49.2°N 5.4°E Western Front Battle of Verdun
Briefing
The longest battle of the war ran from February to December 1916, as Germany set out to 'bleed France white' at the fortress city of Verdun. Ten months of artillery and attrition produced over 300,000 dead and the enduring French vow: Ils ne passeront pas — they shall not pass. Neither side gained ground that mattered.
Books Covering This Event (4)
Popular History
A single-volume military history of the entire war by the most influential military historian of the 20th century.
A global history of the war that ranges far beyond the Western Front to Africa, the Middle East, and the seas.
An intimate history of the war told through the diaries and letters of twenty ordinary people on every front.
This Event on Screen
Screen adaptations of books on this page, each linked to the book it came from: All Quiet on the Western Front (2022).
The War in Books: Verdun
Ten months of attrition, and a battle France has never finished remembering.
Verdun has a claim to be the most French of the war’s battles, and that shapes how it reaches English readers: the British and American shelves belong to the Somme and Passchendaele, while Verdun tends to appear inside larger histories. The idea behind it was unusually bleak. According to Falkenhayn’s later account, the aim was less to capture ground than to bleed the French army dry at a place it could not abandon. Whether he really planned it that way is disputed, but the battle became exactly that for both sides.
John Keegan’s The First World War gives the clearest military account in a general history, and Hew Strachan’s volume of the same name shows how Verdun fits into the Allied and German strategy of 1916. Peter Englund’s The Beauty and the Sorrow supplies the human scale that those broad histories cannot. All Quiet on the Western Front is the great novel of the German experience of the Western Front, though it is not a novel of Verdun as such; it is on this page because it captures the attrition better than almost anything else in print. Read one of the histories for the battle, and Remarque for what that kind of battle did to the men in it.