Hello, I'm Paul Reed, a military historian and writer,

and I've spent most of my life walking the battlefields of the Great War.

Welcome to the old front line.

In this regular podcast, we'll travel together from Eap to the Somme and beyond. We'll uncover

the stories of those who were there and discuss some of the things that I've seen in nearly four

decades of walking this ground. So let's head off along the tracks and the lanes

and past the cemeteries that act as beacons to the Great War

and see what we'll uncover this week

along the old front line.

I promised from the start that we would look at battlefields of the Great War beyond the Somme and Ipe. So this week for the first time we take a walk at Verdun, one of the most iconic French battlefields of the First World War.

In fact, when I lived in France, speaking to the people in my village, or anyone that I ever came across,

if you got talking about your relatives who were in the war, they would always say they fought at Verdun, whether they were at Verdun or not.

It was so much, to excuse the pun, entrenched in the mind of the French people.

And it remained so more than a century later.

It was the biggest battle of the Great War, more than 300 days and 300 nights.

There's some staggering, terrifying statistics.

770,000 casualties, killed, wounded and missing.

In the opening bombardments, 2. half million shells fell in nine hours.

Two and a half million shells in nine hours.

It's almost impossible to conceive what that must have looked like, what it must have felt like,

for the men in the trenches of both sides.

By the end of the battle, more than a thousand shells had fallen for

...