WWI: Battle of Verdun and Senseless Carnage

French Soldier Hit as Photo Taken: Amazing Image

World War I was an appalling waste of life. There is very little that is positive which can be said of the leadership on either side of the conflict. They were all equally retarded. In all, at least 9.8 million soldiers died. Many of them, despite their shiny buttons and smart uniforms, suffered the inglorious fate of rotting where they fell with no marked grave. Even today, large mass graves are periodically discovered, evidence of pointless slaughter and the subsequent disposal of the dead by piling them in shell craters.

The worst part is that many of these men did not die immediately. Veterans spoke of a cacophony of noise after wave attacks where injured men cried for help as they slowly died over hours and sometimes days. Occasionally wounded men would manage to drag themselves out of no-mans-land back to their trenches, but more often than not they would add to the decaying mass of humanity lost in the kill zone.

Around 300,000 men perished at Verdun between February and December of 1916. At least 400,000 more were wounded. The battlefield was only small relative to the number of casualties, all of the fighting occurring along a front 20 miles long and never more than six miles deep.

Around 100,000 remains are estimated to be still missing in the battle area. A common French/German Ossuary was built in the 1920s and houses the remains of 150,000 unknown victims of the fighting recovered during the 1920s and 1930s. The image above is of a pile of bones exhumed around Verdun in the 1930s, bound for the Ossuary.

Verdun was a German initiated campaign designed to lure French forces into an engagement of attrition. The tactic had worked well on the Eastern Front the previous year, and effectively reduced Russia’s offensive capacity for the rest of the war. But at Verdun the Germans found themselves in a muddy wasteland where troop movements were almost impossible. A stalemate ensued which both sides tried in vain to break. Despite the situation quickly being recognised as futile and irrelevant to overall strategy, no one had the sense to return to their strong points and try a breakthrough elsewhere. For a total of ten months men were poured into a meat grinder. By December both sides had returned to their original lines, neither side having gained any strategic advantage. Given the Germans failed to achieve any desired outcomes, it was acknowledged at the time by the German High Command as a defeat, and is officially recognised as such. Verdun proved to be one of the costliest and longest battles in history.

Verdun was the scene of the first battlefield uses of the flamethrower and phosgene gas. Phosgene was intended to render French gas masks ineffective, but the Germans over calculated its effectiveness. It made very little impact on the battle except to hinder visibility, but wiped out the foliage and poisoned the soil for decades.

Everyone loved the flamethrower however, and by World War II they were employed by all major powers, despite general calls for the weapon to be outlawed.

Following is a gallery of pictures from the battle. It is difficult to appreciate the scale of carnage at Verdun, and snapshots from points in time can never convey the absolute misery and terror of protracted conflict. War serves no greater good and should be avoided. There are no heroes or victors. Only the dead and those lucky to survive random, legalised murder.

21 thoughts on “WWI: Battle of Verdun and Senseless Carnage”

  1. I’m a big WWII buff, so it’s always neat to see WWI footage and pics. War in any form is utterly senseless and appalling, but everything about WWI is just misery and ugliness.
    The battlefields are always just big, barren, muddy, godforsaken pieces of earth with soldiers hiding in the trenches like animals, waiting for the order to charge head-on into the very heart of hell itself.
    You have no choice but to run right fucking towards machine guns and artillery barrages… No where to hide, no air support, no Kevlar vest, no chance in hell. Armed with a fucking rifle. Like trying to put out a fire with a squirt gun. Brutal 😈

  2. Great post mate.

    I would never serve in the military for a few, simple reasons.
    First, I don’t like the prospect of being told what to do.
    Second, I refuse to die or kill so a few fuckers fan profit at my expense.
    Third, if everybody thought like this and refused to join the military, wars wouldn’t be an issue.

    Conscription is illegal. No one has the right to force someone into doing something they don’t want to do. One of my uncles went to prison during the Ultramar war for refusing to go to Africa and fight against our former colonies. He suffered abuse in the military prison and was forced into heavy labor. My other uncle didn’t refuse to to, and h died.

  3. Your country only ever belongs to you when your government wants you to fight and die for it.

    Those who returned alive quickly went from heroes to zeros. The badly wounded were abandoned to the cold, unforgiving streets to starve and beg and the lucky ones who came home in one piece and with their mental faculties intact resumed their born into, lower class roles of working for a pittance.

    War never changes, the rich start it and the poor fight and die for it and whilst theses soldiers of poverty fight for their very lives the rich, completely out of dangers way, engage in social merriment, prancing around with cockalorum.

    Fucking cunts.

  4. Totally agree with war serving no greater good and should be avoided.
    For centuries, we send our fit , strong, healthy men off to war to be maimed or killed.
    Who’s left to populate the future generations? The weak , sick , frail , mentally incompetent, that’s who.
    Surely no one needs telling this does us no favours.
    Although Attila The Hun was successful in wiping out millions of people, along the way he and his sons spread their seed and passed on their violent seed.
    Scientists have studied the genomes through his conquered lands and have concluded that ‘he’ is the ‘father’ of many civilisations we have today.

    1. @ladywicked666, my grandfather also fought in WW2. He was eventually a POW in Treblinka concentration camp, was released and went right back into the field. Luckily he was not captured a second time and he went on to live into his 80’s. I remember him telling me stories about ‘the war’ when we were in his tool shed or greenhouse. Ahhhh what memories 🙂

  5. My great Grandfather served in WWI. He lived to 104. I once asked him about the war and he told me a few things. One story I found particularly interesting was of his time in the trenches in France.

    He said, the Germans would yell over to the Americans, “Give us cigarettes and we’ll give you France!” My Great Grandfather didn’t smoke, but would take the smokes from dead soldiers, toss them over to the Germans, wait for them to light up, look for the red cherry at the tip, and pop them off with his rifel one at a time. He said, they were so cold that they would keep smoking even though they knew the enemy was looking for the light to kill them.

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