The Road to Verdun: France, Nationalism and the First World War Book

The Battle of Verdun is central to the French experience of the First World War in the way that the Battle of the Somme is to the British experience of the conflict. Indeed, Verdun meant (and means) more to the French than the Somme does to the British. The very name of the battle, the largest and longest between French and German forces, carried, and continues to carry, a resonance all its own. At the time, and for decades afterwards, Verdun symbolised both the horrors of the war at their worst and something about the nature of Frenchness and what France, as a nation, meant. The road leading to the battlefield became known as La Voie Sacrée--the Sacred Way. Phrases such as General Neville's "Ils ne passeront pas" ("They shall not pass") were seen to embody an extraordinary, and particularly French, courage shown by Verdun's defenders. Ian Ousby, in his ambitious and multi-layered book, is particularly alert to the symbolism of Verdun. This is much more than a standard military history in which tactics, strategy and the movements of men across the battlefield are carefully described. As Ousby points out, tactics were often impossible in the chaos of the fighting and the deployment of men on the field was often obscure to the commanders at the time, never mind to a historian writing 80 years later. Ousby does reconstruct as best he can the events of Verdun, largely through the frequently moving accounts of ordinary soldiers, but he also ranges back in time to the Franco-Prussian War and the years of the Third Republic in search of evidence for how the French saw themselves as a nation and how they defined themselves in opposition to the "anti-France" that was Imperial Germany. The result is a vivid and thought-provoking book, which sets a bloody and terrible battle in a larger historical context.--Nick RennisonRead More