Verdun

by John Mosier

  But von Mudra had prepared a nasty surprise. In May of 1915, he met with von Falkenhayn, who, as always, was concerned about unnecessary losses. The result was that von Mudra was able to put his ideas into play in earnest. The operations in January and February had been only dress rehearsals. Now the real attacks began, a whole series. For the first, launched on 20 June, the Germans had assembled an arsenal of heavy weapons. In addition to the usual 76 field guns and 26 105-millimeter howitzers, von Mudra deployed seventeen modern heavy guns in the 100– to 150-millimeter range, ten of the 210-millimeter howitzers, and another ten guns of even larger size. As infantry support, there were forty heavy and medium Minenwerfer.

  This doesn’t sound like much of an arsenal when compared to offensives like the Woëvre or Champagne, where the French deployed hundreds of guns. But this is misleading. The French arsenal was deployed in support of attacks of 200,000 men spread out on a wide front aiming for a breakthrough. Von Mudra’s arsenal was in support of an attack conducted on the ground by a few thousand soldiers, a brigade or even less, in an attack aimed at a few thousand meters of the line outside the village of Binarville.

  As usual, von Mudra was employing the newest technology he could get. Although at Ypres in April the Germans had used gas, they had released it from cylinders, hoping it would float toward the Allied lines, but the 20 June attack was the first in which gas shells were used as part of an artillery barrage.

  Ten days later, another massive attack. There were fewer of the light field guns, but now there were no less than 30 of the big 210-millimeter howitzers. In addition to its Minenwerfer and flamethrowers, von Mudra’s attackers were armed with 36,000 (of the then-new) hand grenades. All this for a two-kilometer front in which the attack would again consist of a brigade. By 2 July, the Germans had captured the Bagatelle.

  Joffre, deeply worried about events in the Argonne, resorted to his usual idea. He ordered the French to mount a major offensive in the Argonne, and Sarrail promptly obeyed. The French offensive, scheduled for 13 July, would relieve the increasing pressure on the left bank. At this rate, by the end of the summer the Germans would have broken though the forest and would be in the clear—and in a position to drive a wedge deep into French territory. There was a certain practical realism here. Even if there was no breakthrough, if all Sarrail managed was to push the Germans back a few kilometers, that would be enough, since Joffre was planning yet another great offensive in Champagne-Artois, to be delivered in September. A breakthrough there would solve all these problems for good.

  The difficulty with French plans was that they developed far too slowly. It was impossible to conceal your intentions from your opponent in this sort of warfare. Planning for an attack of any size was quickly noticed. The Germans noticed, and they moved first.

  Precisely ten days after the capture of the Bagatelle, on 12 July, von Mudra delivered another hammer blow. As this attack went in the day before the French one was scheduled, it was extremely effective. The Germans lost 525 dead, and 1,838 men were wounded. In return, they captured 3,688 French soldiers and counted over two thousand dead left on the battlefield. And, of course, more territory was gained.

  Incredibly, the French attack still went in on the fourteenth, and was stopped cold in the face of German gas attacks. The first colonial brigade fought its way back into the Ravin de Dieusson, only to be rejected with nearly three thousand casualties, over half of its nominal strength. Joffre promptly sacked Sarrail, a decision that won Joffre no friends either in the government, where he was extremely well connected, or in the chamber, where he was well liked.

  But von Mudra’s system was munitions-intensive. So far, he had been given the resources to keep hacking away in only a fairly small area. Every battle was a victory, but the French had the luxury (still) of being able to lose men in the thousands in the Argonne while planning major offensives elsewhere. And this is what happened. In September, the Germans began diverting resources back for the anticipated Allied offensives of Second Champagne.

  It is customary to speak of these theaters as being entirely separate, but von Mudra’s theater of operations in the Argonne was contiguous with the Champagne Front. As the French attacked there, von Mudra’s efforts had to be stopped and the guns directed to his right. In late September, he was able to mount one more operation before the resources had to be switched. On 15 September, the French lost Hill 213 and the bastion of Marie-Thérèse. On the twenty-seventh, von Mudra’s last attack went in and seized yet another piece of ground, the Fille Morte.

  Practically speaking, the French had lost the Argonne, which doomed in advance the chances of Second Champagne. By seizing so much of the forest, von Mudra was forcing the French to attack across the rolling country on both sides of Reims, where, as on the Somme, they would be attacking uphill against prepared positions over terrain that was ideal for artillery spotters.

  Not surprisingly, Second Champagne was a gloomy repeat of the Woëvre. The French General Staff persisted in the offensive, which went on through November. The failure there would hardly have any relevance to Verdun except for one thing.

  Philippe Pétain, who had worked his way up from an obscure colonel slated for retirement to an army commander, protested at the continued massacre. As Colonel Serrigny, Pétain’s adjutant, remarked, “Champagne had serious consequences: it caused thousands of men to be murdered and it deceived the public,” who were led to believe that the few hectares of ground gouged out represented yet another French victory.29 Pétain’s unwillingness to let the men under his command be massacred confirmed the suspicions the more offensive-minded officers in the French General Staff already had: He lacked the requisite desire to win at all costs. His soldiers felt somewhat differently.

