Original subtitles

January 1916 - the second winter of the war.

On the Western Front, the Germans were preparing a new offensive.

Its code name was Gericht - judgment.

An offensive needs supplies.

This was just one of ten new railway lines that the Germans were edging forward -

scalpels cutting into the heart of France.

A few miles away to the west,

ten miles behind the French line, lay their objective -

Verdun.

Verdun was the great fortress whose name had, for centuries, not ceased to haunt Germanic imaginations.

It was the great advanced citadel of France, the principal bastion of her eastern frontier,

whose fall - resounding throughout Europe - would efface the victories of the Marne and the Yser.

In 1914, before the Battle of the Marne, it had stood like a rock against German assault.

Had it fallen, Paris - even the war - might have been lost.

It was the hinge and pivot of the whole Allied line, jutting like an elbow into the German positions.

On the map, Verdun's defences looked formidable.

Between the town and the front line, ten miles north,

were a ring of forts - some 20 large and 40 small ones.

Strongest of them all, cornerstone of the whole system,

was Douaumont.

Forts like these had been built to be impregnable.

But Verdun was one of the weakest points in the whole Allied line.

The previous summer, the French had begun removing the forts' guns.

By now - January 1916 - over 200 guns had been removed from the forts for mobile use elsewhere,

together with a vast amount of ammunition.

There is no evidence that Germany knew how weak the forts were.

The decision to attack was taken for other reasons and by one man -

General Erich von Falkenhayn, Chief of the German General Staff.

In December 1915, he had written to the Kaiser,

"The strain in France has about reached breaking point.

"A mass breakthrough - which is in any case beyond our means - is unnecessary.

"Within our reach, there are objectives

"for the retention of which the French would be compelled to throw in every man they have.

"If they do so, the forces of France will bleed to death."

Falkenhayn's directive to the staff of the German Fifth Army,

spoke only of "an offensive in the direction of Verdun". There was no mention of capturing the city.

But Crown Prince William, the Kaiser's eldest son, who commanded the Fifth Army, had other ideas.

"The objective is to capture the fortress of Verdun by precipitate methods."

This discrepancy in interpretation cost Germany dear.

140,000 men were assembling for the attack.

Entire villages were evacuated to make room for them.

Most impressive of all were the guns - the guns that were to do the "bleeding white".

The guns came from as far away as Russia and the Balkans -

siege mortars, naval guns, quick-firing guns, field guns, mine-throwers. 1,200 guns in all.

And to supply this fearsome armoury - 1,300 munition trains,

2,500,000 shells.

With the greatest secrecy, the build-up continued through the damp days of January.

Alarm about Verdun's defences had at last penetrated general headquarters at Chantilly.

The French Minister of War, General Gallieni,

wrote to the commander-in-chief,

"Reports have reached me indicating that in the Verdun region the line of trenches has not been completed.

"Should the enemy break through,

"not only would your responsibility be involved but also that of the entire government."

Joffre replied,

"Nothing justifies the fears which you express in your dispatch."

German planes patrolled the forward area, waiting to pounce on any French reconnaissance planes.

They had complete air superiority.

They had assembled the greatest concentration of air power ever employed in war so far -

168 planes at Verdun and a large number of observation balloons. Even Joffre became apprehensive.

"Our Minister to Denmark telegraphed that a German offensive was being talked about.

"This was confirmed by news from Switzerland of the concentration of 400,000 men in the Verdun region."

A regiment of engineers was sent to strengthen the defences on the east bank. Time was running out.

German deserters were crossing the lines in growing numbers with tales that all leave had been cancelled,

that something terrible was about to happen.

Men, and still more men, marching towards Verdun.

They were old hands, these men, old hands of 25 or 30 -

many already wounded in action - toughened by two years of war.

Westphalians from Munster and Dusseldorf,

men from Hesse, descendants of those who had fought as mercenaries against Napoleon - and FOR him,

Brandenburgers from Berlin - one of the elite units of the German army,

three of the crack army corps of the German army - 72 battalions.

