Status
Available
Call number
Collections
Publication
Penguin, 1964.
Description
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; whose aim was less to defeat the enemy than bleed him to death; a battleground whose once fertile terrain even now resembles a haunted wilderness. Alistair Horne's classic work, continuously in print for nearly forty 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 - the minds of those who waged it, the traditions that bound them and the world that gave them the opportunity.
User reviews
LibraryThing member Widsith
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
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.
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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.
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LibraryThing member ksmyth
This is a classic telling of the story of Verdun. Horne tells the story of the brilliant German plan to win World War I, and how it all went so terribly wrong. President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld should have read this book.
LibraryThing member LpmH
This is an informative book that, because of a singular flaw, left me insulted and uninterested in reading any thing else by this author. You may not share my vulnerability.
If you can also read French, you should not even notice this flaw.
Reading this book, I learned many details about the battle
My impression is that the author and his editor did not consider that the readership would not be bilingual or did not care if they were not. I have never read any other book by this author. It has been 19 years since I read this book; the intensity of my feelings even now surprises me.
If you can also read French, you should not even notice this flaw.
Reading this book, I learned many details about the battle
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of Verdun in World War I as was my objective. However often, when it appeared that a conclusion was to be shared or point made, a French phase was often used to do so. Because I do not read French, the full value of this work was not available to me. Because of the overall quality of the writing, I was sufficiently motivated to pay a co-worker to translate, but she disliked the subject of the book to the degree the she gave up on the effort. Having to pay for a translation of a book that is written in English was most annoying. My impression is that the author and his editor did not consider that the readership would not be bilingual or did not care if they were not. I have never read any other book by this author. It has been 19 years since I read this book; the intensity of my feelings even now surprises me.
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LibraryThing member Miro
"The Price of Glory" is a true masterpiece of First World War history with the author striking a perfect balance in recounting the events of the Battle of Verdun. He presents the all important historical background concerning the humiliating defeat of the French by the Prussians in 1870 and spends
Verdun became a totem to both the French and German nations leading to an overwhelming commitment by both sides that went far beyond military logic. Horne shows the astounding inability of the generals (particularly the French) to adapt to the reality of fixed position warfare using heavy artillery and machine guns. The ethos of the French GHQ typified by Joffre was the "Attaque à Outrance", a sort of wild romantic attack with light artillery along Napoleonic lines, to which end for example, he removed most of the guns and men from the vital strategic fort of Douaumont (too positional) allowing ten surprised German soldiers to walk in unchallenged. Its worth reading the book just for the story of sergeant Kunze and the progress of his nine men.
Eventually the French won a Pyrrhic victory as German reserves were exhausted, Falkenhayn vacillated and France finally found a capable general in Philippe Petain. He shunted out the romantics and adapted to the new environment, organising supply, rotating exhausted troops and carefully studying terrain and reserves in defence and attack. The victory was his and in the epilogue the author clearly sides with him in his post WW2 trial for collaborating with France's German occupiers. He was 90 years old at the time and said," My thought, my only thought, was to remain with them (the French) on the soil of France, according to my promise, so as to protect them and lessen their suffering". His ADC he knew him better than anyone and said quite correctly that, " You think too much about the French and not enough about France".
In stark contrast, the inflexible romantic Charles De Gaulle thought much about "La Gloire de La France" and hounded the saviour of Verdun to a death sentence which was eventually commuted to life imprisonment.
An extraordinarily good book in many ways.
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a good deal of time on the flawed generals of both sides who wasted hundreds of thousands of young lives over the space of 10 months.Verdun became a totem to both the French and German nations leading to an overwhelming commitment by both sides that went far beyond military logic. Horne shows the astounding inability of the generals (particularly the French) to adapt to the reality of fixed position warfare using heavy artillery and machine guns. The ethos of the French GHQ typified by Joffre was the "Attaque à Outrance", a sort of wild romantic attack with light artillery along Napoleonic lines, to which end for example, he removed most of the guns and men from the vital strategic fort of Douaumont (too positional) allowing ten surprised German soldiers to walk in unchallenged. Its worth reading the book just for the story of sergeant Kunze and the progress of his nine men.
Eventually the French won a Pyrrhic victory as German reserves were exhausted, Falkenhayn vacillated and France finally found a capable general in Philippe Petain. He shunted out the romantics and adapted to the new environment, organising supply, rotating exhausted troops and carefully studying terrain and reserves in defence and attack. The victory was his and in the epilogue the author clearly sides with him in his post WW2 trial for collaborating with France's German occupiers. He was 90 years old at the time and said," My thought, my only thought, was to remain with them (the French) on the soil of France, according to my promise, so as to protect them and lessen their suffering". His ADC he knew him better than anyone and said quite correctly that, " You think too much about the French and not enough about France".
