{"product_id":"verdun-ivo-vichev-9798233152078","title":"Verdun: Attrition, Endurance, and Memory on the Meuse","description":"\u003cp\u003eAt seven-fifteen on the morning of 21 February 1916, over a thousand German guns opened fire along the Meuse valley. What followed was not a battle in any conventional sense. It was a ten-month industrial catastrophe that consumed more than 700,000 men, obliterated nine villages that were never rebuilt, and scarred the earth so deeply that a century later the ground still contains the men who fell.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eErich von Falkenhayn designed Verdun not to be won but to bleed - a machine built to drain France of its young men at a place so sacred to French identity that no government could permit its loss. Philippe Pétain organized a single road into the most critical supply artery in military history. Émile Driant held a doomed wood for two days with twelve hundred chasseurs against a corps. The strongest fortress in France fell to a German sergeant who walked through an unguarded door. And three-quarters of the entire French army rotated through the same forty square kilometres of hell.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is the complete story - from the cult of the offensive that sent a generation to its death in red trousers, through the frozen Western Front of 1914 and the failed breakthroughs of 1915, into the ten months of bombardment, gas, flame, and close-quarters fighting in the ravines of the Meuse, and through to the reckoning that followed and the memory that France carries to this day.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAcross 40 chapters, this book covers the full scope of the battle: the doctrinal failures that made it possible, the Christmas Memorandum that may never have existed, the bombardment that fired a million shells in a single day, the fall and recapture of Fort Douaumont, the agony of Fort Vaux where men drank their own urine before surrendering, the savage fighting for Mort-Homme and Hill 304, the air war above the Meuse, the colonial troops who bled for a country not yet fully theirs, the German experience from the other side of the wire, the logistics that kept an army alive on one road and one narrow-gauge railway, and the final December battles that pushed the line back to where it had started ten months and 700,000 casualties before.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawing on French, German, and English-language sources, Verdun: Attrition, Endurance, and Memory on the Meuse is a comprehensive single-volume account of the battle that broke two armies, ended careers, shaped a nation, and left a crater in the twentieth century that the twenty-first has not yet filled.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Ivo Vichev\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9798233152078\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Ivo Vichev\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 03\/28\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 724\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.82lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.50h x 5.50w x 1.59d","brand":"Ivo Vichev","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":48874611474687,"sku":"9798233152078","price":45.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/verdun-ivo-vichev-9798233152078","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}