Their wait was a fearful one.

On February 11, the day before the attack,

Verdun's treacherous climate came to the aid of the French. The attack was postponed,

giving the French time to settle in two newly arrived divisions.

These men, like the Germans, were veterans - young men grown old before their time.

"Poilus", the French public called them - the hairy ones.

It was a nickname they disliked.

Few of them fought any longer for such noble aims as the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine.

They fought for the remaining land of France.

And so they waited - 34 battalions of them, 30,000 men,

ill-prepared, outnumbered by over two to one and by much more in guns.

"The hour is near. In our wood, the front trenches will be taken in the first minutes.

"My poor battalion, spared until now."

The dawn, February 21st.

20 miles behind the German lines,

a Krupp's 15-inch naval gun raised its barrel from its netting.

GUN BLASTS

For three hours, the German heavy guns ranged on Verdun itself.

At 7am, the bombardment switched to the French lines -

one heavy battery to every 150 yards of trench -

and to the roads leading up to them.

Gun after gun joined in -

1,000 in all - all firing onto six miles of the French front.

To the French, cowering in the woods of the east bank, the air seemed solid with fragments.

"The shells appear like great ghosts, axing the trunks, mangling the branches into hanging shreds."

The crude iron of the shells shattered into huge, ragged chunks

that sometimes two men would be unable to lift.

Men were squashed, cut in two or divided from top to bottom,

blown into showers, bellies turned inside out and scattered,

skulls forced bodily into the chest as if by a blow with a club.

"Here and there in the front line were a few men who had escaped.

"In all our minds, we had the same thought - that everyone to right and left had been killed."

A German airman reported:

"It's done. We can pass. There's nothing living any more."

A young Hessian scribbled a last note to his mother -

"There's going to be a battle here the likes of which the world has never seen."

SHOT FROM HAND-GUN The Germans had eight miles to go.

Their fighting patrols slipped forward like a dentist's probe.

"They moved slowly, not in a straight line,

"as if they were picking their way.

"Nothing could have looked less like an assault.

"Some of the Germans had containers strapped to their backs.

"They seemed like labourers going to spray the vines."

Flame-throwers -

the Germans were trying out their new weapon on the French.

Tongues of burning oil propelled by compressed nitrogen

turned men into flaming torches.

On the second day came the assault troops to exploit the gaps found by the fighting patrols.

MACHINE-GUN FIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

By the fourth day, the Germans were through into open country.

The whole of the second French line had crumbled. For the first time on the Western Front since 1914,

they scented a breakthrough. Few trenches faced them, not much barbed wire. Open country ahead.

They had taken 10,000 prisoners.

"They give one the impression of complete breakdown and complain loudly of their senior commanders."

Even Joffre was shaken out of his accustomed calm.

"I wished, more than at any time, I could be in two places at once.

"I felt that the decisions I was taking at Chantilly, far from the scene of the action,

"risked being invalidated before they could be carried out.

"I would have liked to be at Verdun but my duty unquestionably was to be at my headquarters."

The Kaiser was certain that Verdun was about to fall.

He came up to watch the kill through a well-protected periscope.

Would the front hold? By nightfall on February 25th, only the forts and a few brave men barred the way.

Fort Douaumont -

its tortoise hump dominated the battlefield.

The men of the 24th Brandenburg regiment, back from their victory over the Serbs in the Balkans,

had no orders to capture Douaumont.

Their objective lay short of it.

But their regimental motto was "Do more than your duty",

and in front of them lay the fort of Douaumont.

It drew them on like a magnet.

Unknown to each other, small groups entered at various points -

a handful of men against a fort of concrete and steel.

The Germans were astounded to find the fort was garrisoned by 56 elderly Territorial Gunners.

A handful of men were manning the guns.

The rest were sheltering in the cellars from the bombardment.

Fort Douaumont, the world's most powerful stronghold, had fallen without a shot being fired.

