Verdun

by John Mosier

  A bloody struggle took place around the fort of Douaumont, which is an advanced element of the ancient organization of Verdun. The position was taken in the morning by the enemy after numerous fruitless assaults, that cost very high losses and was passed by our troops, who repulsed all the attempts of the enemy to throw them back.2

  With that the battle lines were drawn. While grudgingly acknowledging what was impossible to deny, the GQG at the same time began to elaborate on a marvelous fantasy world that completely inverted the situation on the battlefield.

  Yes, the Germans had made gains, but at a horrific cost. For the first part of the battle, the GQG solemnly averred that the Germans had lost 400,000 men, and this incredible fantasy was believed even by cynical generals like Fayolle, while far up to the north, on the same date that the irascible French general was recording the figure in his diary, a brilliant young English officer wrote complacently:

  Things are going quite well for the French at Verdun and they are not the least bit anxious about it. . . . They have not yet used any of their reserves and they have the show well in hand. It is part of our policy to let the Germans beat themselves to death against the stone wall. . . . The Germans have lost enormously and they can’t afford to.3

  Regardless of how they were doing on the battlefield, in the imaginary war the French high command was creating to justify its decisions, Verdun would be turned into yet another disastrous German setback. One imagines that had the Germans gotten to the outskirts of Paris, the GQG would blandly dismiss the event as a few stragglers who had been rounded up by the police.

  Meanwhile, in the real world, the German advance continued.

  PÉTAIN TAKES COMMAND

  Tall, trim, sarcastic, and condescending, Pétain had hardly endeared himself to the government or to the army high command before the war. When it began, he was only a colonel, was in the same boat as Driant, although the causes were different. In fact, it is far from clear why Pétain was never promoted further: the one biographer who has researched the matter thoroughly confesses he has no real idea.4

  In his extensive teaching experiences, Pétain’s emphasis on the importance of firepower certainly put him in the minority of theorists and lecturers. We know he tangled with the various politically correct minions of André during the attempts to purge the officer corps of everyone who was not properly Republican. There is a famous but doubtless apocryphal story that when he was asked to reveal the names of those of his officers who attended mass, he supposedly retorted that as he sat in the front row and never looked back, he had no idea.

  The anecdote, whether true or not, accurately reflects both the chaos generated by the André regime, and, perhaps more to the point, Pétain’s sarcastic wit. We know for a certainty that he told President Poincaré that of anyone, he must surely know that France was neither led nor governed.5

  Or perhaps it was the bachelor’s truly personal life, which was, almost uniquely among field-grade French officers, filled with escapades involving other men’s wives. Whatever Pétain’s professional problems were, women found him attractive. When, on the night of the twenty-fourth, he was routed out of bed, he was not by himself, although the identity of his female companion has never been revealed.

  But by 1916, there were very few French officers who had proven themselves as competent at high command as Pétain. Moreover, he was a soldier’s general. They liked him, if no one else did, the main reason being that he was distinctly unenthusiastic about ordering them to charge the enemy en masse and get butchered. He was dubious about the prospects of the various assaults demanded by the GQG, and enthusiastically embraced by Foch, and a British officer was impressed both by his emphasis on firepower and his sense of humor, although he added that it was “deeply concealed under his frozen exterior.”6

  Promptly at eight the next morning (the twenty-fifth), Pétain appeared at Joffre’s headquarters. By his own account, Joffre had little in the way of advice. The situation was serious, but not alarming, he said; when Pétain got there, de Castelnau would fill him in. Given the situation, the few words speak volumes, and there is a slight hint of sarcastic humor in Pétain’s characterization of Joffre’s “long sentences,” that despite being “a little agitated,” he was able to preserve his customary calm.7

  Given the roads, Pétain did not arrive at Souilly, where de Langle de Cary and de Castelnau were, until that evening. He promptly drove to Dugny, the headquarters of General Herr, there to learn of the loss of Douaumont. Unlike the GQG, he understood what a disaster this was.

