A hollow crater bright with wild flowers marks the spot where the little village school used to stand. Another, the former bakery. Today, on the ridge above Verdun in eastern France, buttercups and clover waft in the breeze where shrapnel, blood and ground flesh once scarred the soil. Swallows dart to and fro. During the Battle of Verdun in 1916, the village of Fleury-devant-Douaumont swapped hands over a dozen times, as French and German troops bombarded each other in a pitiless war of attrition to advance the front line. By the end of the battle, one of the bloodiest of the first world war, the French had lost 163,000 men and the Germans 143,000; the front line scarcely budged.

The unimaginable slaughter, in a small place of little renown, came to mark an existential struggle against an imperialist aggressor. In the French mind, Verdun stands for resistance and honour, sacrifice and unity. It was at Verdun in 1984, before the cemetery, that François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, then French president and German chancellor, held hands in a gesture that became emblematic of Franco-German reconciliation and peace in Europe.

Now, over 1,400 miles to the east, another small place of little renown has come to symbolise a modern existential struggle to repel an expansionist invader: Bakhmut. Since August 2022 Vladimir Putin’s Russia has pounded the Ukrainian town, sending tens of thousands of men to their deaths to try to capture the place, street by street. A former home to 70,000 people has been razed in many parts to rubble. Yesterday’s horrors in Verdun—the filth of the trenches, the relentless shelling, the sandbagged bunkers—are today’s in Bakhmut.

Any parallel between Verdun and Bakhmut is of course imprecise. In 1916 the battlefield lay outside the town, in orchards and woods above Verdun; Bakhmut is an urban battle, fought amid blocks of apartment buildings and wide roads. The number of dead in Bakhmut, estimated at perhaps 20,000-30,000, is a fraction of the number that fell by the end of the Battle of Verdun, on December 18th 1916. In the ten months of fighting, 60m shells pounded the ground at Verdun. When it began at 7:15am on February 21st 1916 the German artillery assault shook the villages and fields above Verdun with “an incalculable deluge of shells” wrote Captain Anatole Castex, a French officer. Louis Barthas, a barrel-maker from the Languedoc region conscripted into the French army, noted “thousands of shredded, pulverised corpses…at places where the earth was soaked with blood, swarms of flies swirled and eddied.” Yet for all the differences between Verdun and Bakhmut, three points nonetheless link the two battles.

One is the raw, muscular nature of the warfare involved, requiring staggering effort for meagre advances. It took the Germans a mere five days to capture the fort at Douaumont, the largest of the defences protecting Verdun. Yet it took four months for German forces to advance the three kilometres from the fort to take Fleury. To this day, the soil around Verdun is filled with unexploded ordnance and the remains of an estimated 80,000 bodies. “The forest here is a shroud,” says Nicolas Barret, director of the Verdun Memorial. Fleury and other villages flattened during the battle have never been rebuilt.

Despite today’s precision weaponry, the artillery battle in Bakhmut has been rudimentary, exhausting ammunition supplies and putting factories on a war footing, just as at Verdun. Shelling has forced soldiers into trenches or underground as it did then, underscoring the value of picks and shovels, cover and concealment. The fight for Bakhmut has now lasted even longer than that at Verdun, the longest in the first world war. Its battlefield is a “meat grinder”, noted Yevgeny Prigozhin, who fed the meat while leading the assault as head of Russia’s Wagner mercenaries.

A second point, as Anthony King at Warwick University points out, is that a small town of little consequence can take on strategic value if it becomes the place where opposing forces concentrate their forces. Initially, Russia put offensive power into taking Bakhmut in the hope of securing roads to the cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. In 1916 Germany’s military chief, Erich von Falkenhayn, thought he could take Verdun swiftly with superior artillery, to secure railway lines and distract French forces from the Somme. Both attempts met fierce resistance. At Verdun, as in Bakhmut, each side drew the other into committing vast military resources to avoid slim territorial losses, turning inconsequential towns into places of military significance.

All not quiet

Above all, each place has acquired a symbolic importance that outweighs its original strategic value. At Verdun, the French were caught ill-prepared. Under Philippe Pétain’s command, they built resistance around the rotation of forces, limiting soldiers’ time at the front and supplying the effort by road from Bar-le-Duc. “They shall not pass” became the Verdun battle cry, a defiant call to hold the town, just as President Volodymyr Zelensky called Bakhmut “our fortress”. “What Bakhmut shares with Verdun is the notion of prestige,” says Nicolas Czubak, a historian at the Verdun Memorial. The war was not won or lost at Verdun; but the French turned it into an emblem of strength that made retreat unthinkable.

The Ukrainians’ defiant attempt to hold Bakhmut was set back in May when Russian mercenaries claimed to have taken the town. Its symbolic value, though, remains. Russia threw all its force into the capture of Bakhmut. Yet it is no closer to victory in its war against Ukraine. The battle has exposed splits in Russia’s armed forces. And the Ukrainians still hold a sliver of the town as well as the outskirts; Russian troops are vulnerable inside it.

Back at Verdun, the Ukrainians’ valiant efforts are being followed closely by those who keep alive the memory of the horrors of 1916. As a mark of respect and fellow-feeling, they would like to invite Mr Zelensky to visit, when the time is right. ■

Read more from Charlemagne, our columnist on European politics:
Europe has shaken off Putin’s gas embargo (May 25th)
Meet the lefty Europeans who want to shrink the economy (May 18th)
Once Russia’s best friend in the West, Austria is facing trouble (May 11th)

Also: How the Charlemagne column got its name