Verdun

by John Mosier

  The point is that the word represents power, or strength, or force as an abstraction. To the educated person who has struggled through courses in philosophy, trying to understand Heidegger or even Kant or Hegel, that should hardly be a surprise. To put it quite simply, and in basic English: Force is an abstract noun, while blood, clearly the root of the word verbluten, is a concrete one.

  By linking them, von Falkenhayn is either resorting to a rather obscure and incomprehensible synecdoche, or he has in mind another definition of the word. Because, although the primary definition of verblutet is, as the cognate of blut/blood suggests, bleeding or draining, only a corporeal organism can be drained of blood. So to use that meaning of the word, to couple it with Kräfte, is a species of false personification.

  As we know, words have multiple meanings, one of the reasons dictionaries are so big, as lexicographers try to list them all. So it is here. The secondary meaning of the word is precisely correct. It means draining or hemorrhaging.

  To the native English speaker, the word is certainly colorful, but German is, after all, a language where veal is called Kalbsfleisch, a compound that to the English speaker immediately suggests a rather unpleasant phrase, calf flesh, as opposed to our rather refined word veal. Another equally standard word, Schweinefleisch, is hardly more appetizing. A restaurant in the United States that advertised “roasted swine flesh” on its menu would probably have potential customers in a stampede for the exit in short order. For that matter, as anyone struggling with the intricacies of French cuisine discovers, the French word used to describe rare beef is likewise rather unappetizing: the primary meaning of saignant is bloody, derived from the same root as the word sanguinary. But that word is in little use, so the derivation does not strike the ear quite as unpleasantly.

  So the whole idea that von Falkenhayn saw Verdun as a way to win the war by killing enormous numbers of Frenchmen rests on one phrase in his letter, which is then rendered as a rhetorical absurdity.

  In addition, it has the inordinate difficulty of ignoring arithmetic. If that was his aim, all he really had to do was remain on the defensive. Given French losses to date, he hardly had to go to the trouble of staging a major offensive.

  By the end of 1915, France, with a population half the size of Germany’s, but with losses two or three times higher, was already facing the prospect of running out of men, which was the main reason Joffre now had to wait patiently until enough British soldiers arrived to allow him to stage a major offensive—six months into the future.

  Of course, given the way the casualty figures were suppressed, misrepresented, and then denied, it is easy to see why this conclusion is superficially appealing. If one believes the Allied fantasies about crippling German losses, then everything becomes reversed. The Germans become desperate, and so forth.

  Now, this intrusion of logic and rhetoric into historical narrative may well make the reader nervous, even if he is willing to grant the basic fact of the lopsided nature of the casualty exchange. So at this point, let us shift slightly. Here is what people actually said.

  Three months into the 1916 battle, von Falkenhayn’s aim had already been incorporated into a neat little trope that was being disseminated all around. His aim was, quite simply, to win the war through attrition—that is, to win by killing off enemy soldiers—and this was expressed through the catchy phrase to bleed France white, a memorable metonymy in which the nation is turned into a person.

  This idea was advanced not by historians writing long after the fact, but by propagandists busily doing their job. How do we know this?

  Proof isn’t hard to find. Here is the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who visited the French, British, and Italian fronts in June 1916, speaking of his visit to the French sector. Notice the date: June 1916.

  Germany set out to bleed France white. Well, she has done so. France is full of widows and orphans from end to end. Perhaps in proportion to her population she has suffered the most of all. But in carrying out her hellish mission Germany has bled herself white also.24

  There, in four simple English sentences, is the whole Allied spin on the 1916 battle for Verdun—written while the fighting was still going on.

  Now then, compare what Conan Doyle wrote in June 1916 with what the eminent historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote nearly a half a century later. In discussing von Falkenhayn’s plans for Verdun, he concludes with this statement:

  He therefore proposed to bleed the French white. . . . This was not a strategy. It was a policy of attrition, just like that of Joffre and Sir William Robertson, but more scientifically calculated. Falkenhayn did not seek a spot where victory would bring him a strategical advantage. He wanted only a symbol which would be a challenge to French pride.25

  A more perfect example of how propaganda becomes sober historical fact would be difficult to find.

  Since the French controlled the figures of their losses, they were easily able to spin the 1916 battles to their advantage. As Winston Churchill would point out later, the French always won what he termed the “war of communiqués.”26 In terms of a rhetorical strategy, the idea was excellent: assign an aim or a position to your opponent that he doesn’t actually have, and then insist that he be judged for failing to meet the goal you have falsely assigned him. Everyone who has studied rhetoric in the past two thousand years knows this is a fallacy, but the reason it was identified early on, and given a name, is because it turns out to be an extremely effective debating technique.

  Apparently it works pretty well for historical narratives as well. But then, as the British historian Phillip Guedalla observed, “It was Quintilian or Mr. Max Beerbohm who said, ‘History repeats itself: historians repeat each other.’”27

  A FAILURE OF COMPREHENSION

  Defending von Falkenhayn, or the Germans, is a forlorn enterprise in which the facts have no particular weight, given the refusal of so many historians to acknowledge even the most obvious and fundamental facts, like the casualty imbalance.