In Germany, there was jubilation and the Crown Prince himself decorated the victors,

the brave Brandenburgers.

But in France, not surprisingly, the disaster of Douaumont was played right down by French GHQ.

Crowds of worshippers in Paris on that Sunday morning, February 27th,

were to find their newspapers full of evasions.

An official communique spoke of "a fierce struggle at Fort Douaumont,

"which is an advanced outpost of the old defences of Verdun.

"The position, carried by the enemy after several fruitless assaults which cost them heavy losses,

"has since been reached and passed by our troops."

Evasions of this sort made matters worse and rumours went around that Verdun itself was lost.

In Verdun, confusion reigned.

"Run like hell, but no panic!" one French officer was heard to shout.

The Germans were five miles away.

There was one ridge between them and the city. Could Verdun be held?

De Castelnau thought it could be and, to carry out his will, he had persuaded Joffre

to appoint General Petain as commander of the Verdun army.

Petain had begun the war as a colonel due for retirement.

Now he was an army commander.

Soldiers had heard about Petain - that he cared for his troops

and was frugal with men's lives.

As the badly needed reinforcements moved up, the word went round -

"Petain's in charge. All will be well."

"Conserve your strength. The counter-offensive will follow," Petain told his commanders.

But only the most precarious of lifelines

connected Verdun to the rest of France.

The only rail link was a narrow-gauge railway

built to supply a peace-time garrison.

Alongside, there was one second-class road.

It ran into Verdun from Bar le Duc, 50 miles to the south.

The road was only 20ft wide, just wide enough for two vehicles.

The trucks that bumped along it had been commandeered from all over France - more than 3,000 of them.

"It was like some gigantic serpent which never stopped and never ended," said one American observer.

By a miracle of organisation, the road was kept open.

In this critical week at the end of February,

25,000 tons of supplies and 190,000 men passed along it -

6,000 vehicles a day, one every 14 seconds,

for hours on end.

In the months ahead, two-thirds of the entire French army were to pass up this road,

bound for the Calvary of Verdun.

A French writer named the road "la Voie Sacree" - the Sacred Way.

In the lengthening days of March,

the Germans extended their attacks to the west bank of the Meuse

and to a hill named "Mort Homme" - Dead Man.

Nearly 250,000 men were now involved in Falkenhayn's adventure.

The blood-letting was getting out of hand.

"Our blinded, wounded, crawling and shouting soldiers

"kept falling on top of us and died while splashing us with their blood.

"It was a living hell."

"Verdun is terrible because a man is fighting with a sensation of striking out at empty air.

"Oh, how I envy those who can charge with a bayonet

"instead of waiting to be buried by a shell!"

By the end of March, after 40 days' fighting,

the Germans had lost 80,000 men, the French a few thousand more.

The casualty gap was narrow.

Villages had disappeared... woods had disappeared.

The battlefield was a lunar landscape.

These days of Verdun were foul.

Several times they have raised before our eyes the veil of hell.

Our mission was to be crushed. Divisions followed each other. They had no other role

but to set up each day, before the enemy, a wall of corpses. Trenches were mere ditches.

For days you never saw the enemy - just endless shells.

You ate beside the dead.

You drank beside the dead.

You relieved yourself beside the dead. You slept beside the dead.

Often you had no sleep for over a week.

Those who sleep in beds will read in papers that the line has held.

How can they imagine what that simple word, "held", means?

Men often went for days without food.

The ration parties were frequently killed on the six-mile slog through the mud to the front positions.

Out of the line, the rations weren't much to write home about.

Stringy and greasy tinned beef, known as monkey, salted cod and rubbery macaroni.

Indeed, only a few months before, the sardonic humour of the French soldier had been roused

by a propaganda leaflet, circulated by HQ. "Our soldiers have always enjoyed two meals a day.

"They are much better fed than the Germans." The soldiers disagreed.

200,000 had written to protest.

At least the rations were free

and so was the wine ration - "pinard", the rough red wine beloved by the French soldier.

