“Logistics? Astronomical costs?” He sighed and then added, “All you need are picks and shovels. And decent men.”
And so it proved: Vauban’s siege method was based on something as simple and straightforward as pick and shovel.
Once the surrounding fence had been established, the engineers would decide on the point of attack. The works would begin at a prudent distance, out of range of the defenders’ weapons. This act was called, altogether appropriately, “opening the trench,” and it marked the beginning of the construction of the Attack Trench.
Like jigsaw pieces beginning to slot into place, the many backbreaking sessions with the Ducroix brothers began to make sense. Because Vauban’s method consisted of nothing more than a sapping job, perfectly coordinated. See here, in all its splendor, his siege méthode.
The aim was to make an immense excavation, the so-called Attack Trench, that would lead to the bastions. To keep the sappers from being fired on by the enemy, the trench had to be deep enough to hide them. And to avoid enfilade fire, it had to run parallel to the ramparts. The initial trenches were therefore named “parallels.” Three parallels, connected by linking culverts in zigzag, would be enough to reach the ramparts. The work would assume a very distinctive appearance. To take on a perfectly designed fortress, the perfect trench.
Never have such immortal works been so ephemeral. A large trench could be titanic in size and, once finished, would simply disappear, swallowed up by not being used. In a number of months, rain, mud, and disuse would see it buried in the mud, forgotten. Racine himself was once sent as a reporter to one of Vauban’s sieges. “There are more corners in one of our great Attack Trenches,” he wrote admiringly, “than in all of Paris.” And at the very instant the city conceded defeat, the life of the trench was at an end.
Logically enough, an Attack Trench required impeccable command of each of the sciences imparted to me in Bazoches. All in all, it would mean thousands of men working together in a coordinated way. The trench had to be wide enough for an entire army to be able to move around inside, and that meant the removal of millions of square feet of earth, with pinpoint accuracy and orderliness. The floor and walls were lined with pieces of wood to prevent landslides and flooding. A siege meant the felling of an entire forest! Munitions stores were located in the second line of trenches. Large enclosed spaces would be dug out in certain places with the sole aim of creating refuges for the cannons and mortars whose task it was to punish the point of attack and the defenders’ cannons. And when the moment came, the third parallel would become the launch point for the assault.
Imagine a trench advancing not along the exact route laid out for it but going off on a tangent of a few degrees. What would happen in such a case? Nothing serious, if we forget about the sappers not digging in parallel to the ramparts, who would be exposed; that is, from the fortress, the vanguard sappers could be seen, and they would find themselves riddled by enemy fire.
Not the ideal situation, wouldn’t you say? I’ve been on one side or the other dozens of times, and if there is a competent officer in the bastion, the most minor error in the progress of the works won’t go unpunished. Usually, a sniper will spill the brains of the poor dupe digging away in the open. But as I say, an attentive, observant officer, efficient and highly intelligent (like yours truly), would leave it a day before doing anything, holding fire as the badly dug trench advanced so ill-advisedly, leaving more and more of the men exposed in the open furrow.
The vanguard sappers might have noticed the parallel trench going off track, no longer parallel but perpendicular. And from the nearest bastion, one of the entire trench lines, and all these muddy little ants carrying wicker baskets of earth, comes into full sight. But the engineer on duty, putting his feet up in his rearguard cabin, ignores the warning, refuses to concede he’s done anything wrong. Blueprints are blueprints, and after all, though the French have recently chopped off their king’s head, the society in which we live is still governed by class. Am I wrong?
Except for those educated by a good Maganon, engineers were spoiled, arrogant brats from some important family, severely indisposed to listening to their inferiors. Well, bear in mind that I received my education from the best of the best, and therefore, I naturally consider the vast majority of military engineers for what they are: a band of savages so inept they couldn’t find their own rump if they used both hands.
Up on our bastion, looking through the telescope and seeing the peons working with pick and shovel on a trench that has strayed off track, the moment has come to act. Rifle fire? Well, of course not. While the enemy worsens his error, you transfer three wide-bore cannons into position on the bastion wall.
