by John Mosier
Nitpicking the victor is a distressing habit of the modern age. Wellington never lost a battle, was clearly the greatest British general since Marlborough, but their hard-earned reputations are often obscured. By any standard, Grant was the architect of victory at Shiloh. The Confederates retreated, their leader mortally wounded on the field. But Grant was savaged nonetheless, while academics later devoted ingenious efforts to rehabilitate Henry Halleck. So it is understandable that when a battle, or series of battles, really is inconclusive, everyone tries to convert it into something definite. Usually they do so at the expense of the facts, preferring instead to weave myths.
THE CASUALTY MYTH
The first and in some ways the most enduring myth that rose out of Verdun was the myth of some incredibly bloody struggle with astronomical casualties. Since the war had gone on for years after the 1916 battle that the French insisted had resulted in a stalemate, the only lesson to be drawn from Verdun was that it was a meaningless bloodbath, an idea that the pacifists who came to prominence in 1918 lost no time in elaborating on.
Immediately after the war, the Basler Nachrichten published an advertisement for round trips to the Verdun battlefield. The copy makes for interesting reading.
Not only to the French mind is it the battlefield par excellence on which the enormous struggle between France and Germany was finally decided. . . . If the entire war cost France 1,400,000 dead, almost one third of those fell in the sector of Verdun, which comprises a few square kilometers. The Germans suffered more than twice the number of casualties there. In this small area, where more than a million men—perhaps a million and a half—bled to death, there is not one square centimeter of ground that has not been torn up by shells.2
It is always tempting to dismiss advertisements as gross exaggerations, figments of a fevered copywriter’s brain. But in this case, the key numbers can easily be traced to a much more authoritative source.
After the war, Monsignor Ginisty, the Roman Catholic bishop of Verdun, began raising money for a great memorial to be erected on the battlefield. The costs would be paid by subscribers. The fund was authorized by the government on 3 December 1919. A committee was formed under the joint presidency of Marshal Foch, former president Poincaré, and Cardinal Dubois, former bishop of Verdun and at that time archbishop of Paris. That was the honorary committee. Then there was the executive committee, whose honorary president was Marshal Pétain.
The committee sent out letters inviting people to subscribe to the fund, to the tune of 500 francs. The opening paragraph is definitely worth reading.
The battlefield of Verdun is certainly the greatest and most bloody on the whole European front. Millions of men struggled here in a gigantic duel: four hundred thousand French soldiers fell on a front of 12 miles, about 300,000 of whom, according to official records, have never been identified.3
So now we know, more or less, where the figure came from. Four hundred thousand became half a million. During the 1916 fighting, the French had claimed that German losses were three times theirs, so suddenly we’re at 1,500,000 dead.
It is worth pointing out here that all of these figures are wild exaggerations of one sort or another, with one curious exception. The official French data for losses in the war is—or rather was—1,070,000 deaths, and 314,000 missing presumed dead. Michel Huber, after analyzing these government figures, concludes that 1,400,000 dead should be considered the minimum, but in the context of his analysis, it is clear that he’s simply being painstakingly precise: the true (and probably unknowable) figure is only a few tens of thousands higher than that, if indeed it is that high.4
So where did the good bishop’s figures come from? The most probable explanation is that two mistakes were made. The first was that the total figure for the missing presumed dead for the entire army over the whole course of the war was used for the total of the missing for Verdun. That is to say, 314,000 total missing became 300,000 missing at Verdun.
The second mistake was to conflate the figures for all casualties incurred in the various categories: the dead, the wounded, and the missing. Many historians routinely do that, even though, as we explained earlier, it is only appropriate as a measure of loss when speaking of one engagement. But terms like losses or casualties are then misinterpreted to mean the totals for the dead. Yves Buffetaut observes that at the joint ceremony held at Verdun in 1990 between Germany and France, the journalists present did precisely that: they added all the figures up and then said they represented the dead, which he quite rightly terms a “gross error.”5 There is a historical precedent for that, so the committee was hardly alone.
And, of course, the bishop wanted to raise money, and the best way to raise money was to attract people’s attention. But clearly these totals are wild exaggerations.
Now, it is certainly possible that if one were to try to total up all the losses over the entire war for all of the battles that were for the Verdun sector as described in this book, it might well be true that nearly a third of their total losses were incurred there.
But as our narrative and the accompanying maps have hopefully made clear, these battles took place in a large section of the Western Front. The French section of the front was, on average, 583 kilometers, so it is not hard to believe that if we take the section from the Argonne through the Woëvre we get very close to a third of that distance. Moreover, an appreciable portion of that 583 kilometers ran through the Vosges mountains. The fighting in the rough terrain there was bloody enough, but the number of troops engaged was, by comparison with the other areas, very small. So if the entire sector is considered for the entire war, maybe.
But to say that those casualties were all incurred on a 20-kilometer stretch of the front is absurd. So is the notion one often hears in France: that the cemetery in front of the bishop’s ossuary is the largest French military cemetery of the war. Not so—that sad distinction belongs to the Notre-Dame de Lorette, in Artois.