  The difficulties, or risks, with the plan had little or nothing to do with either the morality or the practicality of “bleeding France white.” And the idea that it was possible to get a nation to quit a war without winning some spectacular battle was sound enough.

  Like the cherished British notion of a blockade, however, there was an enormous gap between the theory and actual practice. The blockade believers, like the subsequent bomber barons and airpower apostles who rose to prominence in the 1930s, were never able to get the results they claimed could easily be achieved, and this no matter how skillfully they manipulated the facts.

  The blockade worked very well—from November 1918 through June 1919, after the war had supposedly ended. Interestingly enough, the proponents of massive bombing of the cities who came along afterward used the estimates of deaths caused by the blockade to argue that strategic bombing actually killed fewer people. So the two ideas are in a curious way related.

  Moreover, both are means of reaching the civilian population of your combatant, affecting his morale, so the civilians will agitate for an end to the war. That is to say, the British navy aimed to do the same thing through the blockade that von Falkenhayn aimed to do through the Verdun offensive, and that the Royal Air Force later tried to do in the next war through bombing cities.

  That relationship, which seems clear enough, suggests a motive. Given the highly problematic morality of blockades and the bombing of cities, revealing that von Falkenhayn’s aim was pretty much the same (or in fact exactly the same) would lead people to the reflection that the Allies were morally no better than their opponents.

  Since the entire basis of the Allied position was based on the idea that they were as morally unimpeachable as the Germans were wicked and treacherous, that would hardly do. The writing of history can be a way of uncovering the past, but it can also be a way of burying it.

  The aim here is not to defend von Falkenhayn, but to get a
s close to actuality as we can. So having said how his aims were considerably shrewder than his opponents have allowed, and hence that by comparison with the Allied generals he was a mental giant and a competent strategist (although given his opponents, that is not much of an accomplishment either), it should be said that in several key respects his idea was extremely risky.

  Although von Falkenhayn was correct in his assessment about the theoretical possibilities, he erred in seeing the results as being almost axiomatic. He came of a generation of military and civilian thinkers who had quite forgotten Napoleon’s fatalism, Bismarck’s wariness, and Grant’s pragmatism.

  Nations enter and exit wars for reasons that are exceedingly complex, to the point of being irrational. Once half a century of propaganda is stripped away, France’s position in June 1940 was certainly no worse than it was in September 1914, and indeed in some ways substantially better. But the perception, the belief, on the part of the government and of much of the country was that their cause was lost. They acted accordingly, and lost their country.

  There was no way that von Falkenhayn could predict that France would reach its breaking point in the immediate future as a result of Verdun. Yes, the idea was sound, and in May 1917, that breaking point actually arrived—a year too late for the German commander’s hopes, and in the army, not the country.

  Therein lies the difficulty. He could predict with confidence the country’s response. Although he phrased it in such a way that the logic suggested the possibility that the French might not fight, he clearly assumed they would, and he was correct.

  However, whatever his strategic acumen was, he failed to grasp two basic points about the governments of his opponents. Failing to understand civilians and their institutions is not an unusual failure in generals, of course, but since his strategy was directed at the governments, he should have reasoned more closely or observed them more intimately.

  The first failure was the failure to grasp that both London and Paris were caught in a trap of their own devising. The two traps were different, but in each case, the government could not withstand the revelations that would ensue about their deception and ineptitude in the years before the war, and their incompetent impotence once it began. Politicians have great difficulty in placing the interests of their country (or of their constituents) over their careers—not so much out of selfishness, but because they generally confuse the two.

  But however we categorize that error, calling it hubris or wickedness, it is a powerful force. To expect the leaders of the political parties that had dominated French political life for half a century to admit that their decisions had ruined the army, that their alliance with Russia had blown up in their face, and that they then sat around having endless meetings while their citizens were massacred, was unrealistic to the point of delusional.

  If France quit the war, it would hardly be ruined as a nation. France had lost North America in the eighteenth century, Napoleon had eventually been defeated, and the Second Empire had collapsed in 1870. In the last two cases the country had been not only defeated, but occupied by foreign troops. But very few Frenchmen would have argued that they were worse off in 1900 under the Third Republic than in its earlier iterations or under Napoleon.

  Nor is there the slightest shred of evidence to suggest that the Germans had any intention of territorial expansion into Western Europe. This was a war that, in terms of the well-being of its citizenry, France could survive rather easily. It had done so in 1871, and it would do so in 1940.

  But the same could not be said for its leaders. Their careers would suffer; possibly even their lives would be forfeit. They would either vanish into the obscurities of national history, or survive as examples of national failure and perfidy along the lines of Napoleon III or, by 1944, Philippe Pétain.

  So it’s hardly surprising that the French repeatedly refused even to come to the bargaining table, and were unwilling even to discuss the idea. It is well to strip through that particular piece of misrepresentation, to realize that the Germans were willing to talk peace, that it was London and Paris who refused, justifying their refusal on demonstrable falsehoods.

