The Price of Glory

by Alistair Horne

  Later Duhamel and his team were visited by an immaculate Inspector-General who told them they really ought to plant a few flowers around the gloomy station. As he left, Duhamel noticed that someone had traced ‘Vache’ in the dust on the brass-hat’s car.

  At the clearing stations the backlog of even the partially repaired mounted alarmingly as, with the constant demand of the Voie Sacrée supply route, all too few vehicles could be spared for use as ambulances. British Red Cross sections appeared on the front (among them the poet Laurence Binyon), and later American volunteers. Though the crews drove 24 hours at a stretch, unable to wear gasmasks because they fogged up, still there seemed to be more wounded than the ambulances could hold. Meanwhile in the overcrowded, squalid base hospitals, those who had survived so far were dying like flies, their beds immediately refilled. Clyde Balsley, an American very badly wounded with the ‘Lafayette Squadron’ noted in contrast that

  the miracles of science after the forced butchery at Verdun… made a whole year and a half at the American Hospital pass more quickly than six weeks in the [French] hospital at Verdun.

  The wounded in these hospitals lived in terror of the periodical decoration parades; because it had become a recognised custom to reward a man about to die with the Croix de Guerre. Of slight compensation were the visits of the ‘professional’ visitors, such as the patriotic, exquisite, ‘Lady in Green’, described by Duhamel, who spoke inspiredly to the grands mutilés of

  the enthusiastic ardour of combat! The superb anguish of bounding ahead, bayonet glittering in the sun….

  Equipment in these hospitals was hopelessly inadequate, but at Verdun the situation was exacerbated still further by the poisonous environment, virulently contaminated by the thousands of putrifying corpses. Even the medically more advanced Germans noted the frequency of quite minor wounds becoming fatal. Gas gangrene, for which an effective cure was not discovered till a few weeks before the Armistice, claimed an ever-increasing toll; during the April fighting on the Right Bank, one French regiment had thirty-two officers wounded of whom no fewer than nineteen died subsequently, mostly from gas gangrene. In an attempt to reduce infection of head wounds, Joffre issued an order banning beards; the poilus complained bitterly, and still the wounded died. After the war, it was estimated that, between February 21st and the end of June, 23,000 French alone had died in hospitals as a result of wounds received at Verdun. How many more died before ever reaching hospital can only be conjectured.

  So much for the physical; and what of the spiritual effects of this piling of horror upon horror at Verdun? Many were affected like the young German student, highly religious and torn with doubts about the morality of the war, who wrote home shortly before being killed at Verdun on June 1st:

  Here we have war, war in its most appalling form, and in our distress we realise the nearness of God.

  As in every war men confronted with death who had forgotten, or never knew how, began to pray fervidly. Sergeant Dubrulle, the Jesuit priest, was revolted above all by the hideous indignities he had seen TNT perpetrate upon the bodies God had created. After one terrible shelling early in the battle when human entrails were to be seen dangling in the branches of a tree and a ‘torso, without head, without arms, without legs, stuck to the trunk of a tree, flattened and opened,’ Dubrulle recalls ‘how I implored God to put an end to these indignities. Never have I prayed with so much heart.’ But, as day after day, month after month, such entreaties remained unanswered, a growing agnosticism appears in the letters from the men at Verdun. Later, on the Somme, even Dubrulle is found expressing singularly un-Catholic sentiments:

  Having despaired of living amid such horror, we begged God not to have us killed — the transition is too atrocious — but just to let us be dead. We had but one desire; the end!

  At least this part of Dubrulle’s prayers was answered the following year.

  For every soldier whose mind dwelt on exalted thoughts, possibly three agreed with Sergeant Marc Boasson, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, killed in 1918, who noted that at Verdun ‘the atrocious environment corrupts the spirits, obsesses it, dissolves it.’

  Corruption revealed itself in the guise of brutalisation. As twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Derville (killed on the Aisne, 1918) predicted at Verdun well before the battle even started:

  Perhaps we shall soon all reach the degree of brutishness and indifference of the soldiers of the First Empire.

  It was indeed not very exalting to watch wounded comrades-in-arms die where they lay because they could not be removed. One Divisional Chaplain, Abbé Thellier de Poncheville, recalls the spectacle of a horse, still harnessed to its waggon, struggling in the mud of a huge crater. ‘He had been there for two nights, sinking deeper and deeper,’ but the troops, obsessed by their own suffering, passed by without so much as casting a glance at the wretched beast. The fact was that the daily inocculation of horror had begun to make men immune to sensation. Duhamel explains:

  A short time ago death was the cruel stranger, the visitor with the flannel footsteps… today, it is the mad dog in the house… One eats, one drinks beside the dead, one sleeps in the midst of the dying, one laughs and one sings in the company of corpses… The frequentation of death which makes life so precious also finishes, sometimes, by giving one a distaste for it, and more often, lassitude.

