by John Mosier
Welcome to the official histories of the Great War. As the man in charge of the French army’s archives observed after the war was over,
Here is how one will write history in fifty years, when, the witnesses having died, conscientious historians, anxious to go to good sources, will read the archives of the headquarters. Immediately shout at them: “Beware! Danger!” Let’s put them on guard against this vast enterprise of attenuation of the truth that I myself saw accomplished, day by day, right before my eyes. And if they do not keep this in mind, they will make us question the history entire.8
When the man who is keeping the official records tells you to be wary of depending on them, there is indeed a problem. And even the most cursory glance at how the Allied high commands massaged reality shows a fascinating pattern.
The one unquestioned success of the war for the French high command, the Grand Quartier Général, was its success in spinning events. A comparison of what actually happened with the official claim results in mixed feelings: anger at the outrageousness of the claim, tempered with a certain professional admiration for how brilliant the deception was.
Ingeniously, the French spoke of assaults on ridges or hilltops as though the only objective were to plant the flag on the highest point, as though their infantry were playing a football game in which it was only necessary to get the ball over the goal line. That in fact they never were able to stay on the crest, or that, militarily speaking, the highest point was irrelevant, was blandly ignored. When the French spoke of German attacks, they employed the same device in reverse. The chapters that follow will provide fascinating and horrifying examples of how this was done, and, as was the case above with the brief remarks of Jean Bernier, it is difficult to convey, in translation, the choking and bitter anger with which those who were there speak of the real war.
The skeptical reader is entitled to ask how is it that we can be so sure that all this was done. Generally speaking, the evidence is archaeological. When, for example, one hikes up the Hartmannswillerkopf in the Vosges, and stands on the plateau, the ludicrousness of the GQG’s claim that the army had gained a great victory by getting to the crest is painfully apparent. All that can be seen is a sort of misshapen battleship in concrete, a forest of German blockhouses and pillboxes, all of them still intact—as they were during the war.
The clusters of dates on grave markers in cemeteries, the existence of monuments, the remnants of entrenchments still visible in the dense woods, the perspectives to be seen from certain elevations, all provide a valuable corrective to the bland assertions of the high commands.
And in the case of the French, there are numerous accounts by privileged witnesses, as well as intensive and highly critical analyses by men who were experts as well as veterans. Like the massive fortifications of all different sizes and shapes, everything is still there. Buried somewhere, but a matter of the record.
But the official stories have all been duly enshrined, and have the considerable virtue of simplifying complex and unpleasant events into satisfying tales. In the course of this book, the reader will find numerous examples, each one of which is explained in detail, but here is an excellent summary of the whole scheme of misrepresentation.
The reports passed on to the ministers were, as we all realized much later, grossly misleading. Victories were much overstated. Virtual defeats were represented as victories, however limited their scope. Our casualties were understated. Enemy losses became pyramidal. That was the way the military authorities presented the situation to Ministers—that was their active propaganda in the Press. All disconcerting and discouraging facts were suppressed in the reports received from the front by the War Cabinet—every bright feather of success was waved and flourished in our faces.9
The man who wrote those lines was neither a journalist nor a historian; nor was he writing a private note. He was David Lloyd George, the prime minister of Great Britain from November 1916 on, and the passage is taken from his memoirs.
The prime minister was not the only person in authority to be deceived in this fashion. Figuring out what really happened in this war, as opposed to what the army commands claimed had happened and succeeded in having transferred into the histories of the war, is an exceedingly difficult task.
In fact, this issue of misrepresentation surfaces almost immediately, even when we restrict ourselves to the famous battle of 1916. Not only was it actually two separate battles, but the results announced by the GQG were simply untrue.
One would assume that Lloyd George, as the British prime minister, and moreover one determined to assume control over his country’s war effort, would know the truth. On the contrary, here is his appreciation of the results of the second battle, in which he summarizes what he was told: “In barely fifteen days the French Army completely wiped out the results of the grim and costly German attacks [at Verdun] which have gone on for eight months.”10
This bland statement is a minefield of mistakes, starting with the glaring one that the German offensive began at the end of February and was shut down in early July. But let us not split hairs over the matter of a few months. The real problem is more fundamental. It is absolutely not true that by the end of December the French drove the Germans back to their starting positions, and the fact that the claim was duly picked up and inserted into the historical record does not make it so.
Aha! The skeptical reader (or devotee of Alistair Horne) is likely to exclaim: where’s the proof they were lying?
As the quote from Bichet suggests, and as a later chapter will discuss in detail, we have all sorts of evidence, from cemeteries to maps, as well as an account of the battle by a French historian. Nor is it all that difficult to explain why this 1917 offensive was swept under the rug. Having loudly proclaimed that they had driven the Germans back to their starting lines at the end of December 1916, the GQG grasped the obvious point that they could hardly now claim to have launched a second offensive to retake exactly the same ground.
