The Price of Glory

by Alistair Horne

  Mangin had already made one attempt on the fort, on April 22nd. Then, with remarkable élan, his men had actually reached the superstructure but had been driven off by the fort’s machine guns. On May 8th he had seen the huge plume of smoke billow out from Douaumont, and gradually the full significance of the disaster within seeped through to his HQ. Would there ever be a more propitious moment to carry the fort than now when its defenders were still in disarray? Mangin proposed to attack with two regiments on a front of just one kilometre. Nivelle’s blessing was immediate. Pétain — who would have preferred to wait until sufficient troops were available to attack on a much wider front, thereby ensuring greater promise of success — was reluctant. However, great was the pressure from Joffre; the Douaumont explosion argued cogently; and finally the suave persuasiveness of Nivelle tipped the balance.

  On May 13th, the same day that Knobelsdorf had pushed Falkenhayn into granting a resumption of the German Right Bank offensive, the first orders for the attack (scheduled for May 22nd) left Nivelle’s HQ. Within 48 hours the Germans knew every detail. All their offensive projects were immediately suspended and work began urgently on patching up Douaumont’s defences. Security was never one of Nivelle’s strongest points, as was to become tragically apparent the following year.

  One day shortly before the attack, Mangin paid a visit to Fort Moulainville, the almost exact twin to Douaumont. Standing outside, apparently oblivious to the constant heavy shelling, he interrogated the Commandant as to what was the best way of taking a fort. What kind of guns are you going to use, he was asked? Some brand-new 370 mm. mortars, replied Mangin. ‘Mon Général,’ said the Commandant, whose fort had been under steady bombardment by German 420s for the past ten weeks and had not decisively suffered, ‘that’s quite inadequate.’ Mangin stumped away.

  For the preliminary bombardment Mangin mustered some three hundred guns, including four of the 370 mm. mortars he set so much store in. It was the most powerful French concentration yet seen at Verdun. Daily for five days preceding the attack (thereby sacrificing what element of surprise there still remained) a thousand tons of shells rained down on the quarter of a square mile of mud that constituted the objective. Spotting conditions were excellent as the French had by now won mastery of the air over Verdun, and aerial photographs of the damage taken at zero hour minus forty were in the hands of Mangin’s intelligence officers before the attack went in. All the omens seemed favourable, and one of the battalion commanders was assured by Mangin that

  the artillery preparation would permit us to reach the fort with our rifles slung, as it would be completely flattened.

  Among the German troops out in the open the French bombardment levied the usual grim toll, and one of the first heavy shells smashed the principal new entry into Douaumont from the North. From all sides the streams of whimpering wounded poured into the fort until its field hospital could take no more. The signal station on top of the fort was wiped out, together with its operators, and by May 22nd all the observation turrets had been knocked out. Dust and fumes from the exploding shells made the air inside almost unbreathable. Some elusive leaks in the exhaust of the donkey engine that had just been installed to supply the fort with electric light made matters still worse. When this was remedied, a blast brought a whole sandbag barricade down on top of the engine. With the fort now plunged into darkness inside, its eyes on the outside world blinded, an unpleasant atmosphere of apprehension grew in the fort. For some the strain was too much; three men had to hold down a company commander who had roamed through the pitch-black corridors, shrieking wildly that he wanted to shoot his C.O. A direct hit which opened up the southwest flanking turret forced its abandonment. The breach thus caused was to play a most important role during the French attack, but apart from this not even a crack was made in the main body of the fort by Mangin’s mortars. The Commandant of Moulainville had been right.

  In the French jumping-off trenches, Guy Hallé, a twenty-three-year-old sergeant of the 74th Infantry Regiment, was experiencing that familiar knotting of the stomach. All his faculties were concentrated on a single thought, he wrote later;

  to be able to comport oneself correctly in face of death. It’s not very difficult to say this little phrase; but, My God, what a terrible effort it demands! What a hideous thing; to say to oneself, at this moment, I am myself, I am completely whole in myself; my blood circulates and pulses in my arteries; I have my eyes, all my skin is intact, I do not bleed!… Oh to be able to sleep thinking that it is finished, that I shall live, that I shall have raptures, pains, grief, pleasures; that I shall not be killed!