  A period of conditioning on the Verdun battlefield manufactured a callousness towards one’s own wounded, and an apathetic, morbid acceptance of mutilation that seem to us — in our comfy isolation — almost bestial. Captain Delvert, one of the more honest and unpretentious of the French war-writers, describes his shock on approaching the Verdun front for the first time, when his company filed past a man lying with his leg shattered by a shell:

  Nobody came to his assistance. One felt that men had become brutalised by the preoccupation of not leaving their company and also not delaying in a place where death was raining down.

  In sharp contrast to the revolted and tortured Dubrulle, young Second Lieutenant Campana recounts how, at the end of his third spell in the line at Verdun, he cold-bloodedly photographed the body of one of his men killed by a shell that hit his own dugout,

  laid open from the shoulders to the haunches like a quartered carcass of meat in a butcher’s window.

  He sent a copy of the photograph to a friend as a token of what a lucky escape he had had.

  Returning from the Mort Homme, Raymond Jubert introspectively posed himself three questions:

  What sublime emotion inspires you at the moment of the assault?

  I thought of nothing other than dragging my feet out of the mud encasing them.

  What did you feel after surviving the attack?

  I grumbled because I would have to remain several days more without Pinard.

  Is not one’s first act to kneel down and thank God?

  No. One relieves oneself.

  This kind of moral torpor was perhaps the commonest effect of a spell at Verdun, with even the more sensitive — like Jubert — who resisted the brutalising tendency admitting to a congelation of all normal reactions. Jubert also recalls the man in his regiment who, returning from the front, was overjoyed to find his house on the outskirts of Verdun still intact; but, on discovering that all its contents had been methodically plundered, he simply burst into laughter.

  To troops who had not yet been through the mill at Verdun, passing men whom they were about to relieve was an unnerving experience; they seemed like beings from another world. Lieutenant Georges Gaudy described watching his own regiment return from the May fighting near Douaumont:

  First came the skeletons of companies occasionally led by a wounded officer, leaning on a stick. All marched, or rather advanced in small steps, zigzagging as if intoxicated… It was hard to tell the colour of their faces from that of their tunics. Mud had covered everything, dried off, and then another layer had been re-applied… They said nothing. They had even lost the strength to complain… It seemed as if these mute
faces were crying something terrible, the unbelievable horror of their martyrdom. Some Territorials who were standing near me became pensive. They had that air of sadness that comes over one when a funeral passes by, and I overheard one say: ‘It’s no longer an army! These are corpses!’ Two of the Territorials wept in silence, like women.

  Most of the above accounts come from the French sources. For, compressed in their hemmed-in salient and hammered by an artillery that was always superior, maintained and succoured by organisation that was always inferior, things were almost invariably just that much worse for the French. But, as time went on, the gap between the suffering of the opposing armies became narrower and narrower, until it was barely perceptible. By mid-April German soldiers were complaining in letters home of the high casualties suffered by their ration parties; ‘many would rather endure hunger than make these dangerous expeditions for food’. General von Zwehl whose corps was to stay at Verdun, without relief, during the whole ten months the battle lasted, speaks of a special ‘kind of psychosis’ that infected his men there. Lastly, even the blustering von Brandis, the acclaimed conqueror of Douaumont for whom war previously seems to have held nothing but raptures, is to be found eventually expressing a note of horror; nowhere, he declares, not even on the Somme, was there anything to be found worse than the ‘death ravines of Verdun’.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

  … We agreed that we should be considered rather callous to go on with our usual life when we were reading of 3,000 to 4,000 casualties a day….—COLONEL REPINGTON, The First World War

  They are different men here, men I cannot properly understand, whom I envy and despise. I must think of Kat and Albert and Muller and Tjaden, what will they be doing?… Soon they will have to go up to the front-line again.—ERICH MARIA REMARQUE, All Quiet on the Western Front

  ONE of the characters in Barbusse’s great war novel, Le Feu, comments bitterly while on leave; ‘We are divided into two foreign countries. The front, over there, where there is too much misery, and the rear, here, where there is too much contentment.’ It was a sentiment shared in full measure by combatants of both sides at Verdun. After a spell in the line men felt as if they belonged to some exclusive monastic order whose grim rites were simply beyond the comprehension of the laymen at the rear.

  More and more the soldiers felt a certain indefinable malaise during their brief periods of leave at home. Many young Germans, with that strong national instinct for cameraderie, regarded their periods of recuperation at rest camps, set amid the glorious woods and hills of Alsace and spent in the company of those with whom they had shared the common experience of Verdun, as among the more idyllic moments of the war. Home leave in the Vaterland, austere and grey under the privations of war, all too often presented a sad contrast. Returning soldiers found the civil population too obsessed with their own hardships to try to understand what they were being subjected to at Verdun. Of all the major belligerents, Germany by 1916 was feeling the pinch of war most. There was no mistaking the deadly effectiveness of the British blockade. Everywhere there were shortages. Deprived of the fertilisers so essential to the poor soil, German farms were beginning to conform to the law of diminishing returns. In 1915 the first major demonstration of the war had taken place in Berlin, when five hundred housewives protested before the Reichstag that the quality of whipped cream was not up to pre-1914 standards. The following year they protested no longer, as there was no cream at all and butter had become very scarce. Coffee was a nauseous substitute concocted from acorns; bread had already been rationed by the beginning of 1915 to about 2 lbs a week, and goodness knows what was added to the flour to make it so grey and gritty! Things were steadily getting worse, until the following winter would become known as ‘the turnip winter’. Most of the copper roofs had disappeared off public buildings, to make driving bands for the shells being so voraciously expended at Verdun, and the park railings were about to follow the roofs. In the streets, vehicles clattered along on tyreless wheels, with the day not so far off when even at the front the airforce would be forced to encase plane wheels in wooden clogs when being wheeled from the hangar, just to save precious rubber. An acute shortage of cotton had already reduced the civil hospitals to using bandages made of paper, and it was hardly surprising that there was also a human shortage in the country, so that soon after the Somme conscription of labour was decreed for the ages of seventeen to sixty.

