Tuesday 22 January 2013

The Verdun Project: "Verdun 1916" by Malcolm Brown (1999)


Verdun 1916” by Malcolm Brown, published in 1999, is a slightly surprising book. It’s been on my bookshelf for a while, sitting alongside other, better known, volumes on Verdun. 


At first sight it seems to offer little new regarding the history of the long battle at Verdun between February and December 1916. In many ways, it doesn’t really take the history of the battle much further forward than Sir Alistair Horne’s magisterial “The Price of Glory”. While Mr Brown mentions in his foreword that, while paying great respect to Sir Alistair’s classic account, his own book offers insights into the battle from historical sources which were not available when “The Price of Glory” was first published in 1962. However, reading through the contents page and the early chapters, its difficult to see where the additional information is located. 

The book is generally arranged chronologically, with three chapters at the end of the book dealing with the experience and legacy of the fighting at Verdun. 


On the positive side, there are lengthy and very helpful passages from contemporaries present at the battle. Many of these are remarkable and pay testament to the uniqueness of the experiences of the fighting at Verdun. The passages are lengthier than in Horne’s “The Price of Glory” and Ian Ousby’s “The Road to Verdun”. Copying some of these passages and handing them around a table before a wargame is perhaps one of the easiest ways of setting the scene for any wargame based on the battle. 

Here’s a frequently quoted passage from Lieutenant Alfred Joubaire of the French 124th Infantry Regiment, no less grim for all its familiarity:

But for how long is it going to carry on? You wonder with anguish when and how this unprecedented struggle will end. There is no solution in sight. I wonder if it will end simply for lack of fighting men. It is no longer a case of one nation struggling with another. It is two blocks of nations which are fighting, two civilizations which are in conflict with each other. People are suffering from the madness of death and destruction. Yes, humanity has gone mad. We must be mad to do what we are doing. What massacres! What scenes of horror and carnage!. I cannot find words to express my feelings. Hell cannot be so terrible. Mankind has gone mad”.

There are a number of useful references to terrain (Mort-Homme being “originally partly wooded but now no more than a few blackened trunks are left visible, and there isn’t a green leaf or a blade of grass”, from the account of Leutnant Christian Bordeching). To James Rogers McConnell, one of the American airmen of the Lafayette Escadrille, the battlefield was reduced to a “sinister brown belt, a strip of murdered nature…The woods and roads have vanished like chalk wiped from a blackboard; of the villages nothing remains but grey smears” (page 240). Unfortunately, these graphic images stop short of describing the micro-terrain features which both sides exploited vigorously throughout the fighting.


Also on the positive side, the book is elegantly written in a very professional manner. Mr Brown is clearly a fine writer and organizes his material carefully, albeit with an eye on the general reader. 

But there are few revelations in the main part of the book. 


The chronological stages of the battle, the opposing generals, their strategy and their forces are covered in a professional and workmanlike manner. As with Horne and Ousby (and some of the other Verdun-themed books to be reviewed here shortly), there is next to nothing about small unit tactics or a description of exactly what the junior and brigade commanders thought they were doing in the battle. While the predominant artillery conflict is well documented, almost no attention is given to how attacks were arranged, mounted and consolidated by either side. This is not really a criticism – the book is pitched at a general level, and that type of detail (useful to wargamers) isn’t the author’s focus. 


I felt that the book did not really stand out and grab my attention for most of the chapters. At least, that is, until near the end. Chapters 18 (The Closedown), 19 (The Experience) and 20 (The Legacy) are the best in the book in my view by a long way. With extensive extracts from contemporaries, Mr Brown positions Verdun as a battle set apart – a war within the larger War. There’s less focus on the symbolism of the battle for France than in Ian Ousby’s “The Road to Verdun”, and more focus on the nature of the battle as an experience - horrific, dehumanizing and, ultimately, totally alienating. 

Brown’s argument, cogently threaded through his narrative, is that neither the Germans nor the French fully recovered from Verdun before the end of the War owing to the uniqueness of the battle’s intensity and heavy casualties. “One element that marked out Verdun as being exceptional was the sense of impotence felt by the soldiers out in the mud and squalor under the endless fury of the guns” (page 238). The nature of Verdun is explored as a perverse baptism (“He who has not seen Verdun has not seen this War”, Soldat Jean Ayon, 119th Regiment of Infantry) with religious anointing being replaced with expiatory suffering and sacrifice. Brown memorably concludes one chapter saying “It could be said that this was not so much a battle between victors and vanquished – such terms rapidly lost all meaning in so attritional an encounter – as between victims”(233).

