Short of a general nuclear exchange, it is hard to imagine mankind contriving a way to kill 300,000 young men in the course of one battle.

Germany and France managed to do that in the World War I Battle of Verdun which began 100 years ago, in February 2016, and dragged on till December of 1916.

The number of dead is so enormous as to make it hard to grasp the magnitude of the bloodletting outside the smallish city in northwest France.

French newspapers help humanize the conflict by casting back to the slaughter of 1916 — when they do stories, usually brief and always sad, about young men who died at Verdun.

Such as the piece this weekend in the Midi Libre newspaper on Leopold Gustave Jean Marie Antoine Frontil, a native of the little Languedoc town of Autignac, whose given names almost rival the years of his life.

He was killed at Verdun when he was 19.

Leopold was called into service as part of the “1916 mobilization class” and judged to be fit for military service, and he was not long for this world, after that.

It seems just about everything his family knows of him are the dates of birth and death, and his joining this regiment or that.

He appears to have been unmarried, without descendants and, after all, that was about four generations ago, and what do any of us know about our great-great-grand uncles that isn’t recorded in some government document?

The scant outline of Leopold’s life shows him born on December 27, 1896. He was baptized in Autignac on January 10, 1897.

On July 24, 1916, he joined the 297th Infantry Regiment and on September 4 he was assigned to the 158th Regiment which was, as Midi Libre notes, en premiere ligne dans ce terrible combat — in the front line of that awful battle.

Army records show Leopold survived 47 days in the Battle of Verdun, which ended with about 160,000 French and 143,000 German soldiers killed.

Leopold received a mortal wound in the vicinity of Fort Vaux, a key position in the battle, which was fought a few miles outside Verdun, a strategically key city on the Meuse River.

Army records show him receiving a shrapnel wound on October 21, and add that he died while being transported in ambulance No. 225.

He was “buried at the front”, Midi Libre tells us, and later re-interred in a national cemetery, presumably the same as we visited a few years ago.

Because the army appears to know when and where he died, “thanks” to his being in an ambulance when he expired, Leopold may well be in the enormous French military cemetery near the battlefield. More than 16,000 French dead are buried there.

Many of those killed during the battle were buried near where they fell and managing tens of thousands of corpses was a massive task that usually ran a distant second to the war the living were still waging.

Many bodies were not identifiable, after the battle, which led to the French government erecting the grim and enormous Douaumont Ossuary, where the bones of more than 140,000 French and German soldiers are piled inside chambers with glass walls for the visitors to view, if they have the stomach for it.

We visited the site about a decade ago, and it is numbing.

The newspaper story notes that two nephews of Leopold fought in World War II and were decorated, and each died in this century. Presumably, the family of one of those men provided the sepia photo of Leopold that ran in the Midi Libre. It shows a dark-haired young man with a wispy mustache and large, brown eyes and a somber expression.

The story includes a telling statistic of the disaster that was the First World War.

In 1896, Leopold’s home town of Autignac registered 19 births, eight of them girls and 11 of them boys — including Leopold and Pierre Bec, each of whom died in combat in 1916, Leopold at Verdun, Pierre at the Somme.

How many of the other nine boys were killed in the other five years of the war … we are not told.