Battle Saga in the Great Tradition

“The first quality of an historian,” wrote David Hume some two centuries ago, “is to be true and impartial; the next, to be interesting.” The author of this book demonstrates his possession of both qualities. He has achieved accuracy through diligent research, and illumines the result by his clear and impartial vision. He has woven his factual material into a battle saga which rises above mere narrative to achieve the status of veritable drama, because it meets the indispensable dramatic requirement of being peopled with living characters with whom the reader can identify himself.

Mr. Horne has given us a tragedy in the great tradition, marching inexorably to a foreknown, fore-ordained end, yet stirring the emotions anew by each unfolding horror, each incident of self-sacrifice or folly, of devotion or of failure. Intrinsically, it is the story of the battle of Verdun: the titanic ten-month battle of 1916 from which neither France nor Germany ever fully recovered during the remainder of World War I; from which the French Army—in the author’s view—has not recovered even yet. “It was,” he tells us bitterly, “the indecisive battle in anindecisive war; the unnecessary battle in an unnecessary war; the battle that had no victors in a war that had no victors.” Yet it was also the battle in which more than 700,000 men, perhaps as many as 800,000—“the accounting in human lives was never meticulous in that war”—were killed, wounded or gassed.

GE

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George Fielding Eliot

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“The first quality of an historian,” wrote David Hume some two centuries ago, “is to be true and impartial; the next, to be interesting.” The author of this book demonstrates his possession of both qualities. He has achieved accuracy through diligent research, and illumines the result by his clear and impartial vision. He has woven his factual material into a battle saga which rises above mere narrative to achieve the status of veritable drama, because it meets the indispensable dramatic requirement of being peopled with living characters with whom the reader can identify himself.

Mr. Horne has given us a tragedy in the great tradition, marching inexorably to a foreknown, fore-ordained end, yet stirring the emotions anew by each unfolding horror, each incident of self-sacrifice or folly, of devotion or of failure. Intrinsically, it is the story of the battle of Verdun: the titanic ten-month battle of 1916 from which neither France nor Germany ever fully recovered during the remainder of World War I; from which the French Army—in the author’s view—has not recovered even yet. “It was,” he tells us bitterly, “the indecisive battle in anindecisive war; the unnecessary battle in an unnecessary war; the battle that had no victors in a war that had no victors.” Yet it was also the battle in which more than 700,000 men, perhaps as many as 800,000—“the accounting in human lives was never meticulous in that war”—were killed, wounded or gassed.