Under the weight of superior numbers and superior artillery the French troops, brave as they were, were gradually cut to pieces. Except for two brigades, which came in toward the end, they were without reinforcements of any kind. Their mission was to hold to the very last, and right nobly had they fulfilled it. Their duty was to exact the greatest possible price for each yard of German advance, and right powerfully had they exacted it. For every Frenchman who went down, it is said at least four Germans did likewise. The slaughter was great. Verdun thus gained, almost instantly, the place it was to hold for many months as the graveyard of the contending armies. ”

April 9, 1916 – German forces launch a third deadly offensive

Accounts of modern warfare do not get more ghastly than those relating to the First World War. For the first time the technological juggernaut that had vaulted Western Civilization to unimaginable heights of comfort and luxury was turned on itself, and produced a murderous onslaught unmatched in human history. A generation of Europeans who had taken enormous pride in their peaceful and prosperous civilization were thrown almost without warning into an intractable war of unspeakable horrors.

Thousands of shells were fired on the fortifications, day and night for months on end.

The scientific advances that had brought so much material comfort to Europe during the 19th century were now laying waste to her cities and children. And even worse, the “pragmatic” philosophies of the age that derided “outdated” concepts of morality had overridden ancient notions chivalry and limited warfare. The human potential that modern thinkers had unleashed by “liberating mankind” from the shackles of superstition and original sin had turned out to be the potential for unspeakable evil.

The Battle of Verdun was the longest and deadliest battle of the First World War, lasting ten months, with 700,000 killed and hundreds of thousands of others wounded. Verdun was a strongly fortified region on the eastern border of France and the Germans determined that if they could take it, France’s defenses would collapse. German strategists realized it would be an extremely costly undertaking but calculated that it would be worth the lives of thousands of soldiers to achieve their objectives. The fact that the French were likely to defend the fortress with all available men was looked upon as an opportunity to killed tens of thousands of Frenchmen as efficiently as possible.

700,000 French and Germans killed at Verdun

The Heritage History collection includes half a dozen books that cover the events of the First World War, and most were written in the first few years after the war. Some are written in order to showcase the heroics of the war while others try to provide a general overview. But the tone of all of them is distinctly shell-shocked. Most of the authors of the time, even when providing eyewitness accounts, don’t quite seem to be able to adjust to the terrible realities of the age. They dutifully report on the incidents, but struggle to make sense of events. As one officer reported in a letter home, “Humanity is mad. It must be mad to do what it is doing. What a massacre! What scenes of horror and carnage! I cannot find words to translate my impressions. Hell cannot be so terrible!”

Recommended Reading

The Great War by Roland Usher provides an exceptionally good overview of the Great War and is richly illustrated. Even though it was published only months after armistice, it provides an excellent analysis of both the causes and the strategic objectives of the war. It acknowledges in the first chapters that this was a world war, fought on many fronts and that the motives and relationships of the combatants were complicated. It then proceeds to give a clear “birds-eye” view of the war, and explains the developing events chronologically, while providing enough details of battles and heroics to keep readers fascinated. Overall, it is one of the best accounts available. Fraser’s Boys Book of Battles includes battles from the Napoleonic Wars and American Revolution, but the last half of the book focuses entirely on World War I battles, and his accounts, which include many first-person passages, are vivid and exceptionally moving.

Gallipoli by Masefield was written while the War was still in progress, and is therefore openly supportive of the allied war effort, yet the reporting of events is of the utmost interest. Masefield writes with a tone of bewildered patriotism rather than jingoism, and though he is anxious to portray the allied effort as heroic, the unprecedented carnage unleashed by modern weapons took its toll on eye-witnesses as well as combatants. When the Russians came to Poland is written from a civilian woman’s point of view, and chronicles the cruelty with which the Slavs were treated by the Prussians. Another moving account of the war, of enormous interest is Fix Bayonets, written by an American Marine who served at Belleau Woods, Soissons, and Argonne.

All of the books listed above, and many more, can be found on the Modern Europe Classical Library. Almost any account of the First World War is likely to be disturbing to students who are too young to deal with the nightmare scenario that is conjured up by images of modern warfare. But for students who are ready to face the tragic fate of a civilization that has abandoned God and descended into madness, the Great War is an excellent case study.