2001 is the 50th anniversary of the death of Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, France’s greatest military hero of the First World War. He died a prisoner, vilified for his role as Vichy head of state 1940–44. Senile and suffering from hallucinations, he was imprisoned on the Ile d’Yeu off the coast of Brittany in November 1945 after General de Gaulle commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment. He passed away on 23 July 1951 at the age of 95.
Osprey’s Campaign 93: Verdun 1916 is a new account of the battle that made Pétain’s name. This article examines the military reputation of Marshal Pétain and the lessons of the battle. Did the battle undermine the French army to the extent that it was doomed to defeat, not just in 1917 but in the Second World War? Such is the conclusion of Alistair Horne, in his magnum opus The Price of Glory, the only history of the campaign available in English for nearly 40 years. Was what Horne calls the ‘paralysing pessimism’ bred at Verdun, the reason for May 1940?
Pétain was certainly known for his pessimism. Field Marshal Haig, who found Pétain refreshingly taciturn for a Frenchman, thought he lost the plot altogether in 1918. To British soldiers of the next generation – and to subsequent British historians – Pétain is, above all, the traitor of Vichy, the architect of collaboration: the enemy.
And what of the Germans? The relevant volumes of their official history, written in the 1920s, are entitled The Tragedy of Verdun. Yet by the 1930s some of the veterans visiting the battlefield brought Swastika flags with them.
On 21 February 1916, the German 5th Army launched an offensive intended to ‘bleed France white’ in defence of the ancient citadel of Verdun. The Kaiser’s chief-of-staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, believed France would hold Verdun at any cost. He calculated that German artillery would kill Frenchmen faster than the French gunners could kill Germans. It would be a battle of attrition unlike anything seen before. Pétain’s 2nd Army was in reserve when the storm broke. He was ordered to the front, where he found the city in imminent danger. He rushed to the battlefield in an open-topped car, with an energy that belied his 60 years. But he got soaked and went down with double pneumonia. Doctors despaired, but Pétain established a grip on the battle that he never relinquished. The German offensive was blunted.
Pétain became world famous. He was touted as a replacement for the discredited French commander-in-chief, General Joffre. Yet the promotion went to General Nivelle. Not for the first or last time, Pétain’s sharp tongue had alienated his military and political superiors. And not for the first or last time, Pétain had the last laugh.
Pétain was born during the Crimean War. He died during the Korean War. Weapons and tactics were revolutionised during his lifetime, most rapidly of all during the years 1914–18. The French army went to war in uniforms little changed from the Crimea; by the end of the conflict it employed tanks and aircraft. It was also a time of profound social change for France. In 1856 75% of the French population lived on the land. Industrialisation was slower than in Britain or Germany and it was not until 1931, the year Pétain left the army, that the proportion fell to below 50% for the first time.
The son of a prosperous farmer, Pétain was admitted to the military academy of Saint-Cyr in 1876. In 1878 he joined the 24th Chasseurs à Pied and spent five years as a sous lieutenant. Promoted lieutenant in 1883, he was transferred to the 3rd Chasseurs à Pied. Ten years after leaving Saint-Cyr he was taken on at the Ecole de Guerre, remaining there until 1890 when, promoted captain, he was posted to the staff of the 15th Corps. He commanded the 29th Chasseurs à Pied 1892–3, based at Vincennes. Then he joined the staff of General Saussier, the military commander of Paris. He returned to the light infantry in 1899, commanding the 8th Chasseurs à Pied. Still only a major, he had a short-lived spell as a rifle instructor at the Ecole Normale de Tir at Chalons. A crack shot himself, Pétain taught his soldiers to aim and shoot as individuals. This ran counter to French doctrine at the time, which stressed volley fire. Pétain did not disguise his contempt for the school’s director, Colonel Vonderscherr, and he was transferred to a line regiment. Nevertheless, from 1903 to 1911 he was a lecturer in infantry tactics at the Ecole de Guerre, where he refused to endorse the army’s passion for bayonet charges. ‘Fire kills,’ he insisted. He was twice transferred to infantry regiments for not toeing the line. By 1911 he was a 55-year-old Colonel, posted to Arras to command the 33rd Infantry Regiment. In 1914 he took over the 4th Infantry Brigade, which was expected to be his last posting before retirement.
