Verdun

by John Mosier

  Of course, all of this was entirely unintentional and unforeseen, beginning with Bismarck’s attempt to create a lasting peace, a decision that led to the importance of Verdun, and everything that followed. History may not be written for the convenience of historians, but it often seems to prove Thomas Merton’s observation about the law of unintended consequences.

  ENDNOTES

  1. Battles Known and Unknown

  1Herbert George Wells, The War of the Future (London: Cassel, 1917), 8. Wells, along with Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, was one of the leading public figures given an extensive tour of the British, French, and Italian fronts as the Allied governments desperately tried to gin up support for the war, largely as a result of the negative impact of the February 1916 German offensive at Verdun.

  2Jean Bernier, La Percée (Paris: Albin Michel, 1920), 46. Unless otherwise noted, all translations, however wretched, are mine. The French phrase Bernier uses is je grignote. In fairness to Joffre, it’s never been established that Joffre actually said that. See Louis Guiral, “Je les grignote . . .” Champagne 1914–1915 (Paris: Hachette, 1965), ix.

  3That is certainly the impression the casual reader gets from the otherwise excellent account of Jules Poirier, La bataille de Verdun, 21 février—18 décembre 1916 (Paris: Chiron, 1922),15–18. Poirier never says directly why the battle was fought. See as well the numerous illustrations and photographs reproduced in the opening pages of Jacques-Henri Lefbvre, Verdun: la plus grande bataille d l’histoire racontée par les survivants, 10th edition (Verdun: Éditions du Mémorial, 1960). These are all of the city, thus leading the reader to conclude that Verdun was like Ypres. See as well the reference to the “fortress town” in the Army Historical Section, American Military History, rev ed. (Washington: Center for Military History, 1989), 368. This latter is one of the best succinct summaries of the conventional wisdom about the battle.

  4Population figures taken from Guide Michelin (Paris: Albouy, 1900): Belfort, 82; Lile, 163; Nancy, 194; Reims, 225; Verdun, 271. The nearest town with more than a few thousand people was Saint-Mihiel, with 5,250—little more than a village (244). The other neighboring villages—Étain, Stenay, Clermont—were so small they were omitted from the guide altogether.

  5Jules Poirier, La bataille de Verdun, 21 février—18 décembre 1916 (Paris: Chiron, 1922), 58. Poirier is counting the flanks of Verdun, which extended down the heights of the Meuse on one side, and into the Argonne on the other. His point is that when the 1916 attack came, the French troops were widely dispersed, not in a position to respond to the attack en masse.

  6See the table in Michel Huber, La population de la France pendant la guerre (New Haven: Yale, 1931), 112. It should be stressed that Huber’s compilations are critical abstracts of official government documents.

  7Gabriele Bichet, Le role des forts dans la bataille de Verdun (Nancy: Imprimerie Georges Thomas, 1969), 17–19. Bichet was at the time the director of the historic Verdun Citadel, and his monograph was issued by the Centre National d’étude et de Conservation de la Fortification Permanente. He was not simply a maverick historian, in other words. For the discussion of what to call the Battle of the Marne, see Raymond Recouly, Joffre (Paris: Éditions des portiques, 1931), 165.

  8Jean de Pierrefeu, G.Q.G. Secteur 1, édition définitive (Paris: les éditions G. Crés et cie., 1922), 13. See as well the discussion in Jean Galtier-Boissière, Histoire de la grande guerre (Paris: Le Crapouiilot, 1932–33) [Paris: Coquiler, 1919], 295.

  9David Lloyd George, War Memoirs (London: Odhams, 1938), 2.1313.

  10Lloyd George (1: 546). In The Price of Glory (London: Macmillan, 1962), Alistair Horne simply recapitulates this conclusion (13), without bothering to inform the reader that he is simply repeating what Lloyd George was told by Asquith.

  11“On September 14, the Germans reached the Aisne,” is how A. J. P. Taylor describes their retreat in 1914 in Illustrated History of the First World War (New York: Penguin, 1966), 34. Given the course of the river, apparently the Germans were retreating sideways. In The First World War (New York: Knopf, 1999), John Keegan repeats this assertion, making the geography even more erroneous, as he says that the Germans “retreated to the Aisne” (13). These are not simply slips of the pen; they indicate a basic lack of knowledge about key features of France, as though a Civil War historian were to speak of the Ohio River flowing into Lake Superior.

