French machine guns at verdun

THIS BRILLIANT MOKAREX MACHINE GUNNER SHOWS UP FULLY THE BRAVERY OF THE fRENCH AT VERDUN.The French machine guns kept up a murderous fire. On 23 February they held up the infantry of the German XVIII Corps which was pressing forward, wave after wave to be scythed down.
Official German records speak of this as a 'day of horror'. By 24 February, the French had to bring up more reinforcements, the French 37th African Division (Zouaves and Moroccan Tirailleurs) filled the gap left by the 72nd Division. The artillery slowly fell silent, the evacuation of the wounded became more and more difficult. The German artillery cut the only full-gauge railway out of Verdun. Eventually the vanguard of the 20th Corps arrived from Lorraine and was thrown into the battle. Fort Douaumont fell to a small detachment of Brandenburgers during the afternoon of 25 February.


"They had conquered a notorious hill. They had lived in trenches that had been alternately French and German. These trenches sometimes lay filled with bodies in different stages of decomposition. They were once men in the prime of their lives, but had fallen for the possession of this hill. This hill, that was partly built on dead bodies already. A battle after which they lay rotting, fraternally united in death….


(Georges Blond – Verdun).

A German soldier writes to his parents: ...An awful word, Verdun. Numerous people, still young and filled with hope, had to lay down their lives here – their mortal remains decomposing somewhere, in between trenches, in mass graves, at cemeteriesA witness tells: ...We all carried the smell of dead bodies with us. The bread we ate, the stagnant water we drank… Everything we touched smelled of decomposition due to the fact that the earth surrounding us was packed with dead bodies....Louis Barthas also describes such an attack:


...At my feet two unlucky creatures rolled the floor in misery. Their clothes and hands, their entire bodies were on fire. They were living torches. [The next day] In front of us on the floor the two I had witnessed ablaze, lay rattling. They were so unrecognisably mutilated that we could not decide on their identities. Their skin was black entirely. One of them died that same night. In a fit of insanity the other hummed a tune from his childhood, talked to his wife and his mother and spoke of his village. Tears were in our eyes















The Battle of Verdun (French: Bataille de Verdun, IPA: [bataj də vɛʁdœ̃], German: Schlacht um Verdun, IPA: [ʃlaxt ˀʊm vɛɐdœŋ]) was one of the major battles during the First World War on the Western Front. It was fought between the German and French armies, from 21 February to 18 December 1916, on hilly terrain north of the city of Verdun-sur-Meuse in north-eastern France. As pointed out in 1996 by French Verdun historian Alain Denizot in his doctoral thesis "Verdun, 1914-1918", the Battle of Verdun ended as a French tactical victory. However, it can also be considered a costly strategic stalemate. The German High Command failed to achieve its two objectives: 1) to capture the city of Verdun and 2) to inflict a much higher casualty count on its French adversary. By the end of the battle the French Second Army had rolled back the German forces around Verdun, but not quite to their initial lines of February 1916.




Verdun resulted in 306,000 battlefield deaths (163,000 French and 143,000 German combatants) plus at least half a million wounded, an average of 30,000 deaths for each of the ten months of the battle. It was the longest and one of the most devastating battles in the First World War and the history of warfare. Verdun was primarily an artillery battle: a total of about 40 million artillery shells were exchanged, leaving behind millions of overlapping shell craters that are still partly visible. In both France and Germany, Verdun has come to represent the horrors of war, like the Battle of the Somme in the British consciousness. The renowned British military historian Major General Julian Thompson has referred to Verdun as "France's Stalingrad".



The Battle of Verdun popularized General Robert Nivelle's: "They shall not pass", a simplification of the actual French text :" Vous ne les laisserez pas passer, mes camarades" ("you shall not let them pass, my comrades"), on record in Nivelle's Order of the day of 23 June 1916. (in: Denizot, 1996, "Verdun 1914–1918". At the beginning of the battle, on 16 April 1916, General Philippe Pétain had also issued a stirring Order of the day, but it was optimistic: Courage! On les aura ("Courage! We will get them"). General Nivelle's admonition, on the other hand, betrayed concern for the difficulties he was facing at the time. Nivelle's appointment, in May 1916, to command the French Second Army at Verdun had been followed by several instances of collective indiscipline occurring among his troops. This unprecedented disquiet would eventually reappear, but in greatly amplified and widespread form, with the French army mutinies that followed the unsuccessful Nivelle offensive of April 1917