Then came two long-barrelled 380 mm. (15-inch) naval guns (also by Krupp) with immensely long range, tucked away safely in the Bois de Wapremont, well behind the front. There were seventeen stocky Austrian 305 mm. mortars, or ‘Beta guns’, and there were masses of the quick-firing, easily transportable 210s, that for the French ‘poilu’ were to become the most familiar and most feared weapon at Verdun. Next came the long 150s, the future nightmare of French artillerymen and supply troops, with their eternal probing and seemingly limitless range. There were the hated 130 mm. ‘whizz-bangs’, whose flat trajectory gave you no time at all to duck, that preyed on unwary troops making for the latrines, or enjoying a game of cards behind the lines; and, in sharp contrast but equally disfavoured, there were the mine-throwers — crude instruments, throwing canisters filled with over 100 lbs. of explosive, as well as often being packed with bits of alarm clocks to enhance their nastiness. You could see them coming, tumbling slowly over and over in the air; though it seldom did you much good as their gigantic blast levelled whole sections of trench. At the bottom of the scale came the 77 mm. field guns that could lay down a barrage among attacking troops nearly — but not quite — as lethal as the famous French 75s; and the light-infantry weapons, semi-automatic ‘revolver-cannons’ and ‘pom-poms’. Finally, there was a new instrument of horror that was to make its debut at Verdun: the flame-thrower.
Each class of gun had its own carefully appointed task. The mighty Gamma and Beta mortars, hidden behind the hills of Romagne and Morimont, with their superb observation points, were to concentrate on the forts. One of the 380 mm. naval guns was to drop a steady forty shells a day on Verdun itself; the other to interrupt communications far away on the left bank of the Meuse. The 210s — one battery to every 150 yards of trench – were to pulverise the French first line. When that was taken, they would lift and ‘box off’ the intermediary areas with an impenetrable cordon sanitaire to stop French reinforcements coming up to counter-attack. Any strong-points that somehow withstood the mortars would be administered the coup-de-grâce by the close-in mine-throwers. As soon as the attack succeeded, the lighter guns would first move up into new prepared positions, covered by the heavies behind, which, in their turn would move forward as soon as the light batteries were ready to give covering fire. On D-Day, recognised French battery positions would be deluged with gas by the howitzers and field artillery, while special batteries of 150s stood by to eliminate any new guns that might appear in the course of the battle. Meanwhile, other long-range 150s would be constantly raking all roads and tracks leading up to the front. ‘No line is to remain unbombarded,’ ran the German gunners’ orders, ‘no possibilities of supply unmolested, nowhere should the enemy feel himself safe.’ To supply this fearful bombardment, six days’ ammunition had been stocked near the guns. This added up to 2,500,000 shells, the transportation of which had required some 1,300 munition trains. Yet, despite the appalling road conditions, Major-General Beeg, GOC Artillery to the Fifth Army, could report on February 1st that the last of the twelve hundred guns was in position, on schedule — even though the supreme effort had cost him thirty per cent of his horses. In the woods ringing Verdun there was hardly room for a man to walk between the massed cannon and ammunition dumps.
No tiny detail was overlooked in the meticulous German plans; up in the front line emplacements were already being dug for the heavy howitzers to move into once the French first line had been taken; artillery telephone lines were spooled up in readiness to be run forward to overrun positions. There were special liaison troops equipped with large red balloons, to show the artillery just where the attacking infantry had reached in the dense woods.
