by John Mosier
The eastern hump was lozenge-shaped forest. The forest bore an ominous name: Mort Homme, “the forest of the dead man.” Although by the start of the war the appellation was lost in the distant past, it would prove strangely prophetic. In 1916 it would live up to its name and then some.
From the Mort Homme, artillery spotters could see across the river and onto the reverse slope of the Côte du Talou. So as the German infantry carefully closed in on Pétain’s defensive line, they became more aware of the danger posed by these positions.
The danger was very real. Two kilometers behind the ridge of the Mort Homme was another tree-covered ridge, known as the Bois Bourrus. It was on that ridge that the engineers had constructed the main forts of the left bank. The intention was that the observers in the forts could direct artillery fire down onto any troops advancing up the next ridge to the north. Although there were some guns housed in the forts, the real firepower lay behind the ridge, in the valley. Essentially the forts provided cover for the gunners behind them.
The orientation of the left-bank forts on the ridge of Bois Bourrus and their supporting guns was entirely to the north, but, directed by spotters on the Mort Homme, the gunners behind the ridge were able to pour fire onto the right bank.
The forts themselves, however, were actually the third defensive position. The second was anchored by Hill 304 and the Mort Homme, while the first, and most advanced, was based on the structures of the villages that lay in front of the ridge: Forges, Malancourt, the Raffécourt mill, and Béthincourt.
When Pétain had taken command, not much had been done to organize this defense in depth, and there was a limit to what could be accomplished in a week; nor did he have enough men. To defend the entire 15-kilometer stretch there were only two divisions, each reinforced by a brigade, with a third in reserve.
This structure, by the way, appears to be a drastic departure from how the GQG operated. By this point in the war, the German army was well along the road to a drastic simplification of the unit system. Initially, each division had artillery, cavalry, machine gunners, engineers, and infantry. We might therefore think of each infantry division as an army in miniature. Or, to look at it another way, that it was only at the divisional level that a combined-arms force existed.
As we have seen, the French not only had stuck with this organization, but maintained it even more so. French engineers were not organized into combat units, and French heavy artillery units were held back at the army group level (two levels up).
In 1915 the Germans began eliminating the brigade entirely. The division had three regiments, a reduction in the number of riflemen. But that was accompanied by a dramatic increase in firepower, as howitzers began to replace field guns, more machine guns were added, and the combat engineers were given more mortars and, now, flamethrowers.
What all this meant in practice was that increasingly the German regiment became more like a miniature division. The next step, already under way in 1916, was to turn the regiment into a purely administrative construct. Think for a moment of the battlefield as a board game, with the units represented by pieces. Initially, each piece represented a division. The direction the Germans were headed in would mean that each piece represented a battalion, with more and more of the battalions being divided not into the traditional company of riflemen, but into a combined-arms Abteilungen.
To say that the Allies simply failed to see this transformation is a gross understatement. Not only did they misinterpret what they saw, see it as a proof that the Germans were running out of manpower, but they failed to grasp its significance, never really understood that the key to success on the modern battlefield was autonomous units with fewer men and much more firepower, units whose commanders had been trained to act on their own, not wait for orders that might not ever arrive in the pre–wireless communication era.
Given the French losses in manpower, they had been forced to rely more and more on brigades, simply out of necessity. Their heavy losses were dragging the theoreticians, kicking and screaming, into the modern era. But it appears that just as Pétain, in his prewar lectures and his actual combat commands, had emphasized firepower, he grasped the need to move in the same direction. For the French army, however, with his emphasis on logistics and organization, the new commander at Verdun was not only atypical, he was positively heretical.
Still, his problem remained the same. He had too few men, hardly any modern guns, and neither men nor guns were being given sufficient supplies and ammunition. To a certain extent, the insane obsession with offensive actions of the sort that had characterized the army since 1914 had allowed them to shortchange all the vital logistical elements that are now taken for granted. French soldiers lacked proper medical care. They were not being given enough food, hardly ever saw a hot meal, and were not allowed proper rest. In a good many respects, the army treated its soldiers the same way Napoleon had, and largely left them to fend for themselves—the difference being that his soldiers had been able to live off the territories of their enemies.
There was a sad but simple reason why the system hadn’t broken down by spring 1916: losses. The army had many fewer active-duty soldiers to supply.
These problems must be borne in mind to appreciate what happened on the left bank, just as the increasingly asymmetrical nature of the two sides makes us appreciate Pétain’s accomplishments.
THE ASSAULT
Reluctantly, the crown prince agreed to the expanded German offensive, and so on 5 March, the artillery began firing, aiming chiefly at the batteries lying behind the forts. The defensive zone on the left bank was a much smaller area than on the right bank, so German gunners could concentrate their fire. They ignored the frontline positions, concentrated on the ridge and on the artillery behind it, grimly aware that unless those positions were neutralized, their infantry would be massacred.