Into one of these, pack a five-kilo ball; into the other two, grapeshot. And adjust the range. First land one fifteen feet to the left of the furrow, then another the same distance to the right. Everything’s ready—though the sappers have no idea. First because they’re keeping their heads down behind the brushwood breastwork; second because, in the midst of the general harassment, the rifle fire from both sides, the continual exchange of rockets and grenades, the cries of the wounded and the screen of smoke cloaking no-man’s-land, it would never occur to the poor idiots that the two explosions have anything to do with them. And so, when a lot of people are gathered there, on the perpendicular that never should have been, you give the order for all three cannons to fire at once.
Ten sappers explode into ten thousand pieces. The trench is furrowed, and the impact is so powerful that their remains won’t embed into the far wall but will be blasted back the length and breadth of the trench. The shreds of bone, meat, and viscera will likely spread out over an area of more than five hundred feet.
Much is gained from this. Imagine now the morale of the survivors when the nincompoop engineer sitting in his little cabin says, “Dear Lord, what poor luck,” before ordering them to get back to it—all of a sudden they’re three days behind schedule. Desertions may follow, some might even rebel; in any case, the siege is delayed. And when you are the defender, you have one objective: to play for time.
Meanwhile, the unfortunate sappers have to go back to their work, advancing on all fours. And the lovely spectacle accompanying them is that of walls coated with pieces of their friends, fragments of cranium, ribs, and femurs split like pieces of cane. Human intestines, by the way, have a tendency to stick to the wooden uprights in a trench like boiled noodles to a wall . . .
You, stop your whinging and write! Did you not say you liked the epic tone, all that rot? Well, here’s epic for you.
But the example I have just given is hardly worthy of Vauban’s genius. If his method were rigorously followed, the defenders would never be presented with such opportunities. He never made a single mistake. Under his command, the parallels advanced implacably, at great speed, as though an army of termites were doing the work. Within a week, two at a stretch, he could be within sixty feet of any rampart. And at that distance, with the trench so close, the besieger had the upper hand.
They could then tunnel under the bastion and, once underneath, pack the tunnel with an enormous explosive charge. Boom! The bastion would come down with the defenders inside; the rubble would plug the hole beneath and create a mound for the attacking force to scale. The defenders could always come back with countermines, but with the enemy a mere sixty feet away, who could be sure they had not opened two, three, or even four different underground galleries? In any case, the other option, and the commonest conclusion to a siege, was a grenadier attack.
Grenadiers! My God, the very word brings shivers. The French had the best grenadiers of all; they were, very simply, killing machines.
For the French grenadiers, sixty feet was nothing. They were select men, chosen for being the strongest and, more than anything, the tallest men in the realm. In certain armies, instead of the normal tricorn hat, they wore their traditional brimless cap. Their uniform was spotless white. Trench warfare converts soldiers into an army of ra
gdolls, but they never let the slightest speck onto that Bourbon white.
And now consider the effect of this: Each side has become a band of scarecrows, faces black with smoke and soot, all military neatness gone. And you, at the top of the bastion, your hands covered in sores from all the carrying and firing, fed up with pissing down the cannon chamber to cool it, half-starved to death because all you’ve been brought to eat is rancid cabbage soup, your eyes red from tiredness and the gunpowder, half deaf from the explosions, you suddenly see a hundred giants dressed in brilliant white emerging shoulder to shoulder, with astonishing aplomb, from the enemy trench. It’s conceivable that, for all your officer’s bawling, you, rather than pulling the trigger, will let your jaw drop. For half a minute, at least—the half a minute it takes the grenadiers to line up at the edge of the trench.
One or two, or five or six, or even twenty or thirty, will naturally go down under the concentrated, desperate fire turned on them by the soldiers in the bastion. But these, these stay as still as statues and react only to the voice of their capitaine. He gives the orders:
One: Attention! And they stand up even taller, for all that the bullets whistle by. Zip, zip!
