Verdun

by John Mosier

  But although Herbillon was generally very restrained and cautious in his assertions to the president and the prime minister, he too was dependent on the information the staff was giving him, and he naturally assumed they were telling him the truth. Conscientiously, he queried General de Castelnau about what he had seen when he visited Verdun in January, and the general assured him that the defenses were well along and in good order.

  By now—early February—everyone assumed that there would most likely be a German offensive at Verdun, to the extent that on 15 February, both Poincaré and Viviani revealed their unease about the situation. Their concern was not about whether there would be an attack or not; it was much more pessimistic: If there was an attack, would it be successful?

  Back in September 1914, as Poincaré was hearing about the Bavarian offensive at Saint-Mihiel, he had instantly jumped on the notion that the Germans aimed to take Verdun by force, and had told Herbillon what a disaster that would be, owing to its effect on the morale of the country. So now he was naturally even more concerned.

  But Herbillon, having talked to de Castelnau, could only say what he had in turn been told, and that assumption—that he had been told the truth—led the good colonel to climb out on a fatal limb.

  Yes, Herbillon agreed, “the attack is certain.” He went on to explain that they had information from deserters about a great offensive, intelligence from a spy, accounts from workers, all this just recently received, all pointing to a great offensive, and Herbillon was doubtless being quite truthful when he said that the French would be in for “a rude shock.”48

  The interchange between the colonel and the prime minister is interesting, as it suggests just how unreal the atmosphere at the GQG really was. Herbillon admitted that the French would be in for a “shock,” and that he didn’t doubt that the Germans would get into the first line of trenches, “like we did in Champagne.” But there’s no need to panic when that happens. “General Joffre has been preparing for this for a long time. He has brought in more troops, increased the heavy artillery, although there’s no doubt it will be difficult.”

  Briand had only one question: would Verdun hold? Because if it didn’t, “that would be a disaster” (Souvenirs, 1:243).

  So the French waited, Joffre with his usual sangfroid, the civilians nervous, and Gallieni simply biding his time.

  7

  The German Gamble

  A bold stroke of this nature depends absolutely for success on a dog or a goose.

  —Napoleon1

  Judging from the book he wrote about his tour of the front in 1916, H. G. Wells was a terrible observer with a very poor understanding of the war. But he was not a bad judge of human beings, and one of his more intriguing remarks about the war was this:

  One of the larger singularities of the great war is its failure to produce great and imposing personalities, mighty leaders, Napoleons, Caesars. I would indeed make that the essential thing in my reckoning of the war. It is a drama without a hero; without countless incidental heroes no doubt, but no star part.2

  One supposes that when he wrote those lines he was thinking both of Joffre and his own Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the expeditionary force in France. The historian Phillip Guedalla put it much better when he wrote that “the combination of high office with incapacity is peculiar to these islands. It is only foreigners, decadent Latins or unwieldy Teutons, who seek out able men to be their governors.”3

  Certainly by comparison with Haig, Joffre was a mental giant, albeit a slothful one. The point being that as they were not able to say much that was flattering about their own supreme commanders, the Allies took refuge in a time-honored political expedient of heaping abuse on the leaders of their enemies.

  The characterizations of the German commanders are both extreme and extremely foolish. They call to mind nothing so much as Somerset Maugham’s remark about the biographer of his fictional modernist painter: “You may be sure that if Charles Strickland left a laundry bill unpaid it will be given you in extenso, and if he forebore to return a borrowed half-crown no detail of the transaction will be omitted.”4

  A particular virulence is reserved for Erich von Falkenhayn, the German chief of staff from September 1914 to August 1916, probably because he was clearly the most successful and by far the most intelligent of the three commanding generals. That may sound like faint praise, given Haig and Joffre, but von Falkenhayn’s record is formidable: the successful attack on Saint-Mihiel, the seizure of Antwerp and the channel ports, the breakthrough offensive of May 1915 against the Russians, the near absolute destruction of the Serbian army that same year, the steady progress in the Argonne that so disturbed President Poincaré.

  Then there was the creation of the virtually impregnable positions in the west, with the resultant serial suicides of the Allied attacks, from the First Battle of the Somme, to the failed offensives we have already seen (the Vauquois, Les Éparges, the Woëvre). And this list is seriously incomplete, as it does not include the failed offensives in Champagne and Artois, the slaughters of the Hartmannswillerkopf and the Lingekopf in the Vosges. That the GQG and its English counterpart hid the bad news, wildly inflated the German losses, and managed to spin the result of every engagement does not alter the basic fact that London and Paris both perceived there was a bloody stalemate on the Western Front.

  Smearing your opponent as a substitute for admitting his success and your weakness is a standard ploy in politics. Since all the leaders involved, whether they were in uniform or not, were basically politicians, the idea was reflexive, went hand in hand with the hate. The venom distracted them from studying their opponent, understanding his weaknesses. It was, at bottom, the distorting lens of a nationalism that became racism—the same myopia that led to a dismissal of the Japanese military before Pearl Harbor and Singapore.

  None of which should be taken to imply that the Germans did not have their own problems. By the autumn of 1915, their commander in chief was a man sorely beset.