In stark contrast, the inflexible romantic Charles De Gaulle thought much about "La Gloire de La France" and hounded the saviour of Verdun to a death sentence which was eventually commuted to life imprisonment.
An extraordinarily good book in many ways.
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LibraryThing member sergerca
A book that sat of my shelf far too long! This was absolutely outstanding. The subject matter is as grim as anything you've ever read, but Horne's telling of the story is superb. I've been reading military history all my life, and to have never known the story of Fort Vaux is a scandal. I myself am
Read this book. It will teach you more about what the human spirit can survive. It will also remind you that man's greatest enemy is, and will always be, himself.
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guilty of telling the "France can't fight" jokes, but I know better now. Read this book. It will teach you more about what the human spirit can survive. It will also remind you that man's greatest enemy is, and will always be, himself.
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LibraryThing member walterhistory
This 1993 edition, reprinted & updated from the 1962 edition, has essentially remained the classic work on the Verdun battle of World War I. His narration of the February to December 1916 is stark & at times brutal in the scale of death meted out on both sides. It is definitely not timid reading.
Here Horne presents both sides with equal candor with all the prejudices & overweening pride blinding both sides to the utter futility of what they were in the middle of. As the author demonstrates, war is a messy business & all the battle plans carefully thought out can be wrecked merely by nature or by sheer stupidity or by incredible timing.
More specifically, the French army was saddled with an inept high command, poor planning, failure to adjust to ever changing tactics resulting in the bleeding of the French army. It was not a surprise that the French army revolted but incredibly its rebellion was brutally crushed without mercy after the battle. The French army would not recover afterwards necessitating the infusion of the Americans, who came just in time to offset Hindenburg's assault in 1917, to hold up the front.
The German high command faced with shrinking windows of opportunity drew up a plan that might have worked except it relied on too narrow of a front, overreliance on 1 or 2 corps at a time, failure to assess possible issues, increasing inability to control the air for intelligence, & finally, indecisiveness of the Commander in Chief which added to a growing litany of mistakes & failure to adjust early on. (The Germans did adjust in the next battle but the French did not).
Mr. Horne has done a masterful job in his assessment of this battle which served no purpose but to extend the war far longer & left both France & Germany worse off than before the Battle of Verdun started. He carefully presents the players both the high command down to the soldiers on the field sympathetically. An excellent read for those who are interested in how the First World War was fought.
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From the moment of conception in the mind of the German command staff to its disastrous consequences proved a microcosm of the entire First World War. Endless movement but little gains & counter losses only served to bleed both the French & the German armies to sheer exhaustion. Here Horne presents both sides with equal candor with all the prejudices & overweening pride blinding both sides to the utter futility of what they were in the middle of. As the author demonstrates, war is a messy business & all the battle plans carefully thought out can be wrecked merely by nature or by sheer stupidity or by incredible timing.
More specifically, the French army was saddled with an inept high command, poor planning, failure to adjust to ever changing tactics resulting in the bleeding of the French army. It was not a surprise that the French army revolted but incredibly its rebellion was brutally crushed without mercy after the battle. The French army would not recover afterwards necessitating the infusion of the Americans, who came just in time to offset Hindenburg's assault in 1917, to hold up the front.
The German high command faced with shrinking windows of opportunity drew up a plan that might have worked except it relied on too narrow of a front, overreliance on 1 or 2 corps at a time, failure to assess possible issues, increasing inability to control the air for intelligence, & finally, indecisiveness of the Commander in Chief which added to a growing litany of mistakes & failure to adjust early on. (The Germans did adjust in the next battle but the French did not).
Mr. Horne has done a masterful job in his assessment of this battle which served no purpose but to extend the war far longer & left both France & Germany worse off than before the Battle of Verdun started. He carefully presents the players both the high command down to the soldiers on the field sympathetically. An excellent read for those who are interested in how the First World War was fought.
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LibraryThing member RobertP
Travels badly in light of current historiography about the First World War. Unless of course one still believes the lions led by donkeys fallacy.
LibraryThing member DinadansFriend
Perhaps Horne's best book and it is a very good campaign book. A full cast of well drawn portraits, and reasonable maps. The paperback format is a bit too small for the illustrations but the text fully informs the reader of the horror that still resonated through France in 1940. A very good read.
LibraryThing member charlie68
History that reads like a novel. Alistair Horne from the first pages hooks the reader through the battle and battles of Verdun in 1916. A pivotal battle for both Germany and France in many ways.
LibraryThing member kslade
Very readable account of battles to take key city of Verdun in WW 1. Madness of war is clear. French vs. Germans in 1916. Horrible details given of stalemated campaign which pretty well destroyed the French morale. It could never be a world power after this.
Awards
Hawthornden Prize (1963)
Original publication date
1962
Physical description
364 p.; 18 cm