Verdun – or the ‘Mill on the Meuse’, as it became known – holds a similar place in France’s national psyche to that occupied in the British imagination by the Somme. Though surprisingly little remembered today outside France and Germany, the epic struggle for the famous fortress city that took place over 10 months in 1916 would go down in history as the longest battle of World War I. With more than 300,000 casualties on either side, it would also prove to be one of the bloodiest engagements of all time – its huge loss of life providing an early glimpse of the full horror of 20th-century industrialised warfare with which the 1914-1918 conflict would for ever be associated.
Occupying a strategic position on the River Meuse, in north-eastern France, Verdun had already survived several attempts to capture it over the centuries – most notably during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Such resilience had lent it an almost mythic status, even before Erich von Falkenhayn, the Chief of the German General Staff, launched his assault on it in February 1916 in an attempt to inflict both a strategic defeat and a blow to French national morale. With his infamous order to ‘bleed them white’, and with more than 1,200 guns now massed along an eight-mile front, the stage was set for a prolonged ordeal – one that would see entire villages destroyed and the land so poisoned that it would prove impossible after the war to return it to agricultural use.
In the first part of our special feature for this issue, we trace the military career of Philippe Pétain, the French marshal later disgraced for his collaboration with Nazi Germany, but whose contribution to Verdun’s defence led to him being lauded at the time as his country’s saviour. In the second part, we look in more detail at the battle itself to understand how France’s eventual victory was achieved at such terrible human cost.
This is an extract from a special feature on the military career of France’s Marshal Pétain and the epic struggle for Verdun, from the February/ March 2026 issue of Military History Matters magazine.
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