  His resistance to the continued massacre confirmed both his competence and his independence.

  From the German side, the lesson seemed clear enough: It was much better to control the battlefield through offensive operations than to endure these massive kamikaze attacks. So the value of the Argonne offensives went far beyond territory gained and casualties inflicted. In terms of territory, von Mudra had sliced off, at a minimal cost, more ground than any of the Champagne offensives would get. Ferry’s estimate was that the French had lost about 80,000 men (his total for the killed, the wounded, and the missing in the Argonne, not counting the Vauquois), and this seems about right: the eight French cemeteries in the Argonne contain about 36,000 French soldiers.30

  German losses were about a fourth of that.31 Above all, von Mudra was destroying French morale. Every attack was a success. Some of them were less successful than others, but with each the Germans took and held strongpoints the French believed to be important, inflicting heavy casualties in the process. Insofar as there was a simple key to the ability of the German army’s success on the battlefield, this was it. In what was basically a year of combat on both sides of the Meuse, the French were unable to take a single important position and hold on to it for more than few days, if that. On the contrary, when the Germans attacked, they were invariably successful, and at an alarmingly low cost to themselves. During 1915, about 390,000 Allied soldiers were killed in France and Flanders; the German Medical Services reported 114,000 German soldiers killed on the Western Front.32

  6

  France’s Winter of Dreams and Discontent

  Such an outcome can only baffle our intelligence, for it is difficult to discover any rational cause for it.

  —Polybius1

  By any objective standard, 1915 had been a horrible year for the British and the French. Not that fall 1914 had been much better. Given the nearly airtight control over the news, the British and French governments were easily able to persuade their citizens that the war was going reasonably well. At the same time they were amazingly successful in inciting hatred of the enemy, and on many different levels.

  Internally, however, the civilians who ran—or anyway presided over�
��the governments in London and Paris were worried. From the start of the war the French high command dexterously fed them good news: the great victory of the Marne, the frantic German retreat, the seizure of important positions like Les Éparges, the advances in Champagne (particularly in the fall 1915 battles there).

  But even the rankest tyro could see that the war in the west was a stalemate, that the front had hardly moved after October 1914. Take, for example, the concerns of Maurice Hankey, secretary to the British Imperial Defense Committee before the war, and then secretary of the war council. An educated and conscientious civil servant, a former captain in the British marines, Hankey was very much an insider in the British cabinet. Unusually for a man in his position, he was able to think outside the box: For example, he suggested the basic idea of the tank to Churchill, and this early in the war.

  Hankey’s diary records the shock and surprise of the government when they learned of the fall of Antwerp in October 1914, and he understood, far better than anyone in the army or navy, the catastrophic implications of the loss of the channel ports.2 Although like everyone else in the highest circles in both capitals, he was ignorant of just how bad the war was going in France, he seized upon the idea of a stalemate very early on, by January 1915 at the latest. He was perhaps in advance of his colleagues, but not by much.

  Seeing the war in France as a deadlock, the civilians began casting around for alternatives. Since they were skeptical that the war could be won in France, it would have to be won somewhere else. That belief, sensible enough, triggered a basic conflict between the army high commands and the civilians who were, at least in theory, in charge of the war effort.

  Basically, the civilians had four alternatives to argue. The first involved finding some radically new technology that would break the stalemate. The tank, for instance: Hankey proposed the idea to Churchill in December 1914. The French had the idea as well, and in point of fact it was the automobile constructor Louis Renault who developed the first modern tank.3 The point, however, is that in both London and Paris the idea of using new technologies to break the deadlock occurred early on.

  The second idea involved finding allies. When the war had begun, the British and the French placed great hopes in what was popularly called the Russian Steamroller. Millions of Russians would descend on the eastern frontiers of Germany and Austria-Hungary, forcing Berlin to shift troops to the east. By December 1914 it was pretty clear that hadn’t worked out very well, although the notion that the German drive to Paris had failed owing to the transfer of units out of France persisted for decades.

  Undaunted by the failure of the Russians to win the war for them, the Allies cast around for someone else: first Italy, whom they persuaded—or rather bribed—to enter the war in April 1915; then Romania in August 1916; and finally the United States in April 1917—third time being lucky, as it were.

  The fourth idea was closely related to the third: attacking Germany and Austria-Hungary somewhere else, opening up a new theater of operations that would overload their military capabilities. Concurrently with Italy’s entry into the war, in April 1915, the Allies carried out their ill-fated Allied amphibious landings on the Turkish coast, subsequently known as Gallipoli. As everyone knows, this venture hardly brought about the desired result, although by the end of the year, it had sucked in more than half a million—mostly British—troops. Undaunted by the disaster, the civilians insisted on a second foray, this one to the Balkans, where, acting in coordination with a new ally, Greece, a potent new threat to the central powers would emerge.

