Verdun

by John Mosier

  Roques’s timetable called for the general offensive into the Woëvre plain to begin on 5 April. Given where the French were on the butte, that offensive would not have the benefit of observation posts on Les Éparges. So if that was the strategic objective, the attacks had failed completely.

  But by now the idea of taking the butte had its own life, its own rationale. The attacks intensified. On 5 April, French troops got to Point C, the westernmost bastion, only to lose it three days later. On 10 April, the French were at Point X once again. But their grip on any part of the butte was tenuous at best, and as the French offensive on the Woëvre collapsed by the end of April, so did the efforts to take Les Éparges.

  Ferry observed to the secret committee that the army had lost 35,000 men trying to take Les Éparges, and the army’s own official history admits that in its “aggressive” efforts at Les Éparges, First Army lost 2,754 officers and 15,546 men.18

  The 106th regiment was basically wiped out, along with the 25th BCP, whose troops had actually gotten to Point X. Genevoix’s regiment had lost at least half of its official strength during the February attacks; it was then patched back together and attacked in March and April as well. As one of the few survivors, he had a simple title for his narrative of the attack: La Morte. Death.

  By any reasonable standard, the struggle for Les Éparges was the most horrific of the war—certainly up to that point in time, and arguably for the future as well. The description given by one survivor is so ghastly it really defies belief.

  You cannot know what man is capable of doing to his fellow man: after five days my shoes are greasy with human brains, I crush thoraxes, I encounter entrails.19

  Undaunted by the losses of his army corps, General Frederick Herr promptly announced that the French had taken Les Éparges, the implication being that it was a major strongpoint in the German lines that had been conquered by his troops.

  Herr’s claim quickly passed into the ever-expanding mythic lore of the Great War. General Herr received the American Medal of Honor for his distinguished service during the war, and the conquest of the butte was duly sanctified by the Michelin Guides in 1919: “The Éparges crest, stubbornly held by the enemy since September 1914, was definitely taken on 6 April [1915] by the 12th Division after more than a month of fiercest fighting.”20

  Not really: As General Rouquerol observed in 1939, “Never did we chase the Germans off the heights of Les Éparges which they called the position of Combres” (131). And as we shall see in the account of the February 1916 fighting, if Roques’s claim had been incorrect, the single largest territorial gain of the battle for the Germans would never have happened. But by April 1915 the Allies were experts at making things up. Meanwhile, as Abel Ferry had grimly forecast, the destruction of the French infantry continued.

  THE RIGHT BANK: (2) THE DISASTER OF THE WOËVRE

  Although the struggles for the Vauquois and Les Éparges are little known, by comparison with the 1915 French offensive in the Woëvre they are famous, mainly because of the talented brace of writers who survived the fighting there and lived to tell the tale. Maurice Genevoix and André Pézard are arguably the most well-known writers of personal-experience narratives in the war, the equivalent of Robert Graves in Great Britain and Ernst Jünger in Germany. In his magisterial study of personal-experience narratives, Jean Norton Cru classifies writers according to the extent to which they are good witnesses, that is to say, that their accounts are reliable, it having occurred to him that war is one of those experiences that impels men to lie.

  Norton Cru being French, he evaluates his witnesses and puts them into categories, ranging from those whose documentary value is practically nil to those he judges to be excellent. Genevoix, Pézard, and Cazin he places in the first rank, a judgment that is hardly to be disputed by anyone who has read their accounts. However, there are other reasonably popular accounts of the two struggles that, while of lesser value, were absorbing and widely read: the works of Georges Boucheron, Jean des Vignes Rouges, Pierre Ladoué, and André Schmitz.

  In consequence, the Vauquois and Les Éparges were reasonably well-known in France after the war. It should also be added that the two regiments that did most of the fighting at the Vauquois were both recruited from Paris and its environs, and that some of the men who served and died there were at least minor celebrities. For example, Henri Collignon, former secretary to the president of the republic, and an officer of the Legion of Honor, was killed in the March assault.21

  By contrast, the battle for the Woëvre was an obscure affair, and when it concluded in April 1915, no one in the high command, or at First Army, was particularly keen on talking about it.