  12The notion of the enslaved peoples of Alsace-Lorraine—and the French desire to return them to the fold—was a staple of wartime propaganda. Like much else in this war, the facts are complex and obscure. However, the notion that the natives were enslaved, or being repressed, like the notion that the French were desperate to free them, hardly stands up to the facts. See, among the many, the analysis of Jean-Jacques Becker, “L’opinion publique française et l’Alsace-Lorraine en 1914,” in Boches ou tricolores? Les Alsaciens-Lorraines dans la grande guerre, edited by Jean-Noël Grandhomme (Strasbourg: la Nuée bleue, 2008), 39–44.

  13Jules Verne, Celebrated Travels and Travelers (London: Gilbert and Rivington, 1880), 2:113.

  14Indeed, when I used the phrase “Champagne-Ardennes” in a conversation with a highly educated Frenchwoman, I was sharply corrected, lectured on all the reasons why Champagne was not in any way to be connected with a bunch of trees (the Ardennes is indeed mostly forest). She was not pleased to see a photograph of an official highway marker welcoming visitors to “Champagne-Ardennes.” For ten years—up until her retirement—I worked with the president of the French Film and Television Critics Association, who became a good friend. I loved this middle-aged woman dearly, and my affection for her was exceeded only by my respect. But her prideful ignorance (she was a true Parisian) about her own country was a source of constant amusement. I should add that the natives who live out there in the boondocks, in France profonde, heartily reciprocate.

  15All the distances computed under 15,000 meters are computed using the very large-scale (1 centimeter equals 250 meters) maps of the Institute Géographique National. These maps clearly show important landmarks, elevations, contour lines, and, where relevant, the exact locations of fortifications and trenches.

  16The length of the Western Front, and the amount of it held by each Allied power, shifted over the course of the war. The variation in the actual length is insignificant: At the end of 1914, it was 785 kilometers, and at the end of 1917, 750. In 1914, the French controlled slightly more than 90 percent of the front, but their share went steadily down: In 1916 it was 80 percent, and by 1917, 70 percent. See the table in Huber (112), whose figures are derived from official army documents.

  17The New York Times Current History, The European War (New York, 1917) 2:175. The interesting part of this comment is when the writer cheerfully speaks of “the uses” of journalism, that is to say, the extent to which journalism could be harnessed to the service of the state.

  18Elizabeth Latimer, France in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: McClurg, 1892), 244–49.

  19Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, My Days of Adventure: The Fall of France, 1870–71 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1914), 252.

  20Charles Inman Bernard, Paris War Days (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1914), 79–80. The preface is dated October 1914.

  21George Seldes felt this was one of the greatest scoops of his long career. His account of the German expedition appeared in You Can’t Print That! The Truth Behind the News, 1918–1928 (Garden City, New York, 1929), 24–40. To my knowledge no historian has made use of this interview. Seldes’s career spanned the century, and when his accounts were repackaged and issued as Witness to a Century (New York: Ballantine, 1987), the book became a bestseller, and was praised by the Columbia Journalism Review. Needless to say, the von Hindenburg interview was reprinted in Witness (96–101).

  22M. L. Sanders and Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda During the First World War, 1914–18 (London: Macmillan, 1982)
, 143.

  23Charles á Court Repington, The First World War, 1914–1918, Personal Experiences of Colonel Repington (London: Constable, 1920), 1.56–57.

  24Jean Norton Cru, Témoins (Paris: les Etincelles, 1929 [reprinted Nancy: Presses universitaires, 1993]), 17–18.

  25As reported to Abel Ferry and recorded in his Les Carnets Secrets d’Abel Ferry, 1914–1918 (Paris: Grasset, 1957), 35. Note the late date of actual publication; like the secret notebooks of Marshal Fayolle, Ferry’s notes came to light long after the war.

  26Paul Allard, Les dessous de la guerre révélés par les comités secrets (Paris: les Éditions de France, 1932), 15. I’m paraphrasing. As reported, Maginot actually said that the Germans had lost fewer men than the French.

  27Martin Samuels, Doctrine and Dogma: German and British Infantry Tactics in the First World War (New York: Greenwood, 1992), 52. See as well the analysis of how this conception shaped German strategy in Jehuda L. Wallach, The Dogma of the Battle of Annihilation (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1986), 97.

