On his infrequent leaves, the permissionaire from Verdun naturally gravitated towards Paris. Though a mere 150 miles away, it was indeed like entering another country, another world. Sometimes he wondered whether the Capital knew about the War at all. The natural effervescence of Paris can never be suppressed for long, and it had begun to burst forth from the restraint of the early days so that, by mid-1916, it presented to the war-weary world a facade of miraculous brilliance; to the men from Verdun it was an Arabian Night Baghdad. Like London in the nineteen-forties, Paris seemed to have assembled every uniform and race loyal to the Allied cause; and what variety, what colour the Moroccans and the Senegalese, Annamites and Malgaches, presented as they mingled down the Champs Elysées with immaculate cavalry officers, Foreign Legionnaires, kilted Highlanders, pretty nursing sisters, and now a sprinkling of American flyers from the Lafayette Squadron! In the initial fervour of war, the Opera and the theatres had closed their doors, but both had opened again shortly before the Germans attacked at Verdun. Mistinguett was drawing huge crowds at the Folies-Bergères; the great Bernhardt, though aged and ailing, was still as seductive as ever, dividing her time between the theatre and her hospital for the wounded at the Odéon; at the Opéra Comique Manon was all the rage, and in May, when the Germans were hammering their way on to Côte 304, there was a glittering film premiere of Salammbô and once again the Spring Flower Show was reinstated in all its pre-war glory. Into most theatrical productions there was somehow woven a patriotic strain; at the close of a performance celebrating the birth of Molière, Marthe Chenal appeared draped in a tricolor to give a passionate rendering of the Marseillaise; and at the music halls, a night seldom went by without the singing of the new favourites imported by the British, Tipperary and Rose of Picardy. In 1914 the art schools had all but atrophied; the models had gone off to the munitions factories, and students had been replaced by retired businessmen seeking distraction from their troubles. Already the ranks of the creative arts had been woefully thinned; Braque badly wounded, Léger gassed, Derain unscathed but reduced to decorating shell cases; Péguy and Alain-Fournier had been killed, and Apollinaire wounded in the head. Yet somehow the galleries were open again and doing a brisk trade, and publishers could not remember when they had sold so many books.
The men from Verdun viewed this dazzling scene with mixed feelings. Captain Delvert, appraising in April 1916 the crowds of gorgeous well-dressed women who promenaded in the Bois de Boulogne on the arms of their escorts, was reminded of
a national holiday or Longchamp Races… It appears [he added sourly] that the nation is suffering and that all energies are being strained towards the goal of ultimate victory; however this effort does not diminish the number of promenaders.
Dining out the following day, he noted:
At Weber’s, at the Boeuf à la Mode, everywhere there is the same affluence. If the war is prolonged — which seems probable — it will make the fortune of the restaurateurs.
And elsewhere during his leave he comments with uncharacteristic bitterness:
Life is good… one can understand these people behind the lines resigning themselves to the war…. What is consoling is that one may be perfectly sure that if one perishes in the barbed wire, they will not be too much affected by the loss.
It was with almost a certain sense of relief that Delvert returned to his regiment.
Beyond the sparkling bravado of Paris, in the country at large the inevitable distortions and corruptions that war breeds were readily detectable. By 1916 these were beginning to rankle sorely with the men at the front. There were the embusqués, who had somehow dodged the war, and the profiteers who had already amassed sizeable fortunes (from which they were rapidly enriching the restaurateurs and the jewellers, who had never known business to be better). Even the humblest worker in a war plant was earning 100 sous a day, compared to the poilu’s five. As a result, inflation was gaining speed; by the beginning of 1916, the cost-of-living index had reached 120 (July 1914 = 100), and at the end of the year it would be 135. There was a vigorous black-market, and from time to time the authorities had to cajole citizens to cease hoarding gold. There had been bad and costly muddles in the early days of the war; agriculture had been disrupted by the number of peasants called to the colours, and eventually some had had to be returned to the fields; the great Renault motor works was closed down, all but for a small shop making stretchers — motor vehicles evidently being considered a luxury with little application to the war effort. (What would have happened at Verdun had Renault remained out of business can readily be deduced from what has already been said about the Voie Sacrée.) But somehow the economy functioned, often inexplicably, under what was derisively known as the ‘système D’ (a derivation from the verb ‘se débrouiller’, meaning literally ‘to muddle through’).
