“It is difficult for Britons to realise what Verdun means to France. The world can show no battlefield to correspond to it. On those heights Gaul and Teuton had, from the blizzards of February [1916] to the snows of the following December, been fighting out a racial feud which had existed for thousands of years. The concentrated fury of ages raged and tore, shattered and killed for ten months in one intensive struggle which has no parallel in the history of human savagery. The very road that carried the reinforcements, the guns and the shells that redeemed Verdun, is to this hour for Frenchmen the Via Sacra of their country.”

—  David Lloyd George

On the Battle of Verdun, War Memoirs: Volume I (London: Odhams, 1938), p. 875.
War Memoirs

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is difficult for Britons to realise what Verdun means to France. The world can show no battlefield to correspond to …" by David Lloyd George?
David Lloyd George photo
David Lloyd George 172
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1863–1945

Related quotes

Daniel Burnham photo

“The space of time in which a great work can now be accomplished is not marvellous. Brain, muscle, materials, and the means of rapid transport are instantly at command. If one has capital and a well-considered plan, the thing does itself. But that which is wonderful and which I can scarcely believe, although I have been in the midst of it, is the noble, artistic result which has come from the work of American artists who have had only a few months' time to prepare those very designs for the great buildings of the Exposition which have actually been executed with little change from the sketches which were presented in February, 1891.”

Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) American architect and urban designer

Burnham (1891) attributed in: Charles Moore (1921) Daniel H. Burnham, architect, planner of cities http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7205061M/Daniel_H._Burnham_architect_planner_of_cities. p. 72-73

James Howard Kunstler photo

“[…] Abrupt climate change may be normal in the planet's history, or, to state it differently, that the earth's climate is inherently very unstable. The period in which human civilization developed has been if anything, an anomalous ten-thousand-year epoch of remarkable stability.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 5, p. 149.

Wilhelm II, German Emperor photo

“[The coming war is] the last battle between Teutons and Slavs [which would] find the Anglo-Saxons on the side of the Slavs and the Gauls…[England] wanted to forbid other Powers to defend their interests…with the sword. … England will undoubtedly stand behind France and Russia against Germany out of hatred and envy. The imminent struggle for existence which the Germanic peoples of Europe (Austria, Germany) will have to fight out against the Slavs (Russians) and their Latin (Gallic) supporters finds the Anglo-Saxons on the side of the Slavs. Reason: petty envy, fear of our growing big.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Marginal note on report from the German ambassador to London, Prince Lichnowsky (December 1912), quoted in Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1967), p. 32
1910s

Harold Wilson photo

“We are the party of human rights—the only party of human rights that will be speaking from this platform this month. (Loud applause.) The struggle against racialism is a worldwide fight. It is the dignity of man for which we are fighting. If what we assert is true for Birmingham, it is true for Bulawayo. If ever there were a condemnation of the values of the party which forms the Opposition it is the fact that the virus of Powellism has taken so firm a hold at every level.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool (1 October 1968), quoted in The Times (2 October 1968), p. 4
Prime Minister

Peter Greenaway photo

“… there are tens of thousands of photographs taken here, all taken very patiently, because decay can be very slow.. Ten months for a human body… they say…”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

A Zed and Two Noughts

Richard Strauss photo

“Conducting is, after all, a difficult business – one has to be seventy years of age to realise this fully!”

Richard Strauss (1864–1949) German composer and orchestra director

Recollections and Reflections

“My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had.”

Edwin H. Land (1909–1991) American scientist and inventor

"A Talk with Polaroid's Dr. Edwin Land" in Forbes Vol. 115, No. 7 (1 April 1975), p. 49

Mark Twain photo

“Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood -- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Mark Twain book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Ch. 13 http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-13.html
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

David Brin photo

“He read about humanity’s age-old racial struggles. Had it really been less than half a millennium since humans contrived gigantic, fatuous lies about each other simply because of pigment shades, and killed millions because they believed their own lies?”

David Brin book Startide Rising

Source: Startide Rising (1983), Chapter 81 (p. 364)

Norman Angell photo

“I would not hesitate to say that nine out of ten of the critics of the peace movement get the argument turned upside down. "You cannot change human nature" has become a sort of incantation with those critics. Perhaps you cannot "change human nature" — I don't indeed know what the phrase means. But you can certainly change human behavior, which is what matters, as the whole panorama of history shows.”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

Related topics