French folding postcard map of Verdun and the Meuse River, number 9 from the series Les Cartes du Front. Montfaucon is in the upper left and St. Mihiel at the bottom.

Les Cartes du Front

Verdun et Côtes de Meuse

Echelle 1:32,000

Routes

Chemin de fer

Canaux



Maps of the Front

Verdun and the Hills of the Meuse

Scale: 1:32,000

Roads

Railways

Canals



1. - Les Flandres

2. - Artois, Picardie

3. - Aisne, Champagne

4. - Argonne et Meuse

5. - Lorraine

6. - Vosges et Alsace

7. - Route des Dame et Plateau de Craonne

8. - Région de Perthes

9. - Verdun

10. - Somme et Santerre

11. - Plateau d'Artois

12. - Belgique - Flandres



A. Hatier. Editeur.8.Rue d'Assas, Paris.



Outer front:

Correspondence of the Armies

Military Franchise

Other views: Larger, Larger, Back

Sunday, February 27, 1916

"After five days of battle, and much slaughter, the battle [of Verdun] was to go on. Douaumont remained in German hands, but continued ferocious German shelling and daily assaults, while they savaged the French defenders, failed to give the Germans their entry into the city. In the week beginning on February 27 [1916], the French brought to Verdun, along the Voie Sacrée, 190,000 men and 23,000 tons of ammunition. That same week an unexpected spring thaw turned the battlefield and road into a sea of mud, but mud was no deterrent to the continued fighting, or to the intensity of the artillery barrages. In the first five weeks of conflict at Verdun, German soldiers were killed at the astounding rate of one every forty-five seconds. French deaths were even higher. The Kaiser's biographer, Alan Palmer, has written: 'Ultimately on this one sector of the Western Front the Germans suffered a third of a million casualties in occupying a cratered wasteland half the size of metropolitan Berlin.'"

Quotation Context

French Commander Joseph Joffre tasked General Henri Philippe Pétain with the defense of Verdun, a salient in the northeast corner of the French front. Verdun was connected to the rest of France along the Bar-le-Duc road, the Voie Sacrée. Pétain organized the provisioning of the front with supplies and with fresh troops. The road was shelled constantly; repair crews maintained it day and night.

Source

The First World War, a Complete History by Martin Gilbert, page 232, copyright © 1994 by Martin Gilbert, publisher: Henry Holt and Company, publication date: 1994

Tags

1916-02-27, 1916, February, Battle of Verdun, Verdun