LAND & WATER 
Januaiy 4, 1^17 
Verdun and the Somme 
By Hilaire Belloc 
THE publication of Sir Douglas Haig's despatch 
Numniarising the British half of the operations 
upon the Somme suggests a comparison between 
those operations and the corresponding opera- 
tions upon the sector of Verdun. 
. The parallel between the two has occurred to everybody, 
but it is the points in which they differ which afford 
the main interest of the war in the West during 1916. 
The tirst essentials in military study is detachment. 
The reason of this is that while war stirs emotion pro- 
foundh-. judgment on it is mainly a matter of calculation. 
We do not need to exercise our power of detachment 
\ny se\erely to form a good judgment of a chess pro- 
l?lem. We have to exercise it somewhat more severely to 
form a good historical judgment upon a debated point, 
especially if that point introduces the emotions of patriot- 
ism or any other religious emotion. But in the case of 
contemporary war our temptation to bias and at the 
same time our temptation to be unduly elated or unduly 
depressed, is far stronger than in any other field of 
study. And at the same time the real matter for our 
study in this field is figures : Figures of distance, of roads 
and of railways and their number, of munitionment, of 
wastage, of recruitment, of food supplies, total man- 
power and all the rest of it. In other words, the matter 
of our study is that with which emotional judgment is 
least concerned, and yet we have to be more on our 
guard against emotional judgment than in any other 
.kind of knowledge. 
The best corrective against this danger, the best 
aid to detachment, is to examine the enemy's case before 
we examine our own. 
The Enemy's Case 
What the enemy can say, and has said, about the 
two great operations is roughly thi^ : 
" We made from the early days of 1916 up to the 
middle of that year a prolonged and intensive effort 
against a particular sector of the Allied line in the West. 
Pray forget all the journalism and propaganda rubbish 
which we were compelled in our political interests to 
distribute upon the subject. We were not really con- 
.cerned with such nonsense as the ' taking of Verdun '— 
a phrase which never had any military sense. Our 
re[:)eatedly printed prophecies that our troops would 
enter the town at such and such a date (in the Western 
American press we put it at August jrd ! ) was of course 
nonsense. Instructed men need not waste a moment 
upon such tricks. Every Government must lie and boast 
in time of war, and if we do it a little more crudely than 
you, we do it with the same motives. 
" Our offensive against the Verdun sector was intended 
to break the French front. There are purists who object 
to the phrase ' breaking a line ' so we will not use the 
phrase. But we did intend to break the Allied front 
in the West to the same extent at least and in the same 
sense as we had broken the Russian front at the end 
of April, 1915. 
" Now we admit that we failed. We think we came 
. very near to success during the first four days, February 
2i-23th ; but you held us, and after the 26th "of February 
it was clear that you could compel us to a prolonged 
struggle. Nevertheless our intensive action was continued, 
and that with the object of wearing j-ou down. What we 
said to ounselves was this : 
" The French are, of all our opponents the most ex- 
hausted. They are not quite so exhausted as we are, but 
on the other hand they are numerically far inferior. At 
the same time they have of all our opponents the best 
ecjuipped and the best trained army with the longest 
traditions. If — at a great sacrifice to ourselves we admit 
— we can so bleed the French army as to prevent its 
taking the offensive afterwards, o\ir continued effort 
will not have been in vain. 
" Well, we went on for five months, and even at the 
end of those fi\'e months we were still obtaining, though 
at rare intervals, notable succes.ses. We carried the line 
up to Thiaumont. It was 'quite on the cards that wc 
should carry it in another month or two up to Souville. 
The French were unable to establish a permanent line, 
nor did our efforts relax in spite of our great losses and 
the length of time over which they hacl been spread. 
" But just then, after five months of such effort, came 
your own counter-offensive upon the Somme. You still 
apparently had among the French a sufficient elasticity 
and man-power to help in that offensive, and the English, 
of course, had greatly increased their numbers and their 
power of munitionment during a lull of nine months in 
which they had not been hea\ily engaged. 
■ " When you began your Somme offensive you naturally 
drew off energy from Verdun. And you, the Allies, began 
on the Somme exactly what we had done at Verdun. 
Your real object was to break our front. You failed to do 
it as you know. The southern half of your thirty mile 
offensive went excellently for you and dangerously for 
us, but the northern half lost very heavily, was checked 
in nearly a third of its effort and advanced but a short way 
in the rest. 
" After that you proceeded exactly as we had proceeded 
at Verdun, you began a mere wearing down of us by 
successive local advances at considerable intervals. You 
went on (just as we did) for five months. You continued 
on the Somme as we had' before Verdun, in much the 
same fashion, and with much the same results. And all 
your operjjtion did was to confirm what ours had proved : 
the immense strength of the modern defensive. Your opera- 
tion failed in the main just as ours failed in the main, 
but with this difference : That ours in front of Verdun 
was still \igorous, when the diversion of the Somme made 
u« cease ; while 3'ours petered out and came to a standstill 
of itself. 
" At any rate, the general lesson is quite clear. The 
strength of the modern defensive is such that of two 
opponents thoroughly equipped, equal in moral and num- 
erous enough to hold lines that cannot be turned, neither 
can break the front of the other." 
Falsity of Such a Statement 
That, I take it, is a fair statement of the German 
military thesis as it has been laid dow n for the benefit of 
instructed and professional neutrals, with some hope that 
it may also affect a considerable body of solid opinion 
even among the belligerents. 
Now are we to accept this statement as generally 
sound ? Is it something which could only be criticised 
in detail and by special pleading, or is it a fundamentally 
false comparison of the two great battles ? 
It is demonstrable that this German thesis is mili- 
tarily false. It does not describe the ' military conti-ast 
between the two great operations, and it presents a view 
of them which is as favourable to the enemy as it is un- 
historioal. I mean by " unhistorical " that the future 
of the war will certainly belie such a judgment. 
What, then, are the falsities .of concealment or omission 
in a statement apparently so simple and straightforward 
and apparently so well in agreement with what we have 
read in our newspapers of the two great battles ? 
When we have answered that question we shall have a 
true picture of the' contrast between Verdun and the 
Somme, and we shall find it to be almost the opposite of 
the description we have just read. 
Contrast in Phase 
The first and fundamental point which the German 
thesis ignores is this : that Verdun and the Somme be- 
long to two vcr\' different phases of develi)])mt'nt in the 
campaign. 
