Theater of Blood.('The Road to Verdun: World War I's Most Momentous Battle and the Folly of Nationalism')

The Road to Verdun: World War I's Most Momentous Battle and the Folly of Nationalism, by Ian Ousby (Doubleday, 400 pp., $30)

Verdun is one among other rather inconspicuous towns in the hilly French countryside between the rivers of the Meuse and the Rhine. The place has entered history as the site of one of the most atrocious of the many set- piece battles of the First World War. In the course of the 1916 fighting at Verdun, according to accepted figures, the French suffered 378,777 casualties, of whom 162,430 were killed or missing; the German dead or missing were comparable, about 143,000 out of 330,000 casualties. That same year, the battle of the Somme in northern France in fact claimed more victims, but the year-long slaughtering at Verdun has served to symbolize the struggle between France and Germany in the way that the battle of Stalingrad in World War II symbolized the struggle between Germany and Soviet Russia.

At Verdun, as also at Stalingrad, the fighting covered a terrain of a few miles at most, and of no real military significance. In dispute were several forts and lesser fortifications. German strategists had the obvious possibility of bypassing these prepared French positions, while French strategists could equally well have fallen back to a stronger defensive line. Possession of Verdun and the surrounding hills and woods could have no bearing on the final outcome of the war. Yet both sides were inflexible, opting for the tactics of concentrated artillery barrages followed by bayonet charges, or what the unfortunate men at the front referred to as butchering, meat-grinding, a version of Dante's Inferno.

Ian Ousby was a historian who died shortly after completing the manuscript of this book. The relationship between France and Germany was his special concern, and he was exceptionally well read in French sources -- which is the strength of this excellent and absorbing book. Among Frenchmen who served at Verdun were the young Charles de Gaulle; the writers Georges Duhamel, Jean Giono, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and Pierre Mac Orlan; the historian Louis Madelin; and many other gifted observers. (John Dos Passos arrived late in the day as a stretcher-bearer.) Drawing upon vivid memoirs and diaries and fictional accounts from these and many other witnesses, Ousby has evoked the frontline in all its horrific detail. He revives from the historical record a number of heroes. One in particular was Colonel Emile Driant, a parliamentary deputy who warned that France was ill prepared for the coming ordeal, but then found himself facing the brunt of the opening German attack, whereupon he was killed. Soon the once bucolic landscape was transformed. Corpses came to seem matter-of-fact. One French captain described how the earth itself became slippery with human flesh. Patriotism motivated the soldiers, as Ousby makes clear, which accounts for the immense pathos of their self-sacrifice.

In February 1916 Marshal Petain was given command. He instituted a conveyor-belt system of rotating units up to the front for short stints. Unimaginative and stolid as he was, and relieved of his command before the German campaign faltered to a close at the end of 1916, he nonetheless acquired a reputation as "the victor of Verdun."

How were the French able to delude themselves into the belief that Verdun had to be held at all costs, and that bloodletting on this appalling scale was heroism rather than idiocy? In a lengthy section at the heart of his book, Ousby skillfully illuminates the interplay of ideas and politics that decided the fate ...