by John Mosier
The heights of the Meuse above the city would be the basis for a formidable defensive position, so when the French responded by trying to retake their lost territory, they’d be slaughtered. Given the interdicted rail lines, and the denuding of the forts, the French would hardly be able to succeed, as their situation would be considerably worse than it had been when they tried to retake the buttes.
The loss of Verdun would strike deep into the heart of France, and when they realized they couldn’t get it back, that their sacrifices were futile, they’d come to their senses, agree to a reasonable peace.
Unlike the earlier operations, which all involved flank attacks, this one would be a direct frontal assault on the forts of the right bank. But the main weight of the attack would consist not of soldiers, but of high explosives, just as had been the case in the Argonne. The staff planned for a massive artillery barrage that would simply erase the French positions. At the same time, the artillery assault would not simply be aimed at the initial lines, at the forts and the entrenchments in front of them, but would have great depth, so that the defenders would be unable to counterattack.
The 38-centimeter gun was only the first of a whole phalanx of heavy weapons. Two more of the 38-centimeter guns were installed, along with 13 of the 42-centimeter guns and 11 of the Austrian 30.5-centimeter weapons, and 210 smaller guns.15 That was in addition to the 140 21-centimeter howitzers and the usual complement of divisional howitzers in 10.5 and 15 centimeters (354 of them).
As the munitions were being shipped in and the gun emplacements prepared, the troop movements began as well. General Buat’s scrupulous recording of the movements of German divisions in and out of the fronts shows a pattern nicely synchronized with the emplacement and firing of the 38-centimeter gun.
In September 1915, four divisions were shifted from Germany to the Western Front, probably in response to the Anglo-French offensive in Artois and Champagne, or at least that was General Buat’s inference.16
But then, in October, no less than 11 divisions were moved into line, and on 3 November more were added, raising the number of divisions on the Western Front from 107 (in September) to 117. The numbers don’t add up because there were also divisions being transferred from the Western Front, as the German high command kept shifting its resources back and forth, as well as in and out of the line.
However, the most revealing point here is that the bulk of the troop movements to the west came in October 1915. For the previous year—that is, from September 1914 to September 1915—the average number of German divisions in the west had fluctuated between 99 and 107. Most months it had been 104.
But now, suddenly, in October it shot up to the highest it had been, and in November it climbed another notch. By contrast, in December and January only one division was added, and three more were added in February.
The pattern makes sense when we realize that General Herr, the French officer in immediate command of the troops at Verdun, believed he would be attacked on 16 January 1916, nearly five weeks before the actual attack.17 Unusually strong winter storms interfered with the original timetable, and gave the GQG and the French local commanders at Verdun ample time to prepare.
But aside from General Herr, no one seemed particularly concerned about the notion of a German offensive. In Paris, the theaters had finally reopened, although judging from the diaries maintained by Gallieni and Abel Ferry, the best theater in town was to be found at the cabinet meetings. Out in Chantilly, Joffre professed himself quite satisfied with the state of the defenses. Even though 1915 had brought the Allies an almost completely unrelieved strain of checks and disasters, their feelings in midwinter bordered on a dangerous complacency.
THE LETTER
Now that the offensive was set, the arrangements largely complete, von Falkenhayn took the last step. He notified the emperor of the plan. Now, clearly, given all the activity to date, the decision to attack had already been made, and the preparations were complete. So the notion implicit in all accounts of this letter is highly misleading. The letter, which openly hostile writers seized on, is not a proposal; it is a piece of internal public relations. Von Falkenhayn knew the importance of keeping the emperor on his side, as his continuing in the role of chief of staff depended on Wilhelm’s willpower.
He also knew his master’s peculiarities, as did everyone who worked closely with the monarch, so he wrote with a specific audience in mind. That audience explains both the parts of the letter that subsequently became infamous, or anyway notorious, and it also explains the surprising omission.
However, with these reservations, the key paragraph of the letter is really quite revolutionary.
Moreover, the lessons to be deduced from the failures of our enemy’s mass attacks are decisive against any imitation of their battle methods. Attempts at a mass break-through, even with an extreme accumulation of men and material, cannot be regarded as holding out prospects of success against a well armed enemy whose morale is sound and who is not seriously inferior in numbers.18
This point is exactly the one that neither Joffre nor the easterners had yet grasped. Writing to a man whose knowledge of tactics and strategy was minimal, von Falkenhayn did not go into the detailed reasons why a “mass break-through” was impossible. For that we must turn to the musings of General Fayolle, who had spelled it out very precisely the previous summer.
In this war it is not sufficient to open a breach, one must open a gap of twenty kilometers or so, so that there is no response on the left or right. One must do this with an entire army, and then have another ready to pass through the breach. And that is not simple.19
Having now dismissed the ideas of the easterners that more vigorous action would carry their armies to a final victory in the west, von Falkenhayn now explained his idea in very simple terms.
