by John Mosier
On both banks, the obscurity and confusion of geography tends to obscure the fact that the Germans were steadily advancing. Nor were these advances secured at some horrifying cost. The entire German army on the Western Front only had 17,355 soldiers killed or missing in March, a monthly total that was nowhere near being the worst month for the army.18
Moreover, there were signs that the French were beginning to crack. As we noted above, the French position on the left bank was highly defensible (by comparison with others, anyway). But in the initial thrust around Avocourt (20 March), a curious event took place. When the Bavarians attacked, the units of the French 29th Division holding this section of the line simply surrendered.
After the war, an army court established that they had surrendered without a shot being fired. In the rigid world of such affairs, no allowance is made for motivation: surrender is surrender. So no one knows the actual cause. But the act speaks for itself. There has long been a story (or legend) that the French soldiers trudging up the country road toward battle would bleat like sheep. Whether true or not, the collapse and abrupt surrender of the men of the 29th Division suggests that the army was reaching its breaking point.19
But if the local commanders were encouraged, the crown prince was still dismayed, and although von Falkenhayn never revealed his thoughts about the actual battles for Verdun, he certainly could not think that his plan was achieving its goal of getting France to quit the war. We can divine both the drift of his thoughts and the difficulties he was having by a simple accounting. At the end of February, when the offensive seemed unstoppable, three additional divisions were moved to the west. All three were from the Balkans. In March, one unit was pried away from von Hindenburg, and a fourth unit came from the Balkans. A second division was transferred from the Russian front in April, and a fifth from the Balkans in May.
But the total number of divisions remained the same: 172. The only way more troops could be brought to Verdun was to take them from somewhere else. By the end of May, having transferred all the troops that were available from the Balkans, von Falkenhayn was stalled. The easterners, who viewed the whole idea of Verdun with suspicion, hemmed and hawed, claimed they had no men to spare. When the offensives on the left bank temporarily came to a halt in April, therefore, von Falkenhayn was reduced to the hope that finally the French would start behaving the way his plan called for them to behave: that is, either quit entirely or go over to the offensive.
As we have seen, they came very close to the former. Indeed, the Nachrichtendienst, the army’s intelligence service, may have gotten wind of how the idea was being debated. If so, the Germans were now in for a pleasant surprise, as von Falkenhayn’s wishes now more or less came true.
Joffre was just as political as Poincaré, only more so. That was how he had managed to land the job. It certainly was not because of seniority or a distinguished career. But his position was precarious. Deep in his heart, he really believed that a vigorous offensive action was the answer, no matter what the question was.
He was already under fire for the constant replacement of officers. If it hadn’t been for this madcap scheme in the Balkans, he would still be stuck with Sarrail—and the chamber would be pushing him forward as a replacement. But Pétain was an obstacle. You could hardly sack the man who everyone felt had saved the day at Verdun. Besides, the present government would never agree to him as commander in chief, especially not Poincaré, after the general’s sarcastic barbs. So in that sense, Pétain was a good man to have around. Competent enough, but inclined to defeatism. What was required at Verdun was someone who’d get out there and attack!
Politicians craft political decisions, and Joffre now crafted an elegant one: He promoted Pétain. He would now be commander of the Central Group of Armies, namely, the Second Third, Fourth, and Fifth. This was a major step up, and de Castelnau, who had been tasked with belling the cat, observed that given the scope of the command, the GQG would run Second Army, responsible for Verdun directly.
That allowed Joffre to replace Pétain with someone directly in charge of the battlefield, a younger officer who had more dash, more offensive spirit. There was also a military reason. Despite the huge drain on his resources, Joffre was determined to launch the great joint offensive, now scheduled for July, that would end the war. So what was required at Verdun was some vigorous offensive action to rattle the Germans, send them reeling, push them back, and make them go on the defensive.
Pétain was hardly fooled. He knew exactly what would happen, and he was right. His replacement at Second Army, Robert Nivelle, was as convinced of his brilliance as he was committed to the doctrine of the all-out attack. The difference between Nivelle and Foch, other than several dozen points on the intelligence scale, was that Nivelle really did understand the importance of firepower, realized that howitzers were preferable to bayonets.
The difficulty was that the theory was all very well and good, but the French army still lacked the firepower required. Like many theoreticians, Nivelle failed to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Undaunted by mere technicalities, Nivelle proceeded to oblige the Germans by launching an assault on Douaumont.
Late in April, Charles Mangin, the general commanding the 5th Division, had suggested a plan to recapture the fort. It will be remembered that it had been taken by a few junior officers and part of an infantry company. Mangin estimated it would take four divisions, with proper artillery support.
The idea was so preposterous that its details are universally passed over in near silence. The structure of the fort was still completely intact; the Germans held the areas around it, had established their positions there, and owned all the ground behind. Presumably, judging from his later actions, Nivelle believed that if he brought enough firepower to bear on the area, the infantry could secure it. So the infantry force was cut in half.