  Thirty-five minutes before zero hour two solitary German shells fell on the French trenches. Old hands like Hallé shuddered, knowing full well that this meant the Germans had their range and were just waiting for the attackers to show their heads. Despite the fact that early that morning French aircraft firing a new type of rocket destroyed five out of the six German observation balloons in the sector, the German gunners had had such ample warning in which to sight their pieces that observation was hardly necessary, and as the first French soldier went over the top a murderously accurate counter-barrage swept the whole line. In a matter of minutes, the 129th Regiment, earmarked for the actual taking of the fort, found its companies reduced to an average of forty-five effectives; one had no more than a lieutenant and twenty-seven men left. A battalion of the 74th, commanded by fifty-year-old Major Lefebvre-Dibon, that had been appointed to the right wing of the attack, reached its objective to find that there was no sign of the battalion on its left which was to have seized the eastern side of Fort Douaumont. It had simply been wiped out; and the battalion of the 74th, that should have been supporting Lefebvre-Dibon to his right, never left the trenches, pinned down by German fire. On top of Fort Souville, Mangin, watching the course of the attack — as usual out in the open — had a lucky escape when a shell severely wounded the four staff officers with him.

  Nevertheless, charging fearlessly and magnificently through the hail of shot and shell, what remained of the 129th reached the fort in eleven minutes flat. It was an incomparable display of the Furia Francese. Within half an hour, three-quarters of the fort superstructure, bounded by a line running from the northern apex to the southeast corner, was in French hands. From a distance, Oberleutnant Brandis looked on in utter dismay as the horizon bleu figures swarmed across ‘his’ Douaumont. The Crown Prince himself admitted afterwards, it indeed ‘seemed likely at one time that the work itself must be lost’. Inside the fort the shaking reverberations of heavy shellfire had meanwhile been replaced by a sharper sound. Hand grenades! At once there was a cry of ‘the French are here!’

  A small group of French under Sergeant Piau had penetrated into the fort through the breach in the Casemate de Bourges at the southwest. Unchallenged, they reached, the main East-West passage, the very heart of the fort. For a few tense minutes it seemed as if Douaumont might change hands again. Then a German Jäger detachment arrived on the scene. Three of Sergeant Piau’s men were killed, the rest thrown back, and a machine gun was set up to ward off future intrusions. For the rest of the day fighting continued in the outer tunnels, but gradually the French were pressed back.

  Outside, the French 129th Regiment had taken charge of the semiwrecked Casemate de Bourges and installed a well-protected machine-gun nest on its roof. The position completely dominated the whole superstructure of the fort. Repeatedly, with courage but quite incredible stupidity, the German fort garrison sallied forth to take the machine-gun post frontally. Fifty men of the 20th Regiment charged it; thirty-three of them were mown down. Seventy Jägers tried their hand, and fifteen returned; of forty Leibgrenadiers, only a couple crawled back into the fort. Yet another assault was broken up with heavy casualties by the Germans’ own field artillery. Attempts to smoke out the machine-gun post failed, and all through the night of the 22nd and the following day it continued to control the fort superstructure.

  On the evening of the 22nd, re
ports came back on both sides that the French were in possession of the fort. Mangin arrived at Nivelle’s HQ, followed by a staff officer carrying a huge satchel full of the dossiers of officers to be recommended for decoration, and pronounced, ‘Douaumont is ours!’ But the dice were heavily loaded against the attackers. The German ripostes now began in earnest. Under their blows, the French units holding the left flank of the advance melted away in the morning mists of the 23rd, and the two battalions left on the fort found themselves in a narrow salient caught by fire from three sides. On the right flank, Lefebvre-Dibon reported back to his colonel that he had by now lost over forty per cent of his men, and that it was becoming impossible to hold his front without reinforcements. But fresh units ruthlessly hurled forward by Mangin either arrived decimated or not at all. Company-Commander Charles Delvert who watched the whole action from a neighbouring position provides a description typical of these relief attempts:

  Two companies of the 124th carried the German trenches by assault. They penetrated there without firing a shot. But they were insufficiently supplied with hand-grenades.… The Boche counter-attacked with grenades. The two companies, defenceless, were annihilated. The 3rd Battalion, coming to their aid, was smashed up by barrage fire in the approach trenches. Altogether nearly 500 killed or wounded.… The dead were piled up as high as the parapet.…

  Serving with the 124th was twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Alfred Joubaire, who had marched to Verdun a few days previously behind the regimental band gaily playing Tipperary. For the past fifteen months he had kept a diary which was largely restricted to matter-of-fact, almost flippant observations of life at the front. His entry for May 23rd (one of the last before a shell killed him) ends on a remarkably different note:

  Humanity is mad! It must be mad to do what it is doing. What a massacre! What scenes of horror and carnage! I cannot find words to translate my impressions. Hell cannot be so terrible. Men are mad!