Promotion in the French army during this period was slow, but Pétain’s progress was glacial even by the standards of the age. ‘I’ve been old in all my ranks,’ he was wont to complain. He was known at the Ecole de Guerre for his dry sense of humour and savage sarcasm, vented on superiors and juniors alike. It did not win him many friends.
Pétain marched his brigade into Belgium in August 1914. On 1 September he was promoted to command the 6th Infantry Division, which he led during the Battle of the Marne. On 20 October, now an officer of the Legion d’honneur, he was promoted brigadier-general and given charge of the 33rd Corps. He owed his sudden elevation to the slaughter of the French officer corps. That summer, his colleagues discovered the hard way that Pétain had been right about firepower. In the first two weeks of the war, nearly 5,000 French officers became casualties. General Joffre did for the senior ranks what German guns did for their subordinates. Unimpressed with their performance, the French commander-in-chief sacked two out of five army commanders at the end of 1914; nine corps commanders and half his 72 divisional commanders.
On 9 May 1915 the French launched an offensive in Artois. Meticulous attention to detail saw Pétain succeed where all other corps commanders failed: his men took Vimy ridge on the first day, although they were not able to hold it. Pétain was promoted to command the 2nd Army in June. This spearheaded another French attack in Champagne during September. Again, Pétain fought his battle primarily as an artillery affair, with the infantry never left to fight on alone. He did not break through, but because his guns were co-ordinated with the infantry, his army inflicted severe losses on the Germans. Pétain frequently visited the front, turning up unannounced, a plain army greatcoat concealing his rank. He was not over familiar, indeed, his coldness became part of the legend. But he saw – and was seen in – the frontline trenches. He knew the ordinary soldiers better than any other senior officer on either side.
Pétain’s army was in reserve when the Germans struck Verdun. He himself was away from his headquarters when the telegram arrived, summoning him to Joffre’s headquarters at Chantilly. Pétain’s aide-de-camp drove to Paris, where he found his general, or at least, his general’s boots, outside a room in the Hotel Terminus opposite the Gare du Nord. Next to them lay a dainty pair of ladies’ shoes. Their owner, 39-year-old Eugénie Hardon, had rejected Pétain’s proposal of marriage fifteen years earlier, walking up the aisle instead with a painter called Pierre Hérain. The marriage ended in divorce in 1913 and Pétain resumed contact, and was eventually rewarded for his persistence. They married in 1920. Like Sir John French, the commander of the BEF 1914–15, Pétain wrote passionate, erotic love letters to his numerous mistresses. In photographs, both men look like their peers – all boots and moustaches; but whereas French permitted himself the occasional smile for the camera, Pétain is austere, his monumental gravitas bringing to mind President Mitterrand. Another Frenchman with depths not revealed until long after his death.
On the day Pétain was appointed to command the Verdun sector, one of the forts outside the city was captured. Built in the 1880s, Fort Douaumont had a reinforced concrete roof, covered with several metres of earth, steel observation domes and guns in armoured turrets. It fell in the most embarrassing circumstances. Each of the French infantry divisions in the area assumed one of the others was protecting the fort. The infantry battalion that had been inside was withdrawn and swallowed up in the fighting. The gunners manning the fort’s artillery failed to keep a lookout and were taken prisoner when some enterprising German infantry broke into the upper galleries. The Germans trumpeted their victory. Church bells rang out at the news Douaumont ist gefallen. School children were given the day off and the German Crown Prince showered medals on the 24th Brandenburgers, the regiment responsible for the coup.
Paradoxically, the fort had been partially disarmed and, at the time it fell, was being prepared for demolition. Verdun’s forts had been modernised before the war, additional gun positions built between them and 155 mm gun turrets added. But most of the heavy guns had been removed in August 1915 and used to support the offensive in Champagne. In February 1916 the sector commander planned to blow up the forts if the Germans reached them. But Douaumont’s ‘great brooding mass’, as Pétain described it, dominated the northern approach to Verdun. To the general public, on both sides, it was still the formidable fortress of pre-war propaganda. One French general said its loss was equal to the loss of 100,000 men, which was a gross exaggeration of its tactical importance, but proved tragically correct nevertheless. It became a prestige objective, counter-attacked unsuccessfully in May with heavy loss of life. Its recapture figured prominently in the major French counter-offensive launched on 24 October.