It is claimed that the ossuary beneath the memorial that the fund built contains the remains of over 120,000 men. But this is both unlikely and unknowable. Humans have duplicates of some parts. Then there is the grisly joke of the French veteran who used to show visitors the ossuary and remark jovially that he had come to see his leg; he was sure it was in there somewhere.
Historians may sneer at these exaggerations, just as they unconsciously look down on mere journalists, but gradually these popular ideas seep into the narrative, begin to form their assumptions as well, perhaps unconsciously. The result is discoverable only by looking at the subtext of the narrative, assumptions often disguised by waffling and qualification.
The early French historians gave very precise figures for their own losses in the 1916 battles, and these numbers are all more or less in agreement. Interestingly, however, with each decade, there seems to have been a sort casualty creep, as though each successive historian feels the subject is diminished if the body count is not significant. And since none of these gentlemen define the time period and the area with any particular accuracy (unlike the first group), almost any number could be justified in one way or the other.
The myth of incredible losses and a bloody struggle during 1916 help to propel a narrative that emphasizes the futility of the whole enterprise, the cold-blooded calculations of the Germans, and how their plan to bleed France white was foiled, which in turn leads to the idea that in December everyone was back where he was in January.
Perhaps without even realizing it, the narrative is created so as to conform to those preconceptions. Clearly, given the complexities of the fighting there, the host of obscure and vanished place names, the mysteries of the terrain, and the obfuscations of the government, one can come up with any set of facts one chooses.
THE PROBLEM OF FALSE IDEAS
When the issue of learning from historical experience comes up, the famous adage that the only thing history teaches us is that no one learns anything from it
comes irresistibly to mind. That may be true, but military history presents us with a more particular, or peculiar, difficulty. When looked at closely, the events are so confusing, the causes so complex, the effects so difficult to discern, that anyone can find support for almost any idea he chooses to advance.
What makes the situation trickier is that in this particular area, the fox is generally put in charge of the poultry. The 1920s saw the rise of the strategic airpower theorists, who believed that bombing the enemy’s cities and his factories (objectives that more or less meant lots of civilians would be killed) was the most effective way to wage a war. The men who advanced these theories, primarily in Italy and Great Britain, constructed an argument at the expense of certain facts. They created a world in which, in August 1914, hardly anyone had any airplanes, or even any trucks; they avoided any meaningful discussion of the extensive strategic bombing campaigns of the war; they did not discuss the extent to which ground-to-air defenses were extremely effective against bombers.
Either out of genuine ignorance or cunning, they simply pretended that none of this happened. But it did. That the evidence was ignored hardly means it did not exist. It was ignored because it contradicted the basic idea the theorists were trying to advance. The Germans looked at their strategic bombing campaign, decided it wasn’t worth the losses incurred, and saw airpower as an adjunct to traditional ground operations.
At the end of the next European war, surveys were conducted that “proved” the effectiveness of the strategic bombing campaign against Germany, even though those surveys hardly pass muster as such, are mostly exercises in circular reasoning. The fox is not only guarding the chickens, but he’s in charge of the investigation to find out why they keep disappearing.
Now, this example can by no means be taken to mean that the idea was wrong, that it was foolish or even immoral. The point is that dramatically opposing ideas can emerge from a study of the same situation, and particularly when it comes to war. In an ideal world, the British bomber barons would have looked at the data, studied the Germans, and realized that if your loss rate really was close to one out of every three bombers you sent up in the air, you definitely had a problem. The Germans should have studied the hysteria in London (during the First World War) their bombing raids caused, and concluded that possibly the effects were worth the risk.
Instead, both sides sailed (or rather flew) on, serenely confident that they were right, and merrily ignoring any contrary evidence. Iceberg? What iceberg?
The historians who then wrote the accounts that the bomber barons had thoughtfully provided them with the data for, simply developed the meme further, putting on it the imprimatur that it was history, and therefore true. But both the primary data and the subsequent accounts were all generated to support an argument, no more represented an objective look at the situation than did the claims of government propagandists.
Even when there was some skepticism, similarly unsubstantiated ideas kept hovering in the background. In the case of the Great War, for instance, from the very first days of fighting, the French began to describe the Germans as attacking in enormous hordes of massed infantry, wiped out by French (and British) musketry and bayonets. As we noticed in an earlier chapter, the description was still being used for the battle of Verdun. It was being fed to observers like H. G. Wells, and decades later historians who should have known better were describing the German infantry at Verdun exactly the way they had been described during the war by French government propagandists.
Why should the historians have known better? Because early on, French analysts went through all the records available to them trying to find a confirmation of this tactic, and failed. Joseph Bédier found only one example of German infantry advancing en masse: soldiers of the 21st Division attacking the Bois de Marfée above Sedan.6 Given the casualties (established conclusively by French and German researchers), given the absence of examples based on properly verified witnesses, and given the extensive evidence available as to the evolution of German infantry tactics during the war, the whole idea is a myth. But it persists.