  Far removed from this Spartan scene reigned the Kaiser, in an environment that to some of his disquieted advisers seemed rapidly to be regaining the splendour of pre-war days in inverse proportion to the hardships what were mounting in the rest of the country. Since the first disappointments at Verdun, the All-Highest had withdrawn still further into his fairy-tale world, a world whose contact with reality relied principally upon those improbable ‘trench anecdotes’ that were imported from the front for his insatiable consumption; or often simply invented. The hunting expeditions had become more numerous; more and more time was spent in the isolated, leisurely magnificence of Schloss Pless in Upper Silesia, or with the Kaiserin and her entourage taking the waters at Bad Homburg. The evenings were whiled away in endless games of skat (which the Kaiser seldom appeared to win) with the bored but acquiescent courtiers. At Berlin and GHQ Charleville-Mézières, the Kaiser’s appearances were becoming so infrequent that even his senior counsellors were openly expressing disapproval at his aloofness from the war. Nevertheless, the authoritarian structure of Imperial Germany, censorship, and the natural self-discipline of the Germans were such that disenchantment remained largely confined to the upper echelons. Liebknecht’s attempt to hold an anti-war rally in the Potsdamer Platz on May 1st, 1916, was not yet anything more than a flash in the pan. The solid bulk of the nation was as dedicated as ever to the war, phlegmatic and unquestioning, turning a closed mind and a deaf ear to the tales men brought back from Verdun, in much the same way as when, to the succeeding generation, rumours began to filter out from the concentration camps.

  On reaching the City of Verdun itself, French troops just out of the line experienced a sensation not altogether different from the delight of the Germans transported to Alsace’s Elysian Fields. In one of the city’s music halls, the little Green Rooms still bore the traces of the wistful decorum of peacetime garrison life, in the form of notices decreeing:

  By Order of the Police, artistes are forbidden to receive in their rooms during the show.

  But the artistes had all long since departed, and smashed-up mechanical pianos cluttered the abandoned music-hall. Already by early March, Verdun had become a ghost town. The civil population had been summarily evacuated; a few enterprising and courageous camp-followers, evading the grasp of the gendarmes, had clung on to the last, but eventually all that remained were three elderly townsmen permitted to run a canteen for the troops. Much of the centre of the city had been destroyed by the German 380 mm long-range guns. On every deserted street gutted houses sagged open, their contents indecently exposed to view. In one house pulverized by a shell all that remained was a bust of Napoleon, arms folded and facing north as if defying the Germans with its stony glare. But, melancholy as the deserted and shattered city might seem to a casual visitor, to men out of the line it spelled life. In the subterranean catacombs deep below Vauban’s Citadel, there was safety, a hot meal, a bunk, possibly even a bath; but above all a respite from the German shells.

  In 1916 conditions of life behind the French lines stood roughly midway between those prevailing in Britain and Germany. Britain had still not mobilised her war effort quite to the same extent as France; even the good-living Colonel Repington was slightly shocked to note, by the following year, that at home

  the only signs of war are that the men now usually wear short coats and black ties in the evenings, the dinners are shorter, and the servers are fewer and less good.

  Albeit, one of his hostesses still managed to employ ‘twenty pretty maids’.

  But in contr
ast to Germany, the French population suffered relatively little from commodity shortages. (The exception was, of course, in the occupied areas of the north-east; but even there life on the whole was considerably more bearable than it was in Occupied France under the Nazis.) The worst scarcity was in coal, some forty per cent of French production having been lost owing to the German invasion of the Lille area, and the population shuddered at the approach of each winter. For all the agricultural losses, food rationing had never become a serious matter; in 1914, the fabrication of croissants was banned, but permitted again after only five months. In the autumn of 1915 the Government had assumed powers to requisition at fixed prices all cereal products; in 1916 these powers were extended to sugar, milk and eggs, but only limited use was made of them. As in post-Pearl Harbour U.S.A., a meatless day each week was decreed, but little effort made to enforce it. It was not until 1917, when the U-boat campaign had reached its zenith, that a Ministry of Food was created; which then ordered the butchers to close their doors two days a week, forbade the bakers to sell fancy cakes, and at last reluctantly began issuing ration cards. Meanwhile, the gastronomic-minded citizens grumbled, but made shift with the aid of the black-market, so that throughout 1916 the food scarcity was still barely noticeable.