The Price of Glory

by Alistair Horne

  Within a matter of minutes Kunze and his section reached the wire on the Fort glacis. Encouragingly enough, nobody had fired at them, but Kunze had noticed the 155 in the Fort shooting over their heads at some distant target. He also noticed troops on the right flank of the 24th being given a bad time by a French machine gun cunningly placed aloft the church spire in the village of Douaumont. Much of the heavy barbed wire had been torn up by the German bombardment, and — with the aid of their pioneer wire-cutters — the section soon made a way through the two entanglements. They reached the spiked railings some 50 yards east of the northern apex of the fort. It was now shortly after 3.30. There was absolutely no way of getting through or over the obstacle. Kunze now followed the railings, moving leftwards; his choice apparently dictated by the machine gun over to his right. He turned the north-east corner and there, just round it, to his delight was a gap about four feet wide that a shell had blasted in the railing. While contemplating how to get down into the 24-foot abyss of the moat, Divine Providence made up Kunze’s mind for him, in the shape of a near-miss that wafted him over the edge. Temporarily stunned, but otherwise unhurt, Kunze now urged the rest of his section to join him. A corporal, convinced by now that the section leader was out of his mind, announced that he was pulling back, but — possibly persuaded by their own heavy shells which were still falling thickly on the exposed superstructure of the fort — the remainder lowered each other down to where Kunze was standing.

  The moat was deserted. Near the breach in the railings were what looked like some small windows and a closed steel door (they were in fact the orifices of the north-east Gallery), set high up in the face of the wall. The barrel of a small cannon could be seen protruding from one, so Kunze and his men rapidly took cover as best they could among the debris lying about in the moat. But there was no sign of life here either. Once again, without pausing to consider the possible hazards, Kunze set about getting into the gallery. The steel door, however, was stoutly barred, and the gun embrasures were over 12 feet from the bottom of the moat. Then Kunze suddenly remembered something from the tedious PT exercises of pre-war days. Quickly he ordered his men to form a human pyramid. Several times it collapsed in a tangle of limbs, but eventually Kunze was able to squeeze his body through an embrasure, pushing aside the unmanned revolver-cannon that stood there. The gallery was quite empty. After several efforts, he prized open the steel door, and exhorted his men to climb up into it. Faced though with this gaping, tenebrous mouth in the fort exterior, and all the terrible unknown perils that might lie beyond it, Kunze’s little troop now began to lose its nerve. Death under one’s own shells was infinitely preferable! All but two melted away, abandoning the sergeant in his folly.

  Still never hestitating, Kunze set forth down a long, inky-dark tunnel. After the ear-splitting din of the bombardment outside, the silence was oppressively eery. On and on plunged Kunze. The tunnel seemed endless. Where was it leading them? And where was the French garrison? At last came some stairs. Kunze climbed them, then found at the top that the passage branched. He could now hear what sounded like the dull boom of a heavy gun firing close at hand. Leaving his two companions to cover one passage, he followed the other towards the sound of the firing. Soon he was close enough to hear the clatter of ejected cartridge cases. Pistol in hand, the intrepid sergeant flung open a door, bellowing ‘Händehoch!’ Four French gunners, faces blackened with powder, stood there in utter astonishment. Before they could collect their wits, they had been roughly hustled out of the turret. Single-handed Kunze had stopped the fire of the 155 mm gun, the biggest in the fort.