The periodic convulsions that resulted under ‘système D’ usually came of good intentions. Less innocent were the scandals such as that exposed in 1916 of Hospital 27, where a crooked doctor had been providing bogus discharges from the army at several thousand francs a time. The offenders got off with unduly light sentences, and ugly rumours persisted that there had been some urgent covering-up by Deputies, and even Ministers, who had been embroiled. Still more sinister were the activities of the defeatists, ranged around the Bonnet Rouge newspaper and headed by Malvy, a former Minister of the Interior, and of the downright traitors who earned millions of francs from German sources for their work of demoralisation. It was not until well into 1917 that the reckoning came; Malvy was sentenced to five years’ banishment, Bolo Pasha and Mata Hari shot, and Almeyreda found strangled in his cell. But, more than the muddlers, the embusqués, the profiteers and the defeatists, of all the excrescences growing at the rear, the fighting men probably resented most of all the so-called bourreurs de crâne. These were the writers and newspapermen, paid hacks of the propaganda machine and tools of ‘Anastasie’, the censor, who from their comfortable offices in Paris wrote of the nobility of war in the terms of Déroulède; of the brave boys dying beautifully pour la Patrie; who described the piling up of ‘mounds of German dead’ at each attack at Verdun, to the accompaniment of ‘negligible’ French losses; and who published photographs of the grands mutilés with such captions as ‘A Soldier Who Has Lost Both Feet, Yet Walks Fairly Well With Clever Substitutes,’ or ‘Who Has Lost Both Hands, Yet Can Handle a Cigarette and Salute as Before.’1 Nothing enraged the men submitted to the inferno of Verdun more than nauseous effusions like these, and their officers often went to extraordinary lengths to obtain copies of Le Journal de Genève, for a reasonably accurate rapportage of the war.
If the gaiety of Paris was only skin-deep, so the various scandals of inefficiency and corruption were infections that had as yet penetrated but little further. Beneath, the flesh and organs of France were still sound, healthy enough to resist worse privations, and to withstand more savage slashes of the surgeon’s knife. True, in a body wearied and weakened by sacrifices at Verdun, these diseases were to display a certain malignance the following year,2 but the time had not yet come. Despite her losses and suffering, France — like Germany — still displayed a remarkable solidarity towards the pursuance of the war. Propping up this solidarity were predominantly two staunch columns; Union Sacrée and the women of France. For a nation of radicals and independents such as France, the creation of the Union Sacrée whereby men of all political hues submerged their feuds in the interests of national unity was one of the miracles of all time. Its spirit was reminiscent of that which (temporarily) demolished the social barricades in Britain during the Blitz. There was that staunch anti-militarist, socialist and crypto-anarchist, Anatole France, (having attempted to enlist, aged seventy) resuming his seat among the Conservatives of the Académie which he had abandoned shortly after the Affair. There was that eater of clerics, Clemenceau, observed kissing an Abbé on both cheeks. What was even more surprising was that this Union, so unnatural to France, should still endure after nearly two years
of war and reverses. It was significant that when the International Revolutionary Socialists had held their conference of April 1916 in Switzerland, barely any of the French Socialists voiced support for their resolutions calling for an immediate peace. Almost the sole exception was a young Deputy called Pierre Laval.
