Verdun

  As the evening approached, the French were forced to evacuate all of the woods of Herbebois to avoid being encircled, and later that night they abandoned most of Samogneux as well.

  The start of the day had begun with the evacuation of Brabant. It ended with desperate attempts to construct a defensive line based on the heights of Talou, of Hill 344, and the woods of Fosses and Louvemont.

  But there was a dangerous momentum building. At no point had the French been able to stop the advance. And the next day the attack pressed on. By now the left flank of the advance was right down to the Meuse, so for the first time, the gunners on the left bank, relatively unscathed, were able to provide supporting artillery fire for the infantry on the other side of the river.

  But as Colonel Chaligne observes, “In reality, they maneuvered by infiltration, under the protection of heavy fire from their artillery,” and when their advance was blocked by strongpoints or advancing enemy troops, “they did not try to continue, they waited until shellfire had resolved the problem posed by the terrain, or until the advance of one of their neighbors had opened a way forward.”10

  The terse description of this senior French officer makes a nice contrast with the subsequent fantasies of historians. Here is how one of the more distinguished of their number characterizes the opening phase of the assault. It reveals, he says,

  a deep, endemic fault in the German system of war. At bottom this stemmed from the contradiction between Falkenhayn’s large object—the destruction of the French army—and the small means by which he hoped to procure it. . . . The German bombardment of February 21st was more destructive than anything yet seen . . . and yet, when the time came to follow it up, the Germans appeared to lose faith. Very slowly, preceded by large patrols and probing parties, the infantry came forward.11

  Indeed. But, to paraphrase Jean Norton Cru, war is not a game in which points are scored by getting across the goal line regardless of the cost; the true goal of any competent general is to secure objectives with the least possible loss of life, bloodthirsty civilians and amateur poseurs to the contrary. The general who wishes to hurl his men into battle in such a way that enormous casualties are the sadly predictable result is not a great warrior, but an incompetent.

  So, despite their refusal to march toward the French positions in serried ranks and get slaughtered in the requisite numbers desired by historians, the Germans were advancing—slowly but inexorably, as they had done in the Argonne. Although the French succeeded in limiting the German advance, the actual territory gained by the end of the day was the largest slice yet: two ominous bulges down into the French positions, reaching down on either side of Louvemont, while on the eastern end, the advance was right up against Bezonvaux.

  The events of the night of the twenty-fourth were a mixture of confusion and error. It will be recalled that the 20th Army Corps had been arriving at Bar-le-Duc just before the attack. Now, in the evening, two full brigades, having made an astonishing 36-hour march up the road, arrived at Souville. They were promptly dispatched to hold the section of the front to the north of Fort Douaumont. But in one of those typical confusions that happen on the battlefield, they took up positions in the village of the same name, a good distance behind the massive fort. Nor were they able to discover the whereabouts of the nearest French unit, which was holding Hill 378. What was worse, they apparently did not realize that the Germans were already in the forest of the Vauche.

  BAD DECISIONS

  Such mishaps occur on the battlefield; nor are they necessarily irremediable. But that evening, Fernand de Langle de Cary, commander of the Armies of the Center, made what may well be the single worst command decision of the Great War, although admittedly the competition for this dubious honor is steep.

  He decided that to abandon the Woëvre entirely, and to form a front based on the Côte du Talou in the northeast, through Louvemont, then to the forts of Douaumont and Vaux. However, this drastic move was simply the preparation. At eight that night, he telephoned the GQG to inform them that he planned to evacuate the entire right bank, lock, stock, and the few remaining barrels. To that end, he stopped the remainder of the 20th Army Corps at Fort Regret. The order for the successive abandonments, General Order Number 18, was actually sent out.

  Georges Lefebvre terms this decision a “criminal fault” (Verdun, 108–9). But although the result pushed the army right to the edge of the abyss, de Langle de Cary was actually only carrying out what had been prescribed months earlier when Verdun had been downgraded and folded into the front.

  Of course, the self-identified experts at the GQG thought the idea that the Germans would attack to be highly unlikely, because, as they condescended to explain to a mere colonel who was only on the staff of a lowly corps commander, “One does not attack into a salient.”12 But should this highly unlikely event occur, the most sensible option was to abandon the right bank entirely, just as de Langle de Cary was ordering.

  Of course, at that hour—eight in the evening—Joffre was engaged in one of his most important duties as commander in chief of the French army, but an hour later, rising from the dinner table, he sent word to de Langle de Cary that he was to hold the right bank at all costs.

  It is worth pointing out that Joffre’s decision to fight on the right bank completely undercuts his later assertion, made in his memoirs, that it had no real military value. If that was the case, why did he overrule de Langle de Cary? The simple answer was that he had some vague idea that abandoning Verdun was probably not going to go over very well with the president, the prime minister, and the minister of war.

  But then, probably because he felt it necessary to placate the man he had overruled so decisively, he authorized the withdrawal from the Woëvre. Of course, in Joffre’s rather limited playbook, the cardinal fault of any general was a lack of proper enthusiasm for the sort of aggressive actions that showed the proper Napoleonic spirit. His army commander was clearly a defeatist, and had panicked.

