by John Mosier
14French and German artillery figures all taken from Alain Denizot, Verdun, 1914–1916 (Paris: Éditions Latines, 1996), Annexe 2 (French) and 3 (German).
15Totals taken from Alain Denizot, Verdun, 1914–1918 (Paris: Nouvelle Éditions Latines, 1996), Annex 2, 271. Unfortunately, Denizot (or the copy editors) converted all the German gun sizes to millimeters, so the result is extremely difficult to comprehend: For example, the actual dimension of the German 15-centimeter howitzer was not 150 millimeters, but 149.7, so the table has to be decoded.
16All this information is taken from the elaborate tables in Edmond Buat, L’armée allemande pendant la guerre de 1914–18 (Paris: Chapelot, 1920), 34–35.
17[Lieutenant Colonel] Raoul de Thomasson, Les preliminaires de Verdun (aôut 1915–fevrier 1916), (Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1921), 137. Notice the date in the title: August 1915.
18Erich von Falkenhayn, The German General Staff and Its Decisions, 1914–1916, no translator given (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1920), 243. The passages that follow are my translation, taken from Erich von Falkenhayn, Die Oberste Heeresleitung, 1914–1916 (Berlin: Mittler, 1920).
19In order to make this passage more readable, I have omitted a complicated qualifier that Fayolle used. He speaks of this war as a “guerre de siège de campagne,” by which he means war in which heavy artillery has the same importance that it would in traditional siege warfare, even though it is not technically the siege of fortifications, since in gunnery siège and campagne were thought of as opposites. Fayolle, Carnets secrets de la grande guerre, edited by Henry Contamine (Paris: Plon, 1964), entry of 1 June 1915, 109.
20Von Falkenhayn, Heeresleitung (181).
21Not an exaggeration: On 21 December 1915, the 5th, 7th, 27th, and 78th battalions of chasseurs alpines had launched a final fruitless attack against the German positions on the Hartmannswillerkopf, a minor tactical strongpoint up in the Vosges mountains. During that attack, the general commanding, Serret, was mortally wounded and died a few weeks later. See the account in Jean Mabire, Chasseurs alpins: des Vosges aux Djebels, 1914–1964 (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1984), 150. Speaking of an earlier and even less successful attack in July, Mabire used the term massacre (145).
22Charles á Court Repington, The First World War, 1914–1918, Personal Experiences of Colonel Repington (London: Constable, 1920), 1:56–57.
23The whole sentence: “Behind the French lines there are many strong points, for possession of which the French leadership would fight to the last man to hang on to.” The French leadership: franzößische Führung, the word derived from the same root as Führer, a German word that everyone knows (Falkenhayn, Heeresleitung, 181–82).
24Arthur Conan Doyle, A Visit to Three Fronts, June 1916 (New York: George Doran, 1916), 61.
25A. J. P. Taylor, Illustrated History of the First World War (New York: Penguin, 1966), 121.
26Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1916–1918 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), 2:89.
27Philip Guedalla, Supers and Supermen (Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing, 1924), 13. Rather hilariously, he has the quote wrong. Beerbohm actually said something quite different: “History does not repeat itself, historians repeat each other.” See Sir Max Beerbohm, “1880,” in his Works and More (London: John Lane, 1930), 113. Add this factoid as an appendix to the consecutive quotes from Conan Doyle and A. J. P. Taylor, and you have everything that is wrong with historical writing in this century.
28Helen Davenport Gibbons, Paris Vistas (New York: Century, 1919), 293.
29William Roscoe Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 165.
30Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and His Times (New York: Norton, 1972), 527–29. These remarks are taken from the afterword appended to the 1972 edition, and not found in the 1964 original. This is an extremely important miniature essay on the numerous errors of modern German historians, and the snippets quoted do some violence to the sophistication of the argument, although not at all to the basic point here being made.
31First quoted phrase taken from Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 2:212. The second is from Martin Kitchen, The German Officer Corps, 1890–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 19–20.
32Charles Paquet, Dans l’attende de la ruée: Verdun (janvier-février 1916) (Paris: Berger-Lavrault, 1928), xi.
33Lintier (Ma pièce, 107). Significantly—and ominously for the Allies—this observation is taken from his diary entry for August 30—of 1914. The technique was simple: The aviators dropped flares marking the positions, which, given the low speed and altitude of aircraft in those days, made hitting the target rather easy; the gunners then observed the fall of the shells by their proximity to the flares.