Pinard made up a little for the miserable pay -

five sous a day - nearly tuppence ha'penny.

Pinard - which gave a man courage to forget the present.

For the only real enemy now was the battle itself.

The horror of that battle tarnished the face of every soldier at Verdun - French and German alike.

By the end of April - after 70 days' fighting -

the Germans had lost 120,000 men.

The French had lost 133,000.

General Petain's reinforcements poured endlessly up the Sacred Way.

"My heart leaped as I saw our young men of 20 going into the furnace of Verdun. Jolted in their trucks

"or bowed by the weight of their equipment, they encourage one another with jokes and songs."

THEY SING

"But when they came out of the battle,

"what a pitiful sight they were.

"Their expressions seemed frozen by a vision of terror.

"They sagged beneath the weight of horrifying memories.

"It seemed as if these mute faces were crying something terrible -

"the unbelievable horror of their martyrdom."

Petain's demands for troops displeased Joffre.

"Had I yielded to all his demands for reinforcements,

"the whole French army would have been absorbed in the battle.

"He was well aware that I was trying to collect the largest number of divisions for the Somme offensive."

In May, Petain was succeeded by Gen Robert Nivelle - an out-and-out apostle of the offensive -

a man of boundless ambition and self-confidence.

Nivelle was told that he could expect no more fresh troops.

"No matter. We have the formula," he said. The formula included his right-hand man -

the toughest general in the whole French army - Charles Mangin.

Mangin's motto was "Fight to the limit".

The French had by now gained air superiority over the battlefield.

Aerial tactics were becoming more and more sophisticated.

Both sides sent their greatest aces to Verdun.

The Germans had Oswald Boelcke

and Von Richthofen - the deadliest of them all - was blooded here.

The French threw in their famous Storks Group, including such legendary figures as Guynemer...

Navarre.

In May, the French fighter squadrons swept over Verdun.

It was a heartening sight to the French infantry.

German observation balloons were sitting targets to aerial rockets

the French were using for the first time.

Now it was the French turn to attack.

How many have died like this - without glory, taken by surprise on their first day?

They have given their life and nobody even knew their name.

Hell cannot be so terrible as this. Humanity is mad. It must be mad to do what it is doing.

One begins to ask oneself, "Where is victory?" And whether it might not lie in any kind of peace,

which would at least save the race. An artery of French blood was cut on February 21st,

and it flows incessantly in large spurts.

Paris - 150 miles from Verdun -

another country, another world. Paris - still gay, still pleasure- seeking after two years of war.

Music halls were full every night. Tipperary and The Roses of Picardy were imported by the British.

The theatres, closed in 1914, had reopened.

Mistinguett danced to huge crowds.

The actress Sarah Bernhardt, even with one leg now amputated, still graced the boards -

the personification of France herself - mutilated but undaunted.

Civilian France in the early summer of 1916 had not yet felt the full pinch of war. Coal was short,

but food still plentiful. By law there was one meatless day a week,

but few, except the poor, took any notice. The cost of living had gone up one-fifth since 1914,

but wages had risen, too. Factory workers could earn 15 francs a day - nearly 12 shillings -

60 times more than the French soldier.

French soldiers, when they were lucky to get leave, felt themselves strangers in their own land.

Life is good. One can understand these people resigning themselves to the war.

It's consoling to know that if one perishes in the barbed wire,

they will not be too much affected by the loss.

Paris was full of embusques - shirkers - and the armchair warriors and the profiteers,

who had made a packet out of war. I met a lot of them on my last leave - the fat shining swine!

They take their aperitifs and read their papers -

that's the only way they have of knowing what's going on in the war.

So many lies have been spread about us

that I have many times seen the troops tear up the newspapers.

Phrases like, "Our gallant wounded!" - armchair descriptions

of the enthusiastic ardour of combat - cant like this enraged the men who knew what it was like.

They were getting tired of meddlers.