Struggling to explain such a spectacular blunder, some of the French sought refuge in a myth that endured for a generation. The Germans, it was claimed, had worn French uniforms to sneak into the fort. It had been a ruse de guerre. This probably originated with some men of the 3rd battalion of the French 95th Infantry regiment: they thought they saw French soldiers from a neighbouring Zouave battalion: but it was No. 8 company, 2nd battalion, 24th (Brandenburg) Regiment, whose field-grey uniforms looked like colonial khaki after they had spent the morning crawling through the mud under heavy fire.
Two other forts were subjected to heavy attack in June. Fort Vaux was surrounded and its garrison forced to surrender when its water supply failed. Fort Souville was held, albeit battered out of all recognition and barely distinguishable among the nightmare landscape of lip-to-lip craters. But once the Allied offensive on the Somme was under way, the Germans could no longer afford to feed their soldiers into ‘the mill on the Meuse’. What had been intended as a battle of attrition had turned into a never-ending struggle for a number of dominant terrain features. If they changed hands, the loser would be compelled to withdraw his gun-line several kilometres. Attacks and counter-attacks took place on a daily basis. Infantry divisions were sent up to the front line for a few weeks, then replaced by fresh ones. A fortnight in the line cost the average French division more than a third of its men.
The French counterstroke in October was preceded by an intensive artillery bombardment that the Germans could not match. A pair of 400 mm railway guns targeted Fort Douaumont. Their giant shells penetrated its concrete carapace and exploded inside. When it fell for the second time, the garrison had already abandoned it.
The victory was the work of General Nivelle, a flamboyant officer who drove the Germans back to their original front line in another attack during December. When Joffre was finally unseated that month, Nivelle was promoted to commander-in-chief. Pétain’s outspokenness had alienated both President Poincaré and the French army high command. Nivelle attempted to repeat his tactical success on a grand scale, encouraging both the politicians and his soldiers to believe that he had ‘the method’ and would break through. Pétain said it was doomed to failure and leaked his opinion to the newspapers. From 16 to 24 April the French army battered itself against the defences. There was no breakthrough. Casualties exceeded 150,000 and discipline broke down. Regiments refused to attack.
Nivelle was sacked and Pétain given the job. It had taken him 36 years to make colonel. It took him 36 months to become commander-in-chief. But as he remarked to his staff, ‘they call me only in catastrophes’. By June two-thirds of the infantry regiments had experienced some form of indiscipline. It was more like strike action than mass mutiny, but highly damaging nonetheless. Pétain’s reputation as the general who had never lost touch with his men stood him in good stead. It took him nearly a year to undo the damage, but the French army was able to attack with considerable success by summer 1918.
The old office of Marshal of France was revived in 1916 so that General Joffre could be ‘kicked upstairs’. And it was used to reward the victorious commanders in 1918, Pétain becoming a Marshal of France in November 1918. He opposed the decision of Foch and Clemenceau to accept the German armistice, arguing that it was letting them off the hook. A view shared by American general Pershing, who also believed that only the arrival of Allied soldiers in Berlin would ram home the extent of Germany’s defeat.
Inspector General of the French army from 1922 and slated to be commander-in-chief in time of war, Pétain took to the field again in 1925–6 to defeat an uprising in Morocco. He was Vice-President of the Supreme War Council when work on the Maginot Line began. Although he left active service in 1931, at the age of 75, he was appointed Inspector General of Air Defence. In the wake of the Paris riots during February 1934, President Doumerge appointed him Minister of War and he served in that capacity until November. Politics beckoned, but Pétain turned down requests to stand as President and refused to serve in Daladier’s administration. Standing aloof from politics, outliving his peers, by the outbreak of the Second World War, Pétain was The Marshal. But, as post-war critics have observed, since he had held the country’s most senior military positions between the wars and since the commanders in 1940 were very much his protégés, surely the victor of Verdun must bear a heavy share of the blame for the ensuing debacle?
Pétain’s vision of modern war was not that of Guderian and the German panzer commanders. Nevertheless, he had been an early convert to the tank and, as early as 1917, predicted that aircraft would come to dominate land battles. Contrast with the attitude of Foch, who thought both aircraft and tanks were a dangerous waste of manpower, which was what battles really depended on.