Of course, the fall of 1916’s French offensive had been directed against the German positions on the right bank; so some sort of justification could have been made. But the army had excellent reasons for not wanting to call attention to Verdun in 1917. Anyone who bothered to look closely would realize that the French offensive of fall 1916 was not nearly as successful as the army claimed at the time. That, despite what was claimed, the Germans still had Verdun in a chokehold.
So, although it was arguably the first completely successful French offensive of the war, the fall of 1917 battle disappeared into the proverbial memory hole. The army, having made the claim that Lloyd George accepted as true, could not very well now reveal that, actually, they hadn’t done what they had claimed. The British army command, assuming it even knew about the battle, had its own reasons for not bringing it up: the notion that the French were capable of successful offensive operations so soon after the famous mutiny of spring 1917 undercut their claim that they had been forced to shoulder the burden of the war almost entirely, owing to the collapse of the French.
The first question the researcher who begins to dig into the realities of the Western Front ponders is how it is that the army was able to hide what was happening so easily. There were three reasons why they managed to conceal the realities of the war as effectively as they did, befuddling their own government, their allies, the general population, and generations of foreign historians: a genuine geographical obscurity, absolute control over the flow of information, and wishful thinking.
THE CONFUSIONS OF GEOGRAPHY
Geographical obscurity is the simplest and also the most embarrassing, but foreigners have always had great difficulty in untangling the often bewildering names the French use to categorize their country, as the names are a mixture of the legal, the historic, and the local, so that some places have multiple names, just as a good many French towns have names that are pronounced one way by the locals, another way by their fellow cou
ntrymen, and still a third by educated foreigners.
During the war, the French high command was greatly aided by the obscurities of French geography, just as in the present day the French wine exporting industry is greatly hampered by it. Few American wine lovers know that chablis, Pouilly-Fuissée, and Mâcon-Lugny are all wines from a place called Burgundy, and that by definition they’re all made from chardonnay grapes. The first three places named are legal entities, but Burgundy is a historic name derived from the Middle Ages, when it was a separate state—called Bourguignon.
One supposes that all French wine drinkers know this, or anyway claim to know it if asked, but the truth is that French geography is confusing.
Although French army spokesmen were certainly not lying when they spoke of fighting in Lorraine or the Argonne or Champagne, such identifications were hardly helpful. By 1914 France was divided into départements, the legal administrative unit. So none of those three historic names actually existed, in the formal, or legal, sense. Lorraine, like Bourguignon, was a separate statelet, one moreover that had only been incorporated into France rather late, by Louis XIV. The Argonne, like Champagne, or the Riviera (which in French would be the Côte d’Azur), were simply traditional place names, had never existed at all—except as constructs in the minds of the people who lived there.
So if the various names had different origins, different significations, what they all had in common was that none of them could be found on any map of France done since the French Revolution of 1789.
There was no département named Lorraine, for instance, which was divided among no less than four separate administrative entities. The historic boundaries were vague, and required wading through a mass of ancient maps to uncover.
Other geographical terms were so elastic as to be meaningless. Most of the left bank of the Meuse above Saint-Mihiel was called the Argonne, which was simply the southern extension of the Ardennes, a great forest that covered (and still covers) Belgium east of the Meuse, together with much of Luxembourg.
Confusingly, however, the northernmost part of the Argonne forest in France is actually known as the Ardennes, which also happens to be the name of the département. The result, befuddling even to the natives, is bewildering to foreigners. The fact that one of Great Britain’s leading military historians has a major French river flowing west to east when the greater part of it flows south to north—and that another, almost equally respected one, seems to believe that an observer could see what was happening on the reverse slope of a ridge that was actually higher than his vantage point—suggests the nature of the problem.11
The battles of Verdun were all technically fought in Lorraine, a part of France that was hardly ever visited by Frenchmen, and, except for its historic capital of Nancy, virtually unknown. Lorraine was thus a relatively recent acquisition, and a good many of its inhabitants—perhaps as many as four out of five—didn’t even speak French.12
In 1879, the celebrated popular novelist Jules Verne wrote a multivolume series of books recounting the voyages of discovery of the great explorers. In speaking of the French ornithologist Le Vaillant, he makes the interesting observation that although he was born in Dutch Guinea, his parents were French, and he “visited Europe with them as a mere child, and traversed Holland, Germany, Lorraine, and the Vosges, on his way to Paris.”13
Lorraine was a distant and unfamiliar corner of the country: its chief cities of Metz and Nancy were over three hundred kilometers from Paris. By contrast, the German lines in Champagne and Artois were close to the French capital: Soissons was barely a third of that distance from the capital.