  28Basil Liddell Hart, The Real War, 1914–1918 (Boston: Little Brown, 1930), 216. Of course, this point is generally passed over in silence, as it contradicts one of the great propagandistic memes of 1914: that the Germans were trying to envelop Paris. As I pointed out in The Myth of the Great War (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), if the German commander von Kluck was actually trying to do that, he really needed a better map, as his actual position before the general retreat could hardly be squared with the idea (13). But the historians of this war are rarely bothered by actual facts if they get in the way of the myth.

  29Fernand Gambiez and Martin Suire, Histoire de la première guerre mondiale (Paris: Fayard, 1968), 1.79–80. On 297 there is an exhaustive list of what the authors term “secondary” operations. In this table isolated bits and pieces of the Verdun battles are mentioned.

  30Not all of the 56,056 soldiers were dead: 12,543 were wounded, and another 13,028 simply missing; but in the short term those losses meant seriously understrength units. Here is how one of the few detailed analyses puts it: “Of the 84 British battalions on 1 November, 18 had fewer than 100 men, 31 fewer than 200, 26 had 200-300, 9 only exceeded 300 but none had more than 450, that is, half strength.” Peter Young and J. P. Lawford, History of the British Army (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1970), 215. Detailed figures taken from War Office [United Kingdom], Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War, 1914–1920 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1922), Table 3:253.

  31Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1916–1918 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), 1:26–29. Although viciously attacked by British historians, and oftentimes quite wrong as to his deductions, Churchill’s account of the war is not to be despised. The main reason for the attacks is that he made arguments that totally contradicted the delusional complacency of the conventional accounts of the war—as we shall see, notably in chapter seven.

  32The Price of Glory (London: Macmillan, 1962), 13. Subsequent accounts of the matter have simply elaborated on this summary; hence the epigraph to this book.

  2. How Political Geography Dictated Strategy

  1Phillipe Pétain, La bataille de Verdun (Paris: Payot, 1929), 15.

  2Data taken from Charles Heberman, editor, The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Appleton, 1907) 1:342; Dominus Mondroe and Marius Culp, editors, Encyclopaedia Catolica (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 1948), 1:915. An enormous number of studies have appeared dealing with the complexities of the area and its relationship to Germany and France. See, among the many: Francis Roth, Alsace Lorraine: Histoire d’un “pays perdu” de 1870 a nos jours. (Nancy: Éditions Place Stanislas, 2010); Jean-Noel Grandhomme, Boches ou tricolores? Les Alsaciens-Lorrains dans la Grande Guerre. (Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue, 2008); Eugene Riedweg. Les «malgre nous». Histoire de l’incorporation de force des Alsaciens-Mosellans dans lármee allemande. (Strasbourg: Éditions du Rhin, 1995). Note that all of these titles—and others too numerous to list—are published locally, and not widely available anywhere else. Even the most skeptical reader will find the analysis of the popular folk songs of the region convincing. See Carl Engel, Musical Myths and Facts (London: Novello, Ewer, and Company, 1926) 1.8–22.

  3Herbert George Wells, The War of the Future (London: Cassel, 1917), 12. A reader of one of my earlier books wrote me and, rather humorously, observed that I was guilty of “Germanophilia, which is much worse than pedophilia.”

  4See his extensive and candid revelations in Adolphe Thiers, Memoirs of M. Thiers, translated by F. M. Atkinson (New York: James Pott, 1916), 269–328. For the Gladstone quote, see Lord Newton, Lord Lyons: A Record of British Diplomacy (London: Edward Arnold, 1913), 2:334. The British government found the 1870 war, from beginning to end, profoundly embarrassing, as they were unable to admit openly that they were agreeable to the one thing that would resolve the matter—loss of territory.

  5A. J. P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), 62.

  6As quoted by Gerhard Ritter, in his edition of von Schlieffen’s writings, Der Schlieffenplan: Kritik eines Mythos (München: Oldenbourg, 1956), 54.

  7Both quotes from Taylor, Bismarck: “dying man” quote (167); Pomeranian musketeer quote (105). For some reason the former sentiment is always repeated incorrectly: Bismarck actually said “Pomeranian musketeer,” not “grenadier.” The former term was still being used in the German Army in 1914 to 1918, as anyone who studies the markers in their military cemeteries can see rather easily.