The only way to win in the west was to make the French realize that there was no way they could ever hope to prevail, or, as von Falkenhayn put it in the letter, when “it is clear to the eyes of the French people that, militarily, they have nothing to hope for. Then will their limit be surpassed.”20
The precise antecedent of “their” is one of the two most important parts of this often quoted document. Judging from how the reference is invariably parsed, one would conclude that historians are rather weak at grammar. But for those who are not grammatically impaired, the word clearly and unambiguously refers back not to the French army, but to the French people, and hence to France itself. Or, more precisely, the government and the people, the two entities that President Poincaré had invoked in July 1915.
By December 1915, the Germans had begun to realize that the French army was apparently willing to fight far past the point of rational calculation. France’s generals had already established that, as they ordered assault after assault on German strongpoints all along the line. Given the almost total lack of modern heavy artillery, the shortage of shells, any objective observer would conclude these attacks were doomed in advance. They all failed. But in each case, the GQG insisted on more attempts, the local commanders obeyed, and the slaughter continued.
The assaults on the butte of the Vauquois that began in 1914 continued into March 1915. That set the pattern. It was continued all along the line. The attempts on the flanks of Verdun were tactically some of the most senseless and futile. Indeed, judging from the accounts of the survivors, the efforts to wrest the butte of Les Éparges resulted in some of the most horrific combats of the entire war. But the desperate and unsuccessful attempts elsewhere were more of the same.
The struggle for the two buttes was simply the beginning. In the Argonne, in the Woëvre, in the Vosges mountains, and in Champagne-Artois, the GQG launched infantry attacks in successive attempts, with only the most perfunctory artillery support at best. The losses, carefully concealed, were horrifying. The gains, tiny and insignificant at best, were carefully spun. Well might von Falkenhayn conclude that his opponents could b
e baited into destroying themselves.
But thus far, there was no sign that the willingness of France’s soldiers to die in vain assaults was diminishing. To the contrary, as Wilhelm was reading the famous letter, the steep slope that led to the crest of the Hartmannswillerkopf, not far distant from his summer castle in the Vosges mountains, was littered with the dead of the elite French alpine troops, as they tried to seize the German position. France’s best soldiers were taking losses at the rate of 50 percent of the men engaged; senior officers and generals were killed as they tried to exhort their battered men.21
Although the German defenders had not reached the point of their Austrian allies in the Alps, who would call out to the Italian infantry not to attack, as they would be cut down to the last man by machine-gun fire, the situations were precisely similar: just one prolonged and futile bloodbath.
But the attitude of the French nation, or, more specifically, of the rulers of that nation, was a different matter entirely. Both the country at large and its elected officials were being fed a steady diet of soothing reassurance, as epitomized by the slogan on a widely disseminated French postcard, featuring a suitably heroic-looking soldier proclaiming, “We are progressing day by day.”
The rigorously suppressed casualty figures, the wildly inflated estimates of German losses, the clever way that each engagement was turned into a victory of one sort or the other, combined with the obscurity of the positions named, gave the nation an utterly false sense of optimism.
As we have seen, there were men inside the government itself who were hardly optimistic, who were beginning to see behind the comfortable facade. There was not, in fall 1915, any thought of coming to terms.
Although both then and later, it was claimed over and over again that this was because democracy had to be saved from German militarism, totalitarianism, and repression, the real reason was rather less heroic. The two governments were now so deeply immersed in their own lies that if they tried to act rationally, began to negotiate, they would be howled out of office as traitors. Colonel Repington’s observation about the state of popular opinion in Great Britain is worth repeating.
The ignorance of the people concerning the war, owing to the Censorship, is unbelievable. Lunching at the Hautboy [where] . . . the proprietor—a good-class intelligent looking man—told me that the Serbians were going to beat the Germans; that there was nothing in front of our Army in France; and that we were going to be in Constantinople in ten days’ time. These are the kind of beliefs into which the country has been chloroformed by the Censorship.22
But what if the patient woke up, discovered that instead of removing his tonsils, the doctors had actually removed his kidney and his lung?
This was the proverbial elephant in the living room, which was such a horrifying prospect for the politicians of both countries that it didn’t bear thinking about. So they didn’t.
But to put matters quite simply—as, given Wilhelm, they had to be—von Falkenhayn proposed to wake them up. Verdun, he observed, was a position of such importance to France that the nation could not stand to lose it. It was, just as Pétain would later observe, the “boulevard morale” of the country. After half a century of fortifying it, after pouring millions of francs into it, the country simply could not stand for the loss.
Nor could that loss be concealed. Very few Parisians knew exactly where Les Éparges or the Hartmannswillerkopf was, and if their knowledge of the obscurities of their national geography was such that they did, they also knew that these places were rather insignificant.
But everyone knew where Verdun was, and most people had a pretty good idea of the area encompassed by the great arc of the forts. This was one elephant in the room that could not easily be converted into a piece of furniture and covered over with a rug.