34Information from Paquet (Verdun, xii). Actually, the situation for Verdun was considerably worse. As Pacquet admits, the Central Army Group apparently had no specialists in the interpretation of aerial photographs at all (8).
35Henry Corda, La bataille de Verdun, 1916: ses enseignements et ses consequences: conferences faites en 1921 aux sociéte d’officiers suisses (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1921), 35.
36Phillipe Pétain, La bataille de Verdun (Paris: Payot, 1919), 14–16. There is a decent English translation of this account (London: Matthews & Marrot, 1930), but with different maps. Interestingly, the maps in the British translation show this distribution of forces quite clearly. The alert reader will notice that this figure disagrees with the figure cited earlier. In January 1916, the Belgians held 27 kilometers and the British 96, for a total of 133. So Pétain is being generous; the difference, however, is accounted by the 18 French divisions that were in the Anglo-Belgian sector. Official kilometrage from Michel Huber, La population de la France pendant la guerre (New Haven: Yale, 1931), 115.
37Figures taken from Jules Poirier, La bataille de Verdun, 21 février–18 décembre 1916 (Paris: Chiron, 1922), 62–65. The accounting given by the various experts is confusing, mainly because it’s never exactly clear what area is being defined: the actual front (itself confusing) or the entire area going all the way down to Bar-le-Duc. And, of course, the time period is significant. Once the battle began, the French began moving in more guns, which explains why the extensive data given by some historians doesn’t agree with Poirier’s figures. To reconcile the two it is necessary to realize that Poirier is giving the count on February 20, 1916; the higher figures often used are for the end of the month. Compare his data with that given in Denizot, 226–27, although the arithmetical errors in Denizot’s tables hardly inspire confidence.
38See the very precise but somewhat bewildering summary of the French positions in Fernand Marie Chaligne, Histoire militaire de Verdun (Paris: Charles Lavauzelle, 1939), 162–63. As a field-grade officer, his summary is preferable to those of civilians.
39Pétain, Verdun, 21–22.
40The actual quote: The Netherlands could “never again afford the luxury of another Montgomery success,” as said to Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge too Far (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), 597. There is a curious parallel here between Montgomery and Joffre. The French commander never admitted his mistakes at Verdun, insisting that the objective had no military value. Long after the fact, Montgomery insisted that the operation, if “properly backed from its inception,” would have succeeded: “I remain Market-Garden’s unrepentant advocate.” Quote taken from his autobiographical Montgomery of Alamein (London: Corgi, 1974), 267. It should be pointed out that although Ryan’s book is a wonderful account, the catchy title is extremely misleading. The Arnhem Bridge was not the last bridge needed to cross the Rhine. There was a second bridge farther on. Although universally ignored, it was a very real bridge. Also, the last bridges were the whole point of the operation, which was to get across the Rhine: Failing that objective, there was no real point. The First World War was not the only war where one standard
was applied to the Allied side, quite another to the German (and especially to the Italian).
8. The Most Famous Battle: February–March 1916
1Paul Lintier, Ma pièce (Plon, 1916), 25.
2The verb Fayolle uses, abrutir, does not mean “destroy” or “obliterate”; it means to render incapable of doing anything. In the next sentence (not quoted above), he links the French failure to the insufficiency of their artillery. Quote taken from Émile Fayolle, Carnets secrets de la grande guerre, edited by Henry Contamine (Paris: Plon, 1964), 28–29.
3Fernand Marie Chaligne, Histoire militaire de Verdun (Paris: Charles Lavauzelle, 1939), 153. This is an excellent and succinct account, written from the point of view of a field-grade officer. In the narration that follows I have depended heavily on it, but also on the following: Louis Gillet, La bataille de Verdun (Paris: G. Van Ouest et Cie., 1921); Jules Poirier, La bataille de Verdun, 21 février–18 décembre 1916 (Paris: Chiron, 1922); Gabriele Bichet, Le role des forts dans la bataille de Verdun (Nancy: Imprimerie Georges Thomas, 1969); and Jacques-Henri Lefebvre, Verdun, le plus grande bataille de l’Histoire, 10e Édition (Verdun: Éditions du Mémorial, 1993), which is a reprint of a much earlier edition. The third edition, the earliest I have been able to find, was published in 1960, by the Paris firm of Durassié.
