Ninety years on, there are few places in western Europe as empty and desolate as the area in south-eastern France where the Battle of Verdun was fought. The ghosts of the third of a million French and German soldiers who died there still haunt the crumbling forts and funereal monuments that litter its gloomy forests. They hang like a reproachful cloud over the ghastly ossuary built there in the 1920s.
Two roads led to Verdun. One was logistical, the supply road along which so many French soldiers passed on their way to battle and, if they survived, returned with a distinctive jerky, stumbling stride; it became known, in the semi-liturgical journalese of the day, as the Voie Sacree, the Via Dolorosa, leading to the new Calvary. The other road was historical, stretching back to the defeats of 1870, the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, and beyond. We must follow both roads, Ian Ousby believes, if we are to understand Verdun, because it was not just a battle, but a "complex cultural event". Military history alone is not enough; a broader approach is needed. And so, after a long scene-setting introduction and a brisk, competent narrative of the battle up to the Germans' capture of Fort Douaumont in February 1916, he breaks off and returns to the past. Then, in the final section, we return to Verdun between March and October 1916.
It is a story that still has the power to shock and horrify. Ousby's consistently intelligent and readable account highlights two themes particularly well. First, Verdun was a battle that generated and was shaped by its own mythology, even as it was unfolding. It became a symbol of France, and of the Third Republic; its loss was unthinkable. Second, allied to that was the idea that the French army was like a football team that can play only when defeat is staring it in the face: it could fight only when French soil had already been lost. While the French held Fort Douaumont, they regarded it with indifference, undermanning it and stripping it of its guns. But once it had fallen into German hands, it became "a living being, a captive to be freed and, increasingly, a beautiful woman calling for rescue from those who violated her".
To understand this mentality, Ousby places Verdun in its wider context. His attempt to use Gericault's painting The Raft of the Medusa as an extended metaphor for the politics of the Third Republic doesn't quite come off, but his is a masterly survey of the evolution of French nationalist thought, from the poetic irrationality of Jules Michelet to the degeneracy and Darwinism of the fin de siecle. As the British media greet the arrival of a single currency in Europe with shallow suspicion, it is good to be reminded how recent and brittle the European nation state is, and to find that, as far back as 1882, Ernest Renan was writing that the divisions on the European map were probably only temporary and that "a European confederation will probably take their place".
Ousby's command of intellectual history is matched, however, by a complete failure to address popular culture. A former don himself, he overrates the power of professors, even in their haut-bourgeois heyday; and his instinct as a historian is to find a text and deconstruct it. He provides no link between the professors and the poilus, between the study and the battlefield; no equivalent to the network of affiliations - to the Boys' Brigades and Sunday schools and territorial regiments - which, in the British case, provided the trellis on which popular patriotism grew. While emphasising the infantryman's contempt for the hack propagandists at home, he ignores soldiers' newspapers, an important source tapped by modern French historians.
What really interests Ousby is the language in which the experience of battle is rendered. Fertile ground - the postmodernist dictum that we can never know the past through language probably applies more nearly to warfare than any other human activity, and Paul Fussell long ago showed how rewarding one can make the literary transformations of battle. But it is difficult to combine this approach with military narrative - you cannot build a wall and simultaneously knock the bricks away - and Ousby's tendency to wander into textual analysis increasingly undermines his military history. When he returns to Verdun in the final section, he seems to lose all interest in the battle itself, and the book subsides into a discussion of "narratives of disillusionment".
I began to wish Ousby had written a French version of Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. That, sadly, he never will - he died last August. How far his illness affected the book, the publishers do not say, but further revision could probably have corrected certain centrifugal tendencies and filled in holes. The Road to Verdun is an engaging and important book, but Alistair Horne's The Price of Glory, first published in 1962 and still in the shops, is a better place to start.
Ben Shephard's A War of Nerves: soldiers and psychiatrists 1914-1994 is now available in paperback (Pimlico, £12.50)