  So Joffre dispatched General de Castelnau to Verdun to take whatever measures he found necessary. Traveling by car, he could reach Verdun by the next day if he didn’t dawdle, and would see what needed to be done. There was no particular hurry. Having done his bit to inject even more chaos into the situation, Joffre retired for the night, conscious of having discharged his duty as supreme commander.

  But before doing so, he made one of the very few sensible decisions of his military career. He told the staff to find General Philippe Pétain and have him report to headquarters early the next morning. Having dispatched de Castelnau to the front, he now decided to send Pétain along behind, to take command of the French forces struggling there. And then, satisfied, he went to bed, his duties fulfilled: he had sent someone out to do something.13

  He had also effectively removed de Langle de Cary from the chain of command. That is, even though as commander of the armies of the center he was in theory superior to the corps commanders at Verdun, de Castelnau was now going to exercise command independently, since he would be reporting directly to Joffre. And since it would be hours and hours before de Castelnau got there, another whole day before Pétain could possibly arrive, the key decisions would all be in suspension, as no one was exactly sure who was in command or what orders they were supposed to carry out.

  Sometimes lost in the genuine distress about order 18, however, is the subtext—one that everyone involved tries to finesse by a verbal sleight of hand. Instead of saying that de Langle de Cary ordered the army units to abandon Verdun, the phrase evacuate the right bank is used. This is a distinction without a difference. True, a goodly part of the city of Verdun is technically on the left bank of the river. But as anyone who glances at a map can see rather clearly, the river runs right through the city, and the heights of the Meuse are less than a kilometer distant. The engineers of the last century, looking at the terrain, had concluded that the city was no longer in any way a defensible strongpoint, which was
why the forts were all built out on the heights, ten or more kilometers to the northeast. True enough, most of the important buildings, and the citadel, are on the left bank, but to pretend that after a withdrawal from the right bank the city would be nicely divided on the order of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, or Buda and Pest, is absurd.

  So in reality, evacuating the right bank was the same thing as abandoning Verdun, both the city and the defensive position. All that would be left would be the forts on the left bank. Given the angles of the ridge there, those positions could then be shelled from the rear, where they were the most vulnerable. Moreover, the order to evacuate the right bank clearly did not mean the entire stretch of the right bank between Toul and Verdun, but what, precisely, did it mean? Without the northern section, the part of the heights of the Meuse below the city was hardly defensible. The key fort there, Troyon, had only survived by luck, and the courage of a junior French officer.

  The most cursory inspection makes all this painfully obvious, thus presenting us with a vexing question: what on earth were any of these people thinking? The sad answer is that they were firmly held in the grip of extremely theoretical ideas about warfare, ideas in which an analysis of the terrain, like any consideration of morale or politics, played no part.

  Although Joffre’s decision was really the only possible decision, decoupling the right bank from the Woëvre was a really bad move. It shortened the German lines on the right bank, as the main bulge to the east was in the Woëvre. It rendered useless all the struggles of 1915 around Les Éparges. It eliminated what the German crown prince had, with surprising insight, called the postern gate, the prime sally port out of which the French could strike due northeast and actually, if fortune favored them, strike into Germany itself. And it moved the heavy German guns a good ten kilometers closer in.

  Now comes the really bizarre part of this chain. When Joffre said no, the order was countermanded. But the next day, for reasons that have never been explained, General Balfourier, the local commander of the positions in the Woëvre, who had before him an order prescribing that the right bank was to be held position by position, refused to transmit this new order.14

  As a result, the whole southeastern sector was simply abandoned, together with about 5 percent of Verdun’s heavy weapons.

  Nor is there any valid reason why it shouldn’t have been held. The opposing German forces south of the Verdun–Étain road consisted of one cavalry brigade and five Landwehr regiments. The area had been bombarded, but some of the shelling was misdirected—although some of the abandoned guns had already been destroyed, the French could certainly have held their ground here. The evacuation of the Woëvre was a costly mistake, clear proof that the French army was still infected with the same disease that had cost it so dearly in 1914, when fortified positions (Lille) and strategic sections of ground (the Vauquois, the butte of Mont Sec) had been abandoned almost without a shot being fired.

  Leaving aside the tactical value of the area, trying to order a selective evacuation in the middle of a battle only adds to the confusion, lowers morale, and precipitates panic. Sure enough, the decision helped to trigger just those responses, particularly when coupled with the indecision, the change of command, and, above all, the discovery that there really was nobody in command on the French side.

  When the GQG decided to get rid of the whole notion of the fortified place, integrate into the front, and haul off all the ammunition and guns, they created exactly this sort of potential chaos. So now, on the evening of the twenty-fourth, the stage was set for a play in which all these factors would come together to form a perfect storm. The French couldn’t stop the advance; they had hopelessly intermingled their units. No one knew who was in charge, or what actual orders were to be carried out. Some units were told to advance, others to evacuate; others were abruptly halted.