Thoughtfully and calmly deployed, these insights were, for me, worth the price of the book itself. I am not sure I agree with the author’s overall arguments regarding the place of the battle of Verdun in the Great War, which fuse almost too conveniently with positioning Verdun as a colossal sacrifice devoid of any real achievement. To my mind, the fighting at Verdun was far too complex, intricate and militarily important to be reduced to a mere symbol of two nations’ sacrifice. But I felt that my coming to a different view on the battle did nothing to lessen the calm elegance of Mr Brown’s writing. 

So, another difficult book to assign a rating to. There’s not much here for the wargamer interested in tactical developments – perhaps 2 star-shells out of 5. For a general reader, the book is accessible, well-written and thoughtful – so 3 star-shells out of 5. 

In summary, an enjoyable read overall and it is hard not to be moved by the closing chapters of the book, which linger a long time in the memory.

17 comments:

  1. Nicely explained and reviewed Sidney.

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  2. Great review. I am looking forward to your Verdun project.

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  3. Another great review, excellent read while I sip my after-lunch expresso

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    1. Thanks Benito. More to come in the next few days!

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  4. Thank you for this, Sidney. I have only dim memories of reading Horne's book on Verdun, but the subject for me is always associated with deep horror and sadness, one of those terrible battles, like Stalingrad, that took on a sinister life of its own. Between Brown and Ousby, Brown's probably sounds like a good book for me. I am curious what similarities you see, as a gamer and amateur historian, between Passchendaele and Verdun

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    1. Thanks Mike for the great comment.

      Sir Alastair Horne's "The Price of Glory" is the next book review I'll be doing. I'm guessing a lot of people may have read it, but for those who haven't…..hopefully I can change that. Malcolm Brown does make a comparison in his book between Verdun and Stalingrad, not least prompted by Hitler's comparison of the two battles in November 1942. The main contrast which Brown draws is between the savage intensity of the "Rattenkrieg" at Stalingrad and what he terms the "terrifying loneliness" of battle experience at Verdun for the bulk of soldiers being flayed by the constant artillery exchanges.

      As for similarities between Verdun and Passchendaele, I think there are quite a few. From a historiographical perspective, the fighting at Passchendaele has been subject to quite a lot of revisionist interpretations. I'm not sure the same is true of Verdun to the same extent (and certainly not in the English language). Both battles are complex and technically intricate - far more so than I ever thought when I started reading about them. Both battles become "soldier's battles" (Passchendaele through the weather and Verdun through the French tenacity to hold on at all costs), with all the intensity and desperation which that term suggests. I think there's huge potential in both battles for wargaming, with both battles offering the opportunity through gaming of attempting to gain a deeper insight of just how horrifying both battles must have been for the participants.

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  5. A great review, sounds very interesting.

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  6. Thanks for the review, Sidney.I agree with your comment that Verdun was more than just sacrifice. Between it and the Somme lay the seeds of Germany's eventual defeat.

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    1. Thanks Nate! I very much agree. After Verdun and the Somme, the realistic chances of a German victory looked far slimmer.

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  7. A very thoughtful and well laid out review, Sidney. Horne, like Tuchman, is a very hard act to follow and it seems the period's canon (like most others) is choked with historians who claim that they offer critical new insight but all too frequently fail to come up with the goods, or simply don't possess the technical 'chops' to convey their arguments effectively. Nonetheless, based on your assessment, I think I'll try to order this in through the library and give it a whirl.

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    1. Thanks Curt. It is definitely a "library book" in that there's possibly not enough in wargaming terms for most people to justify the cover price. However, if its on the local library shelf I'd certainly recommend giving a read. And as you say, Horne is a very difficult act to follow!

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  8. Great review mate, sounds very intriguing. Regarding tactical developments at Verdun, have you had a look at some of the academic journals? I found this essay to be fairly decent (http://journals.chapman.edu/ojs/index.php/VocesNovae/article/view/334). I've had a brief look on JSTOR and there seems to be a few
    Also, if you've got any French, and if you can get your hands on it, Michel Goya's 2004 'La chair et l'acier: l'armée française et l'invention de la guerre moderne (1914-1918)' covers the tactical developments of the French throughout the war - although i've not read the work in its entirety, the parts i've browsed - primarily about 1914 - do seem rather excellent. Also, Doughty's Phyrric Victory is rather good, if almost exclusively higher level in its focus.
    Anyway, i'm really enjoying the reviews, and have been inspired to get out a few Scarab poilus. Now, if i can just find my horizon blue recipe...
    Ben

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    1. Excellent! Thanks for those leads, Ben. That Chapman journal piece looks very good (great coffeebreak reading for us history nerds).

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    2. Super comment, thanks Ben! And thanks very much for the excellent link to the Chapman Journal article. As for the other books - are you psychic, Sir????

      Robert Doughty's "Phyrric Victory" and Michel Goya's "La chair et l'acier: l'armée française et l'invention de la guerre moderne (1914-1918)" are two of the books I'll be reviewing here in February. Both are excellent at what they set out to do, especially Michel Goya's.

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