Verdun

by John Mosier

  No translation can capture the compressed and eloquent fury of this passage, and the phrases Ferry uses are much more sinister and disturbing than their English counterparts. Guerre d’usure, with its connotations of usury, is much more brutal than the idea of attrition, and the word gaspillage, with its subtext of profligate squandering, is rhetorically much more effective than wastage. But, lacking access to the numbers, Ferry had no choice but to use rhetoric to make his point.

  The cabinet received his note in dismissive silence. But by July their attitude had changed. And then in August came the bombshell: a letter written to Paul Deschanel, who was president of the Chamber of Deputies. Unlike the other governmental positions, this one tended toward stability: Deschanel had been president before (1898–1902), was now serving his second term, which had begun in 1912. He would remain in that position all through the war. He was thus an important political figure in France.

  But then, so was the man who wrote the letter of 23 August 1915—Émile Driant—and his letter was truly a bombshell.

  Like Abel Ferry, Émile Driant was a member of the chamber, and a man with intimate ties to important people. Ferry was the nephew of Jules Ferry; Driant was married to the daughter of the late General Boulanger. But Ferry was a politician who happened to be a soldier. Driant had graduated from the military school at Saint-Cyr (fourth in his class), and had served with distinction in three African campaigns. He had been a battalion commander by 1896, but Louis André (the current minister of war) had no more interest in seeing Boulanger’s son-in-law advanced to the higher grades than he did in allowing defiantly Christian Roman Catholics to become senior officers.

  But when the war broke out, Driant was a colonel commanding the 1st Battalion of chasseurs, one of the crack regiments of the French army. He had been at Verdun since the start of the war, had fought on both sides of the Meuse. So, briefly, he and Ferry were neighbors, as the newly minted lieutenant’s regiment, the 165th, was part of the Verdun garrison, was on the right bank as well, where it got slaughtered as the Bavarians pushed farther into the Woëvre in the first months of the war.

  By July 1915, Driant had lost 26 officers and 1,300 men in six separate engagements. In addition to being a member of the chamber and a career officer, he was also a well-known writer. So his was not a voice to be easily dismissed, and here is what he charged.

  The German wave is going to return. The Russians will be out of action for six months. Here we think that the next blow of the hammer will be delivered on the line Verdun-Nancy. What a moral effect would be produced by the fall of one or both of these! It would be worth the price, and they have already proven that they know how to sacrifice 50,000 men to carry a place, if they are able to succeed.38

  That belief was bad enough, but Driant had much more to say, all of it bad. However, before going on to that, two points are worth remarking.

  One of them is simple enough: the idea that the Russians would be out of the picture for six months, and the connection of these sentences is clear: since the Russians are out of the picture, the Germans can now attack us.

  The phrase Driant uses is significant: coup de bélier, the hammer blow, the same idea that Joffre was pushing for the summer. Both in that, and in the remark that the Germans had already demonstrated they were willing to sacrifice 50,000 men for an important objective, Driant was adhering to both the concept of the battle of annihilation and as well to the belief of heavy German losses. His tactical thinking, in other words, was very much of a piece with the mind-set of the GQG.

  Where he departed from them was in his conception of strategy, because he emphasized the effect on morale—to use the inexact English synonym. His concern was not that the French would lose a battle; his concern was the effect the loss of the position would have on the country at large.

  However, Driant then delivered a troubling assessment of purely military matters. His commanding general, he averred, is a good man, is trying to foresee all possibilities. But there is little he can do, because of the lack of means. The phrase Driant uses, le manque de bras, seems deliberately ambiguous, particularly since he emphasizes it in the letter. However, the point is clear enough. He lacks the means to do what is required—and that is the point of the sentences that follow. Thus the reason for Driant’s letter: He is asking that Deschanel call this to the attention of the minister of war, because

  If our first line is overrun by a massive attack, our second line is insufficient. We have gotten to this point because of a lack of workers and, I add, a lack of barbed wire. . . . If this is not done, we will not be ready when the wave returns. . . . Of artillery and above all machine guns, we only have a minute quantity, but I don’t speak of those, because more have been promised (180).

  In return Driant received a rather blandly inconsequential note, but Deschanel promised to bring the letter to the attention of the minister of war, “either tomorrow or the day after” (181).

  But there is no record of anything much being done. In fact, for the next two months (22 August to 26 October), the cabinet was preoccupied with the grand strategic plan to send an expeditionary force to Greece that would, together with the Greek and Serbian armies, mount a powerful offensive that would do what the previous three attempts (Russia, Italy, and the Dardanelles expedition) had failed to manage.

  Like the earlier schemes, this one ended in a series of disasters: von Falkenhayn, having temporarily ejected the Russians from the field (as Driant noted), now turned his attentions to the Serbians. A joint Austro-German and Bulgarian offensive in early October destroyed the Serbian army and forced its evacuation to offshore Greek islands, and thence to Greece. The forced alliance with Greece was collapsing, the British troops stayed put, and General Sarrail’s French expeditionary force accomplished nothing at all, although the good general managed to alienate all and sundry.