  VON FALKENHAYN’S DIFFICULTIES

  Despite this string of actually rather impressive successes, the German chief of staff found himself in an extremely precarious situation. Paradoxically, the more successful his armies were, the more precarious his situation became. In that sense the German commander was the antitype of Joffre. The reasons are not difficult to comprehend.

  As we have seen, there were two reasons why Joffre, despite the growing antipathy of the government, remained firmly in control as a sort of half dictator. On the one hand, there was no one around to replace him, and on the other, the instability of the governments of the Third Republic, with its revolving-door ministries, allowed him the luxury of cultivating his image undisturbed. This was true even as the animosity of the cabinet grew during the summer of 1915, since by October they had all been replaced. Ironically, as their hostilities increased, so did their general unpopularity with the voters, while Joffre became steadily more popular.

  He and his staff also took care to make sure that there were no possible successors on the horizon. After the wholesale purges of fall 1914, there were really only two senior generals remaining in the army who could be seen in that light. Auguste Dubail and Maurice Sarrail just happened to be the two generals responsible for French forces on the flanks of Verdun, and both came to grief as their offensives there foundered. Dubail had been formally tagged as Joffre’s eventual successor, but he was made a scapegoat for the fiasco of the Woëvre offensive in spring 1915, just as Sarrail was for the failures in the Argonne that summer.

  Whether or not either general was more than minimally competent, given the absolute lack of heavy guns and even sufficient stocks of the shells for the few guns their soldiers possessed, it is hard to imagine how anyone could have done much better. But in the unreal world of Chantilly, a world in which offensives were planned as though the Germans had no artillery at all, hurling masses of infantry into battle on their own was a pe
rfectly sensible tactic, and the general whose troops failed to prevail was clearly incapable.5

  Sarrail was even more of a radical than his old patron, Louis André, the minister of war who had instituted the political inquisition that had essentially wrecked the officer corps, so he was, as one of Joffre’s biographers sarcastically remarks, the “darling of the left.”6 Given the paranoia of the government about Joffre’s control of the war, he was the ideal replacement, at least as far as politics went. So Joffre, rather smoothly, managed to have him shunted off to the black hole of the Balkans. He figured, astutely enough, that this assignment would put an end to any thought of Sarrail replacing him. He was right: out of sight, out of mind, apparently. If Joffre had been as good at fighting the Germans as he was at dispatching potential rivals and successors, the war would have been over in six weeks.

  This brief appreciation of his opposite number allows for a better understanding of the German chief of staff’s basic problems.

  By contrast with republican France, the constitutional monarchy that was Germany exuded stability. Wilhelm II was a popular monarch with his people, and although his powers were extremely limited he had a significant role to play in the government. This role was complex and is even today poorly understood. The complexity and reality of it is explained below, but for the moment, it is only important to understand that he liked von Falkenhayn, despised Ludendorff, and was intimidated by von Hindenburg and von Mackensen—along with the other senior generals who had served under his grandfather and von Moltke the Elder.

  That was important, because the easterners were champing at the bit to get rid of von Falkenhayn, were doing everything they could to trip him up. Part of that was professional jealousy of the usual sort, but at bottom it also reflected a genuine difference of opinion on how to win the war, a split in the officer corps that had been simmering for decades. When von Moltke the Younger failed to secure a quick victory in the west in August 1914, and when von Falkenhayn, who replaced him, opted for a more defensively oriented strategy there, the conflict came out into the open.

  The debate was a reasonable one, but so long as his chief of staff could offer up reasonable prospects of success in this ghastly war, Wilhelm would stand by him. But as opposed to that, there was the matter of the stalemate in the west, particularly when offset by what the easterners were claiming was an unbroken string of triumphs against the Russians. Their position was simple: “Look what we can do, even when stuck with the hapless Austrians as allies, and then imagine what we could accomplish if we were running the war.”

  Von Hindenburg, the nominal commander of the German forces in the east, was as astute as Joffre in self-promotion, the proof being that he ran for president in the new German republic, was elected, and remained in office the rest of his life. And, unlike Joffre, he actually had a string of military successes under his belt. So his position was secure to the point of invulnerability.

  In effect, the easterners had von Falkenhayn in a double bind. They excused any shortcomings by claiming they weren’t getting what they needed, and blamed the Austrians, this last always being a successful ploy in Berlin.

  Whatever his feelings for the easterners were, von Falkenhayn actually was obsessed with winning the war, and what his command decisions mostly reveal is a man trying to balance the two factions. He was also, sensibly enough, concerned about the situation of Germany’s chief ally, Austria-Hungary.

  Its early disasters had mostly been a function of the extremely small size of its armed forces: the army had fewer men in the field in 1914 against the Russians than they had deployed in 1866 against the Prussians. But the empire had a population of 50 million, so it was not as though they were running out of men; it simply took time to draft and train them. But their early losses had been heavy, and by April 1915, with Italy about to enter the war, with the Russians making headway in Galicia and the Bukovina, with the Serbians still in the field, there was a certain amount of panic in both Berlin and Vienna.

