by John Mosier
On the left bank, German possession of the butte of the Vauquois enabled them to interdict the main rail line at Aubreville, as we have seen, and as Joffre admitted in the passage above. The counterpart of the Vauquois, on the right bank, was the much larger butte of Les Éparges. The strategic importance there, however, was completely different from its companion on the other side of the river. In some measure it was the obverse of the Vauquois.
If the French could eject the Germans from the butte, their observers would have a commanding view of the whole plain of the Woëvre from Verdun all the way over to Buzy, and would in theory be able to keep the Germans from reinforcing their positions in the Woëvre, and thus mounting further attacks against the French positions along the heights of the Meuse.
There is, of course, a point at which the comparison breaks down. There was nothing theoretical about the German control of the Vauquois; they had the butte, had essentially stopped the rail traffic, as Joffre admits. But the advantage to the French if they could eject the Germans from Les Éparges was totally about potential. It would only confer an advantage if two distinct and entirely separate possibilities occurred.
The butte was important to the French if there was a major offensive effort across the section of the Woëvre that the butte surveyed, a large, relatively flat area that stretched from the southeastern quadrant of Verdun all the way over to Buzy. Theoretically the Germans might launch another offensive against the heights of the Meuse or even against Verdun itself. Conversely, there could be a major French offensive on the right bank that required the Germans to rush in reinforcements.
In those cases, command of the butte could be important for the French. Provided, of course, that they could amass the heavy artillery for observers to direct. Unfortunately, that was precisely what the army absolutely could not manage. Three months into the war, the army did not have the right guns. It had hardly any guns of any sort. It had hardly any shells for the few guns it possessed, and it had no easy way of making more.
THE HIGH-EXPLOSIVES SHORTAGE
The French deficiency is so appalling, so startling, that one’s initial inclination is to retort that it couldn’t possibly be true. Alas, it was all too true.
As explained in the previous chapter, the French army had begun the war with a very small inventory of heavy guns in service, and the number of hydraulic-recoil, high-angle-of-fire weapons in service was essentially zero.
Although the standard field gun, the famous 75, was clearly the best weapon of its class, it had an inherent design weakness: the gun tube could be elevated to a maximum of only 16 degrees. The old mechanical-recoil heavy guns of the 1870s that formed the rest of the army’s artillery park suffered from this same deficiency, albeit to a lesser degree.
Whatever Joffre’s faults, he was not entirely stupid. There is no reason to doubt his postwar claim that he was quite aware of the problem: “The heights of the Meuse posed a problem not resolvable by the [flat] trajectory of the 75, as there existed all along those steep hills a dead zone with considerable angles that our guns would not be able to reach,” is how he put it in his memoirs.4
As far back as 1910, he had been lobbying for the development of howitzers and mortars like those the Germans had. His lack of success in this matter is not entirely, or perhaps mainly, his fault. The procurement and development of weaponry for the army involved a maze of competing bureaucracies, and the situation was not helped by the fact that the various governments changed ministers of war like a cocotte putting on new stockings. In the forty years preceding the start of the war (1875–1914), there were no less than 40 men in the position—and 17 chiefs of staff.5
So the development of modern artillery sputtered and stalled, and when the war began, the French were pretty much in the position of a man who brings a knife to a gunfight.
France did, however, at least in theory, possess an impressive artillery park. It consisted of approximately 3,500 vintage 120– and 155-millimeter guns that dated from the late 1870s, known generically in France as system De Bange, even though not all of them used the breech mechanism that had given rise to the sobriquet. That total could be supplemented by another 3,000 90-millimeter field guns, the weapon that the 75 had replaced.
These weapons were all mechanical-recoil guns, and the larger pieces had to be modified so they would be mobile. Mounting them on a wheeled carriage was no great feat, but it took time. As a result, by January 1915, the army had fewer than 700 pieces of heavy artillery in service. Almost all of these guns were the older, mechanical-recoil weapons.
The numbers gradually increased, and by the end of 1915, there were nearly 2,000 of these guns available. However, this was a stopgap measure at best, since the improvised mount restricted the angle of the barrel, so the problem that Joffre had noted still remained. All through the war there were areas of the German lines the French could therefore never reach with their artillery.
Moreover, as the weeks passed, the original arsenal of 75s was steadily shrinking: guns were captured, disabled, or simply wore out. Gunners all know, or are supposed to know, that the barrels of their weapons gradually wear out. The greater the force of the explosion that drives the shell up the barrel, the greater the wear. Although ultimately the effect of the wear is lethal (for the gun crew), long before that time the accuracy of the gun begins to be affected, and over long distances, the error becomes considerable—just as it would be for a mechanical-recoil weapon.
The 75 was an excellent gun, but it was a complex mechanism, largely built by hand, one piece at a time. Production was barely able to keep up with the wastage, and the problem was exacerbated by the army’s discovery that it needed many more guns than it had envisioned. The only way the French could manage was to rely more and more on the older field gun, the 95.
