No, not surrender, not reculled by a push,

sefer tu'et on place.

Do not surrender.

Die on the spot rather than yield an inch.

General Robert Nivelle, Verdun, June, 1916. Hello and welcome to the Battle of Verdant podcast episode 9, Fury in the Desert.

The Verdun battlefield was now fully enveloped in blazing summer heat,

and the previous four months of endless artillery duels had, quite literally, wiped the compressed

battle area into an unrecognizable desert. The hills and ravines on both banks of the River

Meuse had had every copse of trees and stand of woods, first blown to stumps and then ground to wood chips and shell craters.

The little hamlets that sprinkled the area were dirty gray smears in the brown earth,

now so thoroughly churned it had the consistency of sand.

Vegetation no longer grew.

The ground itself was so poisoned with explosive and chemical residue

that new growth simply withered and died if it wasn't blown apart first. In this desert, there

lived, if you can call it that, tens of thousands of men huddled in crude trenches or shell craters.

The desert moonscape made map and land reference points useless. Any unit of any size, French or

German, was exposed and never made it to their sector of that imaginary place called the

front line without casualties.

Once there, the survivors dug holes into the earth or pressed themselves against the side of a

shell crater as their enemy sought to blast them out with unending pounding from the guns.

Units and pieces of units frequently found themselves isolated at Verdun.

This was one of survivors' strongest sensory memories of being cut off from the world

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