Bracken - The Verdun Regiment: the 151st Infantry regiment in the Battle of Verdun 1916

Map 9 : Summit of Mort Homme, showing the entrenchments on 20 May 1916. (1:10,000 scale)

Despite holding the lions share of the line, contributing the largest number of troops, and suffering higher losses than any other Allied nation on the Western Front, the story of the French army and the French soldier of the Great War continues to be little known to English-speaking audiences. Over 8.4 million Frenchmen were mobilized between 1914 and 1918, a figure that represents nearly half of the total male population. Over half would become casualties one way or another. By 1916, in seventeen months of fighting France lost roughly as many men killed as the United States has lost in all of its wars combined to date.

How is it that such sacrifice is not better remembered among anglophones? A good deal of this can be chalked up to the language barrier, as most of the body of literature on the subject remains in its native tongue. Anyone who wishes to delve deeper into the history of the French and their experience in the Great War must first surmount this obstacle. Perhaps the greater challenge though is the sheer scale. Like the other major powers, France mobilized millions of men between 1914 and 1918, and the size of these armies led to fighting that was unprecedented in its proportions. The immense scope of these events can be daunting to any person attempting to understand the human experience. What was it like to live through it, to be there on the ground, one of millions of regular people swept up in a phenomenon of breathtaking proportions?

In an effort to convey the French experience of the war, the approach here will be to focus on one of the defining battles, the Battle of Verdun in 1916, which came to symbolize the heroism, horror, and tragedy of the Great War. Verdun itself was vast in scale, involving hundreds of thousands of men fighting over dozens of square miles for nearly a year. It was truly a war within a war. To better assess and personalize this epic event, I will present a view of the battle from the perspective of a handful of soldiers who served together in the same army unit the 151e Rgiment dInfanterie (or, the 151st Infantry Regiment). Fully three-quarters of the French army in 1916 was rotated into what the soldiers called the Furnace. The 151 was one of hundreds of units sent to Verdun and, in many ways, its experience was no different to that of the many other units that fought and endured in this meat-grinder of a battle.