  In the midst of this grim battle an interlude of almost Marx Brothers comedy now began. On emerging from the turret, Kunze must have taken the wrong turning in the Douaumont rabbit warren; he was unable to re-discover his two companions keeping watch in the passage. Instead, marching the four Frenchmen before him, Kunze saw daylight glimmering ahead and once again heard the noise of the bombardment. Soon they came out into the open (the south courtyard of the fort), and suddenly the prisoners bolted. Quick as lightening they turned back into another opening in the fort. Kunze followed, and was about to fire when they disappeared into a doorway to the left. Kunze caught a rapid glimpse of a barrackroom where an elderly NCO appeared to be giving a lecture to a group of about twenty men. Once again Kunze shouted ‘Händehoch!’ but at that instant a heavy shell exploding above blew out the candles inside the room. In the ensuing confusion, Kunze’s immediate thought was, ‘Now they will rush me.’ Quickly he slammed the heavy door, and, as luck would have it, was able to lock it from the outside. For a while Kunze kept watch outside the barrackroom, but no new candidates for his bag appeared. Time began to grow heavy on his hands, and he resumed his reconnaissance in search of further exploits. Soon he ran into another unarmed French soldier, who in utter terror kept calling him ‘mon Capitaine’. Though not speaking a word of French, Kunze some-how made it plain that he wanted to know where the fort’s officers were. Accordingly, his latest trembling captive led him into another barrackroom, evidently belonging to the officers’ mess. The room was empty, but upon a table stood a large basket full of eggs, wine and other provisions. It was something Kunze had not seen for many a month. He had not had a square meal since the battle began, and only iron rations during the miserable weeks of waiting in the Stollen. Suddenly he felt ravenously hungry. In his simple peasant mind the instinct to eat and drink now overruled all other considerations. The prisoners locked up in the barrackroom, his presence alone in a hostile fort surrounded by the enemy, the very war itself, all was forgotten. Before the astounded eyes of his latest captive Kunze sat down and began to gorge himself.

  But where, one might well ask, was the main garrison of this mighty bastion during all these events?

  At the beginning of the war, Douaumont had a permanent garrison of some 500 infantrymen. Then, in 1915, Joffre’s order de-rating the forts had sent the garrison out into the line, leaving only the artillerymen manning the remaining turret guns (by a twist of Fate, Douaumont’s first wartime garrison had been decimated fighting near the Bois des Caures in the first days of the battle, its commander severely wounded). Under the statutes governing French fortresses, those at Verdun came directly under the Governor of Verdun — now General Herr. The Corps Commander in whose sector they lay had no control over them. Thus when General Chrétien had paid a visit to Douaumont on first taking up his command, he had received an extraordinary rebuff. At the drawbridge he had been turned away by the elderly Gardien de Batterie, a mere Warrant Officer called Chenot, with the words: ‘the fort opens only to the Governor of Verdun. I cannot allow anybody to enter without his order. I wasn’t warned of your visit. I should have you arrested as a spy!’ Thus after this humiliating episode Chrétien worried no more about the fort, assuming perhaps that if it could keep out a three-star General it had little to fear from the enemy; in any case, it was not his responsibility. When the battle began the occupants of Douaumont in fact consisted only of Sergeant-Major Chenot and his 56 Territorial gunners manning the 155 and 75 turrets that alone had kept their weapons after the Joffre purge. On the desperate day of the 24th, General Herr had actually dictated that all the Verdun forts be prepared for demolition; Douaumont’s tenants had accordingly been increased by one Sapper sergeant, but the officer sent from Verdun to organise the mining disappeared en route. The mining was never carried out.

  Meanwhile, the first two brigades of XX Corps had arrived on the scene and at Souville Chrétien was about to hand over his command to General Balfourier. Shortly before this took place, he had been rung up from Verdun by a frantic Herr and told to re-occupy ‘the line of the forts’ and ‘defend them to the last’. As one of his last acts, Chrétien detailed his staff to pass this order on to the divisional commanders. On his arrival, Balfourier, exhausted from the long forced march, accepted without query Chrétien’s assurance that the garrisoning of the forts was in hand, that there was nothing to worry about there. Gen
eral Deligny, the commander of the two new brigades that were up in position on both sides of Douaumont, asked Chrétien whether he should not set up his HQ in the Fort. No, said Chrétien, the fort is taken care of, you can take over my HQ here when I pull out tomorrow.

  Under the stress of sustained battle, the best-regulated staffs sometimes break down. Errors that would otherwise be inconceivable arise. Such a one occurred now. Somebody on Chrétien’s staff, perhaps a humble Corporal-Signaller, forgot to transmit the vital order for the re-occupation of the forts. Deligny, separated from Chrétien’s HQ by just a partition, swears he never heard of the order until it was already too late the next day. Up at the front the two brigadiers concerned — comfortably assuming that Fort Douaumont lay between them as a solidly defended bulwark, while recalling the dreadful reputation forts had for attracting shell-fire — ordered the regiments under them to give it the widest possible berth.

