The Road to Verdun; World War I's Most Momentous Battle and the Folly of Nationalism

New York: Doubleday, 2002. First U. S. Edition [stated], First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xi, [9], 393, [3] pages. Illustrations. Maps. Sources and Notes. Index. Ian Vaughan Kenneth Ousby (26 June 1947 - 6 August 2001) was a British historian, author and editor. He was born in Marlborough, Wiltshire to an army officer and his wife. Ousby's father was stabbed to death in India in 1947 during the Partition, leaving his mother to raise him. He was educated at Bishop's Stortford College before matriculating to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he gained a double first in English and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1968 to study at Harvard University. While at Harvard, Ousby was awarded the Howard Mumford Jones Prize for the best doctoral thesis of the year. Following graduation, he became an academic, teaching English literature at Durham University and the University of Maryland. An "intense dislike of organizations, as well as strong and divergent specialist interests", resulted in him leaving the University of Maryland in 1983 to become a freelance writer. The subjects of his books ranged from detective fiction, with Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle to military history with The Road to Verdun and Occupation: the Ordeal of France, 1940-1944, which was awarded the Edith McLeod Literary Prize and the Stern Silver PEN for Non-Fiction in 1998. His most noted work was as editor of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, which was first published in 1988 and republished in various forms in 1993, 1996 and 1998. A powerfully immediate and controversial account of one of the longest and bloodiest engagements of World War I. In mid-February 1916, the Germans launched a surprise major offensive at Verdun, an important fortress in northeast France. By mid-March, more than 90,000 French troops had been killed or wounded. The fighting continued for seven long months, with casualties on both sides mounting in astonishing numbers. By the end of the year, the battle had claimed more than 700,000 victims. The butchery had little impact on the course of the war, and Verdun soon became the most potent symbol of the horrors of the war in general, and of trench warfare in particular. Ian Ousby offers a radical, iconoclastic reevaluation of the meaning and import of this cataclysmic battle in The Road to Verdun. Moving beyond the narrow focus of most military historians, he argues that the French bear a tremendous responsibility for the senseless slaughter. In a work that merges intellectual substance and great battle writing, Ousby shows that the roots of the disaster lay in the French national character, the grandiose, even delusional way they perceived themselves, and their relentless determination to demonize Germans, which began in the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War. Ousby analyzes the generals' battle plans, and provides a graphic, gripping account of the deprivations and inhumane suffering of the troops who manned the trenches. His incisive, moving descriptions make it painfully clear why the influential French critic and poet Paul Valery called Verdun a complete war in itself, inserted in the Great War. In telling the story of Verdun, Ousby demonstrates that the confrontation marked a critical midpoint in Franco-German hostility. The battle not only carried the burden of history, but with the presence on the battlefield of France's future leaders, including Pétain and de Gaulle, it fed an increasingly venomous enmity between France and Germany, and lay the groundwork for World War II.