Word: verdun
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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...
...start of World War I, Colonel Pétain, 54, was about to be retired. A careful planner and able artillery tactician, frugal with the lives of his men, he rose to command of the Second Army at the defense of Verdun in 1916. To him was credited the line: "They shall not pass." When the armies of the Crown Prince were crushed in 130 days of fighting that covered an advance of only four miles and cost 300,000 lives, Pétain emerged as a legendary hero. But numerous French leaders of the time later accused...
...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...