Verdun

First I think this novel should be read together with its preceding volume (see "Verdun, the Prelude + the Battle) to be fully appreciated. No other novel conveys an sensation of what it was like to be a soldier in that war. "The Prelude" is very interesting if you want to understand the bigger picture and the shared responsibilities for the war: although a Frenchman, Jules Romains did not engage in any propaganda whatsoever and showed the Germans were not the only bad guys in 1914. This is not a novel based on a plot, in fact the only plot to speak of is the war itself with its slow inexorable advance towards a nominal victory for one side, but a defeat for Europe as a whole. If all you want is a good story, don't read this book. The characters are very real and you feel identifying with them and their sufferings and frustrations all the time. You sympathize with the men and their shattered dreams, their longings for family and girlfriends, their anger at callous higher officers and at profiteers who had contrived to stay behind the lines and be out of harm's way. These two novels (The Prelude + Verdun) are part of a series of 27 (!!) volumes by Jules Romains entitled "The Men of Good Will". I don't know whether they are still available in English but if you can read French go for them and you will get hooked!

I just finished reading this book for the second time and got a great deal more out of it than during my first reading. My problem with the book on first reading, and perhaps the first reviewer's problem as well, is that this book isn't intended as a history of the battle of Verdun. While the author describes the experience of being in the battle of Verdun, he never 'zooms out' to explain the bigger picture. Instead, it explains what the common soldier thought and felt during the second winter of the war. Once I came back to the book with a better understanding of the events of the battle, I enjoyed it thouroughly.The first several chapters give a brilliant review of the first year and a half of the war. The writer explains at a high level the events of the war, and describes how the French general staff vainly struggled to understand the new rules of war. (The entire book is presented only from the French prespective)The remainder of the book is a series of vignettes, each presenting the war from the point of view of soldiers, industrialists, war widows, shirkers, and others. Some characters are present throughout the book, some appear only for a chapter. While one of the 'points' of the book is that the soldiers' attitudes towards the war, the enemy, and their countrymen behind the lines were complex, multi-faceted, and impossible to definitively explain, I feel I have gained a better understanding of what the average soldier in the trenches must have felt.To sum up, this book does a poor job explaining the details of the battle of Verdun, but an excellent job exploring various French wartime cultures. I thought it was extremely well written. The descriptions of being under bombardment were terrifying, and the dialogue between the soldiers cracked me up several times.

I found the other review to this stunning novel rather offensive and misplaced, almost as if the person never read this powerful novel the entire way through. He states the novel lacks a plot and character development but I question both points. First, as far as a plot is concerned, we are talking about human suffering in the face of one of the most catastrophic battles mankind has ever witnessed. There is no need for a "plot." The plot is there, lived by over one million men, both French and German who either lost their lives or were wounded in the filth and suffering of the trenches. Second, as far as character development is concerned, I believe that is one of the startling points of the novel, that is, men do not progress nor grow in an environment such as Verdun. Men die, bleed, cry, agonize and wither away in the insanity of war. This book is a treasure to be discovered and studied by all who wish never to repeat that which happened in our so called "civilized" and "advanced" world.