So as a result, when von Falkenhayn observed that “the French leadership would fight to the last man to get it back,” he analyzed the situation precisely, and rather astutely.23
But note the abstract nature of the sentence. There is nothing here about the French army; he is speaking about the leadership of the country. Rightly so: he already knew that his opposite number had already written Verdun off, had stripped it bare, and were ready to evacuate it entirely if need be.
And indeed, as we shall see—leaping ahead to those critical days of February 1916—that proved to be precisely the reaction of the French leadership. The GQG was cheerfully willing to write the whole area off, but the government realized that if they did, that would be the end of the war. The country would collapse. What was worse, their careers would be at an end.
Basically, then, given the situation after over a year of fighting, von Falkenhayn’s appreciation was correct. Indeed, it was perhaps more fundamentally correct than he realized, so far as the idea of a breakthrough went. Even when the attack was tactically a success, resulting in a deep penetration into enemy territory, that success did not bring the enemy to the bargaining table. Since the Allies never had anything approaching a breakthrough on the Western Front, they naturally glossed over this rather basic point. But if one steps back, looks at all the fronts, the two patterns are quite clear.
On the one hand there were the theaters where there was a stalemate, just as Lord Hankey had perceived a year earlier: Italy, the Western Front after October 1914. On the other, on the Eastern Front, enormous territorial gains were achieved with commensurate casualties, but failed to bring the war to an end. It has always been fashionable to denigrate the armies of Russia, of Italy, and of Austria-Hungary, all three of whom suffered enormous losses during the war. But Russia did not finally quit the war either because of some great military defeat or because their enemy had conquered their country. On the contrary, the last great action of the Russian army—the offensive of June 1916—was by any standard a massive breakthrough of precisely the sort that both the Allies and the easterners in the German army assumed would end the war.
The difficulty was that it didn’t, any more than the equally impressive breakthrough offensives of the Germans in France in spring 1918. So von Falkenhayn was quite correct insofar as the situation at the time, and largely correct in his judgment for the entire course of the war. The only practicable goal was to create a situation where your opponent realized the impossibility of victory, and was thus willing to quit.
Having established that it was a given that the French leadership would fight to the last man for Verdun, von Falkenhayn now made a nice rhetorical flourish. He wrote two consecutive sentences, each beginning with the same phrase, the only shift being that the second sentence uses a negative, so the result is a rhetorical expression that can be simply expressed: “if he does/if he does not.”
The rhetorical device is even more important to an understanding of the plan than correctly parsing the antecedent for “their.” In fact, it is the most significant part of the letter. Nor is there any particular difficulty in grasping the point. Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of rhetoric recognizes this construction. There are only two alternatives, and either one leads to the same end.
The French cannot afford to lose Verdun. If they fight for it, their losses will be so heavy that they will have to quit the war. If they do not fight for it, the effect on the country at large will be such that they will be forced to quit the war.
Military success has nothing much to do with the end result. In fact, von Falkenhayn is quite clear that it makes no difference whether or not the French would be able to hang on to Verdun or to recapture it. The consequences of losing Verdun would certainly have an enormous effect on French morale: Von Falkenhayn describes this effect as ungeheuer, a German word with all sorts of nasty connotations: frightful, ghastly, and horrific, as well as enormous, huge, and monstrous. Again, leaping forward to the panic in Paris in late February, it should be observed that he was quite correct.
Now comes the one phrase in the letter that several generations of Allied apologists
have seized upon, have indeed made the exclusive basis for their appreciation of the plan. Out of this abstract and sophisticated piece of grand strategy, they extracted one phrase, and then used it to claim that von Falkenhayn’s aim was to win the war through attrition.
Now at this point, the thoughtful reader who is familiar with the traditional interpretations of this letter will begin to see that those interpretations rest on a series of basic grammatical or rhetorical errors. There is the failure to identify the antecedent of their. There is the fatal conflation of the general concept of the leadership of the country, with the more specific notion of the army. Then there is the failure to grasp the rhetorical device of the key sentences.
And then the whole train of error culminates in the most critical, in which a key phrase is incorrectly translated. If the French decide to fight, regardless of the outcome, von Falkenhayn avers, the result will be heavy losses. Then comes the key phrase: in that case, then will Frankreichs Kräfte verbluten. This phrase is the basis for the whole notion that von Falkenhayn’s aim was to win the war through attrition.
Unhappily for the contentions of several generations of historians, it may be easily dismissed. The idea of winning through attrition rests on a basic grammatical fallacy. Frankreich is obviously the German word for France, so it modifies the word Kräfte. Now this word denotes, quite simply, strength, or force, which may either be physical or spiritual/psychological. In point of fact, it is the same term that is used in physics for the English word force, and is the basis for a whole series of compound words that make German such a joy for foreigners, words such as motorcycle (Kraftrad) and motor fuel (Kraftstoff), for instance.