The 95 was the weapon that the 75 had replaced: a mechanical-recoil weapon with a very slow rate of fire. By the standards of 1914 it was a woefully inadequate weapon, and it created a considerable supply difficulty. Since the 75 was the standard divisional artillery, the supply chain was simplified to one artillery shell, which existed in two versions: high-explosive and shrapnel. But now the supply chain not only had to increase dramatically the rate of flow of shells to the gunners, but it had to deal with another kind of shell.
The shortage of modern heavy weapons was actually only the tip of the iceberg. Before the war, the government had refused to appropriate money to allow the army to maintain the shell inventory the gunners reckoned they needed. When Joffre had taken over at GQG, the theoretical figure was from 700 to 1,200 shells per gun (depending on the caliber of weapon). Joffre had raised it up to a higher range (1,200 to 1,500). When the staff looked at how much ammunition was being expended in the two Balkan wars, they realized that their figures were way off: The actual inventory should be around 3,000 shells per gun. But when the war began, the inventory was 1,390 shells per gun.6
In short, the gunners soon ran low on shells, a problem exacerbated by the inaccuracy of their ancient weapons: They had to fire many more shells to effect the same amount of damage a shell from a modern artillery piece would cause. This is not a theoretical observation. In actual field tests, it was established that at a range of between 2,000 and 3,000 meters, it took five field gun shells to reach the same level of accuracy as two howitzer shells, while at shorter or longer ranges the ratio went up still higher.7
These field tests were conducted using modern, long-recoil weapons. In the case of indirect fire using a mechanical-recoil gun such as the French 120-millimeter (vintage 1878), the term accuracy was meaningless. Shells were fired off in the general direction of the enemy, and the gunners hoped for the best.
So the French, dependent on elderly weapons of entirely the wrong type, therefore needed a great many more shells than the Germans did, but, paradoxically, they had far fewer.
The situation was made more difficult still by a rather obscure techn
ical point. The basic explosive ingredient required for a shell was, as we have seen, TNP, trinitrophenol. To make TNP, the manufacturer needs phenol, which is derived from coal. Unlike Germany, Belgium, and England, France does not have an abundance of coal. It hardly has any at all, and by October 1914, what coal the French had was all safely behind the German lines—as was most of Belgium. In the years before the war, the French simply imported what they required from their neighbors, that is, from Belgium and Germany.8 So now the government had to find stable, long-term sources of raw materials for its high explosives. Most of France’s steel manufacturing was in the same place as the coal mines, so the French had to outsource their raw materials.
Some of the shortfall could be made up by the British, but their armaments industry was already straining to equip their own troops, so both countries looked across the Atlantic for help. Although officially neutral, the Wilson administration simply turned a blind eye to the whole affair, and a steady stream of munitions began to flow across the Atlantic. The extent of this trade was concealed at both ends, along with a good many other equally disturbing facts, and to this day it is extremely difficult to get a handle on the dimensions of the trade.
Now, as we shall see in the next chapter, France’s dependency on America, its woeful shortage of artillery and artillery shells, definitely had an impact on what happened at Verdun. It was already beginning to have a disastrous effect, as the hapless French infantry, shorn of artillery support, was thrown against the German positions on both sides of the Meuse in attack after attack, and consequently massacred.
Like the first two battles for Verdun, the next two were deftly obscured by Joffre’s minions, and not only because they were dismal failures. The next fifteen months of the war, from the fall of Antwerp in October 1914 to the start of the German offensive at Verdun in February 1916, are filled with dramatic events: the Allied amphibious invasion of Turkey, the entry of Italy into the war, the beginnings of submarine warfare and the sinking of the Lusitania, the Allied occupation of Greece, the extension of the war both at sea and into east Africa and the Middle East, and, of course, the titanic struggles raging in Russia.
London and Paris had their hands full; their censors and propagandists were busily creating an alternative history of the struggle, and everyone afterward has been picking through the wilderness, trying to construct a sensible narrative of all these events. As the war expanded to include entire nations, the bloody and inconclusive struggles of some tens of thousands of infantry in parts of France unfamiliar to most Frenchmen seem of only minor significance.
FAILURE ON THE LEFT BANK: (1) THE FUTILITY OF THE VAUQUOIS
The Vauquois is a 400-meter-long outcropping that rises up about 300 meters from its surroundings. It merited the name of a butte because it stood in relative isolation: The nearest hill of any significance was Montfaucon, about nine kilometers to the north. So the position was strategically important. The French 82nd Infantry Regiment, charged with defending the butte, had basically abandoned it in September. Although it was a naturally defensible position, no records exist to show that the regiment tried to defend it. It was a victory on the cheap for the Germans.
Probably the French infantry commanders didn’t realize the importance of the position, thought it was simply another butte out in the Argonne. Because the Vauquois was important only in this new war of indirect fire, a war in which it was no longer necessary to occupy a position physically. One could simply call down artillery fire on it, the shells coming from guns the defenders couldn’t see, being fired by gun crews who had no notion of their target, only its coordinates.
In the older way of thinking, then, the butte was hardly significant. To an infantry brigadier or colonel, whose military education (such as it was) had stopped in the 1880s, the six thousand meters that separated it from the main railroad going into Verdun might as well have been sixty thousand. To an artillery observer ensconced on the butte, with batteries of modern guns whose effective ranges started at eight thousand meters and went up from there, a train moving along that railroad was the proverbial sitting duck.
