Verdun is a city in the Meuse department of northeastern France that became synonymous with the horror and endurance of World War I. The Battle of Verdun (February 21 – December 18, 1916) was the longest single battle of the war, lasting 303 days. It resulted in approximately 700,000 casualties — roughly equal on both the French and German sides.
The German strategy, conceived by Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn, was to “bleed France white” by attacking a point the French would defend at all costs. Verdun, a fortified city of enormous symbolic importance, was that point. The resulting battle became a nightmare of industrial warfare: millions of artillery shells, poison gas, flamethrowers, and relentless infantry assaults across a landscape that was reduced to a moonscape of craters and mud.
By the time the Americans arrived in 1917–1918, Verdun was still a front-line area, though the worst of the fighting had passed. The landscape bore the scars of the 1916 battle everywhere — shattered villages, forests reduced to splinters, the earth churned by shells to a depth of several meters.
Margaret Sheldon visited the Verdun area on January 11, 1919, during her motor tour. Her diary describes the devastation she witnessed — including the infamous heights of Le Mort Homme (“Dead Man’s Hill”) and Hill 304, where some of the fiercest fighting of 1916 took place.
Diary of a World War I Donut Girl 