Ten million artillery shells pulverized the landscape until it ceased to resemble Earth: forests erased, hills reshaped, soil churned with metal and human remains. The Battle of Verdun, 302 days through 1916, was not fought to capture territory. German commander Falkenhayn engineered it coldly as a meat grinder, gambling that French pride would feed men into a confined pocket where his artillery could, in his words, bleed France to death.

This episode dissects the trap and the blunders on both sides: the French decision to strip their own legendary forts of guns, the ten-hour opening bombardment heard 100 miles away, and the mighty Fort Douaumont captured without a shot by a hundred wandering soldiers who found it nearly empty. It follows Petain’s logistical salvation on the Sacred Way, the relief brought by the Somme and Brusilov offensives, and a final ledger of 714,000 casualties for a map that looked the same as when it started.

• Operation Judgment: attrition as doctrine, and a battle designed around casualty math
• Joffre’s wrong lesson: why France disarmed Verdun’s forts on the eve of the storm
• Douaumont taken by accident: a hundred lost soldiers and an unmanned fortress
• The Sacred Way: Petain’s truck-borne lifeline and the rotation system that saved an army
• The red zone and the ghost villages: mayors with zero citizens and land still too poisoned to enter