Only more remarkable than the speed of the German preparations was their secrecy; here the influence of Falkenhayn had played its part. The rest of the Germany Army was kept in the dark about ‘Gericht’ until the very last moment. Liaison officers from other armies were banned from the Fifth Army front, and even Colonel Bauer, Falkenhayn’s chief artillery adviser, was not shown the plans until it was already too late for him to alter the artillery programme. Down at the far south of the line, General Gaede was allowed to go blithely ahead with preparations for ‘Operation Black Forest’, an attack on Belfort that Falkenhayn had had no intention of consummating. To add weight to the deception, the Crown Prince made a well-publicised trip to Army Group Gaede, ostentatiously shaking hands with Swiss frontier guards. Elaborate diversionary bombardments were planned for several other sectors, and, when it was no longer possible to conceal that something was afoot at Verdun, German agents in various neutral countries spread rumours that this was only a feint, while the big attack would come elsewhere. Even nurses arriving at the vast new hospitals set up behind Verdun were told that they were simply ‘for the treatment of internal illnesses’. To what extent the enemy were taken in by all this will be shown shortly; meanwhile Germany’s ally, Austria, was hardly better informed — an astonishing error of diplomacy on the part of Falkenhayn that was to have its repercussions.
In their attempts to conceal the mammoth activities going on behind Verdun, the Germans were greatly helped by the broken and heavily wooded country of the Meuse foothills, as well as by the mists that so often hung there in winter. (Indeed, the decision to attack from the covered North-eastern approaches instead of along the perhaps more tempting Eastern axis, out of the exposed Woevre, had been dictated almost exclusively by the need for concealment.) What Nature supplied, German ingenuity supplemented. Franz Marc, the artist, was among those set to work painting camouflage nets and canvasses to cover the guns. Where mere were no trees, these were draped across all roads, like great fishing nets hung out to dry. The installation of the twelve-hundred cannon was accomplished with considerable finesse; when crews had reconnoitred positions, gun pits were dug at night and immediately camouflaged; then the ammunition came up and finally when all was ready, the tell-tale cannon themselves. Before the attack, only long-established guns, that were assumed to be already pin-pointed on French artillery charts, were permitted to reply to enemy fire.
But by far the most effective contribution to secrecy was the great concrete Stollen, or underground galleries, hastily burrowed out all along the attack zone. In the futile offensives of 1915, the vital element of surprise had been lost each time by the cramming of assault troops into the forward trenches, so easily visible to a vigilant enemy. Not only had this at once given the game away, but almost invariably led to hideous casualties from the counter-bombardment. The Allied generals never learnt, but the Germans did, and at Verdun the assaulting infantry were housed in these capacious, shell-proof Stollen, some of which could hold half a battalion of men, well out of sight of French eyes. On D-Day, the infantrymen emerging from the Stollen would have to cover not fifty, but often as much as 1,000 yards of No-Man’s-Land. It was a calculated risk based on the assumption that most of the French 75s would have been knocked out by the German bombardment; and it was a technique that was to be used against the British in March 1918 with even greater success.
Over all this terrestrial activity watched the first air umbrella the world had ever seen. Up to 1916, the infant air weapon on both sides had confined itself largely to single, gladiatorial combats between heroic young men flying flimsy and primitive aircraft. A start had been made on photographic reconnaissance (though viewed with gravest suspicion by the Army Staffs) and there had of course been the Zeppelin raids. But that was about all. Now, at Verdun, history was to be made in the air. For the first time aircraft were used en masse in support of ground tactics. Before the attack on Verdun, the Germans mustered there the main weight of their air strength — 168 planes, plus fourteen captive balloons and four Zeppelins. A huge force by First War standards, it was to provide a dawn to dusk ‘aerial barrage’ which would, in theory, prevent any French aircraft from spying out the German preparations as completely as the ground barrage was later to ‘box off’ French reinforcements. Once the attack had begun, the German ‘aerial b
arrage’ was to protect the vital observation balloons, the eyes of the artillery, from French aircraft. The days of the gladiators were numbered and the Battle of Britain a step closer.