THE ABSENCE OF LESSONS TO LEARN
There were general lessons to be derived from the Great War that all the combatants absorbed and then applied, but very few of them were derived from Verdun. Arguably the fighting there over the course of the war convinced even the most retrograde gunners that their basic weapon should be the howitzer firing explosive shells, not the field gun firing shrapnel, but this lesson would probably have taken whether or not there had been any fighting on the Meuse at all.
Interestingly, both the French and the Germans emerged convinced of the value of concrete fortifications. They both realized that, properly supplied and garrisoned, even weaker forts, the smaller and less protected ones that were known collectively as ouvrages, were basically invulnerable. The French engineering effort that resulted, popularly (and incorrectly) known as the Maginot Line, was the result.
Given the abrupt fall of France in June 1940, there was a mad rush to demonstrate how the idea was not only flawed, but revealed a defective mentality. It was only long after the war that a series of meticulously researched accounts revealed the extent to which all those claims were false.
At the same time, perhaps spurred on by French research into their own fortifications, other researchers pointed out that the Germans had constructed their own equivalent.7 The collapse of the Soviet empire provided us for the first time with glimpses of the fortifications built by the Czechs and the Russians themselves. It may well be that precision-guided munitions have made such forts obsolete, but so far the evidence is inconclusive.
Given the obscurity, misrepresentation, and outright confusion that surrounded the fighting for Verdun, there is a certain irony in seeing how the combat histories of the direct descendants of the Verdun forts met the same fate—yet more proof of how hardly anything about Verdun was properly understood.
THE SEARCH FOR COHERENCE
We are all conditioned to look for Waterloo or Gettysburg or Hastings. Faced with a bewilderingly complex battle that began in geographical obscurity, ended in confusion, and did not in any way resolve the struggle between France and Germany, it is only natural to try to find something there to give it meaning, and thus the origins of a horrific struggle with millions of dead, all to no purpose whatsoever.
For all those people who firmly believe that war never solves anything, Verdun is therefore a wonderful symbol—one that the city has certainly exploited, since it bills itself as the “world center of peace.” But that is to overlook almost entirely the fact that Verdun was the key to France, as Pétain observed. If one wants to find a symbol of the senselessness and futility of war, visit Les Éparges.
Although it is possible, in rather tortuous fashion, to ascribe certain other lessons to the battles there, other than convincing both sides that fortifications, properly managed and equipped, were invulnerable, there are none.
The coherence—the story, if you will—does not lie on the heights of the Meuse. It is the intimate connection between what happened there and the effects it had on the government of France.
Those effects were profound, and no less so for being misunderstood. The Third Republic can be accused of all sorts of vices and defects, but the one thing it cannot be accused of after 1918 was neglecting national defense. In 1939 the army that went to war was well equipped with modern weapons of all types—a striking contrast with its condition in 1914.
That it quit the war in six weeks is true enough, but the reasons given are wrong. That it quit was because of the other lesson that the politicians of the Third Republic absorbed, mainly from Verdun.
Verdun brought to a climax a crisis. Who was in charge of the country: the army or the government? The parties of the left had, unwittingly, created the situation that they had feared so greatly, so the government drifted along in 1916, finally mustering up the courage to dismiss Joffre—only to repl
ace him with someone who was even worse.
But the lesson was learned. When the next war began, the civilians who had been elected (after a fashion) to govern France were definitely in charge. The generals took their orders from them. Unfortunately for France, the government of 1940 was even more inclined to panic than the government of 1914. The only real difference was that in 1940 the panic was final. Paris lacked a Gallieni; France lacked a Joffre. What it did have was a plethora of clever politicians who, having surrendered the country in a panic, managed to cast the blame for the loss on the army.
They succeeded perfectly, mainly because all the agencies involved were in agreement. The British wanted to blame the French to excuse their own miserable performance on the continent. The Germans wanted the world to believe they were invincible. The leaders of post-1940 France wanted everyone to believe that the outcome was preordained, inevitable. The leaders of France after 1945 agreed, as the idea turned them into heroic figures of resistance. That in the process they turned their country into a global laughingstock as a great power never occurred to them.
The collapse of 1940 reminds us of the other direct link with Verdun. The defense of Verdun in 1916 catapulted one minor general among the hundreds to national fame: Verdun made Pétain. Unfortunately, it also made Robert Nivelle, and Nivelle was the man who brought the French army to its knees in 1917. That in turn led to the elevation of Pétain, and we all know the rest of that tragic story. But without Verdun, the meteoric rise and fall of Robert Nivelle would never have occurred. Nor would the emergence of Pétain as by far the most influential and important man in France during the final decades of the Third Republic.
Nor is it particularly far-fetched to make the same observation about Paul von Hindenburg, whose ascent was a function of von Falkenhayn’s failure at Verdun. The situation is a good deal more complicated, but the link is there. In different ways Verdun made each general a greater-than-life figure who then presided over the moral disintegration of his nation.