The fault of our anonymous infantry commander was not entirely owing to poor training. Yes, as a group, French officers were not nearly so well educated in military matters as they should have been, but the real problem here is more fundamental. Already in 1914, the very nature of warfare had changed in a fundamental way, and many people were slow to grasp it. Most French infantry commanders had never even seen field guns in action, much less the howitzers that would define the battlefields of the Western Front.
General Alexandre Percin was inspector general of artillery for France. His reports make for gloomy reading.
On 8 July 1909 I addressed the following letter to the Minister of War. “One never sees, in the autumn maneuvers, an army corps with more than 18 batteries, each of four guns. . . . In the maneuvers of the divisions or brigades, the proportion of artillery is even weaker, although the new organization foresees the employment of 30 batteries per army corps and there is some question of going to 36. . . . Commanders are completely unprepared to manage large masses of guns. In the maneuvers I directed on 12 September last, for the 13th army corps, there were only 23 batteries for the corps, each represented by one gun. . . .”9
That being the case, infantry officers would have no idea of the destructive power of heavy artillery, or even what properly deployed batteries of field guns could do.
The hapless infantry of the 75th Division had discovered this the hard way in September. Now it was the turn of the soldiers of the 10th Division, who had been ordered to assault the Vauquois. It is a truism that experience is the best teacher, that the burned hand dreads the fire. True enough, but there were hardly any survivors from the 75th Division around to pass on the fruit of their bitterly learned experiences, so the infantry on the left bank had to learn on their own.
Like Montfaucon, the Vauquois had a small village atop it. The width of the butte was just sufficient for there to be a church, and three rows of stone houses aligned along the length of the outcropping. The south side, facing the new French lines, was much steeper than the other three. There was a road going up to the top at each end, but unfortunately for the attacking troops, those ends were inside the German lines.
In consequence there was only one avenue of attack: right up the front—even in the best of circumstances a risky venture, and circumstances were totally against the French. Given its altitude, the reverse slope of the butte was a dead zone for French gunners, so the defenders could install themselves comfortably, and reach their positions before the attackers could get to the top, since they had to struggle up a steep slope and contend with all sorts of obstacles: barbed wire, shell holes, and exploding shells.
In that sense, the fighting for the Vauquois, which began in October 1914, established a sort of horrific pattern for the Allied attacks of the next four years. Their infantry would struggle across the area separating the lines. In some cases, they wouldn’t even make it across, but as the Allies slowly acquired more artillery, the infantry would increasingly reach the first line of the German trenches.
But the defenders rarely if ever were there. Instead, they were well behind, dug in deep beneath their stone and concrete shelters, and escaped the shelling almost unscathed. When the bombardment stopped, the defenders would emerge. A basic principle: They could reach their prearranged positions much more quickly than the attacking infantry, and in consequence, the word massacre is appropriate.
But in the initial attacks on the Vauquois, the French lacked the resources to subject the houses to any sort of intensive bombardment. The relatively small amounts of high explosive in the shells from the French 75– and 120-millimeter guns were not going to do much damage to the stone and masonry houses of Lorraine, whose walls were generally a meter thick.
The roof was a different matter, but since the French lacked guns capable of the required
steep angle of fire, only the stray shell would have much effect. We tend to forget an obvious fact: that even today, the best way to destroy a structure is to fire a shell (or a precision-guided missile or bomb) through an opening, not to try to batter the walls down. Given the height of the butte, the trees, the relatively flat trajectories of the guns, the distance at which the artillery would have to be sited, the whole affair was problematic from start to finish. In the case of the Vauquois, basic geometry was against the French.
On 28 October 1914, fourteen companies of infantry from the 46th Regiment of the 10th Division attacked straight up the steep side of the butte. The division, composed of men from Paris, may have had the highest number of writers of any combat unit that ever saw a shot fired. One of them, Georges Boucheron, described the first assault with cold objectivity.
We advance nevertheless, always progressing, as though on maneuvers, but suddenly, a muted detonation, followed by a hiss, makes itself heard: an explosion, then others, and on the slopes, big black clouds . . .10
Those clouds were caused by the German shells, which Boucheron refers to as “les grosses marmites boches,” army slang, as a marmite was a simply a big pot. In this case the pot was full of high explosives, and as Boucheron watched, they fell “exactly on the positions we occupied; the groups are struck and then annihilated.”
Some men want to flee, they are one after another harvested by the shells, or the machine guns, that, both on the front and the flank, greet them. . . . In only a few minutes after the first shell has hit, you can’t see the dark blue tunics or the red trousers or the shell holes, only the dark green grass. All is quiet.
The initial attack had been mounted without any artillery support whatsoever. Retrospectively, it was claimed that the staff hoped to surprise the defending Germans, although given the terrain in front of the hill, this idea flies in the face of any sort of reality. Several thousand men don’t sneak up on a hill, not when the area in front of it is relatively flat. Moreover, when the first attack failed, a second one was ordered for the following day. That failed as well.