  However, General Roques’s plan was for a major offensive. The chosen theater of operations, the German positions in the Woëvre, constituted a front considerably larger than the Somme offensive of 1916 was in terms sheer frontage one of the largest fronts of the war.22 Roques planned a pincers attack; that is to say, he aimed to break through both at the northern end of the line, to the north of Les Éparges, and, at the same time, at the extreme southeast of the front, directly below Thiaucourt.

  So his plan—which Joffre was delighted to approve—had the theoretical merit of emulating the preferred German tactic of aufrollen, or attacking on the flanks. If successful, he would have the entire salient in the bag, totally reverse the results of the great September breakthrough engineered by General von Strantz.

  The force with which Roques aimed to envelop the German lines and eliminate the Saint-Mihiel salient entirely was commensurate. He had six army corps: the First, Second, Sixth, Eighth, Twelfth, and Thirty-first, plus two reserve divisions (the 65th and the 73rd) and an oversize brigade culled from Verdun. Given his relationship with Joffre, Roques was able to coax the GQG out of a sizable portion of the army’s heavy artillery. In April 1915, the army’s total artillery park of heavy guns came to a little less than 700 guns, and Herr got 360 of them for his battle, plus nearly 1,000 75s.23

  Against this impressive force was von Strantz, still in command, and still of the same two main units, the 3rd Bavarian and Fifth Prussian Army Corps, reinforced by a collection of supposedly lesser units: the 5th Landwehr, the 33rd Reserve, and the 8th, 10th, and Guards Ersatz divisions. In the confusing German order of battle, the Landwehr were the third and next-to-lowest type of unit, while Ersatz units were drawn from those men who, prior to the war, had not seen any military service. This last may seem peculiar, given that Germany, like France and Austria-Hungary, had universal conscription. But the government was never given sufficient funds to train the entire class of eligible males, so, unlike in France, where virtually everyone did military service (over 80 percent), in Germany the figure was substantially lower.

  That being the case, it would seem that von Strantz was heavily outnumbered, although the exact numbers involved are difficult to assess. Most of the French units had suffered serious losses in 1914, and those losses had not yet been made good. Further complicating the situation was that by early 1915 the Germans had embarked on a major change in the organizational structure of their divisions. Like everyone else, they had begun the war with an infantry division that was based on two brigades, each consisting of two regiments. But now they had begun to eliminate brigades entirely. They reduced the number of regiments to three, and were increasingly seeing the basic tactical unit as the battalion (a regiment consisted of three battalions, each with a theoretical strength of 1,000 men).

  At the same time, the firepower available was increasing dramatically. So, for instance, although in theory the German 33rd Reserve Division should have had much less artillery than a regular division, it actually had a great deal more. Essentially, the Germans were replacing riflemen with machine gunners and combat engineers equipped with mortars and now flamethrowers, as well as hand grenades. The new “smaller” divisions had 50 percent more machine guns than their predecessors, while the 7.7-centime
ter field guns were reduced—but replaced with the potent 10.5-centimeter howitzer, a weapon their French counterparts by and large still did not possess.24

  So Roques did not have much of an advantage. Unfortunately, he also lost one of the great advantages every commander wishes for: surprise. The GQG leaked like a sieve. The Germans may not have known the date of the offensive, but Parisians certainly did. When one of Herr’s brigade commanders was in Paris he met a member of the senate who greeted him with the casual remark, “Good! You’re preparing to reduce the Saint-Mihiel salient!”25

  And sure enough, right before the scheduled start date, von Strantz deployed a new division, the 121st, on his left flank. That was bad news for the plan, since it meant that the defending Germans would now outnumber the attacking French. So the whole idea was off the rails even before it started.

