Verdun becomes the site of a deliberate strategy in February 1916: German commanders design the offensive not to seize ground but to bleed the French army dry, forcing it to defend a fortress city it cannot afford to lose. The film traces the resulting slaughter, a battle that runs for most of the year and kills at a rate close to one soldier per minute for its entire duration. Archival footage and firsthand accounts carry viewers into the trenches, forts, and ravines around the city, where artillery barrages flatten the landscape and soldiers on both sides face conditions built to exhaust and destroy rather than win territory outright. The film treats Verdun as a turning point in the Great War, a battle whose cost reshaped how both France and Germany could fight afterward, and it stays close to the experience of the men who lived through it rather than the maps and generals directing them from behind the lines.