  8There is an extensive bibliography on the history of the Maginot Line and its performance in combat in France. See Emmanuel Bourcier, L’Attaque de la ligne Maginot (Paris: ODEF, 1940); Roger Bruge, Histoire de la Ligne Maginot I: Faites sauter la ligne Maginot (Paris: Libraire Fayard, 1977), and Histoire de la Ligne Maginot II: On a livré la Ligne Maginot (Paris: Fayard, 1975); Paul Gamelin, La Ligne Maginot: images d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Paris: l’Argout, 1979); Jean-Yves Mary, La Ligne Maginot: ce qu’elle etait, ce qu’il en reste (Paris: SERCAP, 1980); André Gaston Prételat, La destin tragique de la Ligne Maginot (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1950); J. J. Rapin, Une organization exemplaire: l’artillerie des ouvrages de la Ligne Maginot (Lavey, Switzerland, 1977); Michel Truttmann and Alain Hohnadel, La Ligne Maginot (Paris: Tallandier, 1989); Jean-Bernard Wahl, La ligne Maginot en Alsace (Steinbrunn-le-Haut: Éditions du Rhin, 1987). The effects of the German aerial bombardment of Schoenenbourg may easily be seen to this very day: a few eroded craters. The structures were completely undamaged. For an account of fortification building before 1939 and of Patton’s fiasco at Metz, see John Mosier, The Blitzkrieg Myth (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 28–42 (fortifications); 257–61 (Metz).

  9The best single account of Séré de Rivières and the forts is Guy Le Hallé, Le système Séré de Rivières (Louviers: Ysec Éditions, 2001). But see also Henri Ortholan, Le général Séré de Rivières (Paris: Bernard Giovanangeli, 203); Phillipe Truttmann, La barrière de fer (Thionville: Gerard Kopp, 2000).

  10Data taken from Le Hallé (Le système, 62–64). Two hundred and seventy-eight batteries were constructed between 1870 and 1885, but afterward there were so many that Le Hallé is unable to give a precise figure (63). For the importance of the 1885 date, and why that is used as a dividing line, see chapter three below.

  11General James Marshall-Cornwall, Grant as Military Commander (London: B. T. Batsford, 1970), 87. A point echoed, or copied, by John Keegan in speaking of Shiloh: “It was a tract of territory, indeed, on which no European army would ever have offered or given battle. . . . It was an entirely American landscape, one of those wildernesses which settlement as yet had scarcely touched,” in The Mask of Command (New York: Viking, 1987), 167.

  12Général J[ean-Joseph] Rouquerol, Les hauts de Meuse et Saint-Mihiel (Paris: Payot, 1939), 31.

  3. The War of the Engineers

  1
Gabriel Bichet, Le role des forts dans la bataille de Verdun (Nancy: Imprimerie Georges Thomas, 1969), 1.

  2Report of the Surgeon General for 1920 (w1.1:920/1), 49. In this sense the Civil War was a modern war. French medical services recorded casualties from edged weapons at roughly one-third of 1 percent. See Michel Huber, La population de la France pendant la guerre (New Haven: Yale, 1931), 431. The German medical services went one step further and didn’t even bother to record these cases.

  3See the rather technical discussion in Jules Paloque, Artillerie de campagne (Paris: O. Doin et fils, 1909), 142–54.

  4For the technical discussions of artillery, and the estimates of relative numbers, see General Firmin Émile Gascouin, L’evolution de l’artillerie pendant la guerre (Paris: Flammarion, 1920), 18–21; 38ff. There is a brief but extremely relevant discussion in the appendix to the English-language edition of Joffre, The Personal Memoirs of Joffre, Field Marshal of the French Army, translated T. Bentley Mott (New York: Harper, 1932), 2:597–600. See also the essay by Colonel Kauffer in Service Historiques des Armeés, Inventaire Sommaire des Archives de la Guerre (N 24 and N25) (Troyes: La Renaissance, 1967), 143–59.

  5Daniel Reichel implies that these guns were the divisional artillery. See his “History of Artillery in the Last Century, 1871–1971,” Joseph Jobé, editor, Guns, An Illustrated History of Artillery (New York: Crescent, 1971), 171–72. This view is echoed by Ian Hogg, whose caption of the German 77 says it was the “mainstay of divisional artillery during the latter half of the war.” See A History of Artillery (London: Hamlyn, 174), 138. Even the standard reference by Dastrup has only a very perfunctory account of the importance of medium artillery and mobility in his introductory essay: Boyd L. Dastrup, The Field Artillery: History and Sourcebook (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994), 45–50.