Verdun
Page 3
Nor would there be independent journalists or even educated witnesses around to point out the contrast between what was actually happening and what the government claimed was happening. There would be no counterparts to Archibald Forbes or Alfred Vizetelly or Elizabeth Latimer, recording government lies and government ineptitude.
In the Franco-Prussian War, the government had distinguished itself by fabrications, as Elizabeth Latimer, who was there, reports.
The very day of the Battle of Wörth . . . the Parisians were made the victims of an extraordinary deception. A great battle was reported, in which the Crown Prince had been made prisoner. . . . A dispatch was published, and universally accepted with confidence and enthusiasm, announcing that three German army corps had been overthrown at the Quarries of Jaumont. There are no quarries at Jaumont, there were no Prussians anywhere near the spot, and none had been defeated; but the Parisians were well satisfied.18
Alfred Vizetelly’s more general summary was as true in 1914 as it had been in 1870, when this experienced journalist and translator was on the scene. The government foisted off all sorts of deceptions on its citizens.
Most of our war-news, or, at least, the earliest intelligence of any important engagement, came to us in the fashion I have indicated, townsfolk constantly assembling outside the prefectures, subprefectures, and municipal buildings in order to read the day’s news. At times it was entirely false, at others some slight success of the French arms was magnified into a victory, and a petty engagement became a pitched battle.19
The difference this time was the controls the government announced right at the start of the war, guaranteeing that no one would be in a position to contest their claims. Whatever else the army might or might not have learned from 1870, they had absolutely learned how to control the news.
The French regulations promulgated for journalists were severe. Their draconian nature is not sufficiently understood, so the relevant portions are worth quoting in detail. On Saturday, August 15, the fourtenth day of what was called the mobilization, the American correspondent Charles Inman Barnard, an enthusiastic Francophile, recorded in his diary what had been announced. “The official regulations for war correspondents are much more severe, however, than those enforced during the Japanese and Turkish wars,” he writes.20 “In the first place, only Frenchmen and correspondents of one of the belligerent nationalities, that is to say French, British, Russian, Belgian, or Serbian, are allowed to act as war correspondents. Frenchmen may represent foreign papers.”
So until America entered the war, we were totally dependent on journalists from the Allied side. Then Barnard records the practical problems everyone faced: “All dispatches must be written in the French language and must be sent by the military post, and only after having been formally approved by the military censor” (79). There were certainly a few English journalists who spoke French, the military correspondent for the Times being an outstanding example. But very few Englishmen or Americans did, and writing a foreign language is a far different matter from speaking it well enough to get around.
But that was simply the tip of the censorship iceberg. “No dispatches can be sent by wire or by wireless telegraphy,” Barnard notes. So the military censors could hold up troublesome news items indefinitely. There were not going to be any scoops by enterprising reporters.
Nor were they going to be allowed to poke around on their own. “No correspondent can circulate in the zone of operations unless accompanied by an officer especially designated for that purpose.” The entire front—together with the areas immediately behind it—was off-limits, and this decree was rigidly enforced right up until the end of the war. When, at the war’s end, one resourceful American journalist drove through the zone and into Germany, where he was able to get an interview with Paul von Hindenburg und Beinecke, the German chief of staff, he was reprimanded, and the interview—one of the more significant documents to come out of the war—wasn’t published for ten years.21
Now comes the most draconian provision of the regulations: “All private as well as professional correspondence must pass through the hands of the censor. War correspondents of whatever nationality will, during their sojourn with the army, be subject to martial law, and if they infringe regulations by trying to communicate news not especially authorized by the official censors, will be dealt with by the laws of espionage in war time” (80).
Given that at this point in the war, the government was energetically rounding up “spies” and shooting them, this threat was hardly to be taken lightly. Nor was this all. Barnard ends his summary by writing, “These are merely a few among the many rigid prescriptions governing war correspondents” (80).
As a firm believer in the cause, Barnard adds optimistically that his French contacts “All expressed the opinion that that war correspondents would enjoy exceptional opportunities, enabling them to get mental snap-shots and to acquire valuable first-hand information for writing magazine articles and books,” but they were forced to admit that “from a newspaper standpoint there would be insurmountable difficulties preventing them from getting their ‘news to market.’” (80)
The former proved a fantasy, the latter an absolute reality. By late August 1914, the Allies controlled the front in the most absolute sense, choosing what to say and what not to say, and preventing correspondents from even talking to anyone who’d been there.
The Allied control was not simply negative. At the same time as they quashed any sort of independent reportage, the Allies published, through surrogates, an enormous flood of purportedly objective news and new analysis that spun the official government positions in convincing fashion. The British and the French governments realized, correctly, that educated men and women would view official government bulletins with a certain skepticism.
So they fostered, or created, a parallel campaign of disinformation, in which supposedly independent writers generated convincingly objective accounts that just happened to support the Allied position. The authors of one study of the subject characterize it as a deliberate attempt to “strive for the appearance of objectivity. . . . It was . . . essential to ensure a measure of credibility even for the incredible.”22
This clever strategy began early on in the war, creating an almost impenetrable barrier to any accurate understanding of what was really happening. And, unlike the propaganda used by the Bolsheviks after they came to power, the Allied efforts were skillful exercises, often resting on actual facts. They were perfect illustrations of what the great British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay had encapsulated in a memorable quip: that it was possible to write a history in which all the details were true, but the history itself was a falsehood.
Colonel Charles Repington, the war correspondent for the Times, gives us a fine picture of the result.
The ignorance of the people concerning the war, owing to the Censorship, is unbelievable. Lunching at the Hautboy [where] . . . the proprietor—a good-class intelligent looking man—told me that the Serbians were going to beat the Germans; that there was nothing in front of our Army in France; and that we were going to be in Constantinople in ten days time. These are the kind of beliefs into which the country has been chloroformed by the Censorship.23
The difficulty, of course, is that Colonel Repington, like Lloyd George and a host of other intelligent and highly privileged men, themselves had an inordinate amount of difficulty in figuring out what was true and what was part of the chloroform.
Pesky journalists were not the only people shut off from the zone. When the president of France wanted to visit his soldier constituents, he had to ask the army high command for permission. They laid on a carefully guided tour, buttressed by wonderfully optimistic reports of their progress. It was not until 1916 that carefully selected men of some reputation, such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Herbert George Wells, were given tours of the actual front.
BUREAUCRACY AND SELF-DECEPTION
Let us not, however, fall into the error of concluding that there was nothing but a cynical cover-up, that the army high command deliberately lied about the situation. Indeed, one of the keys to understanding the decisions made by the high commands is to realize the extent to which they had deceived themselves, or were being deceived.
The French historian and combat veteran (of Verdun) Jean Norton Cru provides a perfect example of how this process worked.
The combatants bring away a multitude of facts that prove the ignorance of the general staff even til this day concerning the situation on the front. . . . On 10 January 1917. The 133rd division where I was a sergeant and chief of a section took a sector of Verdun between Bezonvaux and the Chambrettes farm, ground conquered 25 days earlier. My section found itself on the extreme left, in liaison with the neighboring division, but I was not able to occupy the position because the trench, that existed on the plan at Corps, had only been traced with a pick. Our predecessors had received an imperative command to finish the trench in the week succeeding the 15 December attack.24
Given the frozen ground, the lack of decent equipment, the incidence of frostbite, it is hardly surprising that the trench hadn’t been dug—or that it wouldn’t be for some time.
In fact, as Norton Cru records, as a result, for three months there was a two-hundred-meter gap in the French line, with absolutely nothing there for a defensive position. As he was well aware from his research, this example is a telling one. Over the course of this book, we will see numerous examples of catastrophic failures caused by the ignorance of the various levels of command as to what was actually taking place at the front.
Norton Cru uses this example to support a larger point, the same one made by Jean de Pierrefeu, the army’s archivist. We should be extremely wary of official documents. True, they were based on reports from the front, but as they passed upward, they were subjected to four or five “redactions,” in which the basic observations were transformed to suit the views of those in command.
Raymond Poincaré, president of France, puts it rather elegantly. Speaking of how the war was going in the Argonne, he enunciates a syllogism: “At headquarters they say that everything is fine, we’re having great success. At army group headquarters, they say, yes, there’s progress, but it’s slow. Down at the corps level, where they’re actually fighting the Germans, the commanding general tells me ‘we’re losing a hundred meters a month; the Germans are devouring us, the letters from the soldiers are deeply discouraged.’”25
As these two examples make clear, decisions were being made based on an alternative reality where losing was transformed into winning, and lines traced by picks became defended trenches. Notice as well that we have now moved from what the army would like the general public to believe was happening to what they believed was happening: self-deception with a vengeance.
In fact, there was a synergism at work here. The army high command, fed by reports that became progressively more optimistic as they made their way up from the front, fortified by wonderfully precise and detailed intelligence reports—whose only fault was that they were completely wrong—really believed that they could win the war with only one more additional increment. One more offense, one more ally, one more division, one more month, would see victory.
This idea, deeply held by the army commands, created another sort of self-perpetuating cycle. Early on in the war, by December 1914 in fact, the hapless civilians in both governments, resigned to what they perceived as a stalemate in the west, began arguing for an expansion of the war effort to other theaters. The Anglo-French landing on the Turkish coast is for most American readers the most notorious, and it certainly encapsulates the futility of much of what the Allies did. However, it is not an isolated example. In terms of diversion of resources, the French adventure in Greece is probably more significant.
The point here, however, is that as the two governments pried resources away from their respective army high commands, sending them off to the Balkans, to Africa, and finally to Italy, they unwittingly provided both the British and the French military leadership with the perfect alibi, allowing them to adopt a classic passive-aggressive behavior.
At the same time, the army chiefs, knowing their horrible losses, may be forgiven for clinging to slender reeds, or for even going completely into absolute denial. Colonel Repington provides a perfect example of how the denial worked. On August 4, 1916, he met with General William Robertson, who had been going over the casualty reports. The general told him that
We had had about 150,000 casualties in France, which were certainly very heavy, but that 60,000 of these had happened on the first day [of the Battle of the Somme], and that we now had not lost lately more than 20,000 a week. . . . The enemy had suffered 750,000 casualties in the course of the past two months on all fronts. We went into these figures, which included the 382,000 mainly Austrian prisoners. . . . (1.298)
Given that the first day on the Somme saw more British soldiers killed than in all the country’s previous wars put together, Robertson can be forgiven for taking refuge in the idea that German losses were much worse. As a caring, compassionate human being, that is; as a member of the high command, however, he should have been able to see what the numbers were saying, as Colonel Repington was gently trying to remind him.
When he spoke of the “last two months,” Robertson could only be referring to June and either May or July. Given the date of August 4, it is difficult to believe he already had the German data for July, but even if he did, since his figures were, as he admitted, for “all fronts,” and hence included German losses at Verdun during the heaviest period of the 1916 fighting, as well as on the eastern front and in the Balkans, simple arithmetic suggested the distinct possibility that German losses were equal to or lower than British losses, and that in the worst possible case, he had no German data for the Somme at all.
Moreover, although British writers sometimes fail to make this clear, the Somme was a joint offensive. By early August the French were winding down their part of it, General Émile Fayolle, one of the few competent French commanders, having come to the conclusion that a further continuation would be futile. Now Robertson surely had to know that this was a joint offensive. Even if he had not been given any French casualty figures for their part of the Somme, the reasonable assumption would have been that their losses were about the same as the British losses.
So: 150,000 times 2 is 300,000; and 750,000 minus 382,000 is 368,000, a simple conclusion that is far from reassuring—especially since we’re comparing German losses on all fronts with Allied losses on one section of the front.
Put that way, the error seems blindingly obvious. But in order to understand how the Allies fought the war, they must be allowed exactly this error, because they made it over and over again. At the peak of the 1916 battle for Verdun, André Maginot did an even more basic arithmetic for his colleagues in the Chamber of Deputies: the total of German losses on all fronts was either the same as or less than French losses on the Western front.26 His announcement caused an uproar, as well it might.
THE UNKNOWN BATTLES FOR VERDUN
Now that the extent to which information about the war was manipulated, distorted, or simply suppressed entirely is known, it is easy to see why minor embarrassments like the 1917 battle for Verdun were simply omitted from the record.
But that is only the beginning. There was a whole series of battles for Verdun, all of them completely hidden from view. The 1916 German offensive was the exception, but, as we shall see, that was through no fault of the French high command: They did everything possible to manipulate the situation—everything possible except defeating their opponents.
Now comes the more complicated part of our enumeration. During the war, it was widely remarked that the preferred German tactic was envelopment. This was hardly news: the German army had incorporated the idea of the flank attack, the aufrollen, into its doctrines back in 1888.27 That is
to say that whenever possible, they tried to work around the front of their opponents, delivering their main thrust either to one flank, or, ideally, to both flanks (a double envelopment). If perfectly executed, the enemy would find himself completely surrounded, could then be destroyed at a relatively low cost to the attackers. In theory, an enemy so surrounded might simply quit.
As the eminent British military theorist and historian Basil Liddell Hart points out, this was, on a grand scale, what the Germans attempted in August 1914.28 More precisely, they attempted two double envelopments, one around Verdun, the other aiming to surround the bulk of the French forces farther to the west.
The idea of envelopment, like its close relation the flank attack, was hardly a novel idea. Hannibal had done it to the Romans, Napoleon had done it to the Mamluks in Egypt, and if the recent study of Gettysburg is correct, Lee was attempting it against Meade. This latter example suggests the difficulty: even a single envelopment or flank attack is difficult to execute successfully, much less the classical double envelopment attributed to Hannibal.
As we shall see in chapter three, Verdun was not the sort of position that an army would wish to attack head-on if it could be helped (the question of why the Germans did just that in 1916 is another complicated affair that is explained in chapter seven). So it is hardly surprising that the Germans first tried this alternative rather than attacking the forts directly.
In August–September 1914, they did exactly that: Two separate German armies tried to envelop Verdun, pinch it off at the base. They came extremely close, were probably only thwarted by the general retreat that was ordered on 12 September 1914.
But the Germans retreated to positions on the left bank that still left them in place to stop the flow of supplies into Verdun, as they could interdict the main rail line into what was now a slight bulge or salient projecting into the German lines.