In 1940 the French army had more tanks than Germany, and its newest types were better armed and armoured than the Panzer IIs and IIIs that made up the bulk of the panzer regiments. Had Pétain got his way, the whole French army would have been mechanised. As early as January 1919 he wanted ‘the most men possible under armour’. His plan, had it come to an invasion of Germany that year, involved 7,000 tanks spearheading the assault. However, French strategy turned defensive. Until 1926, French army plans in case of war with Germany envisaged an offensive aimed at the Ruhr and, ultimately, Berlin. Then plans were changed, reflecting the army’s commitment to colonial operations and uncertainty over international alliances. France’s wartime ally, Britain, had criticised the occupation of the Ruhr in 1924. Together with the USA, it had treated the French navy as equivalent to Italy’s in the Washington Naval Treaty. Pétain had distrusted the British since 1918, suspecting they were preparing to fall back to the Channel ports when the German spring offensive was in full spate. Assuming they would look to their national interest, he deployed French reserves to guard Paris instead of co-operating with the BEF. The defensive strategy adopted in 1926 was very much Pétain’s – and it involved the extensive use of fortifications.
As early as 1920 the French staff planned to fortify the northeast. Joffre and Foch opposed this as beneath the dignity of a victorious army, but Pétain feared a surprise attack could repeat the experience of 1914. Then, the French coal and steel industry was overrun in a matter of weeks and remained the wrong side of the front line for the rest of the war. Gamelin’s strategy in 1940 was a reaction to the same concern: he concentrated his best formations and pressed forward into Belgium and the Netherlands. Of course, instead of repeating the Schlieffen Plan, the Germans attacked through the Ardennes, but it is worth observing this German strategy represented a last-minute change of plan. Until the winter of 1939–40, Hitler’s generals intended to do almost exactly what Gamelin anticipated.
The French armed forces of the 1930s laboured under a number of disadvantages, foremost of which was a shortage of Frenchmen. Even with Alsace-Lorraine restored to her, France had a population of 41 million. Even with the loss of some eastern territories, Germany’s population was 62 million. During the First World War over a quarter of Frenchmen aged 18 to 27 had been killed. The demographic consequences were dramatic. From 1935 to 1939 the French population declined absolutely as deaths outnumbered births by 100,000 per annum.
Pétain wanted the army to fight from a champ de bataille organisé, blockhouses and obstacles laid out in great depth like the Hindenburg Line in 1917. He envisaged something like the Israeli positions on the Golan Heights, from which the IDF inflicted grievous losses on the Syrian attackers in 1973, or the Russian defences at Kursk in 1943. However, the resistance of Fort Vaux’s tiny garrison against overwhelming odds encouraged many other officers to believe a line of modern concrete and steel forts would be superior. Inside and outside the army, forts were seen as a method by which France could defend herself with minimum loss of life.
Pétain told the War Council that a line of latter-day Douaumonts would be a dangerous diversion of scarce resources, better spent on the field army. ‘It would give the country a false sense of security. It will avail us nothing to have fortifications if we don’t have an army. The army is paramount.’ Even the most thickly armoured concrete and steel fort could be knocked out by super-heavy guns: the French had built two 500 mm railway guns in 1918, building on the experience with their ‘400s’ at Verdun. But the concrete barons triumphed. From 1930 to 1936 some 2,900 million francs were spent on the Maginot Line: multi-storey underground tunnel networks with turret-mounted cannon and even their own light railway systems to ferry men and ammunition around inside.
During his ten months as Minister of War, Pétain pressed again for greater mechanisation, arguing that only motorised troops would be able to act as an effective mobile reserve behind the fortification line. This had been provisionally agreed in 1930, but little progress had been made for want of money. It was the same story with aviation. In December 1931 Pétain proposed the creation of an independent air force with a strategic bombing capability. His ideas foreshadow the post-war Force de Frappe. Its smaller army fighting from behind field defences, a motorised reserve in the rear, France could strike deep into Germany from the air. Two could play at this game of course, so Pétain pressed for new regiments of anti-aircraft guns. Note that this is two years before Hitler came to power and four years before the existence of the Luftwaffe was officially revealed.
The Spanish Civil War, and the German and Italian intervention there, spurred the French government to establish the Permanent Committee for National Defence. In 1937 Pétain used this forum to demand that a single officer be placed in charge of all the French armed forces, but inter-service rivalries triumphed. Bad news poured in. General Féqaunt reported that whereas France had five regiments of anti-aircraft guns, Germany had 18 and would soon have 30. Gamelin noted that German factories produced more guns in a month than French ones built in a year. Ironically, the technologically aware left-wing parliamentary deputies supported the army high command: generals and socialists alike saw advanced weapons of war as a substitute for the manpower France lacked. The trouble was, no one wanted to pay for them.
