The Price of Glory

by Alistair Horne

  Before leaving the actual seizure of Douaumont, two puzzling questions about the French defence need to be answered. Why had Chenot not seen the Germans approaching, and why had he not brought his twin 75s to bear on them ? Why had the French troops on either side of the fort apparently done so little to stop them?

  The answer to the first question is a simple, and human one. Though none of the 420 shells had penetrated the fort’s concrete, the effect of the last three day’s bombardment on the occupants had been demoralising. Each time a heavy shell landed above, lamps blew out, corridors were filled with dust and asphyxiating fumes, and the reverberations underground imparted a sensation of being inside an immense drum. Well might the elderly Territorials have feared that any moment the fort would collapse about their ears. Consequently, Chenot and all the gunners not actually manning the 155 gun turret had taken refuge as far below surface as possible; on the cellar floor. After his capture, Chenot claimed in self-defence that the observation domes were destroyed. This was not so; they were simply unmanned. Isolated from the rest of the world, out of touch with the course of the battle, Chenot had no idea that the Germans had advanced at such fantastic speed during the past twenty-four hours. Therefore, he had seen no need to man the observation domes. The crew of the 155, encased in their turret, had merely been firing blind on computed positions; on targets which had long since moved on. Some warning that the Germans were nearer than anticipated had apparently reached Chenot about half an hour before his capture. He had still not ascended from the cellars to verify this himself, but had sent a crew to man the 75s for the first time. It was too late, Radtke was already in the fort and apprehended the gunners en route.

  The answer to the second lies in the last of the series of tragic French errors. It will be recalled that the two brigades on either side of Fort Douaumont, the first arrivals of Balfourier’s ‘Iron Corps’, had been told that the fort could look after itself. On the 25th, the 95th Regiment was solidly occupying the village of Douaumont, with excellent observation to the northern approaches of the fort. In the haste and confusion of its arrival, all it knew of neighbouring friendly forces was that somewhere on its right (i.e. covering the fort to the North) was a regiment of Zouaves. During the afternoon, the machine guns in the church spire had kept up a brisk fire on the attacking Brandenburgers, about half a mile away. It was snowing hard and visibility was worsening rapidly. Suddenly a group of men appeared, well in advance of where the Germans had last been spotted, heading up the glacis of the fort, and within a couple of hundred yards of the flanking French company. This company at once opened fire, but the supposed enemy neither returned the compliment, nor was fired upon from the fort; moreover it was marching straight into its own heavy barrage. Straining his eyes in the grey of the blizzard, the French company commander now gave the order to cease fire; it was painfully clear to him that his company had been firing on their own side. He swore that he could now even distinguish their Chéchias, the characteristic headgear worn by Zouaves. Thus the detachments of Haupt and Brandis had been allowed to progress the last vital yards up the glacis and into the fort virtually unchallenged by the French 95th. (Kunze and Radtke, it will be remembered, approached the fort in covered ground, along a defile to the east). What the French had mistaken for Chéchias must have been the German helmets with their spikes removed to facilitate passage through the dense Verdun thickets. Pericard and Durassié, the principal French witnesses to this event, incredulous that Douaumont could have been taken without recourse to some kind of Trojan Horse guile, insist to this day that the Germans were clad in captured Zouave uniforms. Alas, no sufficient evidence to corroborate the thesis of the ‘false Zouaves’ has ever come forward. Certainly none of the men Chenot saw that afternoon was dressed in anything but Feldgrau.

  In Germany, scenes of great jubilation acclaimed the capture of Douaumont. It was, as a British war correspondent noted later, ‘the highwater mark of German efforts on the Western Front’, the most notable triumph there since the breakthrough to the Marne. Church bells were rung all over the country, and schoolchildren were given a special holiday. One German newspaper reported the evacuation of Bar-le-Duc and Ste. Ménéhould, twenty-five miles behind Verdun; another declared ‘VICTORY OF VERDUN… THE COLLAPSE OF FRANCE…’ Even hardened ‘Easterners’ on the General Staff began grudgingly to admit that maybe Falkenhayn had been right in his decision to attack in the West. At the Crown Prince’s Stenay headquarters, the All-Highest arrived to express in person his appreciation of the Brandenburgers’ feat.

