![]() They were very exposed on high ground, well within sight of German artillery in the woods east of the Meuse River. The Frenchmen all knew what concentrated heavy guns could do to an entrenched position. They had reliable Lebel 8mm rifles tipped with 20-inch bayonets, and they knew how to use them. They would fight every German who showed his pointed helmet to the 137th Infantry. These were French soldiers, sworn to defend their sacred homeland to the death against the vile Boche. Yet there was no talk of retreat or surrender. Two battalions of the 137th had been ordered to hold their lines against the German Fifth Army.īut there was little doubt that the soldiers, clad in the characteristic horizon blue jackets and trousers, helmets, and leather belts with ammo pouches, had no illusions about their ability to hold off a determined German infantry assault, especially those that carried flamethrowers and grenades. Their trench, wreathed in barbed wire and surrounded by shell craters was in a salient a short distance from what had once been the most heavily fortified bastion in France, Fort Douaumont. The stink of expended cordite, scorched wood, and rotten corpses permeated the air around them. ![]() Instead, the soldiers of 3 Company of the French 137th Infantry Regiment smelled only death on the wind. The weather was warm with breezes coming down from the north, but they did not carry the scent of wildflowers or grapevines. The massive loss of life at Verdun-143,000 German dead out of 337,000 casualties, to France’s 162,440 out of 377,231-would come to symbolize, more than that of any other battle, the bloody nature of trench warfare on the Western Front.The morning of June 23, 1916, dawned over the broad crenellated valley of the Meuse River in northeastern France. By early December, under Robert Nivelle, who had been appointed to replace Philippe Pétain in April, the French had managed to recapture much of their lost territory, and in the last three days of battle took 11,000 German prisoners before Hindenburg finally called a stop to the German attacks. In July, the Kaiser, frustrated by the state of things at Verdun, removed Falkenhayn and sent him to command the 9th Army in Transylvania Paul von Hindenburg took his place. READ MORE: Life in the Trenches of World War IĪs fighting at Verdun stretched on and on, German resources were stretched thinner by having to confront both a British-led offensive on the Somme River and Russia’s Brusilov Offensive on the Eastern Front. Among the weapons in the German arsenal was the newly-invented flammenwerfer, or flamethrower that year also saw the first use by the Germans of phosgene gas, ten times more lethal than the chlorine gas they previously used. From the beginning, casualties mounted quickly on both sides of the conflict, and after some early gains of territory by the Germans, the battle settled into a bloody stalemate. Falkenhayn believed that the French army was more vulnerable than the British, and that a major defeat on the Western Front would push the Allies to open peace negotiations. The battle had begun on February 21, after the Germans-led by Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn-developed a plan to attack the fortress city of Verdun, on the Meuse River in France. The Battle of Verdun, the longest engagement of World War I, ends on this day after ten months and close to a million total casualties suffered by German and French troops.
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