Book description
The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at
least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles. Its aim was less
to defeat the enemy than bleed him to death and a battleground whose
once fertile terrain is even now a haunted wilderness. Alistair Horne's
classic work, continuously in print for over fifty years, is a
profoundly moving, sympathetic study of the battle and the men who
fought there. It shows that Verdun is a key to understanding the First
World War to the minds of those who waged it, the traditions that bound
them and the world that gave them the opportunity. One of Britain s
greatest historians, Sir Alistair Horne, CBE, is the author of several
famous books on French history as well as a two-volume life of Harold
Macmillan.