  Not surprisingly, on Thursday, 25 February, the perfect storm appeared. Four days into the offensive, the Germans had really honed the liaison between the infantry at the head of the advance, and the gunners far behind. Still, the day began inauspiciously enough. On the western edge, the Germans were having difficulties, and in the center Louvemont was captured and lost several times.

  In November 1915, the French had decided that they needed a third defensive line, and this was defined as a line running from the Côte du Talou, right beside the Meuse, along the Côte du Poivre and then through Hill 378 and on to Bezonvaux. By the evening of the twenty-fourth, the Germans were still more than a kilometer from 378 and twice that distance from Bezonvaux. So the French situation was passable, although not exactly “brilliant,” to resort to a bit of Gallic military irony.

  But the French line, precariously held and badly led, was like a levee. One crevasse and it would collapse. Thus far, despite the shelling, there had been a steady flow of reinforcements up into the heights. But de Langle de Cary’s order to the 30th Army Corps to hold at Regret essentially stopped that flow. True, it was only a temporary stoppage, but given the obvious confusion, it is understandable how the troops bearing the brunt of the repeated advances began to feel that they had been abandoned, and that they had no positions left to fall back into.

  THE COLLAPSE

  The cracks first began to show in the east, where the 2nd chasseurs (one of the elite units of the army) was completely infiltrated by German infantry advancing carefully through the woods of the Vauche. The chasseurs retreated toward Douaumont fort, abandoning their colleagues in the 208th Infantry Regiment, who were promptly surrounded. Some made their own way back down the heights; most simply surrendered.

  It was now three in the afternoon, and as the Germans cautiously advanced, they were approaching the great fort of Douaumont, the centerpiece of the Verdun defenses. That was the idea still presented to a credulous world. But as we have seen, in August, the largest concrete structure in the world suffered the same indignities as its lesser brethren. The garrison left and it was largely disarmed, except for two turrets where the guns were permanently mounted.

  So when the attack commenced, the two turrets of the great fort were subordinated to a lowly lieutenant located off in the woods of Caillette. The fortlet he commanded was well on its way to being demolished by the morning of the twenty-fifth, but the lieutenant managed to send orders to Douaumont, directing them to fire in the general direction of the Vauche forest.

  There were forty or so aging territorials in the fort, elderly men who had most likely done their conscription two or even three decades earlier. Inside the enormous structure, they were performing little more than maintenance, although there were a few artillery observers on hand. But the noncommissioned officer in charge of the 155-millimeter turret obediently began firing toward the trees. As they began firing, detachments from two Brandenburg regiments were working their way toward the fort. As they went through the forest of the Vauche, they began rounding up members of the French 208th Regiment.

  But Brandeis, a junior lieutenant in the 8th Company of the 24th Brandenburgs, began working his way toward the southeastern corner of the great fort. His assault team inched its way around, trying to get down into the dry moat and find an opening. But they were wary, and assumed the fort was fully manned. After all, the 155-millimeter turret was still firing.

  After several false tries, the Brandenburgs finally managed to find an opening close by the other turret, and, although an officer was hit by stray machine-gun fire from Douaumont village, the Germans were now inside.

  Following close behind Brandeis was a captain in the same regiment, and Hauptmann Haupt now began an exploration of the fort. The handfuls of territorials inside were astonished to discover the Germans had gotten in, but, confronted with a handful of heavily armed and nervous enemy soldiers, they surrendered meekly enough. There were no combat soldiers in the garrison, if we can dignify the motley group by that name. It was basically cooks and electricians, mechanics, a few artillery observers, and a core of retire
es.

  Thus were all the hopes and dreams of a series of great French engineers and strategists confounded by the boneheaded idiocy of a group of inexperienced junior officers at the GQG, who had decided that they knew everything and no one else knew anything.

  The fall of Douaumont was not the cause of the abrupt collapse; rather the two events happened almost simultaneously, were independent of one another. But by the evening, the remaining key positions on the right bank were all in German hands.

  In five days the Germans had advanced over ten kilometers on an ever-expanding front that was perhaps 15 to 20 kilometers across. And that was not counting the nearly 200 square kilometers of the Woëvre that had been handed to them on a platter.

  In these first few days the three French divisions that bore the brunt of the fighting lost about 17,000 dead or missing, with another 3,000-odd wound cases; the attrition was roughly 30 percent, or perhaps higher, and the alarming thing about the figures was that more than 95 percent of the first category were simply listed as missing. No one knew what had actually happened to them.

  9

  Panic, Politicians, and Pétain: April–July 1916

  It is a terrible advantage to have done nothing, but it must not be carried too far.

  —Jean Dutourd1

  The Germans lost no time in announcing the fall of Fort Douaumont, even as their soldiers were steadily advancing beyond. The news was released on Friday, 26 February.

  The armored fort of Douaumont, the northeastern pillar of the chief line of permanent fortifications of the Verdun strongpoint, was taken by assault yesterday afternoon by the 24th Brandenburg Regiment. It is completely in the power of German troops.

  This precise and accurate account, which, as one French historian observes, is an “exact description” of the importance of the fort, drew a quick response from the French high command.