  To the victor, the spoils. Once the Germans had assured their tenancy within the fort it remained only to hand out the medals for this outstanding exploit. To the reader it should be fairly evident who among the Brandenburgers were most deserving of reward. But often in the course of war the ribbon merited by one in fact goes to another. So it happened at Douaumont. It was Oberleutnant von Brandis who had been detailed by Haupt to carry the news of the capture of Douaumont back to Battalion HQ. Having given his account of it to the C.O., Major von Klüfer, Brandis then requested permission to convey the news back to Regimental HQ. On the basis of Brandis’ account alone, the staff at Brigade that night recorded in the war diary that Douaumont had been ‘… stormed by 7 and 8 Companies of the 24th, led by Captain Haupt and Oberleutnant von Brandis. Both officers most conspicuously distinguished.’ And so, in this form, the citation passed back along the line until it lay on the desk of the Crown Prince himself. Meanwhile, the next morning — before he could give an account of his part in the action — Radtke was seriously wounded in a French counter-attack. For over a week he lay in a torpor in the fort sick-bay, then was transported to hospital in Germany. There he heard that Haupt and von Brandis had been awarded the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest decoration, and he had received nothing (nor, for that matter, had Kunze). In vain Major von Klüfer tried subsequently to set the record straight, but the heir to the Hohenzollerns could admit no mistake. Besides, von Brandis, with the ‘flashing eyes’ the Crown Prince so admired in his legions, was manifestly more of the stuff that heroes are made of than the faintly un-military Radtke; the fact that he was a von and Radtke was not may also have had its influence.

  The modest Haupt, thoroughly deserving of his high award, soon slipped back into anonymity. Not so Brandis. Rapidly he assumed the position of favourite with the Crown Prince; was given a gold cigarette case inscribed ‘Wilhelm’, photographed with him in his staff car, or with arms linked in the company of other heroes, like the great air ace, Oswald Boelcke. His book, The Stormers of Douaumont, which appeared the following year, full of bombast and relegating even Haupt to a lesser role, was an instant best-seller. Letters of hero-worship flooded in by the hundred from Germany, even offers of marriage. After the war, a village in Prussia was named after Brandis, whose inspiring lectures to schools on the capture of Fort Douaumont are recalled to this day by a later generation of Germans. For ten years von Brandis’ role remained undisputed. Then the official Reichs Archives appeared, establishing for the first time that, second only to Haupt, Radtke had played the most important part in the capture. Next Radtke himself published his own account of the action. At last, Sergeant Kunze, now a police constable, provoked by this reopening of the discussion and evidently feeling that after the passage of so much time it might now not be too imprudent to admit the dereliction of nearly twenty years ago, contacted his old C.O., Major von Klüfer, and told him his whole story. On the eve of the Second World War when interest in who took Douaumont had all but disappeared, Klüfer’s meticulously compiled account, representing years of research, appeared. Radtke’s claim was confirmed and for the first time it was revealed that a Pioneer Sergeant, not a Prussian officer, had been the first to penetrate the fort. Kunze was rewarded with accelerated promotion to Inspector; in belated compensation, Radtke received a signed photograph from the Crown Prince.

  If in their exaltation at the capture of Douaumont the Germans had exaggerated a trif
le, it was nothing by comparison to French efforts to play down the disaster. The propagandists of G.Q.G., abetted by ‘Anastasie’ the ugly old lady with the scissors who personified French censorship, rose nobly to the occasion. The first communique on the 26th was a masterpiece:

  A fierce struggle took place round Fort Douaumont which is an advanced work of the old defences of Verdun. The position carried by the enemy this morning, after several fruitless assaults which involved them in very heavy losses, has since been reached and passed by our troops, all the enemy’s endeavours having failed to drive them back.

  Then, when it was realised there was no hope of its recapture, communiqués concentrated on the desperate German losses; one report thus inspired spoke lyrically of a ‘whole autumn of green-grey leaves fallen on the snow’. Finally it was allowed to ‘leak out’ that the fort had in fact been demolished by the prescient French sometime previously, and the Germans had merely occupied a useless ruin. To important neutral countries like the U.S.A., it was pointed out somewhat mysteriously that the French Army was employing a ‘new system of war, for which Verdun was fully prepared’, in which forts played no part. At the Elysée, the G.Q.G. attaché, ‘April Smiles’ Pénélon, blandly assured President Poincaré that the French bombardment would not allow the Germans to remain in Douaumont long; then told him that it had in fact been recaptured. But the world could not be deceived for long. When the truth became apparent, Poincaré, in his mild fashion, notes, that there was ‘excitability’ in the Chamber of Deputies that day. In fact, the shock experienced by all Frenchmen was as devastating as the impact in Britain of the fall of Tobruk in 1942; with the difference that Fort Douaumont was but 150 miles from the Arc de Triomphe.