  Late that night (at eleven) Pétain formally took command, and notified both Balfourier (right bank) and Bazelaire (left bank) that he was now in command. One imagines that they were both relieved to find that someone finally was, given that the attack was now going into its fifth day.

  The new commander promptly laid out a defensive line on both banks. His intention was to hold fast to those lines, and to do so, he could rely on three new army corps that were en route: the 21st, the 23rd, and the 33rd. With those, and with those units that were still intact and holding the battlefield, his forces would be more than equal to the Germans in terms of manpower.

  The pressing need was organization, a word that the army had basically forgotten, if it had ever known it. Nothing was foreseen, and everything was improvised, hurriedly thrown together at the last minute, a technique that the soldiers referred to sarcastically as “plan D”—those who were still alive, anyway. Fortunately, there was time.

  Now, simply by looking at the map, it was easy to see a developing German problem, insofar as further advances went. One of the stupidities of abandoning the forts was that it let the Germans move up their relatively short-range howitzers so they could cover the initial defense positions in considerable depth. But the German advance had now put the infantry out of range of all but the heaviest of their artillery. Paradoxically, the advance meant that the French guns on the left bank, located behind the ridge with the main forts, could now be brought to bear on the area around Douaumont.

  So the German gunners now faced the difficult task of moving their barely portable weapons up into the heights themselves. This was not in the plan, which assumed that the French would either quit outright (the de Langle de Cary option) or they would come charging up the heights to retake what had been lost (the Ferdinand Foch approach). But Pétain refused to be drawn. Having seen firsthand the logistical problems of breakthrough offenses, he knew that there were unavoidable pauses. Troops had to be rotated; ammunition had to be replenished; guns had to be repositioned. Even though the Germans had bashed away for five, now going on six straight days, there was a limit that had been reached, was in the process of being reached.

  Having studied the German defenses all through 1915, Pétain had grasped the idea of a defense in depth that was based on interlocking strongpoints, and that was what he proceeded to construct.

  The main defensive line on both banks was created, a line that was to be held at all costs. It ran roughly from Avocourt to Hill 304, then to the ridged forest of Mort-Homme, jumped the river to Thiaumont, cut down to Fort Vaux, and hence to the downward slope of the heights of Meuse due east of the city of Verdun. The line was essentially based on the original fortifications, and these were rearmed and put in the first class. From the left bank going across the river, the positions were des Bruyères, Bourrus, Marre, Belle Epine, Vacherauville, Charny, Froidterre, Souville, Vaux, Tavannes, Moulainville, Lauffé, and Déramée.

  Then there was a second position, anchored by Choisel, Belleville, Saint-Michel, Rozelier, and Belrupt. Those were known, colloquially, as the forts du Panic, as there would be a real panic if they attacked, given their position.

  Behind that was a final position: Chana, Sartelles, La Chaume, Regret, Landrecourt, Dugny, Falouse, Haudainville, Saint-Symphorien, and Génicourt.

  Each of the forts in the first and second groups was given a garrison
and a commandant, integrated into the lines of defense.

  Pétain then turned to the thorny matter of supplies. Belatedly, work began to effect a bypass for the main west–east line, still interdicted by the German position on the Vauquois. But that would take weeks and weeks to complete, so the army was totally dependent on the country road running up from Bar-le-Duc, and the narrow-gauge railway that ran alongside.

  From his headquarters at Souilly, Pétain could see the work on the road being done so it would support the round-the-clock convoys into and out of Verdun, and the road gradually began to take more and more traffic, which peaked at 3,900 trucks every 24 hours.8 Almost 200,000 French soldiers marched up that road, and Pétain stood on the sidewalk and watched them as they trudged past, so close that they could have reached out and touched him.

  However, the single most important command decision was this. Pétain refused to be drawn. He took a page from the German defensive manual, established a good defensive position, and waited for his opponent to try to take it.

