The German attack that opened on 21 February 1916 was not meant to take Verdun so much as to make France defend it until the French army bled to death. The French did defend it, under a rotation system that sent most of the army through the sector at some point, so that Verdun became an experience the whole country shared. Supplies came up one road, later called the Sacred Way, along which a lorry passed every fourteen seconds for months.

The fighting lasted three hundred days on a front a few kilometres wide, and the artillery was so dense that the ground was ploughed to a depth that destroyed the villages entirely: nine of them were never rebuilt and still exist only as named plots of forest with signs where the streets were. Around three hundred thousand men died. The ossuary at Douaumont holds the mixed and unidentifiable bones of about a hundred and thirty thousand French and German soldiers, visible through windows at ground level, and the cemetery in front of it holds sixteen thousand named graves. The surrounding zone rouge is still closed in places because of unexploded shells and poisoned soil.