  On the battlefield itself, the impact of the fall of Douaumont was immediate and grave. The commander of the 37th African Division, the last of the units of XXX Corps still in the line, now did a disastrous thing. The battle had gone extremely badly for de Bonneval. On arriving at Verdun, he had seen his fine division promptly dismembered and fed piecemeal to the 51st and 72nd Divisions. Worse still, he had seen its crack colonial units falter and break, one after another, in an unheard of fashion. Though described by contemporaries as having ‘the bearing of a great commander’, by the afternoon of the 25th de Bonneval was thoroughly depressed. Suddenly from his command post on Froideterre Ridge he had spotted the German rockets fired from Fort Douaumont to halt the bombardment. A disastrous breakthrough must have taken place on the right! His battered division, now holding the vital spurs of Talou and Pepper Hill, would be trapped in a pincer movement with its back up against the flooded Meuse. Though he had not been attacked at all that day, he at once gave the order to withdraw in stages, first to Froideterre, then right back to Belleville Ridge. The important bridge at Bras was also blown up. Belleville was the last of the transverse Meuse spurs before Verdun, looking down into the very city itself, and within machine-gun fire of it. Retreat to Belleville Ridge meant the yielding of all the forts and entrenchments on the Right Bank; within a short space of time, it must inevitably mean the loss of Verdun too.

  The Germans had been quick to capitalise on their triumph by scattering leaflets from planes over the French lines, announcing, ‘Douaumont has fallen. All will soon be over now. Don’t let yourselves be killed for nothing.’ Something alarmingly like mass panic began to sweep through Verdun. At the front, Sergeant Dubrulle of the 8th Regiment, one of the new units hurled precipitately into the battle, noted in his journal ‘the beginning of incoherent sentiments which pave the way to defeat. “We are lost! They have thrown us into the furnace, without rations, almost without ammunition. We were the last resources; they have sacrificed us… our sacrifice will be in vain.’ A melée of guns, wounded, and deserters was pouring back along all the roads. A Zouave overheard a general remark, ‘Even if I were Napoleon, I couldn’t stop the defeat of this shower.’ Battle-shocked remnants of the 51st Division took refuge in the barracks where they had been lodged, and refused to budge. But even in barracks out of the line, terror pursued the French troops. Down upon Marceau Barracks where Dubrulle and his regiment were quartered, on being relieved from the line, there suddenly rained a deluge of German long-range shells. A sickening carnage was executed on the horses tethered outside. Then the roof of one of the buildings crumpled, crushing some hundred or more men. Survivors rushed out into the night, only to be blown to pieces among the crazed and pitifully wounded horses. Eventually, the exhausted, demoralised troops were marched out of the death trap of the barracks back towards the front again, and ordered to dig trenches for themselves.

  Human endurance had reached its limits. In Verdun itself a Lieutenant was arrested for running through the streets, shouting ‘Sauve qui peut!’ Seeing the Meuse bridges prepared for demolition and all the other signs of impending withdrawal, the civil populace began to abandon its houses. Shortly afterwards, an order was issued that all civilians were to evacuate Verdun, within a matter of hours. The pathetic flotsam of war that was to become so familiar a sight on French roads a generation later — the hopeless columns of refugees, painfully pushing mattresses and belongings in prams before them — now added to the chaos on the roads leading from the city. In their haste, some of the citizens of Verdun had left even the food out on the table; others had found time to drag barrels up from the cellars and puncture them in the streets. The gutters ran red with wine. A food depot near the Citadel was thrown open, and soldiers told to take what they could carry. Elsewhere in the city that invariable companion of military rout, pillage, took place. Frightened troops who had taken refuge in the cellars of evacuated houses got drunk on their contents, then looted the other floors. There were reports of gendarmes being strung up by drunk looters when they attempted to intervene.

  February 25th was, in the view of one foremost French authority, General Palat, ‘perhaps the darkest of the whole assault on Verdun’. That night nothing seemed to stand between the victorious Crown Prince and the conquest of France’s mightiest bulwark. It was no exaggeration to say, as he later wrote in his memoirs ‘We were, in fact, within a stone’s throw of victory! ‘Would he deny Falkenhayn the opportunity of trying out his ‘bleeding white’ experiment? There did indeed seem a possibility that the victim would the of shock before that sinister process could do its work.