  So in spring 1915, von Falkenhayn turned his attention to the east, worked with his opposite number in Vienna, Conrad von Hötzendorf, to come up with a grand offensive operation against the Russian forces in Galicia. That offensive began on 2 May, with a bombardment the like of which the Austrians had never seen before, one that simply pulverized the Russian lines.7

  The key German general in this operation was August von Mackensen, a spry and energetic veteran of 1870 who was in command of the Eleventh Army, a force of eight German and four Habsburg divisions. This attack was very much a joint affair, as von Mackensen was flanked on each side by an Austro-Hungarian army, but, like von Hindenburg, the Eleventh Army’s commander wasn’t at all shy about taking credit for the resulting success.

  The May offensive was certainly successful enough. The dazed Russians immediately began to retreat, and when the offensive finally wound down in July, not only had the Russians been run out of Galicia, but the new front stretched from just outside of Riga in the north, all way past Pinsk and Tarnopol, and on to Czernowitz in the Bukovina.

  So von Falkenhayn’s (or Conrad von Hötzendorf’s) plan resulted in a major victory, far greater than anything achieved thus far by von Hindenburg and Ludendorff in the north. This victory was why, when Driant wrote his letter to Paul Deschanel, he began by observing that the Russians were out of action for six months. In fact, Driant’s time frame was eerily prescient. If anything, it was understated. After the collapse of May 1915, the Russians had only enough left for two more offensives, one in February 1916 and the other in June.

  So Austria-Hungary was now off the hook, and in fact, the army of Franz Josef, despite the universal contempt in which it was held by friend and foe alike, proved remarkably resilient. Although von Falkenhayn had been nearly as distressed as Paris was enthusiastic about Italy’s entrance into the war in May 1915, as the summer wore on events turned out somewhat differently both from his fears and from Allied hopes.

  The Italian ambassador to Paris had proclaimed enthusiastically to the French cabinet that his country had the “formula for a rupture,” which they hopefully took as meaning that the Italians would smash through the Austro-Hungarian positions almost immediately.8 But Tomaso Tittoni was as ludicrously out of touch as Joffre. Within twelve months the Allied government was dispatching friendly witnesses like Wells and Conan Doyle to the Italian front to help them justify what any objective observer could see was simply another stalemate, the only accomplishment of which was the slaughter of the hapless Italian infantry. Far from collapsing the Habsburg empire, what the subjects of Franz Josef perceived as Italy’s stab in the back was repaid with interest—even by the allegedly unreliable Slavs.

  But triumph in the east, and the failure of Allied hopes on the Italian front, hardly solved von Falkenhayn’s problems. In fact, it only made them worse. His successful actions in the east—actions for which von Mackensen, von Hindenburg, and the Austrians all promptly claimed the credit—only made the stalemate in the west all the more discouraging, and thus made his position all the more precarious.

  Marshal von Haesler, the octogenarian former commander of von Mudra’s Sixteenth Army Corps—who was still on hand in the Argonne to make sure this brash young sexagenarian was up to the mark—expressed the view perfectly when he exploded about the whole idea of trench warfare. It was a disaster that destroyed the army’s chances for victory: “And it should never have come to this, if we had not been led with such deplorable incompetence.”9

  But this was unfair. As the war had worn on, von Falkenhayn was beginning to grasp something that the vast majority of the generals, regardless of their nationality, failed to grasp: The armies of this war, backed by the great industries of the combatants, were simply too large for the traditional idea of warfare to work. Joffre claimed that the Marne was a great French victory, just as von Hindenburg did the same for Tannenberg. But both battles were fought in September 1914, and here it was, g
oing on a year of warfare, and the Germans were still in France and the Russians were still in the fight.

  Driant’s estimate really hit the nail on the head. Despite their defeat, despite being on course to lose the incredible figure of a million men taken prisoner, and with equally staggering casualties, the Russians were not disposed to quit the war.

  For that matter, the same could be said of the Austrians. Annihilation worked reasonably well if your opponent was Serbia or Belgium. Those countries were not very large in terms of population or area. Their small size meant that they could be physically occupied, and both had small armies. Serbia’s was larger and more experienced, but in the context of this war it was possible to overwhelm a few hundred thousand men.

  As we noted earlier, by October 1915, that was basically what had happened in the Balkans. The Serbian army had largely been destroyed, the country overrun. But when a country had a population of 30, 50, 60, 100 million—and the industry to match it—the thing was either impossible, or not achievable in any reasonable amount of time.

  The easterners, in other words, were pursuing a chimera: the idea that one more great victory would force the Russians to quit the war. In that sense, the only difference between von Mackensen and von Hindenburg on the one side, and Joffre and Haig on the other, was competence. Fundamentally, they all believed in the same thing: the great battle of annihilation that, with its consequent massive breakthrough, would bring a speedy end to the war and the defeat of their opponents.

  But as the months went by, von Falkenhayn decided that was not going to work.10 The only way to win was to destroy your opponent’s will to fight, what the French called his moral, a word that means something slightly different from its English equivalent, morale, as it implies a sort of backbone as well as a state of mind.