* * *
Behind the city of Verdun lay a long and quite distinguished history in which, among the deities, Mars had had an unusually large interest. Even in Roman times, Virodunum was already an important fortified camp, and considered worth burning by Attila. In 843 the Treaty of Verdun was signed there by the three quarrelling heirs of Charlemagne; it divided Europe between them, and gave birth to Germany as a nation — hence part of the eternal mystique Verdun held for Teutonic minds. Although in theory the Treaty made Verdun part of France, in 923 it fell under German suzerainty where it remained until ‘liberated’ by Henri II in 1552. Just over a hundred years later Veuban confirmed France’s title by turning Verdun into the most imposing fortress in his cordon protecting France. Besieged in the Thirty Years’ War, the experience was repeated regularly once a century, up to 1916. In 1792 Verdun held out against Prussian guns until its commander, Beaurepaire, committed suicide, rather than surrender (or, as another version has it, was murdered by less patriotic burghers); in 1870, it was the last of the great French fortresses to fall, surviving Sedan, Metz and Strasbourg. Thus on both sides there was plenty of symbolic and sentimental material on which to draw.
At the opening of 1916 Verdun was a sleepy, duller-than-average French provincial town, unassumingly modest about its noble past and strangely insouciant about the future. It was proud of its sugared almonds (they had replaced the rather less bourgeois trade in eunuchs, the city’s principal commerce up to the seventeenth century); but not so proud of a climate that must be one of the rainiest, foggiest and nastiest in all France. Considering that since September 1914 the enemy had been less than ten miles from the city gates, life in Verdun seemed remarkably little altered from pre-war days. The place was full of troops, but this was nothing new to the Verdunois, as it had always been a garrison town. The proximity of war and the spasmodic bombardments had reduced the population from somewhere under 15,000 to about 3,000. But those that remained had adapted themselves well, and had seldom had it so good. The proprietors of a former music shop now sold tomatoes and tins of sardines to the voracious poilus (at a handsome profit); a hotel for travelling salesmen had put up the boards but did a brisk business in wine by the barrel, and cheese and oranges were retailed from a disused cinema. Instead of four wine merchants, there were now a dozen, and former bank clerks, teachers and even policemen (those that had not been called up) had gone into the comestible business — while Verdun’s twenty-five established grocers had watched the emergence of forty new competitors with mild indifference.
At the Coq Hardi evenings were as gay as ever before the war. The officers dining there may have looked back with some nostalgia on the peacetime fishing in clear streams and the wonderful chasses au sanglier among the oak woods that covered the hills beyond the Meuse, now the forward area, but otherwise life was not disagreeable. For, in fact, from October 1914 until February 1916 the Verdun sector had been one of the quietest of the whole front; true, the occasional shelling had forced Area HQ to shift from the barracks surmounting Vauban’s Citadel into its impenetrable subterranean casemates, and finally out of Verdun altogether, but then staff officers were notoriously windy. An officer arriving from the Champagne in April 1915 expressed astonishment at not hearing a single cannon; it was, he remarked, just like peacetime. Life behind the French lines at Verdun was agreeably, deceptively and dangerously calm — it may have been not unlike Singapore in the last days of 1941. And no one was more deceived than the Grand Quartier Général.
Verdun was reputedly unassailable, the strongest fortress on earth, the Gibraltar-cum-Singapore of the First War. Its reputation had been thoroughly put to the test during the Battle of the Marne. The Crown Prince’s Army had all but encircled the fortress, and Joffre — ever mindful of the fate of Bazaine, locked up in Metz with his huge useless army in 1870 — actually ordered its abandon. Fortunately the commander of the French Third Army, Sarrail, an elderly general with an American Civil War beard, disregarded the order. Verdun stood like a rock against the Crown Prince’s repeated assaults, forming a vital anchor and pivot for the whole left wing of the French Army falling back on Paris. Had it in fact been abandoned, Joffre’s front would have been cut in two, the Miracle of the Marne could never have taken place, Paris — and probably the war — would have been lost. In 1914 the importance of Verdun was as simple as that.
After the Marne, the Germans had been forced to withdraw slightly on either side of the fortress, but surged back again to establish a bridgehead across the Meuse at St. Mihiel, embarrassingly close to Verdun and severing one of its major railway links. Through 1915 new attempts had been made to cut off Verdun by thrusting into the salient on both flanks, at Vauquois in the Argonne and Les Eparges, culminating in some particularly savage mine warfare. By 1916, the front around Verdun still formed a bulge like a large and vulnerable hernia.
