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 ; the aim was less to defeat the enmy than bleed him to death. It was a battleground whose once fertile terrain even now resembles a haunted wilderness. Alistair Horne's classic work is a profoundly moving, sympathetic study of the battle and the men who fought there. It shows that Verdun is key to understanding the First Worl War - the minds of those who waged it, the traditions that bound them - and also what happened to Europe a generation later.