  By late afternoon of the 23rd Lefebvre-Dibon’s battalion to the right of the fort was encircled and forced to fly the white flag; over seventy-two per cent of its effectives were either dead or wounded. On top of the fort, the 129th was now also cut off. Still its machine-gun post at the southwest turret hammered away stubbornly. But ammunition was running out. Worse still, because the French had never occupied the whole superstructure, the Germans were able to push reinforcements into the fort underground, through a tunnel at the northeast corner. By this means, they smuggled up a heavy mine-thrower on the night of the 23rd. As the sun rose through the Meuse haze, the weapon had been built into an emplacement less than eighty yards from the French machine-gunners, but impervious to their direct fire. In rapid succession it lobbed eight aerial torpedoes, each containing a huge charge of explosive, at the south west turret. Before the smoke from the last shattering blast cleared away, three German companies leapt out of the fort on to the stunned survivors.

  It was the end. That night a few remnants of the French spearhead crept back to their lines in ones and twos. Heavy as the defenders’ losses had been those of the French were incomparably higher, with a thousand prisoners alone left in enemy hands. Mangin’s 5th Division had not as much as a single company in reserve, and for a time there was a dangerous hole in the front 500 yards wide. Mangin himself was abruptly withdrawn from the sector by his Corps Commander, Lebrun, passing — for neither the first nor last time — into temporary disgrace. The whole episode was a tragic case of too little, too soon. Had the forces been available to attack on a broader front — as Pétain had wanted — the fort might possibly have been retaken. But since they were not, the attack should clearly not have taken place when it did. Pétain assumed full responsibility for the debacle, and the fact that his account of the battle contains no single breath of reproach for Nivelle or Mangin reveals a magnanimity rare among the ex post facto writings of war leaders.

  But, at the front, the failure brought about a noticeable decline in morale. Ominously, cases of ‘indiscipline’ were reported from Verdun towards the end of May. In Paris, the news of Douaumont threw Galliéni of the Marne, already weakened by an operation, into a profound depression. Two days later he was dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ‘MAY CUP’

  Of all man’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.—HERODOTUS.

  … I cannot too often repeat, the battle was no longer an episode that spent itself in blood and fire; it was a conditioned thing that dug itself in remorselessly week after week….— ERNSI JUNGER, The Storm of Steel

  As May gave way to a torrid June at Verdun, the three-and-a-half-month-old battle entered its deadliest phase. It was not merely the purely military aspects that made it so. In all man’s affairs no situation is more lethal than when an issue assumes the status of a symbol. Here all reason, all sense of value, abdicate. Verdun had by now become a transcendent symbol for both sides; worst of all, it had by now become a symbol of honour. L’honneur de France! That magical phrase, still capable today of rousing medieval passions, bound France inextricably to the holding of Verdun’s Citadel. To the Germans, its seizure had become an equally inseparable part of national destiny. On a plane far above the mere warlords conducting operations, both nations had long been too far gone to be affected by the strategic insignificance of that Citadel. In their determination to possess this symbol, this challenge-cup of national supremacy, the two nations flailed at each other with all the stored-up rage of a thousand years of Teuton-Gaul rivalry. Paul Valéry, in his eulogy welcoming Marshal Pétain to the Academie, referred to the Battle of Verdun as a form ‘of single combat… where you were the champion of France face to face with the Crown Prince’. As in the single combats of legend, it was more than simply the honour, it was the virility of two peoples that was at stake. Like two stags battling to the death, antlers locked, neither would nor could give until the virility of one or the other finally triumphed.