On the ground, Verdun’s defences looked dreadfully impressive. Surrounding it on all sides were the steep Meuse hills whose unusual concentric pattern itself formed an immense natural fort, with a radius of five to ten miles, the Keep at the centre of the fort being Verdun itself. In the vital northeast sector of the Right Bank there were four natural lines of defence along the ridges. Many of these were formed like the glacis of a fort, sloping gently away towards the enemy, but with steep reverse slopes, so that defenders could lie in wait in these relatively protected ravines, then move up to sweep an enemy advancing up the long glacis with withering fire. Forces trying to progress along the meandering Meuse valley would find themselves caught in enfilading fire first from the one side, then from the other, from the ridges that protruded, interlocking and overlapping, into the river bends. Little resemblance here to the featureless, open country of Flanders and the Champagne.
Moreover, the crest of each important hill or ridge in this great natural stronghold was itself studded with powerful forts, the outstanding feature of Verdun’s defences and the derivative of General de Rivière’s post-1870 line of fortifications. On the German 1914 maps alone, no less than twenty major and forty intermediary forts (or ‘ouvrages’ as the French called them) were shown. The Right Bank forts lay roughly in an outer and two inner rings; the first containing Moulainville, Vaux and Douaumont; the next, Tavannes and Souville; and the innermost ring, on the heights overlooking Verdun, Belrupt, St. Michel and Belleville. On the left bank there were two similar lines, but the most important was the outer one comprising five forts along the Bois Bourrus ridge, which lay interlocking with the Douaumont and Souville lines across the river. To the south of Verdun, but unconcerned in the great approaching battle, were still further clusters of forts. Of all, the most powerful, and indeed, the cornerstone, was Douaumont; which, from its 1,200-foot elevation, dominated the terrain at every point of the compass like a scaled-down Monte Cassino.
From the time of Vauban, French engineers have led the world in the ingenuity of their fortifications, and Verdun was no exception. Each fort was so sited that its guns could dislodge any enemy appearing on the glacis of its neighbour. The guns themselves, sometimes either a heavy 155 mm. or twin short-barrelled 75s, were housed under heavy steel carapaces in retractable turrets, and were invulnerable to all but a direct hit from the heaviest artillery. They were supplemented by equally well-protected machine-gun turrets and ingeniously placed block-houses containing flanking guns that could repel an attack on the fort from any direction. The bigger forts contained a company of infantry or more underground, and the more modern were armoured with reinforced concrete up to eight feet deep under a thick layer of earth. They were in fact like ranks of immobile, but apparently indestructible tanks, or a flotilla of unsinkable monitors. Furthermore, as the battle had receded in 1914, the outer line of the forts had been left with a protective cordon of trenches in the foothills between them and the
Germans, two or three miles deep; which the French had had a relatively undisturbed fifteen months to make as impregnable as might be.
In theory, Verdun in 1916 should have been the strongest point of the whole Allied line. Yet, in practice, it was one of the weakest. Why?
In 1914 the ease with which the secret German 420s had shattered the legendary Belgian forts, and — worse still — had forced the surrender of France’s own Manonviller, her biggest and most modern, had come as a terrible shock to the French High Command. At G.Q.G., the Grandmaisonites — ignoring Sarrail’s success at Verdun — rapidly exploited these disasters to their own advantage (no doubt partly to re-establish their reputation tarnished by the Battle of the Frontiers). Forts are nothing but shell traps, they averred, and so we have always maintained; quite out of keeping with French offensive spirit. The French soldier’s place was en rase campagne, if absolutely necessary in a trench, but certainly not hiding under a pile of concrete. And what had happened to Bazaine and MacMahon in the vaunted fortresses of Metz and Sedan during the last war? When the Allied 1915 spring offensives failed, owing to lack of artillery, G.Q.G. had rummaged through all its arsenals for every available gun. But why not tap the vast resources of cannon installed in all those useless fortresses at Verdun, suggested some bright disciple of de Grandmaison?
The Price of Glory Page 7