Two: Grenade! They put their hands to the grenades in their pouches —a kind of iron and bronze ball, incredibly heavy in relation to its size, and with a short fuse.
Three: Au feu! They light the fuse and hold the grenade behind their head, ready to throw.
A terrifying sight—particularly when viewed from the summit of a half-destroyed bastion. All those flickering sparks, suspended in the air, apparently so harmless . . . One may be tempted to stand watching, like the rabbit with the serpent, to see what happens. But if you find yourself at such a point, believe me: Forget Honor, forget King and Country, all such nonsense, and run, run for all you’re worth!
Fourth and final order: Lancez! A hundred or more black balls curving through the air toward you, landing directly upon the defenders’ heads.
Next, a pretty carnival of screams and flying human limbs. Then a bayonet charge, sweeping aside the wounded and any crying out for mercy. Or do you imagine those who have been providing the others with targets to practice on will feel all at once forgiving? Just because the others raise their little hands? No. They will bayonet their livers, they will split them head to behind and move onto the next. As the first to enter a now defenseless city, one that had the chance to surrender and obstinately refused, they are well within their rights to ransack houses, churches, and storerooms, slit civilians’ throats, and amuse themselves with the womenfolk.
The problem any defensive perimeter faces is that a chain of fortifications is only as strong as its weakest link. An assailant force need not take the rampart’s whole perimeter, just a toehold on a single bastion, just one. Control one bastion, and the city will be yours for the taking. The city has fallen. This is why, once the attack reaches the third parallel, the defenders usually concede. A trumpet will sound, asking to discuss the terms of the surrender. With a rampart destroyed and the enemy trench a few paces away, any sensible garrison opts to negotiate an honorable way out. I have seen surrenders that were majestic in the way they were enacted.
A trumpet from the besieged calls for a truce. The firing dies down. The tumult of war becomes expectant silence. A few minutes later, the garrison commander steps forward in his best regalia, sword in belt, at the center of the breach—which the cannons have made look altogether like a stage in a theater. He is not at risk; to shoot him now would be too dishonorable. The two armies look at him: the besieger in the trenches and those remaining on the fortifications. Should he be a man with a talent for declamations, he will stand proud and tall before proclaiming with a dignified wave of the hand, “Monsieur l’ennemi! Parlons.”
And they agree terms.
It is not a military manual I’m writing here, so I won’t go into the technical aspects (which I had coming out of my ears in Bazoches), measures, countermeasures, appeals, stratagems, and all manner of imponderables that might arise during a siege. But in a nutshell, these were the rules of the game.
Vauban was not the only one to set out a general method for besieging. When he was young, his great rival was Menno van Coehoorn, a Dutchman with a face more elongated than a cucumber.
Vauban and Coehoorn settled their disputes many years before Longlegs Zuvi was even born. In fact, it was already history when I came to Bazoches, with both men nearing the ends of their lives. But two distinct schools of thought came to be named after them, two entirely opposed ways of conceiving a military siege.
The system Coehoorn devised, it might be said, was the obverse of Vauban’s. For Vauban, storming a fortified place was a rational undertaking, informed by almost all the disciplines with which humankind has shaped the world. For Coehoorn, it was a stunning act of extreme violence.
Coehoorn is said to have compared the siege to removing a molar—painful but quickly over, the quicker, the better. According to the Dutchman, the besieger ought to concentrate on the weakest, or least well defended, point in the fortifications. Once this had been identified, hurl everything at it and break through it in one savage onslaught. At night, if possible, using the element of surprise, exploiting any weakness the besieged side has failed to take into account. Nothing else mattered.
Theorists across Europe divided into two camps, and impassioned arguments ensued: the supporters of the attack à la Vauban and those who preferred it à la Coehoorn. Needless to say, I was on Vauban’s side; unavoidably, intellectually, we become our teachers’ children. And my view has always been that, at root, there isn’t much to take from the Coehoorn school. The idea that what the enemy needs is a good cosh to the head—any thug could come up with that. Hard-line Coehoornians would come back with the argument that war is simple, radically simple. In reply, I would say this is to negate two thousand years of developments in the science of war. A humanist edifice was constructed upon Vauban’s foundations; Coehoorn merely encouraged rashness.
