Days as Cannon Fodder at Verdun

If All Quiet on the Western Front had taken place at Verdun, this would be the story of those young Frenchmen.

“They told me the war would end. No one told me I’d end first.”

In 1916, at Verdun, the German army unleashed ten million shells, while the French army held fast to its vow: “They shall not pass.” In this city history would call the “meat grinder,” there were no epics and no heroes, only a group of young men driven onto the battlefield. They called themselves “cannon fodder.”

Private Lucien Maréchal, a history student who had dropped out of the Sorbonne, should have been leafing through old books in a library. Instead, he crouched in a trench with icy water up to his ankles, gripping a Lebel rifle. He wrote letters home in an ink-stained notebook soaked with blood, lying in every one and saying, “I’m fine.” Corporal Gaston taught him his first lesson: don’t look up, don’t play the hero. Heroes are all dead. Albert, a volunteer who enlisted with idealistic dreams, believed he was fighting for his country, until he watched his best friend lose half his face to shrapnel, still clutching a photograph of his fiancée. The silent miner Émile, the slippery signalman Raymond, and all the comrades blown to pieces before anyone had time to learn their names: they shared one unit number, one lice-ridden helmet, and one fate. To live, or not.

This is not a novel about victory.

This is a novel about surviving.