German and French soldiers fought for every last metre of ground, making it the longest battle of the war, almost twice as long as any other encounter. One hundred years ago, on February 21, 1916, a Monday, the first shots were fired in the battle for the French fortress town of Verdun. Here, French soldiers are moving into attack from their trench during the Verdun battle German and French soldiers fought for every last metre of ground, making it the longest battle of the war. ‘And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you?’ Ernst Toller’s words should give us all pause for thought as we mark - not celebrate, never celebrate - another grim milestone in that blood-drenched, pointless war. After that, I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. ‘All these corpses had been men who breathed as I breathed, had had a father, a mother, a woman whom they loved, a piece of land which was theirs, faces which expressed joy and suffering, which had known the light of day and the colour of the sky. They choked my throat and chilled my heart. But now the words closed upon my brain like a vice. ‘Until then, I had seen the dead without really seeing them, like figures in a waxworks. On the end were human entrails - all that was left of a dead man buried there by a previous bombardment. He was digging a trench when his pickaxe became entangled in a bundle of slime. The truth hit home for the German soldier with all the impact of one of the millions of artillery shells buzzing through the air at the Battle of Verdun during World War I.
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