The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s

I the harvest of armageddon

Well before dawn on 21 February 1916, when powdery snow lightened the darkness shrouding the lines of trenches gashed across the face of northern France, a 15-inch Krupp naval gun fired the first shot in the battle of Verdun. Its long barrel rising through the camouflage netting of its hiding-place in a wood near Loisin, it gave a full-throated roar and vomited a huge projectile 15 miles into the fortified city. The shell burst in the courtyard of the Bishop's Palace, "knocking a corner off the cathedral".

Others followed but not until sunrise did the main German bombardment begin. In the dead silence moments before the onslaught, French soldiers of the 56th and 59th Light Infantry Battalions, dug into a bosky hillside north of Verdun known as the Bois des Caures, saw snow fall from trembling branches. Then they were engulfed by a tornado of fire and steel. The barrage could be heard a hundred miles away in the Vosges Mountains, "an incessant rumble of drums, punctuated by the pounding of big basses."

Close at hand its impact was tremendous. One of the earliest victims was a water carrier who, with his horse and cart, was blown to smithereens by a direct hit from one of the 1,200 German guns. His comrades expected the same fate as they clung to the earth and, Jules Romains wrote, breathed "the smell of a tormented world, a smell like that of a planet in the process of being reduced to ashes."

The trenches of the First World War have been compared to the concentration camps of the Second. So they were, in the sense that they witnessed bestial suffering. By that analogy Verdun was Auschwitz.

Actually Verdun was not the bloodiest battle of the war--that grisly distinction belongs to the Somme. Moreover, the carnage was so unspeakable elsewhere, notably on the Eastern Front, that governments sought refuge in censorship and lies, reporters dealt in euphemisms like "baptism of fire" and even poets felt lost for words. In every sector the combatants saw a new vision of hell, experienced an "iron nightmare."

They occupied killing fields in which the quick and the dead were buried in the same stretch of tortured soil, men gouging holes in the ground like the rats which fed on corpses regularly exhumed by scorching metal. Amid the stench and squalor of a gigantic shambles, legions of doomed youth emerged to be scythed down by machine-guns and crucified on barbed wire. They endured an inferno of shells: shrapnel which tore flesh to pieces and high explosive which pulverised bone and stone alike. They encountered the hideous inventions of perverted technology: flame-throwers and poison gas. Even in so-called "quiet sectors" of the line, those in which (one French officer complained) generals "plague us with their visits."

A 2nd lieutenant's commission was, as Wyndham Lewis said, tantamount to a death warrant. Yet, even taking Passchendaele into account, Verdun was the most terrible battle of the war. This was because of time and space: it lasted longest and was most concentrated. It continued at maximum intensity for much of 1916 and erupted sporadically until the armistice. And the kind of fighting which no one chronicled with more Zolaesque vehemence than Henri Barbusse was aimed at a single target on the narrowest of fronts: the woods are sliced down like cornfields, the dug-outs marked and burst in even when they've three thicknesses of beams . . . all the roads blown into the air and changed into long heaps of smashed convoys and wrecked guns, corpses twisted together as though shovelled up. You could see thirty chaps laid out by one shot at the crossroads; you could see fellows whirling around as they went up, always about fifteen yards, and bits of trousers caught and stuck on the tops of the trees that were left . . . And that went on for months on end, months on end!

Probably more soldiers were killed per square yard in defence of Verdun, symbol of French honour, than in any other conflict before or since. The figures are difficult to compute, but nearly 300,000 Frenchmen and Germans died and another 450,000 were wounded. The German commander, General Erich von Falkenhayn, thus fulfilled his ambition to bleed the enemy white. Admittedly, his own forces paid an almost equally horrifying price. But the French armies, most of which were sooner or later dragged into the charnel-house of Verdun, suffered more. They were crushed by a weight of artillery "against which courage had no resource."

Soon hopes of glory gave way to talk of butchery. French soldiers had entered the war with sublime faith in the offensive, symbolised by their red k�pis and pantaloons (where the British wore khaki and the Germans grey).