4Even though, as noted above, Henry Corda observed that “the most important tactical lessons of Verdun concern artillery and aviation,” hardly anything has been written about the topic. See the exceedingly brief essay in Alex Imrie’s Pictorial History of the German Army Air Service (London: Allan, 1971), 30–33. For the Corda quote, see La bataille de Verdun, 1916: ses enseignements et ses consequences; conferences faites en 1921 aux sociéte d’officiers suisses (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1921), 35.
5Casualties computed by Jules Poirier, Les bombardements de Paris (1914–1918) (Paris: Payot, 1930), 15–16. John McConnell at the United States Naval Academy has computed that German losses during daytime raids approached 30 percent.
6Poirier (Les bombardements, 15–16). Total tonnage dropped on Verdun from Imre (German Air Force, 33).
7Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, translated by Gerard Hopkins (New York: Norton, 1968), 43.
8See the extensive discussion in Martin Samuels, Doctrine and Dogma: German and British Infantry Tactics in the First World War (New York: Greenwood, 1992), which is one of the three or four best books written about the war. History of the evolution of the Sturmabteilung, 18–25; used as training units, 27; inability of British to grasp tactics, 53–55; failures of historians to grasp structure of army, 17–19.
9The complete passage is his diary entry from June 13, 1915. See Émile Fayolle, Carnets secrets (Paris: Plon, 1964), 111–12.
10Chaligne (Verdun, 167). It should be noted that this characterization completely contradicts the dramatic picture painted by British accounts of this day’s fighting, which describes French gunners firing point-blank into dense masses of Germans on the slopes of the right bank. How the gunners managed to get their elephantine and elderly weapons to the tops of the ridges on the left bank remains a mystery, although it is one anyone who hikes up the ridges will easily resolve: It is logistically impossible, geographically erroneous, and flies in the face of the accounts written by the French themselves.
11John Terraine, The Great War, 1914–1918 (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 208. And yet these very precise and detailed step-by-step accounts of the battle by French officers and historians had been in print for decades. Gillet’s study appeared in 1921; Poirier had published his detailed study in 1922; the compilations of Lefebvre and the more restrained military perspectives of Chaligne appeared before the start of the Second World War.
12The lowly colonel was Serrigny, the general Pétain. See the account in Bernard Serrigny, Trente ans avec Pétain (Paris: Plon, 1959), 56.
13That is one version. There are others, even less creditable to Joffre, in which everything is de Castelnau’s doing. See the summary by Herbert Lotttman in Pétain: Hero or Traitor (New York: William R, Morrow, 1985), 53. Lottmann references Abel Ferry’s Carnet secrets, in this case not a convincing source, since Ferry was out of the government after the fall of the ministry in October 1915. Nor does the reference particularly support the contention.
14The only extensive discussion is in Jacques-Henri Lefebvre, Verdun, le plus grande bataille de l’Histoire, 10e Édition (Verdun: éditions du Mémorial, 1993), 108–11, although there is a brief summary of the situation in Jules Poirier, La bataille de Verdun, 21 février–18 décembre 1916 (Paris: Chiron, 1922), 108–9.
9. Panic, Politicians, and Pétain: April–July 1916
1Jean Dutourd, Les Taxis de la Marne (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 95.
2All three quotations are taken from the excellent short account of Yves Buffetaut in La bataille de Verdun, de l’Argonne a la Woëvre (Tours: Éditions Heimdale, 1990), 63. He concludes by remarking that “not a single word [of the French communiqué] corresponds to reality.”
3The lieutenant was Bernard Law Montgomery, who became famous in the next war as the general who beat Rommel in the desert. To be fair to Monty (not that many British historians are), he later annotated this letter: “My views on the fighting at Verdun were not in any way in accordance with the true facts.” Both the letter and the annotation quoted by Nigel Hamilton in his excellent multivolume biography, Monty: The Making of a General, 1887–1942 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 103.
4Herbert Lotttman, in Pétain: Hero or Traitor (New York: William R. Morrow, 1985), concludes his summary account of the marshal’s prewar career with a question: Was the reason for the blocked promotion “personal or political, or both?” (43).