  But by then—mid-October—the government was fighting for survival, so the Greek fiasco was simply another nail in its coffin, and on 29 October the Viviani government fell.

  As with most of these governmental crises—and quite unlike the situation in Great Britain or the United States—there was much less to the changes of government than met the eye. The conscientious reader will recall that Joffre had been elevated to chief of staff by Adolphe Messimy when he was minister of war in June 1911. Five changes of government later—it was only June 1914—and he was minister of war again. But in the panic of late August, the government fell again, and Messimy was replaced by Alexandre Millerand, who had already succeeded Messimy once before, in 1911.

  So in October, when Poincaré asked Aristide Briand to form a new government, it was his third turn as prime minister, which suggests how little things had changed. However, in an uncharacteristic burst of rationality, Briand named as his new minister of war Joseph-Simon Gallieni, the real architect of the victory that Joffre had let be called the Battle of the Marne, and France’s most distinguished soldier, prewar.

  Now, Marshal Gallieni was personally extremely unhappy about the way in which Joffre’s staff had tried to deny him any credit at all for the Marne; nor was he impressed by what he had seen thus far at Chantilly. “The GQG is a machine with an engine that doesn’t run,” is a quote from his diary that pretty much sums up his attitude.39 Nor was he much of a fan of the civilian leadership. Before the war he had lobbied for heavy artillery, and he personally blamed the Chamber of Deputies for blocking the appropriations to develop proper weapons. As minister, he had to attend cabinet meetings and sessions of the chamber, and his descriptions of them are scathing, as a few snippets from his diary make clear.

  At the Council of Ministers, discussion confused, as always (10 November)

  Council. Always words, never decisions. Poincaré, Briand . . . talk continually, and about everything. Nothing is ever resolved (11 November).

  At the Chamber [of Deputies]. Interminable babbling (12 November).40

&n
bsp; However, Gallieni was not simply some crotchety oldster. A certain contempt for a government that has had seven ministers of war—in 42 months—hardly seems hypercritical. Particularly when most of the time the new prime ministers and most of their cabinet were simply being recycled from the same parties that had been in power for decades.

  Moreover, Gallieni had an argument to make about the reason the GQG was a machine that lacked a working motor. His argument was in two simple parts, both of which revealed a shrewd insight into the problem.

  During the first month or so of the war, Joffre had sacked almost all the senior generals. By 6 September 1914, by his own admission, he had removed about a third of the senior commanders from their posts: two army group commanders, 9 of the 21 corps commanders, 33 of the 72 division commanders, and 5 of the 10 cavalry commanders.41

  Their successors were men who were new to their rank, colonels who were now having to be division and in some cases corps commanders, brigadiers who were having to coordinate units much larger and more complex than infantry divisions. The learning curve was steep.

  At the same time, Joffre had surrounded himself with relatively junior officers who had no experience either in the field or in combat. Maurice Gamelin, for example, was a major in 1914 who had never commanded more than a battalion, and that only briefly. Most of his military service had been doing staff work. Although Ferdinand Foch was not only older, but was actually a corps commander in 1914, he had held the job only briefly, as he had spent most of his recent career at the École Militaire. Like Gamelin, he was somewhat of a theorist, had written a book that was rather pretentiously entitled On the Principles of War. Among its many gems was the notion that victory could only be achieved by engaging in hand-to-hand combat, that, in an atrociously ambiguous phrase, “victory floats above the enemy’s bayonets.”42

  But these new men felt themselves vastly superior to everyone else, even though they had no substantive experience. “The GQG, perpetually incorrigible, lives in an atmosphere of unreality,” Gallieni observed (Carnets, 239). Given that major battles such as the Woëvre were planned in a way that revealed complete ignorance of the terrain, that costly and futile attacks were launched on strongpoints that clearly were beyond the means of the units involved, that information was carefully massaged to reflect the preconceptions of the headquarters, Gallieni’s remark seems fair enough.

  Then there was the aging marshal’s idea that Joffre was in fact being managed by his staff, rather than the other way around. His experiences in September 1914, watching as these same men glorified the commander in chief, building him up as the great military strategist who had defeated the Germans at the Battle of the Marne, rankled, and not least because of the way in which his role as military governor of Paris had been dismissed.

  The whole thing was smoke and mirrors, Gallieni thought. “Was there a Battle of the Marne?” he wondered, meditating on the four separate battles, spread out from north of Paris to south of Verdun, that had all been rolled up into one battle and given the name of a French river.43

  Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the Marne was how the name was assigned. At Chantilly, there was considerable discussion about this. General Berthelot suggested “Bataille des Champs Catalauniques,” an obscure and rather bookish reference, although one with some vague historical resonance.44 General Belin suggested a more prosaic but accurate tag: “La Bataille Paris-Verdun.” To which another officer retorted that the name sounded more like a bicycle race than a battle. Then Gamelin, still a major, and very much a junior member of the staff, came up with the idea of calling it the Battle of the Marne. Joffre, who had contributed nothing to the discussion, agreed.