  Roques also had another enemy: the weather. Now, this was entirely predictable. The name of this region, Woëvre, is derived from a word that means “wet.” The southern section is definitely that, given its lakes and marshy ground. Given that April, in this part of Europe, is proverbially rainy, mounting an offensive there was problematic.

  But apparently no one, either at GQG or at Roques’s headquarters, had given much thought to either the terrain or the weather. Until the start date for the offensive, at which time the rain had turned everything to mud, and the slow warming created fog—mixed with snow in some places. It would be hard to find a worse combination of circumstances: bad visibility, mud, and an enemy who knew you were coming.

  As a practical consequence of the mud, it was basically impossible to bring all the heavy guns into action to support the assault, which, as a logical result in consequence, went in without any artillery support to speak of. The result was, all too predictably, a slaughter.

  To the north of Les Éparges, the 43rd Regiment, attacking into the bois de Pareid, lost 34 officers and 511 men in a few hours. But no one else did much better. Roques, undeterred, ordered another round of attacks for April 8. There was marginally more artillery support, but the results were nil.

  By 7 April, Dubail, who was technically the overall commander as head of Army Group East, stepped in and ordered a stop to the offensive. The pincers plan was dead, to be replaced by a more methodical advance, with the infantry attacking only after there had been a thorough artillery barrage. Moreover, the objectives would be extremely limited.

  Having been stopped at the northern end of the line, in a curious change of direction, the French now scrapped the original plan, and attempted to take the most formidable of the positions the Germans held in the Saint-Mihiel salient, the wooded heights between Saint-Mihiel and Apremont. It was now April 22, 1915.

  Officially, the French took over 700 meters of the German trenches, but a close look reveals that these were largely positions the Germans had no intention of defending. The success was more on the order of the success of Les Éparges: That is to say, propaganda, pure and simple. The German hold on the Bois d’Ailly, as the woods were known, was not shaken in the least. Anyone who hikes back into the woods today can see this easily enough, and also see the importance of the position, as it commanded the heights overlooking Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse.

  Moreover, the next day the Germans launched their own attack, up at the northern end of the line, at the Tranchée de Calonne. This was not, as one might suppose, an actual entrenchment, but rather referred to a road that had been cut through the forests to connect the town of Verdun with Hattonchâtel back in 1786. It was named after Charles Alexandre de Calonne, a controversial financier and minister to Louis XVI.

  In 1914 it had become, more or less by default, the baseline for the French positions on the edge of the heights of the Meuse. Unlike the French efforts, the German offensive was successful. Within 48 hours they had overrun a four-kilometer stretch of the French positions, together with what one historian laconically calls “numerous” pieces of heavy artillery.

  This attack was a costly loss for the French. On 29 April, they tried to counterattack, but to no avail. In terms of territory, the French were now worse off than when they had started their grand offensive. To add insult to injury, on 4 May, the Bavarians launched an entirely unexpected a surprise attack against the new French positions in the Bois d’Ailly. This attack was a real surprise: the French regiment holding the position simply collapsed, and only through desperate efforts were the French able to keep this whole section of the front from collapsing as well.

  But the loss was more than human lives, although that was bad enough. What was beginning to bite into the soul of the infantry was the futility of the struggle. Here is the record taken from the diary of a sergeant in the 29th Regiment.

  Oh, my friends, all are cadavers here: the men, and the trees, and the reddish earth with hues of clotted blood. Have I ever known anything more sinister than these hills of the Bois d’Ailly!

  It was near five o’clock in the evening when we penetrated, one by one, on our knees, rifle in hand, into the communication trenches. I saw there, for the first time, the cadavers mortared into the walls. Putrefying fingers were sticking out, hurriedly sprinkled with tar; scalps covered with a hideous mousse; feet especially, feet still in boots, powdered with lime, twisted. And the abominable odor made us become pale.

  Shame on him who won’t believe me!