  Indeed, as the truth gradually leaked out, the confidence in the government evaporated. By spring 1918, it was already largely gone. Here is the offhand remark by a young American woman resident in Paris for the entire war: writing in early 1918, she speaks dismissively of “the falsehoods concerning German military strength that had been spread consistently for three years,” by which she meant the steady diet of wildly exaggerated claims of their losses and of Allied successes.28

  In other words, von Falkenhayn was extremely naive to believe that anything within his powers would bring Paris to the table. A curious defect, since von Moltke the Elder had gotten stuck in the quagmire of France in 1870. He had defeated their armies, captured their leader, had their capital surrounded, and they refused to quit. That it took nearly five months before they did should have suggested the perils of dealing with the French political class as though they were rational.

  That was one failure. It was intimately connected to another: the failure to realize the extent to which both governments were enmeshed in their own lies. Educated Germans who took the trouble could find out what their losses were, as they were regularly reported in the Reichstag, and the newspapers listed names, albeit tardily and somewhat erratically. One can hardly say the Kaiserreich was transparent, but by contrast with its opponents it was a pane of glass compared to a fog in a swamp.

  A swamp into which the civilian leaders of the two governments were steadily sinking. If they agreed to any sort of terms, they would have to admit that everything the public had been told was a lie. So instead they resorted to the standard techniques of shady politicians. They covered up their failures and demonized their opponents.

  During the war, the convergence of anti-German propaganda and emerging Marxist theory combined to turn the German empire into a feudalistic, repressive, militarist state. All of that was nonsense, as any halfway competent survey of what was written about Germany in the decades before 1914 quickly reveals.

  Nowadays it is difficult for us to grasp the corrosive distortions generated by Allied propagandists about the German government and the German emperor once the war began. The following passage is an excellent illustration, since it comes as an almost offhand remark.

  Even in Germany, the most rigid of Absolute Despotisms, a phantasm of political liberty was allowed to flit about the Halls of Parliament. But through the cunning of Bismarck the Socialist masses were bound all the more tightly to the Hohenzollern Despot.29

  That this completely untrue and gratuitous swipe occurs in the middle of a biography of Theodore Roosevelt only drives the point home more effectively. Nor is this an isolated comment. In a later chapter, the author tells his readers:

  The German attack on civilization, which was openly delivered in 1914, revealed to the world that for twenty years before the German Emperor had been secretly preparing his mad project of Universal Conquest (Thayer, 216).

  The man who wrote these lines was not a minor journalist or some eccentric conspiracy theorist. He was the president of the American Historical Association, a member of the governing board of Harvard University, and an established historian. The remarks come dangerously close to professional malfeasance, and really escape only because they are patently ludicrous.

  But given the author’s profession, and his professional reputation, it is no wonder that this sort of nonsense has proven remarkably durable, particularly among military historians, to the point that one of the emperor’s more distinguished English biographers has been compelled to make the following, rather blunt remarks:

  Nor do I consider that the Kaiser really did run the country. . . . Ideas about what happened in 1914 must not be influenced by knowledge of what happened afterwards. The German military and civilian leaders were not thinking in terms of 1918 and 1940
so much as of 1866 and 1870. . . . Other countries as well as Germany could have averted the outbreak of war in 1914 by adopting different courses of action.30

  If the reality was totally fraudulent, the intensity was equally real. During the war the Allies demonized the German emperor, to the extent of branding him a war criminal and making a surprisingly feeble effort to arrest him and bring him to trial. He fled to the Netherlands, and the Dutch, quite sensibly and morally, refused to see him extradited; the whole sorry affair demonstrated the extent to which the whole vicious campaign had been simply another aspect of the four-year hate.

  Unfortunately for von Falkenhayn’s career, Wilhelm II was simply another constitutional monarch, rather more like his cousin George in London than like his more distant relatives in Bulgaria and Romania. Long before the start of the war, he had been relegated to the sidelines. As another of his biographers remarks, his “ignorance of the true nature of the struggle in which Germany was engaged was profound and his utility to the military leaders quite limited,” and a much more hostile writer admits that his behavior had already “convinced the vast majority of the generals that the Kaiser was not capable of playing a decisive part in any future war.”31

  But what Germany actually was, was a state governed with remarkable naïveté. Bismarck’s successors were an equally remarkable collection of idealists and academics, whose common trait was a lack of any practical political sense.

  Von Falkenhayn realized that the easterners were extremely naive in their ideas about how to win a war. He was equally naive in his notions of how France worked. The politicians were too ineptly narcissist, the people too blindly ignorant of the truth, for his strategy to have any chance of working. Indeed, as we shall see, the army had little difficulty in spinning Verdun into yet another French triumph: the facts of the case had little to do with it.

  People had not yet grasped that governments frequently lie to their citizens, generally when the lies are necessary to keep the members of the government in power, but also to keep them from fomenting revolt, or giving in to counsels of despair.