WASHINGTON — "Verdun."

The very name of the World War I battlefield evokes images of mindless sacrifice: More than a million men killed and wounded in months of pitiless trench warfare as numerically superior German forces sought to bleed the French army to the breaking point.

"They shall not pass!" declared French Gen. Henri Philippe Petain, but it took one of the longest and bloodiest struggles of the Great War to make good the legendary vow.

Now, almost 75 years later, U.S. military analysts say, something approaching that mass slaughter could repeat itself on the sandy wastes of the Arabian Peninsula. In the most detailed portrait yet of what U.S. troops face along the Iraq-Kuwait border with Saudi Arabia, government officials say Iraq's defensive lines resemble nothing so much as the barbed-wire and mine-fields killing ground of Verdun.

First comes razor wire, government officials say, then three parallel rows of minefields, each several hundred yards deep and dotted with anti-tank and anti-personnel mines purchased over the years from the Soviet Union, China and France.

Between the minefields are anti-tank ditches--each 12 feet deep and eight or nine feet wide--dug by bulldozers and earthmovers and studded with 55-gallon drums of napalm that can be detonated by remote control.

Beyond these obstacles lies the Iraqi infantry, several hundred thousand strong, dug into deep trenches reinforced with concrete-coated steel mesh, wire or reeds.

Behind the troops are hundreds of fortified artillery pieces--from 81-millimeter mortars to long-range 155-millimeter cannons. The Iraqis have also used Soviet-made, four-barreled, anti-aircraft cannons against infantry formations. Known as ZSU-4s, these guns can lay down a withering field of fire over a broad swath of land.

Finally come the tanks, other armored vehicles and self-propelled guns, more than 7,000 in all.

U.S. strategists say current plans dictate that if war comes, American forces will try to use machines--rather than manpower--to soften up and dislodge the entrenched Iraqi forces: sorties by tanks and airborne forces, coupled with massive bombardment from the air and sea.

But, as U.S. Marines learned fighting the Japanese forces dug into Okinawa and other bastions in World War II, eventually American ground forces will almost certainly have to attack the enemy troop concentrations directly--a task that U.S. commanders do not relish.