“There's going to be a battle here, the likes of which the world has never seen,” wrote a young Hessian soldier to his mother as he prepared to attack with his companions in the early afternoon. The heaviest artillery fire ever seen had already begun some hours earlier. More than 1,200 artillery pieces, including those of the heaviest caliber, fired in continuous bombardment a large share of the more than 2.5 million shells that had been brought to the front in 1,300 ammunition trains over a period of seven weeks. French reconnaissance planes were helpless as they tried to locate the batteries that delivered this heavy fire. They could provide no precise information, for wherever they looked, German artillery was firing. The forests surrounding the battlefield had been transformed into a blinding, deafening firestorm.

On this day, February 21, 1916, Wilhelm, the crown prince of the German Empire, personally ordered a naval gun to fire the first shot. He thus gave the signal to begin the German strike against Verdun. The young Hessian soldier was proved right. Soldiers later called this battle the “hell of Verdun.” It turned into a type of warfare that the world had never seen before, nor has seen again - despite World War II, despite Stalingrad. It was the most terrible battle of attrition (Materialschlacht) of World War I, and it offered the most dreadful conditions that fighting men had ever encountered. The soldiers were situated in a fighting zone visible from all sides, and they were bombarded from all directions; they had no trenches, for they had no opportunity to dig them under continuous fire. The ground was littered with bodies in all stages of decomposition.