The Age of Attrition. 1916 — Verdun, The Somme, and the Arithmetic of Endurance.

Hello and welcome to War — 1870 to 1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Season Two: World War One — The Age of Attrition. Episode Three: 1916 — Verdun, The Somme, and the Arithmetic of Endurance.By 1916, the war has stopped pretending. The speeches can still use the old words—honor, duty, glory—but the battlefield is now speaking a newer language, colder and more precise. It speaks in tonnage, in supply lines, in shell production, in rail schedules, in replacement drafts, in body counts. It speaks in the logic of systems. And the most frightening thing about that logic is that it doesn’t require hatred to function. It only requires momentum.If 1915 taught Europe that modern war could become a trench-bound stalemate, 1916 proved something worse: that the stalemate could be exploited, engineered, and extended on purpose. This is the year of Verdun and the Somme, two names that aren’t merely battles so much as mechanisms—vast machines built to test how long a society can bleed without collapsing.