Men who have lived for weeks under nightmare conditions can no longer discriminate between what they see with their own eyes and the figments of their imagination.

George Blanc, Verdun.

Verdun. they're done. Hello and welcome to the Battle of Verdun podcast episode 10, the trench of bayonets.

With the last episode, we covered the furious fighting that took place at Verdun during June of 1916.

For those listeners out there who already know the history of the battle, you may have noticed that the story of the Trench of Bayonets was missing

from episode 9.

For folks who have not heard of it before, this is the story where a whole unit of

French soldiers was found to have been buried alive with only the bayonets of their rifles sticking out of the

ground. There's no way you can tell the story of the battle at Verdun in

1916 without talking about the trench of bayonets. The battle with its numbing

list of horror after horror just isn't complete without it.

It is a story that deserves to be told on its own, though.

The legend of La Tronche de Bayonet probably combined the reality of what was found on the ground in 1919 with a battlefield rumor that originated from June 1916.

It was during the tense days when fighting for the Ovarage de'Amon and Flourri village were at a fever pitch.

The fate of the battle hung on the edge of a knife.

On both sides, but especially for the French, there was chaos on the battlefield.

We've gone over all of it before. The constant artillery, the lunar landscape,

the summer heat and the bodies, the fighting. All of this going on for weeks and months

without end came together to stretch many men's minds to the breaking point. With many others who indeed crossed

over and never came back, there were things out there you'd see that only a fellow veteran

would be able to understand because he had seen them too or he had seen worse.

According to George's book Verdun, published in France in the 1960s, there was a weird story

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