To the women of France, the war had brought an emancipatory revolution. Never had they been so great a power in the country. At the outbreak of war, to a woman they had rushed off to become nurses, fill the administrative gaps left by the men, work in the munitions factories. The soldiers grumbled on returning home to find their wives turned yellow by picric acid, but they had little redress. Initially, the women were doubtless drawn by the glamour of the nurse’s uniform and by a sense of adventure; later, as the French women who had not lost a husband, lover or brother became fewer and fewer, the more frivolous motives became replaced by a formidable dedication. Most of them had become marraines to one or more soldiers, according them benefits ranging merely from encouraging letters to parcels of food and woollies to the highest a woman can offer a man. All of them in their letters exhorted their adopted soldier to ‘tenir coûte que coûte’ and their influence was mighty. No other section of the French community was boosting the will to war more substantially than the women; and it was certainly no accident that, as a source of inspiration, La Madelon had almost replaced La Marseillaise. Perhaps symbolic of the whole spirit of 1916 was the divine Sarah Bernhardt, one leg amputated, but still stumping the boards with a wooden leg. Here was France herself, mutilated but undaunted.
And so, as the fighting at Verdun was reaching a climax of frightfulness, the continuance of both the war and the battle was assured by firmness on the home fronts of the adversaries that would not be seen again.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE AIR BATTLE
There won’t be any after the war for a fighter pilot.
RAOUL LUFBERY, Lafayette Squadron.
They are the knighthood of this war, without fear and without reproach; and they recall the legendary days of chivalry, not merely by the daring of their exploits, but by the nobility of their spirit.—DAVID LLOYD GEORGE, House of Commons, October 29th, 1917
IN the eyes of the unhappy infantry, the heavy gunners may have been a breed apart, but beyond them lay one small body of men that seemed to be not even of the same world. Out of the seething hell of the Mort Homme in May, Raymond Jubert gazed up with envy as the vermilion plane of Navarre performed triumphant aerobatics above the French lines to proclaim yet another victory. For these ‘happy pilots’, he reflected, triumph or defeat ‘gains equally the cheers of those who die beyond glory of any sort. They are the only ones who in this war have the life or death of which one dreams.’ Compared with the prolonged torment and mutilations of life on the ground, the knowledge that a pilot’s expectancy of survival was far poorer even than a machine-gunner’s could not detract from the infantryman’s envy; even though death commonly meant being burned alive, at least it was quick, clean — and witnessed by thousands. Coupled with envy was a terrible sense of inferiority. The planes circling overhead, and the double lines of hovering artillery observation balloons they protected, made the infantrymen feel like some protectionless rodent under the penetrating gaze of an eagle endowed with Jovian powers of destruction. To the airmen themselves, unable to hear the monstrous fracas, and detachedly observing the tiny sparks like flashes of a mirror and the puffs of smoke bubbling up below them, it was impossible to grasp what a sum of human suffering all that represented. To begin with, the actual battlefield seemed so absurdly small. Even from the low altitudes attainable by First War aircraft, observers could see simultaneously their own long-range guns and the targets being pounded far behind the enemy lines. Night patrols over the front sometimes had in sight the lights both of their own base and of enemy airfields, glowing in the distance as if the soil had been smeared with phosphorus. Flying over the battlefield the reaction of an airman was often one of disgust mingled with a certain arrogance, the contempt of the individualist for the herd; ‘What cowardice to accept such a situation without revolt!’ exclaimed Observer Bernard Lafont. ‘This is the cowardice of the measureless mass.’