The result was a barrage of much greater intensity than the one of 21 February. French observers described the two positions as being flattened. Hardly anything remained except craters. At ten in the morning on 6 March, the infantry launched the first assault. Their plan was painfully obvious: to start at the easternmost section of the first line and simply enfold it. So they attacked the area between Béthincourt and Forges, roughly five kilometers, using the same tactic of infiltration that they had used on the right bank.
In general, the end results over the next few days were the same as in February. That is, each day the German infantry surged forward, driving their opponents back, and simply erasing positions with accurate artillery fire. The bombardment on 7 March was even worse than the first one.
But there was a difference. This time in response to each attack, the French countered it with their own. They were, in other words, imitating the German system as best they could. In each case the position was eventually lost: Raffécourt and Béthincourt on the sixth; then the Corbeaux woods; then Cumières, which changed hands several times; then the Côte d’Oie. Finally, on 10 March, the French unit bearing the brunt of these attacks, having lost almost its entire complement of officers, retreated. The greater part of the first line had been lost.
By 14 March, the Germans launched the first of their assaults on the Morte Homme, as they now had the whole eastern end of the first line. But the attack was beaten off. Pétain was moving artillery up to replace what had been destroyed, was conducting an aggressive defense of exactly the same sort the Germans did. His troops were not as well armed, his artillery woefully inadequate, but he had grasped the principle, and it was working.
Two days later, another assault was repulsed, but the Germans kept on, each time adding more and more firepower, broadening the frontage, until finally, on 21 March, they succeeded, more or less. There certainly was no more possibility of artillery spotting from the ridge.
But the Germans had now been at Verdun for a month. This was not how matters were supposed to go. Pétain’s refusal to be drawn into fruitl
ess assaults, his emphasis on the same details that had distinguished his opponents, was paying dividends. Strategically, the Germans were in serious trouble. As we have seen, their plan had been predicated on one of two things happening. True, the French were losing the casualty exchange, but this was nothing new. The panic of February had vanished, and as von Falkenhayn knew, with the coming of April, spring was on the way, summer not far behind—a summer during which he could look forward to enemy offensives on every front and then some.
Tactically, however, the situation on the left bank was encouraging. The German attacks of 20 to 22 March simply eliminated the top of the bulge and collapsed the western side running from Avocourt to Malancourt. A new wave of attacks, beginning on 28 March, resulted in the loss of all the initial positions, including Malancourt, and the Germans were now on the western slopes of Hill 304. Gradually, they were collapsing the French line, forcing it back in on itself. An aging monument outside the ruins of Malancourt gives an idea of the scale of the fighting: It commemorates the losses of the French 69th Infantry Division. Between 30 March and 5 April 1916, six companies of the division “completely disappeared” in the struggle to defend the sector from Lamcourt to Haucourt.
This was repeating the same step-by-step advance that had been so destructive to the French in the Argonne; no matter how hard they fought, they were unable to stop the advance. Once the Germans finally wrested a strongpoint, they held on to it—not necessarily the first time, but within a day or so, it became theirs.
In February 1915, General Sarrail had admitted to Colonel Herbillon that
in the Argonne, the Germans have a superiority of morale. They conquer parcels of terrain where the gains or losses are of minimal importance, but those operations allow them to maintain an ascendancy of their morale.14
In the end, in the face of the French fall offensive in Champagne and Artois, von Mudra had been forced to call off operations. But here, on the left bank, the Germans simply seemed to keep on coming, regardless.
From Pétain’s point of view, the fact that the attacks kept on coming was even more alarming than their modest success. He was convinced that the left bank was the real key to Verdun, and later argued in his account of the battle that if the Germans had attacked on both banks in February, the whole position would have been lost.
This argument, although it reflects a very narrow view, has a great deal of merit. The left-bank front was roughly 15 kilometers across. The Germans already were right on the southern edge of the Argonne forest to the west. Moreover, the left-bank position was vulnerable at the western end. The engineers had wanted to build a fort there, but had lacked the funds. As a result, the position could be turned, outflanked, and the German superiority in heavy artillery meant that they could isolate the forts and reduce them one by one.
Once across the ridge of Bois Borrus, there was no real way they could be stopped. They could roll down the left bank, turn Verdun into a pocket, and drive a wedge deep into France. While none of this had been in von Falkenhayn’s plan, opportunistically it was too good to pass up. So on 4 April, two entire German divisions attacked the Mort Homme and got control of the top. It will be recalled that to defend the whole left bank, Pétain only had two divisions and three brigades, and his losses were, not surprisingly, heavy. He needed more men.
Although the German offensive on the left bank was the crucial event now, there had been violent attacks on the right bank as well, beginning just before the first German assault of 6 March. On 4 March there was an offensive directed against the remnants of the Twentieth Army Corps, whose soldiers had borne the brunt of the February attack.
Sensibly enough, given the way French artillery could reach the attacking Germans on the right bank, this new German assault was aimed squarely at the part of the front lying between Douaumont and Vaux, and by 8 March the fighting had intensified. The village of Vaux was attacked at least a dozen times, and the two French regiments defending the sector were almost completely destroyed: Between them they lost over 2,500 men in a few days of combat.