  While Kunze was sating his appetitie within the fort, from the wings without, three officers of the 24th were preparing their various appearances. Their names were Radtke, Haupt and von Brandis. In short succession, but quite independently of each other from their different points on the battlefield, they too had been seized by the intoxicating magnetism of Douaumont. Radtke was a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant in 6 Company, a reservist who with his rimless glasses and sloping shoulders reminds one more of a bank clerk or petty official than a Prussian officer. With his platoon he had followed more or less the same course as Kunze through the objective, and then on to the edge of the fort’s wire, creeping up under cover of a defile called Strawberry Ravine. When he emerged into the open again at the wire he was surprised not to find himself fired upon by the French in Douaumont village. His two worries were the heavy German bombardment coming down around him and the fact that there appeared to be no sign of the 12th Grenadiers on the right. Radtke fired off all his Very cartridges to get the guns to lift their barrage, but as often happened they were not noticed by the artillery. The nerves of some of his men were beginning to crack under the intense shelling, but Radtke urged them on. Like Kunze he easily found a way through the wire, and reached the fort near the northern apex, but somewhat to the right of Kunze. To his great good fortune a heavy shell had in the meantime blown a new, and much larger gap in the railing near the apex. It had also blasted a hole in the edge, leaving a pile of debris in the moat immediately below, so that the actual drop was considerably reduced. Followed by about twenty men, Radtke clambered down into the moat; the first German officer to enter Fort Douaumont.

  To some extent, Radtke’s leap into the Douaumont moat must have required more real courage than Kunze’s About half an hour behind, he could not have seen Kunze enter the moat unchallenged, and as an officer he knew enough about fortifications to expect to be met by a murderous fire from the flanking galleries. As soon as he realised that these were in fact unmanned, he set up some heavy timber, discovered in the moat, against the breach to facilitate the entry of succeeding groups. Instead of breaking into a gallery like Kunze, Radtke and his men now moved forward up over the glacis, creeping on all fours because of the German shelling. Having reached the Rue de Rempart, they soon found an opening leading into the upper floor of the barracks. Here the corridors were lit by dimly flickering kerosene lamps. There was a sound of footsteps, the Germans crouched back in the shadows, and Radtke made his first bag of three unarmed and terrified Frenchmen. To his astonishment, they told him there were only about sixty men in the fort, and then promptly led him to another group of five in a barrackroom.

  On the floor below, Kunze had now finished his meal and decided it was time to resume duty. Marching his single prisoner down the corridor, he propelled him into the room where he had incarcerated his other prisoners. But, du lieber Gott, the room was now empty! At this very moment they were probably alerting the whole garrison. The full significance of his dereliction began to dawn on Kunze. How could he explain matters to his officer? As a final touch of comedy, a relief crew of four French gunners had meanwhile reached the 155 turret, utterly dumbfounded at finding no trace of the crew they were to relieve. Nevertheless, with a Gallic shrug of the shoulders, they took their posts and after an interruption of about half an hour the gun once again started firing aimlessly into the distance.

  Captain Haupt now makes his appearance. Aged nearly forty, a modest officer of long service, Haupt was the commander of the 7th Company. Gathering as many of his company as he could, Haupt moved towards the fort five minutes after Radtke. It was now snowing heavily. When one of his subalterns objected that they had already gone far beyond the halt line, Haupt replied, ‘We are going to storm the fort.’ Approaching from a little further to the right, Haupt’s group came under heavy fire from the machine guns in the spire of Douaumont Church, and a subaltern was mortally wounded. Haupt pressed on, to find the north breach in the railings and Radtke’s conveniently placed timbers. Still the German heavy shells rained down on the fort, and with commendable bravery one of Haupt’s men now stood upright on the top of the fort to wave a large artillery flag, in hopes of stopping the fire. Entering the upper floor of the barracks in much the same way as Radtke, Haupt almost immediately ran into a French gunner, who, it transpired, had found Kunze’s twenty-six captives, and released them, some quarter-of-an-hour earlier. Demoralised by this encounter with a fresh set of Germans, he quickly led them to the white-bearded Chenot himself, evidently taking refuge from the bombardment on the lower level of the fort. The poor man was almost overcome with distress when he realised that the fort had been invaded by only a handful of Germans.