  Postscript. When writing about the capture of Fort Douaumont, I was led to believe that Eugen Radtke was already dead. Several years after the German translation appeared, however, I was agreeably surprised to receive a long letter from him in Berlin, kindly commending me on the accuracy of my reconstruction, with the words: ‘I am amazed, Mr Home, where you gained this detailed knowledge of the assault Only we who were in the first wave could have had this knowledge…’

  Later I met Radtke, then in his seventies, in Paris (his first visit to France since the Battle of Verdun fifty years previously) in a confrontation with the French veteran, Durassié (see page 119). When it came to the issue of the ‘false Zouaves’, the two old soldiers embarked on a violent dispute, that threatened to end in a resumption of the Great War.

  CHAPTER TEN

  DE CASTELNAU DECIDES

  When one has the misfortune to make war in the interior of one’s own country, pure strategy cannot always have the last word.—LT.-COL. DE THOMASSON, Les Préliminaires de Verdun

  AT Chantilly, news of the first two days’ fighting had not particularly upset General Joffre. The placid, petit bourgeois routine of life had continued as ever. In the Illustrated London News a correspondent declared that Joffre had ‘been seen… literally rubbing his hands over the attack’. On the 23rd, however, even after percolating the softening filters of G.Q.G. the reports sounded so bad that Joffre was persuaded to dispatch his Assistant Chief of Staff, Colonel Claudel, to Verdun to make an on-the-spot report. Claudel seems to have possessed an abundance of the talents (notably optimism) required by his post. The following afternoon — i.e. the day the Germans made their most menacing gains — he
telephoned that the attack had ‘slowed down and it looked as though we would be able to hold out and even make a counter-attack’. That evening, Joffre’s supper was interrupted by a telephone call from General de Langle de Cary (as Commander of Army Group Centre, the immediate senior to General Herr) with a much gloomier account. He asked permission to evacuate the whole of the Woevre Plain, now menaced by the rapid German advance on the Meuse Highlands. To a French general, conscious that in the usual manner of things there must soon be a hunt after scapegoats for the Verdun disaster, Joffre’s calmly non-committal response of ‘It’s up to you’ can hardly have been comforting. The Generalissimo returned to his meal. An hour later, Joffre’s second-in-command, General de Castelnau, arrived with three other generals to impress upon him the urgency of the situation at Verdun. De Castelnau recommended that the entire Second Army, currently in reserve, should at once be transferred to Verdun, to defend the Left Bank. Its commander was a General Philippe Pétain.

  Joffre agreed. At 11 o’clock de Castelnau, by now in receipt of further intelligence which seemed to presage the total collapse of the defence on the Right Bank, was back in Joffre’s office. But, in accordance with inflexible routine, the great man had already retired for the night. One version of what then ensued caused an uproar in France when it was published, a few months later, in Le Matin — through the evident complicity of a coterie of officers ardently desiring to install de Castelnau on Joffre’s throne. This account had it that de Castelnau was first turned away by the orderly officer, saying that on no account was the Commander-in-Chief to be disturbed. De Castelnau, however, persisted, and went to the Villa Poiret in person. There he sent in an ADC to awake Joffre, who, unbarring the double-locked door, then appeared in his night shirt. Telling Joffre how serious the situation had now become, de Castel nau requested authorisation to go to Verdun himself, armed with plenipotentiary powers, to take whatever measures he felt necessary. According to Le Matin, Joffre (responding in much the same way as he had to General de Langle earlier), said ‘let him do what he wants’ and then went back to sleep. Joffre firmly denied the episode; the Editor of Le Matin was killed at Verdun. Whatever really happened, two facts are certain: de Castelnau had his request granted, and Joffre completed his night’s rest. In Joffre’s own words, that night ‘I wished more than at any time of my life that I had the gift of omnipresence.’ But to have gone himself to Verdun at this hour would have demolished at a stroke the legend of imperturbability, upon which so much had been built, and the crash would have been deafening. Besides — and in the way the French Army of those days functioned it is hard to believe such considerations did not pass through Joffre’s mind — if things went badly wrong henceforth at Verdun, the Generalissimo’s responsibility would now be shared by another.