Quotes from Robin Neillands

The difficulty with von Falkenhayn's original concept was that since the city had to be defended, the French had made it defensible. Once the Germans had lost the advantage of surprise and failed to take Verdun in the first few days, the French were fully alert to the threat and responded to it with increasing force, more weaponry, and not a little skill.

there, though urging, inevitably, that the

even today, 85 years after the battle, an average year of scavenging on the Somme battlefield provides the disposal squads of the French Army with 90 tons of dangerous ordnance.

What Joffre wanted on the Somme was not a tactical battle. As he saw it, the attempt at a breakthrough had failed and now, as so often before, the task of breaking the enemy line would get even harder. Therefore, since it was probably impossible to break through the enemy line, the next best thing was to attack all along the line, and engage the enemy in a battle that would force him to remove divisions from the Verdun front

la Boisselle was not taken until 4 July, a gain of perhaps 220 yards in four days of constant fighting. The problem, as the Germans had found when attacking at Verdun, was that the defences had interlocking fields of fire.

The orders given to the troops were not the result of stupidity or ignorance but attempts to cope with the hard and oft-repeated fact that there was no way of communicating with those troops once they had left their trenches. Hence the daylight attack, hence the general shortage of smoke, hence the advance in extended line, hence the 'creeping', or 'drifting', barrage.

on the day the Somme battle opened, the French share of the offensive had shrunk to 14 divisions compared to 16 British divisions; this fact disposes of one of the lesser British myths, that the French only played a minor part in the Somme offensive. On the first day of the Somme, the French divisions on the right also did far better than most of the British divisions.

1,627,824 shells were fired in the preliminary bombardment on the Somme

total of 895,000 French soldiers died in battle during the Great War, but a further 420,000 died of wounds in the casualty clearing stations, from gangrene or septicaemia or some other sickness, much of it preventable.

A total of 895,000 French soldiers died in battle during the Great War, but a further 420,000 died of wounds in the casualty clearing stations, from gangrene or septicaemia or some other sickness, much of it preventable.

As time went by, matters improved; the armies, especially the British and French Armies, became better at staying alive while killing larger numbers of the enemy which, though hardly a matter for satisfaction in human terms, is what well-trained armies are supposed to do.

the credit for developing the basic idea into what became the first tank must go to Winston Churchill

Physical bravery is essential in second lieutenants but dangerous in general officers. They should learn caution and judgement as they rise through the ranks; a general needs moral courage, not least the courage to make a hard decision and stick to it under pressure from his superiors and events.

During the Great War tens of thousands of German civilians died of malnutrition and starvation because of the British naval blockade; the accepted estimate is that between half a million and one million people died of hunger in Germany between 1914 and 1918

while the means to cause casualties had vastly increased, the means to reduce them had yet to be thought of. This applied in particular to the attack, because the armies, all the armies, were fighting a twentieth-century war with nineteenth-century tactics - even though the new technology had made those tactics either obsolescent or positively dangerous.

The regular lesson of the Western Front, one the generals seemed unable to learn, was that - using the currently conventional methods - most attacks simply did not come off, whoever carried them out

In some curious way the battle at Verdun had become a paradigm for the entire war. Verdun now exerted its own dynamic and needed no reason to continue. By the middle of 1916 it was, or should have been, clear to all that there was no reason in it; reason had ceased to play any part in this struggle.

There was failure at every level: failure to see what was coming; failure to estimate how long the war would last; failure to set up a supreme command to fight the war strategically; and finally failure extended to the battlefields. Whatever their size, in terms of doctrine, the armies of 1914-1916 were nineteenth-century armies.

Now and again, the history of war throws up a battle that transcends reason. The soldiers fight because they cannot stop fighting, because too much has been committed to give up now. Too much blood has been shed, so much courage and will has been committed, that to admit defeat would be unthinkable.

as Alistair Horne points out, this was not simply a battle between two armies but the ancient conflict of Teuton and Gaul, two ethnic groups letting one thousand years of envy and hatred out in one long pent-up explosion of violence

The British generals have been widely castigated for their actions in this war and their prodigality with lives; it is hard to find evidence that the French or German generals were any better.

In Britain, and in many parts of her former Empire, the blame for the death toll is generally laid on the incompetence and callousness of the Great War generals, especially the British generals. In France, they blame their politicians; in Germany, historians blame the Kaiser.

It was a war requiring the use of strategy as well as of tactics - but, above all, it was a war that could only be won by the use of superior technology and superior skills in command.

Nothing the Western Front can offer, however, matches the intensity of the five days of fighting inside Fort Vaux.