Frank H. Simonds, one of America’s most respected war correspondents, chronicles the Battle of Verdun — the ten-month struggle of 1916 in which France and Germany each suffered catastrophic losses fighting over a narrow salient on the Meuse. Simonds analyses the strategic logic that made Verdun simultaneously indispensable and insane, and captures the human scale of the carnage through frontline accounts and tactical description.
Written with journalistic clarity and genuine admiration for French tenacity, the book is a compelling account of one of the defining episodes of the First World War and modern European history.