Heroics were all very well for the cartoonists. Sentimentality might bring comfort to the folks at home,

but this glorification sickened the men who had faced death at Verdun,

and the newspapers of the world agreed.

"As ye shall sow, so shall ye reap," read this American cartoon.

The Crown Prince, too, came in for his share of blame.

"Father, we must have a higher pile of bodies at Verdun!" read the caption to this, in the Daily Mail.

But Crown Prince William no longer believed the city could be taken.

I was absolutely opposed to continuing the attack. I was now convinced,

after the stubborn to-and-fro contest for every foot of ground,

that a decisive success at Verdun could only be assured at the price of heavy sacrifices

out of all proportion to the desired gains. Yet, I had to obey the orders of general headquarters.

And as May drew to a close, a new attack was ordered.

Sledgehammer blows to blast in the gateway to the fortress... once and for all.

On June 1st, a glorious summer day, the Germans attacked yet again.

The two nations were now locked firmly in their mortal duel.

All Germanism had gone into the meticulous preparation, the armament, the skilful planning,

the sheer courage of the attack.

All French nature had gone into the lack of preparation,

the casual assurance, the panics and the brave resistance.

To Lloyd George, the British Minister of Munitions, Verdun seemed, "One of the most gigantic,

"tenacious, grim, futile

"and bloody fights

"ever waged in the history of war.

"On those heights, Gaul and Teuton fought out a racial feud,

"which had existed for thousands of years.

"But the concentrated fury of ages

"raged and tore, shattered

"and killed in one intensive struggle,

"which has no parallel

"in the history of human savagery!"

The battle was no longer an episode that spent itself in blood and fire -

it was a thing that dug itself in remorselessly.

Week after week,

they breathed in the smell of a tormented world -

a smell like that of a planet in the process of being reduced to ashes.

Most of them had given up all hope of surviving.

I saw a man drinking from a scum-covered green marsh...

where a dead man lay -

his black face downward in the water, lying on his stomach

and swollen as if he'd not stopped filling himself with water for days.

Having despaired of living amid such horror, we begged God not to have us killed -

the transition is too atrocious - but just to let us be dead.

We have but one desire - the end.

French morale wavered.

Petain signalled to Joffre about the Anglo-French offensive on the Somme in August:

"A tactical success by the English would not compensate for the loss of this city.

"Its capture would be an inestimable success for the Germans. Verdun must not fall."

Joffre issued an order of the day. "Soldiers of Verdun,

"upon your heroic resistance still depends our future victory.

"I make one more appeal to your courage,

"your ardour, your spirit of sacrifice, your love of country.

"Hold fast and strive with all your might

"to shatter the last desperate efforts of an enemy now at bay."

MUSIC: The French National Anthem

The turning point came on June 23rd.

The Germans penetrated to within two-and-a-half miles of Verdun.

It was a moment of supreme crisis.

Petain warned GHQ that he might have to withdraw from the east bank.

General Nivelle issued a dramatic order of the day.

It ended with words which were to ring round the world:

"You will not let them pass."

The Germans did NOT pass. They had shot their bolt.

They had no more to spare.

Three divisions had been taken away from the Crown Prince

to bolster up the Austrians against a Russian attack.

And on June 24th, the French troops heard the first rumble of the British bombardment on the Somme.

Joffre's plan for a combined Allied offensive was coming to pass.

"We will bleed France to death," Falkenhayn had said.

337,000 Germans fell at Verdun.

The President of France had said,

"If Verdun is saved, how shall we ever be able to forget at what a price?"

The price was 362,000 Frenchmen killed, wounded or missing.

Small wonder that one Frenchman had written before he was killed,

"They will not be able to make us do it again another day.

"That would be to misunderstand what it cost us.

"They will have to resort to those who have not lived out these days."

"Among these motionless bodies,

"two things moving.

"One crawls, crying, towards the ditch -

"a man with his legs shattered,

"the sole survivor.

"And in the other direction, a small barrel of wine

"rolls slowly down the road,

"stopping against a dead body."