The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles; whose aim was less to defeat the enemy than bleed him to death; a battleground whose once fertile terrain even now resembles a haunted wilderness. Alistair Horne’s classic work, continuously in print for nearly forty years, is a profoundly moving, sympathetic study of the battle and the men who fought there. It shows that Verdun is a key to understanding the First World War

the minds of those who waged it, the traditions that bound them and the world that gave them the opportunity.