As best can be figured out from what actually happened, Nivelle and Mangin believed that their guns would simply punch holes in the fort, allowing the infantry to break in and overpower the dazed defenders. After all, this was the French impression of what had happened to the Belgians in 1914, what the army press releases said had happened to Douaumont in February. After an artillery bombardment there had been a direct assault that had carried the fort.
If either general had studied the aerial photographs closely, or had talked to an engineer, he would have realized that the idea was physically impossible. Moreover, the terrain surrounding, although relatively unscathed in February, was now, owing to the fighting there in March, the worst sort of cratered ground over which to mount an assault. Moreover, the only way to get to it was to attack it head-on, so the infantry would be exposed to fire from three sides.
Nevertheless, on 22 May, troops from the 5th and 36th divisions stormed the fort, after what observing officers felt was the most well-coordinated artillery barrage they had yet managed. The French had temporarily blinded the German gunners by shooting down six of their observation balloons. As a result, the advancing infantry were on top of the fort in eleven minutes.
But what then? The carapace was now almost completely bare, nothing but blasted concrete with steel cupolas and turrets, hardly a good place to be in the middle of a battle. Brandeis and Haupt had found a way in by carefully going around the dry moat, which in February was still intact. There was no comparable entrance from the top; nor did the French possess a gun that would effect one (neither did the Germans, for that matter).
This approach was like that of a man trying to dig his way through a steel plate with a plastic fork. It was doomed to failure from the outset. The soldiers who reached the top were stranded, killed off one by one. By the evening of the next day, the attacking force had either been killed or had surrendered.
Incredibly, after nearly two years, there were still French generals who believed that the solution to a failed attack in which everyone got killed was another attack. Charles Mangin’s colleagues
had a very low opinion of him, as did many junior officers. One of them famously quipped that he was only fit to lead an army of monkeys.20 However, in this case another attack was too much even for Mangin. He flat-out refused to launch another attack. But then, he had nothing left with which to attack. His division was now essentially destroyed: in a few days’ fighting with what Joffre and the GQG believed to be the proper offensive spirit, it had lost 130 officers and 5,507 men, or about half its strength.21
Mangin’s losses had shaken Nivelle sufficiently that he reversed course. Besides, it was now the end of May, and Joffre was beginning to assemble his forces for the Somme. So the French went back to the defense, frustrating von Falkenhayn’s plan. The window was closing rapidly.
CALAMITIES ALL AROUND
On June 4, the Russian general Alexei Brusilov began his grand offensive in Galicia. Initially, this offensive seemed destined to bring the war in the east to an end. The Russians penetrated deep into the Habsburg empire, and there was panic in Vienna, alarm in Berlin.
Conveniently for the easterners, that now gave them the perfect excuse. The imaginary conveyor belt that moved troops from one front to the other now had to be thrown into reverse. Four divisions were sent to the Russian front, and the loss was partly made good by sending two units in the interior of Germany to the west.
June thus saw a curious paradox. On the one hand, the fate of the Brusilov offensive suggested, perhaps even proved, that von Falkenhayn was correct. Despite enormous territorial gains, despite the panic it generated, it did not bring the war in the east to a conclusion. On the contrary, the easterners rallied, the advance stalled out, and the war went on. In retrospect, the Brusilov offensive was the death rattle of the Russian army. It was also confirmation of von Falkenhayn’s observation that the principle was flawed, something the Allies were shortly going to find out the hard way, on the Somme.
On the other hand, however, events meant that the Germans had to change plans. Hence the paradox: they now went over to the offensive at Verdun once more, trying to bring the battle to an end before the July offensive began.
Of course, strictly speaking, the German attacks on the right bank had never actually stopped. But these operations were more in the nature of consolidations, were of an entirely different sort from the initial assault on the right bank and the subsequent one on the left.
At the beginning of March the Germans had been about 3,000 meters from Fort Vaux, and 4,000 from Fort Souville. Their eventual aim was to envelop the northeastern quadrant of the forts by exploiting a sort of fissure that existed, marked by the railroad line that ran from Verdun toward Étain and thence on to Metz. The rail line marks a drop-off in the heights. If the Germans could exploit an opening there, they would be in a good position to isolate the forts that controlled the area, notably Vauz and Tavannes. Then they could drive straight to the river.
The climax of this effort, however, only took place in June. By the end of May the Germans were close enough to mount an attack of Fort Vaux, and on 2 June, after a heavy bombardment, they attacked the fort directly. Unlike in the French assault on Douaumont, the Germans were well equipped, but in six days of what were basically combat mining operations, they were unable to break into the fort.
Commandant Raynal, the irascible commander of the fort’s garrison (500 men plus about 100 stragglers) was ultimately defeated, mainly because he was out of water. On 8 June 1916, with no reinforcements—and no water—he surrendered.
Thus encouraged, the Germans began working to create a large wedge-shaped opening that encompassed the area stretching from Vaux all the way up to the rubble that marked where the hamlet of Fleury had once stood.
