You’ll suffer losses every day, for they’ll be harassing our positions. The post of honour is here, this is right where they intend to attack. After conferring with Deville, Lieutenant Colonel Moisson, the commander of the 151, did not spare his words in addressing his subordinates. Good luck, gentlemen!’ ¹Īnd with that, General Deville abruptly departed the room leaving his audience in stunned silence. Reinforcements: I don’t have any to give you. Gentleman, don’t ask me for supplies: I don’t have any. No barbed-wire, no defensive entanglements, certainly no shelters. The situation was desperate it’s not yet stabilized. I won’t hide the mistakes from you we must fix them. I won’t hide the truth from you we’ve been taken by surprise. You are at Verdun and you are the Verdun Brigade. Standing stiffly before them, he began tugging nervously on his greying goatee as he addressed the audience, his voice hoarse and cracking as he spoke: A grave sense of foreboding prevailed among the pensive gathering as their senior commander, General Deville, strode into the room appearing weary and agitated. The sound of hundreds of cannon discharging and thousands of artillery shells detonating filled the air with a deep and incessant thundering, and illuminated the horizon with a continually flickering reddish glow.Īs the exhausted men settled into their temporary billets in the town for a few hours of much-needed sleep, a call went out summoning all officers to the Hôtel de Ville. A few miles to the north of Verdun along the heights of the River Meuse a mighty battle was raging. Now and then, massive artillery shells fired from long-range German guns plummeted out of the dark sky and burst through the roofs and walls of the densely packed buildings and homes. Much of Verdun was now in ruins with a series of fires blazing away in the streets. The regiment had just completed the final leg of a gruelling forced march over deep-rutted roads made slippery by thick mud. Snow was falling heavily on the late-winter night of 9 March 1916 as the 151st Infantry Regiment trudged into the ancient fortress city of Verdun. It was vicious and brutal utterly cruel.”- War History Online Read more None of this is particularly pretty and the accounts do much to scatter notions of war as a glorious, thrilling experience. “The book recounts the horror of intense artillery bombardments and men mown down in great waves. Their diaries and memoirs tell their story in the most compelling way, and through their words the larger human story of the French soldier during the war comes to life. Yet their ordeal was no different from that of hundreds of other infantry units that fought and endured in this meat-grinder of a battle. The French 151st Infantry Regiment spent fifty days under fire at Verdun in 1916 and another thirty-five in 1917 and lost 3,200 soldiers killed or wounded. That is what Johnathan Bracken does in this meticulously researched, detailed and vivid account. But we can gain a genuine insight by focusing on one of the defining battles of that war, at Verdun in 1916, and by looking at it through the eyes of a small group of soldiers who served there. The immense size of the French armies, the number of battles they fought, and the enormous losses they incurred, make it difficult for us to comprehend their experience. This book on French soldiers during WWI is “a first-class narrative with an abundance of personal testimony from the officers and men of the regiment” ( The Great War Magazine, Editor’s Choice).Īlthough the French fielded the largest number of Allied troops on the Western Front in the First World War, the story of their soldiers is little known to English readers.
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