergoes a transfiguration. ![]() The initial assault makes dramatic gains but is soon bogged down in the face of determined resistance from defending forces. An invading army, unable to advance its lines elsewhere, masses its men and materiel in an attempt to overwhelm a small city jutting into their western front. ![]()
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