  This was not at all what von Falkenhayn had envisioned. Pétain’s resolve to hold fast was a calamity, as far as the Germans were concerned. Given how obligingly they had been trying to fight their way up hills and clambering across no-man’s-land, it apparently had never occurred to anyone in Berlin or Stenay that this would change. So they were, temporarily, stymied.

  Moreover, the crown prince, the commander of the Fifth Army, whatever his failings, whatever the realities of the complicated system of command in the German army, had imbibed one important lesson of generalship: the need to conserve the lives of your troops. Of course, for men like Foch and Haig, and certainly for their admirers, this was not at all in accord with the manly sport of war. But the sort of man who receives a letter from a woman that says, “[O]f all the feminine hearts you have conquered, there is none (am I too bold?) which understood you more, which devoted more faithful admiration, fervent tenderness,” clearly has no need to assert his masculinity in other ways, and certainly not with the false manhood of sending men to their deaths while hiding out in the rear.9

  So the Germans were frustrated, and inevitably, they turned their attentions to the left bank, just as Pétain anticipated.

  PANIC IN THE GOVERNMENT

  Gallieni, the minister of war, was slowly dying, and he was quite aware of it. Unfortunately for France, the attack at Verdun seems to have coincided with that sense of detached remove, of viewing the world from a distance, that often occurs to those in the final stages of illness. His colleagues in the government misinterpreted it, complained about it, and his admirers were disturbed, because they assumed that the attack would result in Joffre being replaced, preferably by the aging marshal himself.

  On the twenty-sixth, the cabinet spent a heated 90 minutes discussing Verdun. They grilled Pénelon, who was the liaison between the GQG and the government, who of course gave all the usual answers. At some point his repeated references to the “battle” irritated Gallieni, and he nailed the issue head-on. “Why speak of a battle; are there even any defenses? Why aren’t there more troops there, given that you’re opposed by seven army corps? Why change commanders at the last minute?”10

  Judging from his notes, the implication seems to be, How can there be a battle when you don’t have any defenses, very few men, and no commander? However, the dominant impression one gets from reading Gallieni’s increasingly terse and gloomy notes is of a panic, but a panic without any direction or purpose, indicative of a government that has no idea what to do.

  Despite Poincaré’s animadversions in private about Joffre and the GQG, and the fury of the prime minister, the government really had no choice but to close ranks and support Joffre. Gallieni’s jibe about changing commanders at the last minute had struck home. Besides, Gallieni was clearly not able to continue serving as minister of war, so the position would have to be filled. There was a widespread suspicion inside the government, particularly if we include the members of the chamber of deputies, that Briand was deeply supportive of Joffre, and sure enough, when Gallieni was forced to resign for reasons of ill health, he was replaced by Pierre Auguste Roques, a colonial solider, an engineer, and in consequence a friend of Joffre’s.

  While the cabinet was wrangling and the chamber was simmering, the German offensive, after a few days’ respite, abruptly came to life, so events quickly left the government behind, as had been the case throughout the war.

  Now, it is true that France had the misfortune to be in the hands of politicians of the lesser sort. Even the reputation of the best of them was based on what Robert Louis Stevenson once derisively referred to as resting on the more cultivated among the ignorant. But it is almost impossible to overestimate that ignorance. Poincaré offers a wonderful snapshot of how, in the face of impending disaster, the military responded.

  A month after the fighting began, he assured the president that the Germans had already lost nearly a quarter of a million men, the French only 65,000; the figures the Germans were publishing for prisoners were completely false.11 This charade continued, with the army giving ever more precise figures. Possibly the French had slightly over 100,000 casualties of all sorts, but the Germans had suffered nearly 300,000, the president was told in early April (Service, 8:187–88). Poincaré kept insisting. He wanted more precise figures. De Castelnau pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. As of 25 April, 125,000 prisoners, 16,594 dead, 57,142 wounded, and 51,000 or 52,000 missing, figures that Poincaré greeted with incredulity, since they “did not agree with those given previously” (Service, 8:209). When pressed, de Castelnau admitted that it was not impossible that the Germans actually had taken the number of prisoners they were claiming.

