tyler88: переводы

→The third error, then, stems both from an erroneous understanding of the objective and a failure to grasp the size of the battlefield. It is the error of supposing that operations at Verdun were all of a piece, that they can be treated like Gettysburg or Waterloo or even the Somme.

→However, no matter what measurement we use, the sheer breadth and depth of Verdun is impressive. Jules Poirier, a distinguished military historian who wrote the first account of the main battle, gives a figure at the start of the 1916 German offensive of 166 kilometers.5 A simple comparison: in January 1916, that is, before the start of the February German offensive, the British section of the Western Front was 63 kilometers.6 Verdun was larger than the entire British and Belgian sectors combined, larger than all the other sectors of the Western Front west of the Moselle river: Champagne, Artois, Picardy, the Somme.

→Compounding the difficulty is that the French military analysts and historians, many of them veterans of the war, tended to rely on rather elastic geographical concepts as they talked about the various battles. City dwellers do the same thing. They know that there is a legally defined entity called the city, which is contiguous to other legal entities, but that all taken together form the metropolitan area. The difficulty is that although New Yorkers and New Orleanians know all these distinctions, other people do not. So it is when the word Verdun is mentioned, a confusion that has led to a great many more as foreign historians have tried to write accounts of the fighting there.

→Such suggestions, skillfully planted, in turn led to another important area of confusion: a failure to grasp the sheer size of the battlefield. The forts were not physically connected, but rather were emplaced so as to provide (hopefully) overlapping fields of fire, both from their own guns and from heavy weapons in batteries located behind them. If we establish an imaginary line connecting the forts we get one measurement. If we construct an even more imaginary line connecting the limits of the fields of fire, we get a second. If we measure the forward positions held by the infantry, we get a third, and so on.

→But the suggestion, the inference, that the town was an important military objective allowed Allied propagandists to create a straw man, to claim that they had won an important victory because they had kept the Germans from getting into the town itself.

→There followed the inexplicable offensives of the first winter, the first battle of the Somme in December 1914, of which one never breathes a word, during which, from Mametz and Carnoy to la Boisselle, the regiments rushed every day the enemy lines, without a cannon-shot fired.2

→Joffre, comfortably installed, snored: “I gnaw at them,” and threw or let throw on the barbed wire and the German machine guns the purest French blood.

→Although for readers who grew up believing that Alistair Horne’s account was the definitive tale, the notion of multiple Verduns is surprising, perhaps incredible, the idea of several battles for the same piece of ground, and with the same name, is hardly unique. There were two battles of the Bull Run in the Civil War. The Italians and the Austrians fought no fewer than twelve battles of the Isonzo between 1915 and 1917. Although the American reader would never know it, the 1916 Battle of the Somme was not the first battle of the Great War that was fought there. It was the second battle, and it was the first one that stimulated Jean Bernier to his memorable description.

→The original Michelin guides spoke, quite correctly, of multiple battles, and recent French accounts have done the same. A. J. P. Taylor once quipped that the difficulty about the Second World War was trying to decide when it began, and when it comes to Verdun we have an analogous problem. The first battles took place in August of 1914. The German stranglehold was not removed until late September 1918. The difficulty arises when trying to compute exactly how many battles there were.

→To begin with, it is a serious mistake to think that there was only one battle for Verdun, that battle being the 1916 struggle described so eloquently and misleadingly by Alistair Horne in his classic study, The Price of Glory.

→THE 1916 BATTLES

→Verdun is one of the great battles of the modern era. It is also one of the most complex, and probably the most misunderstood part of a war only imperfectly grasped, even today.

→If I were to be tied down to one word for my impression of this war, I should say this war is Queer. It is not like anything in a really waking world, but like something in a dream.

→—H. G. Wells1

→THREE SIMPLE ERRORS