In the first week of June, as the situation around and inside Fort Vaux worsened, General Nivelle ordered an attack to rescue the fort. Four companies of infantry, who for some reason were specially equipped with scaling ladders, were to conduct the attack, which went in on 6 June. But the same conditions prevailed around Vaux as at Douaumont. When the attacking troops were slaughtered, Nivelle proposed a second attack, in which a brigade would be pulled from the left bank, trucked across the river, and then thrown immediately into action.
Although the loss of Vaux and the surrounding territory hardly changed the overall situation, it considerably heartened the local German commanders, who took their success there as an indication that one or two more vigorous assaults would win the day. That phrase is trite, but it expresses the idea perfectly.
So on 21 June, the Germans attacked once more, opening up the wedge still further. The artillery barrage there now took a horrifying turn. German gunners began firing gas shells, and in the face of this new and disturbing weapon, the French were thrown back. After ten days, regardless of how hard they fought, the French had lost another sizable piece of Verdun: the ouvrage of Thiaumont, what remained of the ruins of the village of Fleury, and all of the Vaux-Chapitre woods.
So on the right bank, the French were now hanging on to the edge of the heights of the Meuse, were reduced to what was basically the last defensive line, comprised by the oldest and most vulnerable forts. Thanks to the Nivelle-Mangin assaults, the French were also woefully short of men.
Helpless, removed from immediate command, Pétain was grimly pessimistic. He had good reason to be. Since the start of the battle, every German offensive operation had ultimately succeeded. Each one chewed off a slice of the defensive positions, using the same approach that von Mudra had pioneered in the Argonne—not surprisingly, since he had been brought over to direct operations on the right bank.
Insofar as von Falkenhayn’s plan went, these conquests were beside the point. However, that was not the case of the battlefield itself. The German commanders were optimistic, their opposite numbers depressed. So was Pétain. It would do Joffre little good to break through on the Somme if at the same time the Germans surged out of the right bank. It would be like the revolving door of August 1914 in reverse.
So the final assault, on 11 July, was a moment of desperation on both sides. Mangin—by now promoted to command of an army corps—simply ordered counterattacks with no apparent concern for losses or results. On 15 July, he ordered the 37th Division to retake Fleury, which was now held by the Alpenkorps, who had consolidated German control of the area the week before.
Mangin’s attack was such a disaster that on the eighteenth, Pétain, as commander of the center group of armies, and thus technically still in charge of Verdun, stepped in and stopped all further attacks except in cases where he was assured the preparations had been adequate.
The July fighting degenerated into a confused melee of mutual attacks, and when it was over, thirteen days later, both sides exhausted, nothing much had been accomplished.
The most famous battle for Verdun was at an end—not so much with a bang, but with a gasp. The word ironically is greatly overused. But in this case it is hard to avoid. Of all the battles fought at Verdun, this one, despite being the most famous, ironically achieved the least.
Curiously, then, the great plans of both commanders in chief collapsed at almost the same time. By the third week in July even the perennially optimistic Joffre had to admit that the great offensive on the Somme had failed. There was no breakthrough. Nor was there likely to be. Fayolle, the army’s point man for the French attacks there, promptly wound the offensive down. Haig soldiered on, his main achievement being to get still more of his men killed, and to ruin the advent of the tank as a surprise weapon.
The Allies secured some territory, a good deal more than they had managed in their earlier offensives in Champagne. But their losses were horrific. By contrast, total German losses in dead and missing for July—a month that encompassed both the last gasp of the Verdun offensive and the brunt of the Somme—came to 58,960 (Sanitätsbericht, 3:150). By comparison with their opponents, the Germans won this casualty exchange as well, but they were dismayed: July was the second-worst month of the war
in terms of losses.
It is vaguely possible that had the final German assaults on the right broken through completely, that event, taken in conjunction with the collapse of the two Allied offensives in the east and west, might have achieved something close to what von Falkenhayn had envisioned. But the operative phrase here is the qualifier after the verb. It is vaguely possible, which is to say not very likely.
10
Revanche and Revision:
October 1916–August 1917
What all this comes down to is that the enemy’s losses on all fronts are not appreciably greater than our losses on our one front.
—André Maginot1
So the most famous of the Verdun battles—in the minds of most people the only battle—ended in a curiously anticlimactic way. The attention of everyone, from peasants to historians, was diverted to the horrific spectacle of the Somme, which began on 1 July 1916, and whose losses, both the real losses of the Franco-British forces and the imagined losses of the Germans, rapidly eclipsed the bloody spring of 1916.
Nor was the Somme the only great event. June began with the death rattle of the Russian armies in their great offensive in Galicia, and this success was in turn dwarfed by the Somme, which in turn was partially eclipsed by Romania’s entry into the war.
In each case the governments trumpeted the event as a great triumph that heralded the impending doom of the Central Powers. At Verdun the Germans had been worsted. Their nefarious scheme to bleed France white had backfired. The Austrians were on the verge of collapse in the east. Finally the Russian alliance was bearing fruit. The Somme offensive would smash the Germans into the ground. Romania’s entry into the war would collapse the Balkans, fatally weaken the Germans, who were already on the ropes, owing to their catastrophic losses at Verdun and the Somme.