The aviators had more than one ground for their sense of superiority. While the wretched biffin was receiving five sous a day for his services, on the French side a mere corporal in the airforce received two francs a day, an officer ten francs, as extra flying pay. Each enemy plane shot down brought the victor three days’ leave, and a palm-leaf to add to his ribbons. In addition, ‘bounty money’ was paid from a fund created by Michelins, the tyre manufacturers; Guynemer, the French ‘as des as’,1 earned before he died the huge sum of approximately 15,000 francs (which he handed over to a foundation for wounded airmen). Above all, in this drab war of amorphous anonymity where the public yearned for identifiable heroes, the air aces received an acclaim far in excess of anything known by ‘The Few’ of 1940. A Press, frustrated by censorship, built them into almost comic-strip heroes, daily recounting and exaggerating their latest exploits, revelling in the eccentricities of their uniforms. Out of the blue came invitations from well-known actresses begging the aces to spend their next leave in Paris with them; eulogizing sonnets and adoring letters (Germany’s Oswald Boelcke received an average of twenty—thirty a day) poured in. When Max Immelmann, the first of the great German aces, was killed, a Crown Prince and twenty generals attended his funeral. Guynemer came to be accorded something close to deification. One day he flew into a cloud and no trace of either plane or pilot was ever seen again; a legend sprang up among a generation of French school-children that he had been translated bodily to Heaven. Some of the aces found this lionization distasteful; the modest Boelcke, visiting the opera on leave, was mortified and fled from the house after a special verse in his honour had been inserted in the midst of an aria.
Popular appeal was of course related to the scarcity of their numbers and the sheer novelty of their weapon. In 1910 the Commandant of the French Staff College, exemplifying the orthodox military mind, declared that ‘the aeroplane is all very well for a sport, for the army it is useless’. France went to war less than 150 planes, and Germany few more; nevertheless, after the first month the Commandant’s opinion had already been refuted by Galliéni’s use of aircraft to spy out von Kluck’s classic mistake on the Marne. By the end of the war, despite tremendous efforts at expansion, the personnel of the French airforces totalled no more than 13,000 (to get an idea of the aces’ prospects of survival, one may compare with this total the figures of 3,500 men killed in combat; 2,000 killed on training alone; and another 3,000 injured in flying accidents). Disorganised French industry was slow to get into gear, and when it did it committed the traditional error — not emulated by the Germans — of having too many models. The first of France’s war pilots flew in Blériots that cruised at fifty m.p.h. and took an hour and a half to climb to 6,000 feet. Later came the Farmans, aptly named ‘cages à poules’, and the Caudrons, of which a French flyer remarked at the time that between these and the current German types ‘there was all the difference between a lorry and a Rolls Royce’. Guynemer once claimed that if the Germans used such planes he could have guaranteed a bag of one a day. It was not until the appearance of the 107 m.p.h. Nieuport fighter in the spring of 1916, at Verdun, that the French pilots could compete with the Germans on anything like equal terms. But the Germans really had little to boast about; they too had made a major blunder early on by concentrating on the construction of Zeppelins, and their maintenance of technical superiority during most of the war was almost entirely thanks to the brilliance of a twenty-five-year-old Dutchman, Tony Fokker.
Arms and equipment were equally primitive. Radio was a late-comer, and for the most part artillery observation planes communicated with their batteries by dropping messages (generally in the form of marked-up maps) in capsules attached to a banderole, or long streamer. The ground forces in turn indicated targets by laying out markers on the ground, o
r letters composed of white canvas sheets six feet long. This was an activity not much favoured at Verdun, as it invariably attracted a tornado of enemy fire. When the first attempts had been made to adapt the Wright Brothers’ invention as a lethal instrument, pilots went aloft with steel darts and took pot shots at one another with service revolvers. Rifles had followed, then machine guns, but the biggest breakthrough of the whole war came with Fokker’s introduction, in 1915, of a synchronising gear that enabled guns to be fired through the propellor. Here too the French lagged. The faults of their guns drove the French aces into a frenzy; in the air, they jammed at critical moments; on landing, they had a nasty habit of firing unexpectedly, often shooting up ground crews. While the German weapons could rattle off 1,000 rounds without re-loading, their own magazines only contained forty-seven. Changing a magazine in mid-air was a major act of skill and daring, which involved climbing half out of the cockpit while flying the plane with one’s knees clamped on the joystick; all the time with the enemy possibly circling for the kill.
The Price of Glory Page 25