So Pétain simply did not have the men he needed to contain these simultaneous offensives. He had already told Poincaré that he would not hesitate to abandon the positions on the left bank if that was what it took to save his troops, to which the president replied that it would be a “parliamentary catastrophe,” which he judged to be far worse than a national one, judging from the way he phrased it.15 First and foremost a politician, he was more concerned about the collapse of the government than of the country.
It would be hard to find a better example illustrating von Falkenhayn’s naïveté than this one. When push came to shove, the cabinet and the president were just as willing as Joffre and the GQG to fight to the last Frenchmen. Neither group appreciated Pétain’s position, in either sense of the word.
It was at about this time that he sent Joffre a telegram saying that without more men, he would be obliged to retreat from the left-bank positions. He had no intention of retreating, but he was certainly blackmailing the GQG into sending him more troops.
As March passed, the fighting continued. On 4 April, nearly a month after the first attacks on the left bank, the Germans launched yet another round. The 12th and 22nd reserve divisions cleared the whole of the forest of the Mort Homme. At the same time, the Germans began a series of attacks that, by 9 April, had gained them the crest of Hill 304.
But the French were still hanging on, and that led to the subsequently famous order of the day, with its slogan, On les aura!—the implication being that the attacks had failed and the defense had triumphed. Pétain had hesitated to sign this order, remarking to Serrigny that the phrase was not correct French, but then relented.
Unfortunately, like many catchphrases, this one covered up the reality. The Germans now had long since passed over the first line, and were now firmly in command of the second. They had eliminated the menace of the spotters, which was one of the main reasons for the assault.
The hope, which was in accordance with standard army doctrine, was that now that they had seized the position, the French would try to take it back, which was, it will be remembered, the whole point of the offensive in the first place. So there was no need to go any further, especially since they commanded the ground between the ridge of Hill 304 and the Mort Homme as well as the ridge of Bois Bourrus, where the forts were.
So declaring that the defense had prevailed was simply more of the same sleight of hand that had been employed all through the war. But in modern warfare, if you had the proper heavy artillery, once you seized the crest of a ridge, there was no need to fight your way across a valley.
Whether they knew it or not, both the Fifth Army staff and the German high command had guessed correctly. In one of those marvelous coincidences that no novelist would dare to put into his story, on the very day that the left-bank fighting reached its desperate crescendo, 9 April, Pétain received a peremptory telegram from Joffre, urging him to reestablish the situation with “a vigorous and powerful offensive to be executed with only the briefest delay.”16 Given the situation during the first week of April, the timing of the telegram was grimly amusing. Far from being able to go over to the offensive, French troops were hardly able to contain the steady advances of their opponents.
But this lunacy was consistent with how the GQG felt war should be waged: full speed ahead and damn the machine guns; forget about losses; charge up that hill and wrest it from the enemy at the point of a bayonet. War à la Ferdinand Foch, in other words.
Now, to be fair to Joffre, just before that telegram, he had gone a round with the prime minister. Briand was a career politician; he understood the mood of the chamber. It was beginning to dawn on them that what was really happening was not at all what the army claimed was happening. In February 1915 the GQG had boasted that the Germans were running out of men, and would soon have to quit the war. Here it was, a year later, and not only were the Ge
rmans still fighting, but they had so many men that they could afford to lose 400,000 of them in one battle.
There was clearly something wrong somewhere. But now, when pressed, Joffre simply blandly dismissed the whole thing. Verdun was a minor military objective. If need be, they could simply abandon it. Briand went ballistic. If Verdun fell, the government would fall; everyone except the GQG would realize it was a defeat. Implicit in the explosion was a threat: If Briand went, he would take Joffre with him. Stung, Joffre comforted himself with a good meal and a telegram ordering Pétain to put together an attack.
THE DESPERATION BEGINS
By mid-April, the French were exhausted. But the Germans were beginning to have second thoughts. Although their casualties throughout the offensive were significantly lower than the French, their generals were more inclined to worry about heavy losses than anyone in Paris. The crown prince was particularly disturbed. His army had sustained more than 50,000 casualties (including wound cases) in a fight that the plan had never envisioned.
The disadvantage of a decentralized system of command was that local commanders understandably tended to make judgments on the basis of the situation directly in front of them. From their point of view, the steady string of advances, and the relatively low casualties incurred, suggested they were on the verge of a breakthrough. Generally speaking, in the French army, the pushback of unit commanders was essentially passive-aggressive: That is, they dragged their feet in an effort to keep all of their men from being killed. As Norton Cru remarks, “If orders had been obeyed to the letter, the entire army would have been massacred by August 1915.”17
On the German side, the pushback was more positive: local commanders, scenting victory, and having been trained to be aggressive, naturally wanted to continue. There is sometimes the suggestion in attempts to construct a narrative of the fighting for Verdun that the battle simply spun out of control. Not so; in the earlier battles the French kept on attacking because of the obsessions of the GQG, which saw failure as a want of the proper aggressive spirit. Their opposite numbers kept on attacking because they were encouraged by their successes.