  Gradually, all the threads became knitted together. Radtke met up with Haupt; Kunze was re-discovered by his officer, Lieutenant Voigt, who had reached the fort with Haupt, and to whom Kunze now gave only the most blurred account of his recent activities. Assuming command as the most senior officer present, Haupt quickly organised the defence of the fort against a possible French counter-attack, and sent Radtke to winkle out the remnants of the garrison. Their extraordinary success made the Germans suspicious that a hidden time bomb would now blow the fort and themselves to smithereens, so for double security the unhappy Chenot and his fellow captives were lodged in a room right above the magazines.

  The arrival of Haupt and his capture of Chenot form the point at which Fort Douaumont passed from French to German hands. The whole day’s fighting had cost the Brandenburg Regiment only thirty-two dead; not a shot had been fired in defence of the world’s greatest bastion, the loss of which, in the estimation of one French divisional commander at Verdun, was to cost France a hundred thousand men.

  It was now about 4.30, three-quarters of an hour after Kunze had landed in the moat.

  There remains von Brandis and his somewhat equivocal role in the capture of Douaumont. Brandis was a twenty-seven-year-old regular Oberleutnant (the nearest equivalent rank in the British Army would be Captain) commanding 8 Company. Through his own writings he betrays some of the less attractive Prussian characteristics; bombast and the contempt of the Übermensch for the lesser European breeds. On marching to the Marne in 1914, he had noted scornfully the rustic untidiness of French farms, deducing that this was a true indication of the decadence of the race. War, in von Brandis’ eyes, was a succession of demoralised Frenchmen, hands above their heads, murmuring ‘Pardon, Camarades!’ On February 25th, Brandis’ company had been on the extreme right of the battalion. Undoubtedly it had had the worst time that day. The non-appearance of the 12th Grenadiers and heavy machine-gun fire from Douaumont village had both slowed down his advance and caused him more casualties than any other company. Thus at 4.30 he was well behind Haupt’s and Radtke’s companies, and still out in the open. According to Brandis’ story, at the moment when he, too, was seized with the impulse to move on the fort he had no idea that anyone else had got there first. But a remark made to the Battalion Adjutant at this time reveals that he had in fact seen Haupt’s group reach the fort, and it seems unlikely that at leas
t someone in his company should not have noticed the large German artillery flag when it was waved from the top of the fort at so short a distance away. In a swirling snow storm, he reached the north breach, strangely enough not fired upon by the French in the village, to whom he was of course closer than either Haupt or Radtke had been. He and his men clambered down the timbers that stood under the breach, without — supposedly — pausing to wonder who might so conveniently have placed them there, and without noticing the tracks made by the fifty-odd men who had reached the fort before him. Traversing the glacis, he entered the fort interior through an opening at the east end, and descended to the lower floor, where behind a closed door French voices were heard. A soldier who had once been a waiter in France shouted out ‘vous êtes prisonniers’, and a lively debate ensued, with the French within querying how they would be treated. When told ‘as soldiers’, twenty-six territorial gunners came out (Brandis claimed ‘between fifty and sixty’). All the French in the fort had been rounded up, without a shot being fired. There were now just over ninety Germans on the scene. Shortly before 5, Brandis met Haupt, and as second in seniority was put in charge of external defence. A quarter-of-an-hour later, in the gathering dusk, Brandis’ men repulsed a weak French patrol approaching the fort, the only attempt to retake it that day. At 5.25, Haupt sent Brandis back to report to the C.O. and bring up the rest of the battalion. This was the full extent of Brandis’ part in the capture, though it was not the last that would be heard of Brandis.