XX0007 – Verdun, 1916

Verdun, 1916: Ten Months on a Front of Fifteen Kilometres

The Battle of Verdun opened on 21 February 1916 with a nine-hour bombardment by around 1,200 German guns and closed on 18 December, after 302 days. It remains the longest battle of the First World War and one of the longest in recorded history. Combined casualties are generally estimated between 700,000 and 800,000 killed, wounded and missing, divided almost evenly between the two armies.

The German Plan

Erich von Falkenhayn’s stated intention was not a breakthrough but attrition: to attack a position the French army could not abandon for reasons of prestige, and to bleed it white with artillery. Verdun, a fortress city on the Meuse ringed by forts, fitted that description. Whether Falkenhayn actually formulated the plan in those terms before the battle, or reconstructed it afterwards in his memoirs, has been debated by historians for a century.

The Voie Sacrée

The French response was logistical before it was tactical. With the railways cut, a single secondary road from Bar-le-Duc became the army’s only supply line: some 3,500 lorries a day moved men, ammunition and food along what Maurice Barrès named the Voie Sacrée. Philippe Pétain also instituted the noria system, rotating divisions through the sector rather than leaving them until destroyed — with the result that roughly seventy per cent of the French army passed through Verdun, which is why the battle entered the national memory as a collective experience rather than a regimental one.

The Ground

Fort Douaumont fell almost without a fight on 25 February and was retaken in October. Between those dates the villages of Fleury, Douaumont, Cumières and five others were destroyed so completely that they were never rebuilt; they retain legal existence today as communes with no inhabitants. The Ossuary at Douaumont holds the unidentified remains of about 130,000 men from both armies.

Giuseppe Rava’s Original Work

Giuseppe Rava reconstructs the French infantry of 1916 from surviving equipment and photographs: the horizon-blue uniform introduced the previous year, the Adrian helmet, the Lebel rifle, the individual load carried into the line. The ground is rendered as the sources describe it — churned chalk and clay without vegetation, shaped entirely by shellfire.

This is a limited edition fine art print, hand-signed by the artist, produced in SRA3 format on fine art paper. Ships worldwide.