Word: verdun
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...leafless little parks of Vichy seemed even more forlorn than before. The name Pétain might keep for many a touch of magic-a legendary gleam that shone out of the mud of Verdun. But the man Pétain, watery-eyed and old, and his regime, for months largely fictional, seemed indisputably through...
...commentary is often corny and certainly this is not by any stretch the story of the whole Battle of Midway. But history would be a different matter if there had been a few such sketchy pictures of Austerlitz, of Jutland, of Gettysburg and Verdun...
...million dead men heaped the battlefields of southern Russia. Millions more were maimed, captured or missing. Verdun had gulped 738,000 Frenchmen and Germans in 299 days, but Verdun was a lesser horror. Not until long after the war, if ever, would the full losses be known. Russia acknowledged that 606,000 men had been lost in three months and declared that 480,000 Germans had been slain. Germany gave no hint of its own losses, but claimed 1,044,741 Russian soldiers had been captured since spring, raising to five million men their total claims of Russian captives...
...Laconic. When the most gifted of the post-war novelists rebuilt the first hours of the war it was with imaginations darkened by the memory of the 900,000 English, the 1,385,000 Frenchmen, the 1,600,000 Germans, who were dead in battle. The agony of Verdun, the bogs of suffering in the Masurian Lakes, the memories of starvation, wounds, cruelties, riots, assassinations, broken families and broken lives haunted the minds of men even while they compelled them to try to bring an intellectual order out of war's chaos...
...spirit of the first half of the volume is beautifully suggested by its French title, Cette Grande Lueur a L'Est (which the translator insipidly renders into Promise of Dawn). The young politician Jerphanion compares the magnetism of the Soviets with that of Verdun six years before: "There is something in it of that same sense of a distant melting pot, of a light shining through the darkness-a great blaze of light. ... It may be the dawn; it may be a conflagration. But whether we believe it to be one or the other, we are all agog...