Over the following ten months, roughly 700,000 to 1 million men were killed, wounded, or went missing as French and German forces fought over a stretch of fortified hills along the Meuse River. German commander Erich von Falkenhayn had designed the offensive explicitly to 'bleed France white,' a war of attrition fought for its own grinding sake.
At 7:15 in the morning, over 1,200 German guns opened fire on a front barely 8 miles wide, one of the most concentrated artillery bombardments the world had yet seen. Shells fell at a rate that turned the wooded hills around the ancient fortress city of Verdun into a cratered wasteland within days, the trees stripped to splinters and the ground churned into a landscape soldiers described as lunar.
Falkenhayn's strategy was coldly explicit in a memorandum he reportedly sent the Kaiser: Verdun held such symbolic importance to French national pride that France would throw men into its defense regardless of cost, allowing Germany to kill French soldiers faster than they could be replaced. The plan back-fired in its arithmetic, German casualties nearly matched French ones by the battle's end in December.
The French rallying cry became 'Ils ne passeront pas' (they shall not pass), associated with General Robert Nivelle and General Philippe Pétain, who organized a crucial supply route nicknamed the Voie Sacrée, the Sacred Way, to keep men and material flowing to the front. Verdun became, and remains, a byword in France for senseless industrial slaughter and stubborn national endurance in equal measure.
Key people: Erich von Falkenhayn, Philippe Pétain, Robert Nivelle