  Now, these forays demanded men and resources. If there was one thing that the British and French high commands could agree on, it was that they needed every single soldier, every last shell, in the west. Actually, that was about the only thing they could agree on, so, in addition to the simmering conflict between the armies and their nominal civilian leaders, there was the conflict between the British and the French. They had, after all, been enemies for hundreds of years.

  Now, in this conflict with their governments, the army chiefs had two advantages. They controlled the news of what was happening on the Western Front, and since during this time period—all through 1915—most of the front was controlled by the French, London was at a considerable disadvantage. There was, as we shall see, some leakage inside the French army, but little to none of it got to London, one important reason why subsequent generations of British historians wrote in blissful ignorance.

  The other advantage was that although the front might be a stalemate, the civilian ideas had all spectacularly misfired. The Greek expedition, usually referred to by the Allied landing city, Salonika, was a festering disaster; nor was Italy’s entrance into the war having much of an effect.4

  So for the GQG, it was easy to retreat behind a reserve of passive-aggressive professionalism. Bolstered by the steady stream of adroitly managed encouraging news, the high command never lost the opportunity to remind the civilians that they had no real expertise, their ideas were amateurish, that the only way to win the war was to win it in the west, and that required a concentration of national resources.

  Gradually, as the months went by, it began to dawn on the civilians that perhaps there was a fourth solution, the one that Abraham Lincoln had employed in the American Civil War: keep changing commanding generals until you found one who could win the war.

  But there were difficulties with this approach, since the generals could, with some justification, claim that the main drag on their success was the diversion of resources into these schemes to fight the war elsewhere.

  GRAND DELUSIONS

  Besides, the Allied high commands in France were taking refuge in an unimpeachable argument. Although they were forced to admit to the civilians that they had not yet broken through the German defenses, and that it was true that not much territory was changing hands, their soldiers were inflicting heavy casualties on the Germans. If the civilians would just be patient, Germany would soon run out of manpower and be forced to quit the war.

  The French term, which Joffre may or may not have actually used, was a word usually restricted to descriptions of rodents: gnawing, or perhaps nibbling. And in their steady gnawing, they were killing enormous numbers of Germans. German losses were, initially, the one category of hard information that the GQG was delighted to let be published.

  In June 1915, the New York Times printed what they claimed (truthfully) was an abstract of a French government report dated March 27, 1915: “by the middle of January [1915], the German losses on the two fronts were 1,800,000 men.”5 After subtracting 500,000 men as “the normal proportion” of wounded who were healed and then returned to service, the report established a casualty figure of 1,300,000 deaths. This section of the article is entitled, “Wastage of German Effectives,” the point being that the Germans, who were supposed from their own documents to be expending men at the rate of 260,000 a month, would soon run out of soldiers, and had already started to run out of trained troops. The conclusion of the report was that the “available [German] resources for the year 1915 will not suffice to fill the gaps of a war of ten months.”

  Numerous articles in the Times spoke to the heavy German casualties. In July 1915, an article reported that

  estimates published in the English papers derived from indications given in the Prussian official lists of casualties carry the German losses to a total of 3,500,000. This figure largely exceeds the computations made by the German authorities . . . [who] admit that Germany up to the end of June had 482,000 men killed and 852,000 wounded. In regard to prisoners the German[s] admit a loss of 233,000 up to the end of last month [June? 1915], altogether a grand total of 1,567,000 killed, wounded, and missing . . . according to Teutonic computations, Great Britain had lost 116,000 killed, 229,000 wounded, and 83,000 prisoners, a total of 428,000. When there is such a discrepancy between the German claims and the British governmental statements as to British losses the possibly na
tural inference is that the German claims . . . are like to be exaggerated (4:1042–1043).

  The newspaper articles the Times summarized were supplemented by analysis by various experts. Depending on the time period used, the figures ranged from a low of 1.9 million to a high of 3.7 million.6

  On 25 January 1916, Colonel Repington, who had access to the highest circles of both governments, reported that “the Germans had a total available of 11,000,000 men to fight, and that they have lost 3,500,000,” a figure that is remarkably close to what was being reported in the various newspapers and journals.7

  Now, the interesting fact is that these figures track very closely what the high commands of the two armies actually believed. Although they were released to aid the Allied war effort, to spin the war, they do not represent propaganda, but rather reflect the actual intelligence estimates that Joffre was receiving and passing on to the civilians. We know, for example, from Marshal Fayolle’s secret diary, that Ferdinand Foch believed them to be true.8

  We also know from Lloyd George’s memoirs that Lord Kitchener assured the British cabinet in February 1915 that the Germans were running out of manpower and in a “few months” would “have exhausted their reserves.”9 One therefore infers that both Kitchener and the Times were citing the same official French report.

  The army was convinced that it was winning the war of attrition—to the point that it was telling the world about it, and releasing its intelligence estimates.

  In other words, when Lord Hankey and his French counterparts looked at the map and saw a stalemate, the generals reassured them that they had nothing to worry about: They were killing the Germans off in splendid fashion. They’d soon be running out of men, and all the evidence pointed to this conclusion.