Daladier rejected Gamelin’s 1937 plan to establish an armoured corps. In May 1938 Gamelin pressed for the creation of five armoured divisions (three regular and two reserve). Government opposition remained entrenched and the plan was watered down to two reserve armoured divisions to be assembled by October 1940. Political musical chairs in Paris did not help. During Weygand’s tenure as commander-in-chief, 1931–35, there were 12 governments and nine ministers of war. Between 1937 and 1940 there were eight ministers of war and five chiefs-of-staff, all with their own agendas.
The military service of French conscripts was reduced to a year, reducing the reserve divisions to little more than a militia. This suited the left-wing parties that clung to the Republican concept of the Nation in Arms. They rejected the idea of young Turks like de Gaulle who argued for a small, elite, mechanised army. A military career became intensely unfashionable in 1930s France. The intake at Saint-Cyr fell steadily. The army was 60,000 under strength in 1933. Weygand warned the War Council that the army was becoming a hollow shell. ‘The country thinks it will be defended. It won’t be.’
It was not just lack of parliamentary credits, however. There was a widespread, cross-party belief that Germany would rise again and that France could not shoulder the burden of stopping ‘them’ again. Veterans’ organisations were profoundly anti-militarist. Armistice Day was treated as the anniversary of a bereavement, not a celebration of victory. Military historian Philippe Mason notes that, in proportion to the population, German casualties in the First World War were about the same as French. Yet there were plenty of Germans, like the former stormtrooper office Ernst Junger, who regarded their years on the Western Front not with the attitude of ‘never again’, but as ‘an incomparable schooling of the heart’. And an angry, younger generation that had just missed the war, burned to reverse the result: men like Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and Josef Goebbels.
A significant number of Hitler’s most senior commanders had first-hand experience of Verdun: Field Marshals Paulus and Manstein and generals Guderian, Kluge, Brauchitsch, Stülpnagel and Keitel all served there as junior officers. As generals, Manstein and Guderian presided over the dramatic reversal of fortunes in May 1940. In a plan instigated by Manstein and executed with great verve by Guderian, the German army broke through the Ardennes and ruptured the French frontline. Panzer divisions raced to the Channel coast, cutting off major Allied forces, including the BEF, and outflanking the Maginot Line. The chain of modernised Douaumont-style forts turned out to be a trap, not a shield.
Between the wars French tactics and doctrine did not so much ossify as regress. The army did not remain stuck at 1918, but at 1916. Its model for the future was not the breaking of the Hindenburg Line, but the battle of Verdun. ‘Senior officers’, the German military attaché reported, ‘are obsessed with battles of attrition like the Somme and Verdun. They forget the innovatory counter-offensive of 18 July and 20 August, marked by all-arms co-operation of infantry, tanks and aircraft.’ There was little thought of manoeuvre. French tactics of the 1930s relied on artillery. Pétain took pride that whereas the French infantry division of 1914 had only had 36 field guns, those of the 1920s had 60. Artillery was the primary weapon of destruction, with infantry and tanks as supporting arms. The primary mission of the air force was to spot for the big guns, not drop bombs of their own.
The object of the exercise was to fight battles at the least cost in French lives. All notions of breakthrough and exploitation were forgotten, indeed, were prohibited. As at Verdun in late 1916, the artillery would bombard the objective, then the infantry would advance to occupy it, assisted as they did so by tanks, parcelled out at a ratio of one 45-tank battalion per infantry division. After an advance of 10 km or so, they would be at the limit of artillery range and would stop. Over the next few days, the guns would be brought forward to new positions, the tanks would refuel and re-arm and the whole leisurely process could begin again. At such a pace there was no need for radio communication, which was believed to be vulnerable to interception: hence the French cavalry’s insistence on relying on signal flags and carrier pigeons. Although most regiments were re-equipped with armoured cars or light tanks by 1940, the cavalry resisted mechanisation, arguing that France produced plenty of oats and hay, but no petrol.
Pétain inspected the Maginot Line in 1937. He was appalled by what he discovered. It required a garrison equivalent to ten divisions. Eight battalions and 29 regiments of artillery were allocated to the forts, which still had to have extra troops brought up to cover gaps in the defences. As one of his officers remarked, ‘it is an absurdity. We spent millions to build the forts to save soldiers and now we protect them with soldiers to economise on concrete.’ Pétain was typically caustic: ‘I have seen plenty of cock-ups in my military life, but never one of this calibre.’
