Poison gas killed 80,000 soldiers in World War I. Nearly a million more were victims who suffered its lingering effects. Initially the wind distributed chlorine gas across the battlefields of the western front but an arms race quickly developed until one in three shells contained some form of toxic gas.
The Battle of Verdun was the longest and deadliest battle of the First World War, lasting ten months, with 700,000 killed and hundreds of thousands of others wounded. Verdun was a strongly fortified region on the eastern border of France and the Germans determined that if they could take it, France’s defenses would collapse. German strategists realized it would be an extremely costly undertaking but calculated that it would be worth the lives of thousands of soldiers to achieve their objectives. The fact that the French were likely to defend the fortress with all available men was looked upon as an opportunity to killed tens of thousands of Frenchmen as efficiently as possible.