  A month later, the president was given an entirely new set of figures, broken down into categories that seemed expressly designed to confuse, since in order to derive the actual numbers, Poincaré would have to do sums on the fly, as it were. But it came down to 23,343 dead, 54,000 missing, and 74,844 wounded. But now Poincaré had been doing some fieldwork, as it were, and challenged the data. There had been a good 135,000 wounded and sick evacuated from Verdun, which was far higher than what the army was admitting (Service, 8:242–43).

  But the contradiction was shrugged off. The government and the army had thus reached a standoff. No one really believed anything that the army’s generals said, but they had no way to disprove it through data; the only man among them who had any real military expertise was missing, gravely ill (Gallieni); the only person who knew enough to do any analysis of the numbers was no longer in the government (Ferry); the only insider secure enough in his position to speak out had been killed early on in the fighting (Driant).

  Moreover, to make matters worse, at moments of crisis, the generals tended to close ranks. Interestingly, in Poincaré’s quest for the truth, he was foiled by three senior generals (Joffre, de Castelnau, and Pétain), none of whom much cared for one another. But their contempt and dislike for the successors of the men who had persecuted the officer corps during the André regime was a powerful institutional memory. For decades, the Republicans had hated and feared the army, only to be outraged that they were viewed with contempt.12

  So the government drifted along, suspicious and impotent, too divided to exercise an authority it had long since lost any moral claim to possess and at bottom more concerned about its own welfare than the fate of the nation. As the unhappy Louis-Philippe, the last real king of France, observed toward the end of his reign: “All things are possible for France, but one thing is impossible, that any of those things should last.”13

  THE SITUATION ON THE LEFT BANK

  Pétain’s refusal to mount offensive operations against the newly held German positions on the right bank forced a change in plans. There were four reasons why the initial thrust had been aimed at the positions on the right bank. The existence of Douaumont, the way the heights sloped down to the river, the difficulties of reinforcing the fo
rward position all made it the obvious choice. Perhaps most important, the angles formed by the French position lent themselves to exactly the sort of attacks that allowed the new infantry tactics to work. They could approach the sides of a section of trench, and work their way around.

  By contrast, the positions on the left bank formed a reasonably straight line—straight enough that it would be difficult for these tactics to be employed. At some point, the infantry would have to make a direct frontal attack. However, the angle of the line was promising. The northernmost part was right on the Meuse, just opposite the village of Brabant. The French positions then continued at a slight southwesterly turn, with a bulge between the villages of Béthincourt and Malancourt.

  The bulge was roughly five kilometers across and about three kilometers deep. Some four kilometers back from the initial positions was a more or less continuous ridge with two distinctive humps, although the dip between the bulges is wide enough to be thought of as almost a valley, or a pass. In 1916, that was where the village of Béthincourt was located—the operative word being the past tense of the verb. But, of course, by now there were a good many villages détruits, or destroyed villages, on this section of the front. The village of the Vauquois only had the honor of being the first.

  The two bulges are not very high. The eastern one, closest to the river, is only 260 meters, while the western one is 294 meters. To add further to the confusion of French place names, this 294-meter hill was designated as Côte 304, the result of a surveying error. That the infamous Hill 304 was not in reality 304 meters high is an excellent illustration of the general conflation of error, myth, and downright confusion that characterizes the battles for Verdun.

  Speaking in purely military terms, the ten-meter error is not inconsequential, particularly when one realizes that the irregularly shaped ground that the hill rises out of is itself a good 280 meters above sea level. The Germans were not, therefore, attacking up a butte, as was the case for the French infantry at the Vauquois and Les Éparges; rather they were advancing up an irregular slope with an inclination about one meter or so for every 100.