Pétain was the French ambassador in Spain when the Second World War began. His fears of an immediate, overwhelming German attack on France were not realised. But the French high command’s assumption that Poland would hold out for several months, perhaps until the spring, was proved wrong in a matter of days. The German army spent the winter of 1939–40 in intensive training; for France the drôle de guerre meant a few lackadaisical exercises. Gamelin refused to entertain any thought of an offensive while Poland was crushed. By 1916 standards, his artillery had only ammunition for three weeks. Millions of stockpiled rounds fell into German hands in June 1940. Ironically, while the French expected this new war with Germany to last for at least three years, Hitler’s forces were only capable of a short war. In May 1940 Germany had only enough oil and petrol for four months’ fighting and only three months’ ammunition. If blitzkrieg did not deliver, the war would be over that year. As it was, Hitler’s decision to have a war without a war economy would rebound on Germany with dramatic effect: but by the time it did, the hero of Verdun was presiding over a defeated nation.
Pétain had confided to his staff as early as 1916 that ‘they’, i.e. the Paris political establishment, ‘are afraid of me’. His contempt for politicians deepened between the wars. In 1940 he spoke of giving France ‘the gift of his person’ and enjoyed near universal support when he established his regime at Vichy. The treacherous attack on the French navy at Mers-el-Kebir served to underline British perfidy, followed as it was by assaults on the French empire by British forces and a tiny, unrepresentative group of French renegades led by Pétain’s former protégé Charles de Gaulle.
Pétain’s attempt to force through a counter-revolution in French politics, under the guns of the German occupier, was doomed to failure – with hindsight. His regime was founded on the not unreasonable premise that the war would end in 1940. Surely Britain would make a compromise peace with Germany once her army had been driven from the Continent? The descent into collaboration and the complete reversal of French public opinion by 1944 is beyond the scope of this article, save to note that many a ‘resister’, like President Mitterrand himself, supported Le Marechal until near the end. The ‘depétainisation’ of the history of the battle of Verdun that took place under de Gaulle is now over. President Mitterrand laid a wreath to Pétain in 1993. President Chirac has done so every year since 1995. Pétain’s body may yet be exhumed and interred where he wished to rest forever, among his soldiers on the field of Verdun.
Verdun did not doom the next generation to defeat in 1940. However, the French army did not, as the cliché goes, prepare to fight the previous war. The French army of the late 1930s had actually regressed to mid-1916, forgetting everything it learned in 1918. (It was not alone: it took the British army from 1939 to 1943 to rediscover how to integrate tanks, infantry, artillery and aircraft.) And the determination not to be outflanked by another Schlieffen Plan led the French high command to commit the most cardinal strategic error in 1940. There was no reserve. And no plan in case the enemy failed to do what he was expected to do.
Was Pétain to blame? He had tremendous influence between the wars and held all the senior posts. Readers who have worked for a large company with a high staff turnover will appreciate how difficult it is to remain focused. ‘Musical chairs’ in the boardroom postpones decision taking. It has a corrosive effect on the willpower of even the greenest and keenest. Pétain was 75 when he retired in 1931. The chronic instability of French governments confirmed his contempt for politicians. He and his protégés could have done more to modernise the French army, but every Franc of the defence budget had to be squeezed from a reluctant treasury. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, while Pétain recognised the revolutionary potential of tanks and aircraft, he despaired of a country that refused to invest in them. Instead, he adopted the stance of the all-knowing Marshal, poised to say ‘I told you so’.
by William Martin
Further reading:
Asprey, Robert B., The German High Command at War, Warner, New York 1991)
Conte, Arthur, Verdun, Paris 1987
von Falkenhayn, General Erich, The German General Staff and its decisions 1914–16, New York, 1920
Falls, Cyril, The First World War, London, 1960
Fridenson Patrick, (Ed), The French Home Front 1914–18, Berg Publishers, Oxford, 1992
Herwig, Holger, The First World War, Germany and Austria Hungary 1914–18, Arnold, London, 1997
Hohenzollern, Crown Prince Wilhelm, The Memoirs of the Crown Prince of Germany, London, 1922
Horne, Alistair, The Price of Glory, Penguin, London, 1962
Martin, Wiliam, Campaign 93: Verdun 1916, Osprey, Oxford, 2001
Pétain, Henri-Philippe, Verdun, Paris, 1929