Watermark 1916: The War Foundry

Exactly a hundred years ago, the Great War was in full blast. The shock waves it set off still influence ‘modern’ sensibility.

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Saikat Niyogi

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Updated: 28 Oct 2016 4:04 pm

A hundred years ago, in 1916, the First World War came into its own and cemented its terrible reputation. The British and the French had spent a year-and-a-half in chafing and sniping at the Germans across barbed wire, along a line of trenches stretching from the North Sea coast of Belgium to the Swiss border in France. As the British and the French firmed up plans for an attack along the line of the river Somme in Picardy, the Germans were putting in place the final touches on an assault on the town of Verdun, in Alsace, on a loop of the Meuse, which lay in a salient on the front, and was thus vulnerable on three sides from German attack. If the Allies, so thwarted in their frontal assaults on enemy trenches, wanted to pursue the chimera of a ‘war of movement’, the Germans were concerned at the replenishment of manpower and materiel of its two adversaries. The enemy had to be ‘bled to death’.

The punishing assault on Verdun started on February 21, and, in spite of early German success, it degenerated into an awful slanging match. Verdun was unique in the sense that it was a battle of small groups, rather than massed battalions, and as such, perpetually smoke-masked areas of the battlefield as the quarries of Fleury, the Chapelle Sainte-Fine or the Bois du Chapitre took on a hellish reputation. The only road that supplied Verdun and its ring of forts, the Voie Sacree (the Sacred Way), stood for a country’s determination to fight on. Through it passed columns of soldiers and wagons feeding the battle’s terrible maw, and through it limped by a bedraggled trickle of glassy-eyed revenants. The Germans kept on attacking, out of habit; the French kept on defending, out of habit. When, after 10 months, they exhausted themselves, 3,01,440 men lay dead. “If you haven’t seen Verdun, you haven’t seen war,” said a Poilu. At the end, German gains were negligible, and it reinforced the supreme irony of this most ironic of wars—the immense sacrifices made would devilishly wink at the paltry returns. Any victory would be Pyrrhic.