To the men on the ground it seemed ‘as if to finish things off the Germans had decided to point one cannon at each one of us.’ Casualties among the French, badly deficient of deep shelters after the weeks of heavy shelling, were appalling. One French officer describes how he was buried three times that day in his trench, and dug out each time by his men.
Others were less fortunate. Of one battalion, only three men were said to have survived; many of the remainder were simply buried alive by the shells.
Source:
Horne, Alistair. “The Mort Homme.” The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916. New York: St. Martin's, 1963. 170. Print.
Further Reading:
Verdun was a fucking meat grinder. I visited there few years back, even though it's been a century, the land still clearly shows the destruction that raged there.
Talk about being burried alive. - The Trench of Bayonets, Verdun