5See the observations by Serrigny (Pétain, 82). None of Pétain’s wit comes through in his rather dry and bland account of Verdun, a book that makes Grant’s memoirs of his role in the Civil War look like a flashy popular novel.
6The officer was Colonel Edward Spears; the quote is taken from Lottman (Pétain, 49). In November 1914, Pétain was actually able to convince Foch to hold off on one of his massacres, and in May 1915, in Champagne, he was equally unenthusiastic—and quite correct. But in the eyes of the GQG, being right was a capital offense.
7Philippe Pétain, La bataille de Verdun (Paris: Payot, 1929), 45. The word he uses to describe Joffre’s demeanor is curious: It suggests a man who is struggling to maintain an outward appearance at odds with an inner panic. Regardless of what Joffre pretended, or what he thought about the military situation, there is no way he did not realize the political implications of the attack, given the correspondence with Gallieni in December.
8See, in addition to André Duvignac, Histoire de l’armée motorisée (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1947), 100–5; Chaligne (Verdun, 178). The road up, the voie sacrée, is justly famous, like the legendary taxis of the Marne. But in reality, the French relied on motor vehicles to a much greater extent than is generally realized. Nearly 10,000 vehicles were immediately pressed into service upon mobilization in 1914, and the army was moving large units entirely by truck before the end of October. On the other hand, none of the heroic measures of 1916 would have been necessary if the GQG had bothered to reroute the main railroad at the Aubréville curve. Given that it had been cut since October 1914, they had plenty of time to fix the difficulty. A point to remember when pondering Pétain’s withering contempt and thinly disguised scorn.
9Letter quoted by Lottmann (Pétain, 41) who cites private correspondence as his source and does not identify the lady. Although some generals (Grant, Fayolle) were devoted and uxorious husbands, it is interesting to note that some of the greatest generals had quite an eye for ladies, regardless of marital status (on either side), and that it was warmly reciprocated. Both Napoleon and Wellington come to mind, this last despite a certain primness foisted off by his biographers. The same is true of Pershing, after the h
orrific death of his wife. But many of the generals of this war seem ambiguous characters. In a Freudian world, it is difficult not to entertain certain suspicions. One can either laugh or sigh at Joffre’s gourmandizing, but there’s nothing creepy about it.
10Joseph-Simon Gallieni, Les carnets de Gallieni (Paris: Albin Michel, 1932), 273.
11Raymond Poincaré, Au service de la France (Paris: Plon, 1931), 7:143.
12For a good many historians of those years, the framing of Alfred Dreyfus as a German spy justifies everything. Not only is this a gross oversimplification of a complex situation, but it commits the cardinal sin of evaluating 1900 in the light of 2000. France was arguably the most anti-Semitic country in Europe, and it remained so for a long time. “If someone had come to me in 1914 and said that one country would attempt to exterminate the Jews, I would have said then ‘no one can be surprised at the depths to which the French can sink,’” George Mosse is quoted by Yehuda Bauer, as discussed by Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler (New York: Random House, 1998), 345.
13As quoted by Elizabeth Latimer, France in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: McClurg, 1892), 13.
14Colonel Herbillon, Souvenirs d’un officier de liason pendant le Guerre Mondial (Paris: Tallandier, 1930), 1:106.
15An exact translation of the French; the anecdote is found in Bernard Serrigny, Trente ans avec Pétain (Paris: Plon, 1959).
16As quoted by Yves Buffetaut in La bataille de Verdun, de l’Argonne à la Woëvre (Tours: Éditions Heimdale, 1990), 72. No one else refers quite so explicitly to this telegram.
17Jean Norton Cru, Témoins (Paris: Les Etincelles, 1929), 20.
18According to the monthly totals maintained by the German medical services and reported in “Verluste und Ausfall bei dem Deutschen Feldheere im 1 Kriegsjahre 1916/17 auf dem Westlichen und Östlichen Kriegschauplatz,” in Heeressanitätsinspektion des Reichsministeriums, Sanitätsbericht über das deutsche Heer in Weltkrieg 1914/18 (Berlin: Reichsministerium, 1935), 3: Table 150. Interestingly, the only Anglo-American history of the war that makes any reference to this book is Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927). Churchill derived most of his numbers on German losses from the officials in Berlin who were working on this text, as publication was some years away.