Moreover, there was nothing much there. Of the two historic areas that together comprised most of Lorraine, one was nothing but forest (a part of the Argonne forest, on the left bank), and the other was a vast plain, whose name (the Woëvre) was derived from a word that basically means “wet.” And indeed a good bit of it was. Aside from a string of small towns on the Meuse, there were no settlements of any real size, no reason for anyone to go there. Although the numerous small towns are as old and established as any in France (Provence excepted), Lorraine lacks the great cathedrals and monasteries that are the infallible signs of historic significance. Indeed, there is no tourism there even to this day, and the French themselves are poorly informed about the area.14
Now the French army, always precise and legalistic, was quite aware of these historic designations. They called the part of the front on the left bank immediately adjacent to Verdun the Argonne, the parallel area on the right bank the Woëvre. The same precision extended all along the 80 percent of the Western Front under French army control, with army group commands being assigned to each section, the entire front being legally designated as the Zone of the Armies, and controlled by the military.
By referring to each theater of operations by its historic and also rather vague name, the army obscured matters wonderfully. So to the historian dependent on documents, even French documents, these sections of the front immediately adjacent to Verdun are as separate, as far away, as Champagne or Artois—or the Somme.
But here’s the error, or the difficulty: these places are all intimately related.
From tip of the butte of the Vauquois in the Argonne, the great tower of the ossuary of Douaumont—the central point of the battle for the right bank—can easily be seen with the naked eye. In point of fact it is only 26 kilometers from the Vauquois to the fort of Douaumont, and only 13 kilometers from the butte to the westernmost fortification of the RFV, the ancient Poste à Bruyères.
Now, very few students of military history have heard of the Vauquois, but as chapter four explains, the German possession of it in 1914 cut off the main east–west rail line into Verdun, and the French were never able to wrest control of it until the Americans smashed through the German lines in September 1918.
American readers may well be familiar with the butte of Montfaucon, as there is a great American monument there. The largest American military cemetery in Europe, Romagne-sur-Montfaucon, is 5,250 meters to the north, and the butte itself is the next hill to the north of the Vauquois, only 8,700 meters to the northeast of the butte.15
But as the names of a good many villages testify, this section of the left bank below Verdun is still, historically, part of the Argonne. In fact, the region known as the Argonne simply wraps around the left-bank forts. But it does so literally: the Verdun positions on the left bank are basically in the Argonne.
To extend these remarks further: in spring 1916, when the Germans attacked the French positions on the left bank, they were technically fighting their way through the Argonne itself: The famous struggles for Côte 304 and the ridge of Mort Homme, were not in fact parts of Verdun, but were positions in the Argonne, about 5,200 meters north of the left-bank forts.
A similar situation prevailed on the right bank. From Point X, a famous observation site on the butte of Les Éparges, the Verdun forts of the southeastern quadrant could likewise be seen. Or they would be except that one of them has been destroyed and replaced by a waste site, and the other is a ruin deep in the forest, as are the smaller supplementary fortifications. But anyone who studies the guide on the stone pedestal at Point X can see quite easily that the fate of Les Éparges is intimately tied up with the fate of Verdun: Point X is only 12 kilometers from the ouvrage de Déramé, and only nine from the ouvrage de Jaulny. Ominously (for the French) the butte is actually to the southeast of those positions.
The area known as the Woëvre is analogous to the Argonne on the left bank: Both wrap around Verdun. As our quote from Gabriel Bichet makes clear, the fighting there was an integral part of the battles in which the Germans attempted to surround Verdun and pinch it off, and the French attempted to throw them back.
Now, these geographical designations are perfectly logical, and based on the historical names given both regions, but in using them, the army, whether deliberately or not, created a great
deal of confusion. The Woëvre is a large area that stretches from the Meuse to the Moselle rivers and from Luxembourg far to the south. The Argonne, slightly smaller, was still enormous.
Nor does it help that both areas were divided among no less than five French administrative units, or départements. A communiqué that mentioned fighting in either one was thus about as helpful as a Civil War dispatch that spoke of fighting in the Mississippi River valley.
TRUE LIES
The American or English reader may well be surprised at the idea that four-fifths of the Western Front was controlled by the French, and that our knowledge of the war there is derived almost entirely from the small piece held by the British.16 But that is indeed the case, as a correspondent for the New York Times remarked in 1915.
France has been so silent about her army and her Generals, and so indifferent to the use of journalism in the war it is scarcely realized even in France that 450 of the 500 miles of fighting front are held by the French and only the remaining 50 by the British and Belgians.17
What the correspondent for the Times failed to mention was that the secrecy and the silence were part of a deliberate policy on the part of the army. To the genuine obscurity that prevailed with regard to this part of France must be added the deliberate and highly successful attempts of the army high command to throw a veil of secrecy over everything within the zone of the armies.
When the war began in August 1914, the French and British governments—or, more precisely, the military bureaucracies of those countries—were determined that there would be no repeat of the embarrassing revelations that had characterized their earlier conflicts. There would be no independent journalists or interested civilians poking around the battlefields and drawing their own conclusions.
There would be no Florence Nightingale to expose the complacent bungling of the British War Office. The dispatches alleging great French victories over the North German Confederation in September 1870 would not be contradicted by impartial observers.