  Confined to the most sublime plane, Valéry’s metaphor was a noble and apt one. But, to the men actually engaged in it, a less noble form of symbolism was apparent. In the last days of peace, there had seemed to come a point where the collective will of Europe’s leaders had abdicated and was usurped by some evil, superhuman Will from Stygian regions that wrested control out of their feeble hands. Seized by this terrible force, nations were swept along at ever-mounting speed towards the abyss. And once the fighting had started, one also senses repeatedly the presence of that Evil Being, marshalling events to its own pattern; whereas in the Second World War somehow the situation never seemed entirely to escape human manipulation — perhaps because the warlords, Churchill and Roosevelt, Hitler and Stalin, were titans when contrasted with the diminutive statures of the Asquiths, the Briands, and the Bethmann-Hollwegs. So now, as the Battle of Verdun moved into June, its conduct had in fact been placed beyond the direct control of the two ‘champions’, Pétain and Crown Prince Wilhelm. With the ascendancy of Nivelle and Knobelsdorf, each pledged to the continuance of the battle regardless of cost, the fighting had reached a higher peak of brutality and desperation. The battle seemed to have somehow rid itself of all human direction and now continued through its own impetus. There could be no end to it, thought one German writer,

  until the last German and the last French hobbled out of the trenches on crutches to exterminate each other with pocket knives or teeth and finger nails.

  In the diaries and journals of the time, on both sides, mention of the vileness of the enemy becomes more and more infrequent; even the infantryman’s hatred for the murderous artillery grows less pronounced. The battle itself had become the abhorred enemy. It had assumed its own existence, its own personality; and its purpose nothing less than the impartial ruin of the human race. In the summer of 1916, its chroniclers accord it with increasing regularity the personifications of ‘ogre’, ‘monster’, ‘Moloch’ and ‘Minotaur’, indicative of the creature’s insatiable need for its daily ration of lives, regardless of nationa
lity. All other emotions, such as simple, nationalist, warlike feelings, had become dwarfed in the united loathing of the incubus; at the same time it was accompanied by a sense of hopeless resignation that would leave an indelible mark on a generation of French and Germans.

  Abroad, beyond the general admiration for France’s heroism at Verdun, there was widespread unanimity in the kind of symbol it evoked among the cartoonists. In the United States, The Baltimore American printed an adaptation from Millet, with the Kaiser sowing skulls at Verdun; and a similar figurative device was employed by the Philadelphia Inquirer, above a caption of ‘Attrition Gone Mad’.1 In an Italian cartoon Death says to the Crown Prince, ‘I am weary of work — don’t send me any more victims’; a British cartoon of the period shows Death sitting on top of the world — ‘The only ruler whose new conquests are undisputed.’ From Germany, a grisly armed knight pours blood over the earth out of a copious ‘Horn of Plenty’, and in a propaganda medallion — dedicated with an ironic twist of things, to Pétain — Death is portrayed as a skeleton pumping blood out of the world. Looking back from the autumn of 1916, the New York Times summarised the diseased, Totentanz imagery which Verdun had sparked off with a monstrous Mars surveying three-and-a-half million crosses; ‘The end of a perfect year’.

  The Sower

  —From The Baltimore American.

  As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

  * * *

  When the Chief-of-Staff of the German Third Army visited Supreme Headquarters during the French counter-attack on Douaumont, he had found the normally insusceptible Falkenhayn rubbing his hands with glee, declaring that this was ‘the stupidest thing they could do’. Far from disrupting new German offensive plans as Nivelle might have hoped, the French failure temporarily halted Falkenhayn’s wavering and threw his full support behind Knobelsdorf. Preparations for the new assault, bearing the delectable code name of ‘MAY CUP’, now went ahead at top speed, with reinforcements in men and material promised by Falkenhayn. The prospects seemed rosier than they had for some time; the French line on the Right Bank had been seriously weakened by the losses suffered in the Douaumont venture;1 there were also indications of a decline in morale. On the Left Bank, both the commanding hills of Mort Homme and Côte 304 had been taken at last, and from them German guns could place a deadly restraint on the French heavy artillery massed behind Bois Bourrus ridge. Despite all Pétain’s efforts, by the end of May the Germans still had an appreciable superiority in artillery at Verdun, with 2,200 pieces against 1,777. Everywhere the French margin of retreat had become exceedingly slim. Once again the German Press was encouraged to declare bombastically: