In 1916 the supremely high cost of taking it made it so for the Germans, too. Verdun had long been a mythical place for the French, a fortress guarding the eastern frontier since Roman times, and made legendary by its defence in the war to protect the French Revolution in the 1790s. Once the onslaught began Horne helps us to see how both sides shared the pain of Western Europe’s bloodiest killing field. He knew they would rather bleed to death there than surrender Verdun. After a year of stalemate on the Western Front, the plan of Erich von Falkenhayn, the German commander, was not so much to breach the French defences but to concentrate them at Verdun, a tiny, exposed pocket of land, where German artillery could wreak a terrible toll and ‘bleed the French army white’.įalkenhayn understood the French psychology. The British historian Alistair Horne’s The Price of Glory, a magisterial account of the battle, first published in 1962, belongs to a school of compelling narrative history that puts the human experiences at its centre and, as a result, is hard to put down.įirst, the book introduces the characters and their aims.

The French held Verdun, but it was one of history’s pyrrhic victories. Nowhere was this resolve more renowned, or more tragic, than at Verdun in 1916, the ten-month battle that claimed more than 700,000 French and German lives over a front of fewer than fifteen miles. When they found themselves fighting the same invader, once again on their own soil, they were determined not to yield another inch of their territory, whatever the cost in blood. In 1871 the French had endured the mutilation of their country, and the seizure by Germany of some of their richest and most strategically important regions. There is much to learn from the titanic struggle between France and Germany during the First World War.

The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne