Verdun

by John Mosier

  The Austrians by now had shelled enough forts to understand the physical and psychological effects on the garrison as they huddled in their cavelike shelters, trying to figure out whether they’d suffocate for lack of air, be poisoned by fumes, be buried alive, or, perhaps more mercifully, be blown to bits. So the next day, the Germans thoughtfully asked the garrison whether they were ready to surrender.

  Now, the commander of Troyon, a lowly captain named Heym, was well aware of the consequences of the surrender of the fort. He refused the offer, the shelling began again, and that evening, the Germans tried an actual assault. They moved cautiously, unwilling to risk heavy losses, and retired when they realized the defenders were not about to quit without a fight.

  So the next day the shelling resumed, with Paroches and Genicourt firing in the general direction of Troyon and hoping to hit something. Although the French 120-millimeter gun had a decent range, it suffered from the defect common to any mechanical recoil weapon that was being fired over any distance: The movement of the gun as it recoiled when fired made it impossible to land successive rounds with any accuracy.

  Heym was determined to hold out, as General Michel Coutanceau, the commander of Verdun, was scraping together troops from the garrison to come to Heym’s relief. The Austrians kept on shelling, and by 12 September, the fort recorded ten separate barrages. But by this time, the relief column was arriving. Their approach coincided with the general order to retreat. But Heym was still holding out in the rubble.

  It is not much of an exaggeration to say that this obscure officer played the role of the proverbial Dutch boy who put his finger in the dike. If Troyon had fallen, most of the French defenders on the left bank would have been trapped, and it is quite possible that this, the first battle for Verdun, would have then become the last and only. Sadly, Heym, a true hero of the first weeks of the war, did not live long enough to see his feat recognized. He was killed a few weeks later, in the desperate French attempts to defend Marchéville, in the Woëvre, and few remember his name, even among specialists.

  His death was to prove doubly unfortunate for the French. As one of the few historians to recognize Heym’s feat remarks, “As goes the chief, so goes the fort.”5 And if Heym had lived he could have spoken out against the delusions of the French high command regarding the weakness of the forts. Troyon was old, had never been upgraded. But Heym held out.

  To elaborate on this notion from the other side: it is anyone’s guess whether or not the crown prince, commander of the German Fifth Army, or his Bavarian counterpart, in command of the Sixth, would have retreated so obediently to the north in response to the general retreat ordered by von Moltke if they had maintained their stranglehold on Verdun.

  This idea may seem peculiar to the reader who has been given the somewhat distorted idea that the German army operated on principles of robotic obedience. To a certain extent that was true for ordinary soldiers—as in theory it is in any army. But it was hardly true for field-grade commanders. In 1870, von Moltke the Elder had been frequently frustrated by the actions of his subordinate generals. More than once he found himself in the same position as Lee or Grant, scrambling to try to figure out what they were actually doing, his only certitude being that they definitely weren’t doing what he had told them to do. Von Moltke the Younger had ejected Kaiser Wilhelm from army maneuvers because he was disruptive, and as we shall see, his successor, Erich von Falkenhayn, had the devil’s own time with Paul von Hindenburg. And this despite the fact that von Falkenhayn was his superior and in theory the supreme commander of the German army.

  The commanders of the two German armies involved followed their orders not because they were blindly obedient, but because by 12 September, the battlefield situation was a stalemate. Moreover, since their colleagues were retreating, they faced the prospect of having to continue a battle against an enemy whose strength was growing.

  There is no question that eventually Troyon would have been neutralized. Either the garrison would have surrendered, or the fort wrecked to the point that, like the hapless Belgians at Liège, they were powerless to stop the Germans from flowing around them.

  But Séré de Rivières had never intended his scheme to result in impregnable fortifications. The whole design was predicated on buying time, and that was exactly what Troyon had done. It had held out long enough for a relief column to be approaching, which was all that could be asked of it. In fact, given its condition, it had done much more than that.

  There had always been questions about the extent to which the Malmaison trials of 1888 had been a fair test. The engineers had always felt that the artillery had been allowed to operate much closer to the fort than would have actually been the case in a real-world situation. And, as we have seen, when, in 1908, there was a repeat test, at Fort Antoine, that structure proved considerably more resistant.

  Troyon had received 200 direct hits from Austrian guns, and 2,800 from smaller ones. The damage to the fort was severe, but Heym had only five men killed and 23 wounded. The system definitely worked. Unfortunately, as we shall see, no one at headquarters was paying any attention to what was happening on the heights of the Meuse.

  THE SECOND BATTLE FOR VERDUN: (1) THE ARGONNE

  The order for the general retreat was Helmuth von Moltke’s last order as German chief of staff. In the German system, the man at the top paid for the failure of his plans, a sensible approach that the Allies would have done well to follow. A. J. P. Taylor’s caustic remark speaks to the central paradox: “The French had lost most of their coal supplies, all their iron fields, and much of their heavy industry. Joffre, strangely, came out with an enhanced reputation which kept him in supreme command for two more years.”6 Even more strangely, over the next decades, British military historians used von Moltke the Younger for rhetorical target practice, probably to deflect attention away from the inadequacies of their own generals.

  Meanwhile, back in the real world of early September 1914, von Moltke’s successor was Erich von Falkenhayn. As minister of war, he had been following events carefully, and he lost no time in redirecting German strategy in the west. On 18 September, he ordered a new envelopment of Verdun. The main effort would be on the right bank, but Fifth Army would also see what it could do in the Argonne, where the French Third Army was still licking its wounds from Revigny.

  The French were caught off guard by the idea of an offensive on this side of the Meuse. The heavily forested, tough terrain of the Argonne was the kind of landscape that European armies liked to avoid. Nor was the section of the front a small piece of it. The Argonne front by itself was approximately the same size as the section held by the BEF in 1915.7

  Trees posed unique problems for the armies of 1914. Wherever possible, of course, gunners liked to set their batteries up so that the position was screened by trees. Given the rather primitive nature of aerial reconnaissance, a small wooded area could provide excellent cover, even during the winter, and the guns could be aimed up through the branches. Provided, of course, that we are talking about guns with a high enough angle of fire, which the majority of French weapons were not. Then a site on the edge of a forest, so the guns were firing out across an open field, was the best choice.

  The real problem began, however, when the shell tried to descend through the tree canopy at the other end, and its descent was obstructed—temporarily—by branches and trunks. The result was minimal accuracy. Shells went off course, plunged deep into the wet ground, or burst too high in the air. The ideal ending for a shell was to explode either right on contact with the target, or directly above it. In the former case, it would destroy the target itself, while in the latter, the blast would destroy the people beneath.

  Then too it was difficult to observe where the shell actually fell. Indirect fire was totally dependent on gunner-observer coordination, the observers providing continuous feedback on the initial shots. The realistic objective was one long, one short, and then
a rapid-fire barrage right on the target. But when the shell exploded beneath the tree canopy, it was next to impossible to spot it accurately. And even if the impact was observed, it was quite possible that the fall had been deflected, and the observer’s correction would walk the gunners away from, rather than into, their target.

  Heavily wooded areas were problematic for machine gunners as well. For their weapons to be effective, they needed large, unimpeded spaces for the weapon to traverse with its fire. So the Argonne appeared to be an area where the German advantages in matériel, especially in artillery, would be largely offset by the terrain.

  It should be pointed out that the barren landscapes that immediately come to mind when we think of this war are all derived from photographs taken after the fighting had been raging in that area for months, sometimes years. But it took a surprisingly long time for all the trees of a forest to be destroyed, a fact that was true from the Argonne all the way down through the Vosges.8

  There were stretches in Lorraine with open fields, but the heavily forested, rugged landscape of the Argonne was duplicated on the right bank of the RFV, while the ridges that led from the Argonne to the Meuse were also heavily forested, as were most elevations of the Vosges.

  And it was true that initially the Germans had tough going. In their initial offensive of 23 September, the Germans had taken a reasonable piece of the forest.9 But by the twenty-eighth, French resistance had stiffened, and then, on 2 October 1914, the French began their own attacks, the success of which created a kind of salient into the German line, centered around Bagatelle and Saint-Hubert.

  The Argonne was handed over to General Karl Bruno Julius von Mudra, a spry sexagenarian with handlebar mustaches, who had been the military governor of Metz, and the head of the German combat engineers, the Pioniere. Like von Falkenhayn, von Mudra’s approach was to take incremental steps, carefully planned, and certain of results. Under his leadership, the Pioniere became not merely a combat force, but one equipped with weaponry that no other army possessed.

  The most famous of these was the Minenwerfer, what in Anglo-American infantry parlance would be called mortars. In the early days of the recoil revolution, the French and the Germans categorized artillery pieces according to a ratio between the length of the barrel and its diameter. Below 10, the weapon was a mortar; if it was longer than 20, it was a gun, while anything between the two was called a howitzer.10 This was a practical distinction with all sorts of implications, obvious to anyone with a knowledge of Newtonian mechanics, or gunners, but somewhat confusing to everyone else. Short barrels not only meant short ranges, but allowed for a nearly vertical angle of fire.

  Think of the shell as going almost straight up and then coming down at the near vertical. By contrast, guns (to use the definition above) fired their shells in much flatter trajectories. A simple example: If soldiers were sheltering behind a building or a ridge, shells fired from guns would pass harmlessly overhead, or crash into the solid barrier they were behind. But a shell fired from a mortar would land directly on them, and in many instances, depending on the nature of the obstacle, so would a howitzer shell.

  There was a final twist to all this, which again was a function of basic physics. A shorter range meant less stress on the shell as well as the weapon. In consequence, a mortar shell could have a much greater explosive payload, and that, in accordance with another basic physical law, meant that its blast radius was substantially more lethal. It was like having a satchel of dynamite thrown at you.

  Under von Mudra’s guidance, the Pioniere were equipped with mortars in two sizes: 17 and 25 centimeters. The relatively low stresses involved, when coupled with the high angle of fire, made for a much flimsier mechanism, so these weapons could be manhandled into position. Get close enough, and a 17-centimeter mortar shell would wreak havoc almost unimaginable.

  The idea was simple enough, and after a few years of combat, everyone had infantry mortars. The French soldiers even had a slang term for them, les crapouillots. But in August 1914, only the Pioniere had these weapons. Nor was that all. They also had rather primitive inflammable projectors, which by 1916 had become the infamous flamethrower.

  Perhaps more important than the existence of such practical infantry weapons was that German doctrine, with its emphasis on pure firepower, meant that Pioniere, like machine gunners, were deployed along with riflemen.

  Given von Mudra’s background, one would expect him to be an advocate of a war in which explosives replaced men, and this was exactly his approach to fighting in the Argonne. On 21 September, his Sixteenth Army Corps, supported by a huge inventory of artillery, attacked the French Third Army units on a relatively narrow front of about 15 kilometers. At that point in time, the German position was anchored on the butte of Montfaucon and Varennes.

  The German offensive can best be thought of as a slowly closing door, the hinge, or pivot, being the Meuse itself. The end result would be to force the defenders back, opening up a gap, and ultimately collapsing them back toward the Meuse itself. An ambitious plan, but it was hardly necessary to achieve it in its entirety. The sort of step-by-step increments that von Mudra preferred would work perfectly.

  The main west–east railroad into Verdun was only a few thousand meters to the south of the German lines. Once the Germans got to a certain point in their advance, they could interdict the railroad line without going any farther. Most of the railroad was about twenty kilometers to the south, but there was a curve, or loop, known as the Aubreville curve, because at the village of that name, the line jogged north.

  Now, only a short distance away, due north, was a large butte called the Vauquois. Observers on the crest of this hill could easily call down artillery fire on the railroad. There was a small village on the butte, so it was a fine defensive position.

  Unfortunately, the French failed to grasp this basic point. Their fear, which was quite understandable, was that the Germans would break through the Argonne forest entirely. So when the German attack began, Maurice Sarrail, the French general commanding the Third Army, directed all his efforts to staving off the leading edge of the door, which was through a densely forested part of the Argonne called the Bois de la Gruerie.

  Sarrail is a controversial figure, about whom more later, but at this point it is enough to say, in his defense, that he had figured out the German predilection for flanking attacks, understood that if they broke through the Gruerie and got around his left flank, it would be Revigny all over again, only worse, because by September 21, most French units under his command were still recovering from their losses, were short of ammunition—particularly artillery shells—and were desperately short of men.

  Von Mudra’s approach was simple. Although he was only an army corps commander, he probably had more heavy artillery at his disposal than the entire French army. In September 1914, the only long-recoil weapon the French had in service was the 75-millimeter gun. Their heavy artillery consisted exclusively of the 120– and 155-millimeter guns from 1878, mechanical recoil weapons incapable of the high-angle fire that the terrain on both sides of the Meuse required.

  No army had anything like the German 21-centimeter howitzer. The French firm of Schneider was developing a long-recoil 105-millimeter howitzer, which was going into service, so officially, or technically, the French army did possess a weapon that was the equivalent of the German 10.5– and 15-centimeter howitzers. But in August 1914, the French inventory of heavy guns, as listed by Joffre himself, came down to this:

  The bottom line was, that at the beginning of August 1914 . . . as heavy artillery for the army we had 104 Rimailho 155 [millimeter] Shorts divided into 26 batteries, 96 Bacquet 120 [millimeter] cannons divided into 15 batteries, and 20 batteries of 120 [millimeter] Longs either pulled by motors or traction engines. On the other side, Germany aligned: 360 10 centimeter guns, 360 13 centimeter guns, 128 21 centimeter howitzers, for a total of 838 pieces.11

  As is ofte
n the case with the memoirs of the leading participants, the actual situation was much worse than Joffre lets on. The French commander in chief neglects to mention that while French divisions had only 75-millimeter guns, their German counterparts each possessed 18 10.5-centimeter howitzers, while each army corps had at its disposal 16 additional 15-centimeter howitzers.

  When it came to firepower, the French were totally outgunned. So saying that von Mudra had more heavy artillery at his disposal than the entire French army is not an exaggeration. Unfortunately for his opponent, it was the truth.

  On 19 September, German shells descended precisely onto the French positions, simply erasing them. Then the infantry cautiously moved in and occupied the wreckage.

  Every 24 to 36 hours, the process was repeated. By 26 September, von Mudra had advanced roughly eight kilometers on a front of roughly 20, had captured the chief town of the region, Varennes-en-Argonne. More important, his troops had occupied the Vauquois, and had a solid front that extended on both flanks of the butte. Paradoxically, given its importance, the Germans had taken it easily, mainly because the French infantry defending it had not been told how important it was.

  One of the advantages of the new long-recoil high-angle-of-fire heavy guns was that truly accurate indirect fire was possible. Once the gunners hit a train, as confirmed by the observers on the butte, they could duplicate the shot almost precisely. Railroad tracks were small targets, but they suffered the disability of not being able to move out of the way. Nor could a train traveling along them.

  In consequence the only way the French could get trains into Verdun from the west was at night, and even that was risky. The eventual solution was to lay down new track, safely out of range of observers and their guns. But for the moment (strangely, the moment went on for several years), the Germans had half of a stranglehold on Verdun.