The Coehoornians had another, more scientific argument, which therefore held more weight. They claimed, with reason but unreasonably, that Vauban’s method always drew things out. “Agreed,” they would say, “a city besieged according to Vauban’s model will inevitably fall within ten, twenty, or thirty days. But in that time a great many things could happen: Epidemics might break out within the besieger’s enclosed camp; reinforcements might arrive; the adversary might lay siege to one of our cities, turning it into an exchange of kingdoms, or any other diplomatic imponderable obliging us to suspend the siege.”
Coehoorn’s detractors, in turn, pointed to the risks involved in such a premature thrust. If successful, it would indeed see an end to the siege before it had formally become that. But if it failed? You ended up with a carpet of dead bodies, the city intact, and the defenders’ morale sky-high.
Clearly, the debate turned on certain irreconcilable principles, endless fodder for the dispute. Vaubanians and Coehoornians, two schools that would never see eye to eye. Once a Maganon was a Coehoornian, he would always be one, and vice versa. The debate never ended. The problem being that these rational theories were also at cross-purposes with individuals’ self-interest.
Your young and ambitious general, for instance, would tend to be a Coehoornian. What did it matter to him to sacrifice five hundred, a thousand, or two thousand lives in a reckless attack? Coehoornians sought glory, and after all, they wouldn’t be the ones having to cross those labyrinths of stone, those unforgiving ditches and steep scarpment walls. By contrast, and though they were little educated in the matter, footsoldiers were outright Vaubanians. Out of self-interest! The thing is that Vauban was no military man. He never was. The engineer in him always governed the soldier. At the first siege he was in charge of, he addressed not his generals but the rank and file: “Sweat for me, and I will save you having to bleed.” Sweat instead of blood. That was the heart of it.
Coehoorn accused Vauban of being spineless; Vauban bra
nded Coehoorn a brute. In private, after the Dutchman’s reference to pulling teeth, Vauban referred to him as “the Dentist.” And their rivalry went beyond the merely intellectual: Vauban once even laid siege to a fortress commanded by Coehoorn! In 1692, this was, at Namur.
What brought particular renown to the duel was that the Beast was there watching. Louis XIV was there, and as king, he was the attacking army’s general in chief. He witnessed the spectacle with his royal buttocks comfortably seated on a litter, an awning over him, and refreshments at hand, since he had delegated command to Vauban. If things went badly, it would be the fault of the subordinate. (Kings, all of them, are callous self-serving swine. Always have been, always will be!)
Well, in spite of the fact that Coehoorn had a heavily manned and battle-hardened garrison to count on, the city fell in precisely twenty-two days. Not a day longer. Driving home the victory was that Vauban had twenty times fewer dead. Vauban once managed to take a city with only twenty-seven dead or wounded! The rank and file adored him. At Namur’s surrender, the Beast couldn’t help but grimace owlishly when the troops who usually would have been cannon fodder—still alive, thanks to Vauban—cheered far more loudly for Vauban than their own king. Soldiers may be simple, but they are not stupid.
Namurcum captum. Could there ever have been a more total victory or a more humiliating defeat? As a matter of fact, there could. Vauban showed mercy to Coehoorn in the only way a righteous person could: showing such indulgence as to raise up the generous giver and belittle the receiver. The keys to the city were handed to him by Coehoorn himself, whose cucumber face looked longer and waxier than ever. Vauban abstained from unnecessary humiliations; the garrison was allowed to leave Namur honorably. The Frenchman showed extreme courtesy in renaming the citadel where his enemy had made his last stand as Fort Coehoorn. A monument to gentlemanliness. Looked at another way, it could be seen as a way of commemorating his great rival’s defeat, wouldn’t you say?
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