  The roots of the firs had been massacred with blows of the axe; the rocks crumbled with strokes of the pick; but no one had dared to prune the cadavers. They stayed there hindering our way, we who crawled along the stones on our knees. And we advanced cursing them. Our equipment caught itself to those feet. Those who put their hand in a rotten place didn’t dare mention it, and rolled their fingers quickly in the dust.

  Shame on him who won’t believe me!26

  All this before the actual assault itself. And it gets worse.

  My company had to take a trench. We had been told it was at seventy meters: it was more than two hundred. It was necessary to crawl and keep still: all the world was up and screaming. My half platoon held the left. I had six men around me when I reached the German wire, between eight and nine o’clock in the evening.

  I stepped over their bodies, the next morning, about four o’clock.

  I found the first pantless, as if claws had scratched his trousers off. His buttocks exposed, cut back and forth as though by a butcher’s knife. The second hung whole on a bush, his head balancing on the end of the highest branch, like the head of a dead sparrow. The others were rolled into a porridge of mud and blood. I didn’t look at them. I returned on all fours, my blanket around my neck and my packs up under my chest. When I caught sight of the stones of our trenches, I straightened up and I cried out. I was pulled in by the legs and was given cold coffee and rum to drink. The slopes were covered in haze (117).

  It was a dismal end to an offensive marked from start to finish by nothing but miscalculations and disasters. Abel Ferry computed the French losses at 123,000 men, and there’s no reason to doubt his accounting.

  THE LEFT BANK: (2) GNAWING THROUGH THE ARGONNE

  In the Argonne, the fighting was continuous from late August of 1914 until late September of 1915. Boucheron, who had been in the Vauquois assaults, after enumerating the names of the places inside the forest, observes that “each of those names recalls, not a combat, but a series of combats. An arduous and incessant struggle . . . The Argonne was a true sector of the war, never at peace, always at struggle.”27

  So it is easy to get confused about the intentions of the two sides. But, as was noted in the previous chapter, the initial attacks launched in September 1914 were part of the second envelopment of Verdun, followed by a second round of fighting occasioned by the French attempts to reverse that envelopment. Unlike the German offensives, the French plans for the Argonne were not designed to occur at the same time as the offensive of the right bank, but were set for summer 1915, after the failure
of the Artois offensive in May.

  What makes the situation even more complicated is that in July in the Argonne the Germans repeated what they had done earlier in Artois. Knowing that the French were ready to attack them, they attacked first.

  When we left von Mudra’s troops in the last chapter, they were steadily advancing through the Argonne, where, despite the dense forests, the heavy weapons of his Sixteenth Army Corps gave them a considerable advantage. Von Mudra, like his counterparts to the east, generals von Strantz and Freiherr von Gebsattel, was an officer of the first order, and under his command the Sixteenth Corps had historically been lavishly equipped, and not only with artillery (as early as 1900 it had four field artillery regiments and two heavy artillery regiments). As would be expected of an engineering officer’s command, the troops were well equipped with weapons that the Allies were just discovering, thought of as experimental toys of no use to real soldiers: flamethrowers, grenades, gas shells, and, of course, the transportable mortars.

  Although von Mudra is conspicuous by his absence in English-language accounts of the war, it was not so in France. He was one of the few German commanders the French referred to by name. He is the only German field commander Joffre mentions in his memoirs, while Boucheron begins his recollections of the Argonne fighting by singling him out.

  It was Joffre who had coined—or been credited with—the phrase grignotage: gnawing at them. But as we have seen, it was von Mudra who was doing the gnawing. And he was destroying the French in the process. As Lieutenant Jean-Marie Carré, attached to the staff of the 4th Division, put it, “We lost, in four months, a little over eight hundred meters on the average. But we lost the Fourth Division.”28 Joffre was beside himself. He had always had his doubts about the Third Army’s commander, Sarrail, who was prodded to take control, and to assert the superiority of the French troops over their adversaries. Sarrail, duly prodded, promised a great offensive in July.