  Now, the French, left in possession of the battlefields, were entitled to claim a victory, and certainly to call it whatever they wanted. But this process is a perfect encapsulation of the problems at the top: a great concern with appearance, a rather passive supreme commander, discussions dominated by junior officers. But neither civilians at the top nor the uneasy officers lower down had access to the data that would enable them to substantiate their unease, their distress. They were forced to argue either on the basis of anecdotal information or abstract principles such as the faulty theories or the ignorance of modern warfare.

  But now, at about the same time that Gallieni was appointed minister of war, there was a new development that helped to bring matters to a head.

  Since the staff at Chantilly was sitting on all the information, only doling it out as they saw fit, there was no way anyone on the outside could win the argument as it was being framed. But there was leakage. Driant apparently wasn’t the only source for the cabinet. Here is Gallieni’s entry recording the discussion of 16 December.

  Morning, Council of Ministers, discussion about Joffre and the trenches. Disquiet about the next German attack. Wrote Joffre. In some places, the defensive works are not in good condition. The thing is grave. Do what is necessary from Verdun to Toul, between Berry-au-Bac and Soupir. The first line easily broken through, there aren’t enough troops there. At 1500 or 2000 [meters] very little in the way of a second line of troops.

  So that same day, Gallieni wrote Joffre a letter, laying out his—and the government’s—fears about Verdun and adjacent areas:

  Some differing sources have come to us giving accounts of the organization of the front and signaling some points of faultiness in the system of defense. In particular and notably in the regions of the Meurthe, Toul, and Verdun, the network of trenches is not completed as it is in the major parts of the front. This situation, if true, risks posing the most severe inconveniences.45

  Translating from the habitually understated and generic language of the military bureaucracy: We hear there aren’t any defenses in this area and that’s a big problem, because we’re talking about a big piece of our front line, everything from Verdun down to Toul.

  Now, Joffre could easily brush off the potshots taken at him by members of the chamber who just happened to be officers and so were immune to military discipline. They didn’t understand these matters, had no grasp of military theory or of modern warfare. But whatever he thought about Gallieni, he was minister of war. So, within 24 hours, Joffre promptly answered him.

  I can give the government assurance that, across the entire front, there are at least two main defensive lines, furnished with the necessary passive obstacles required to assure all the required resistance. In this region there exist three or four successive defensive positions, finished or on the road to completion. The organization is, on the whole, much better and more complete than that of our adversaries. . . . I consider that nothing justifies the fears you have expressed in the name of the government in your dispatch of 16 December.46

  Joffre could hardly have been clearer. These people don’t know what they’re talking about. Everything is in order. Shut up and let me win the war.

  Of course, the difficulty here is that after four months of pounding away on the right bank, it was hard to see just what the French defensive positions actually had been, but the consensus among the men who were there is that Driant was largely right: that Joffre’s claim was largely and fatally untrue.

  Now comes the puzzle. To give Joffre credit, he did actually visit the front on occasion, when he could fit it into his schedule of eating and napping, and during 1915, he inspected Verdun almost every month. That raises an interesting and unanswerable question. He went there, he presumably looked around. He surely must have noticed that the defensive positions in no way corresponded to the letter.

  What’s curious is that, as we all know, bureaucrats usually give themselves escape clauses when their pronouncements are parsed carefully. But there is none here. Joffre could not have been more emphatic.

  Of course, France’s military ruler had always been prone to making sweeping declarations. In January 1915, he had told President Poincaré that “in six months, the Germans would no longer be
in France,” that he would be in hot pursuit of them.47 But his wildly optimistic views were to a considerable extent shared by the civilians, who believed—as did Joffre—that Italy’s entrance into the war (in May 1915) would have a great effect on its outcome.

  Colonel Herbillon, whose diary is a fascinating record of these blissful moments, was less sure. In July 1915, as everyone was still rhapsodizing about the impact of Italy and the prospects of a great breakthrough in Champagne-Artois, he said frankly to the prime minister and the president, “I do not believe that the war will be over by this winter [1915–1916] and that by that point we will have run the enemy off our territory” (Souvenirs, 1:162).

  There followed a spirited exchange, in which Poincaré observed that he hoped Herbillon was a bad prophet, because if the army didn’t at the very least win some sort of tactical victory [in Champagne in September], “I can’t answer for the Chamber, or for the country,” and the president went on to characterize Joffre and his “entourage” as being out of touch with the mood of the government.

  Joffre was not in the least bit abashed by the failure of his January prediction. On 18 July 1915, he told Herbillon how pleased he was with the results of a meeting with Prime Minister René Viviani, Millerand (minister of war), and Alexandre Ribot, the minister of finance. “He had declared that, in three months, there would be no Germans in France. I hoped so, but I regretted his words,” Herbillon confided to his diary, drawing the obvious conclusion that if his confident forecast proved false, everyone would turn against him (Souvenirs, 1:169).