By about 4 p.m., Raynal had lost both his exterior defences, the superstructure was solidly occupied by the enemy, and the battle was about to move underground. A little like the children and the pirates in ‘Peter Pan’, members of the fort garrison gazed helplessly through the slits of the observation cupolas at the young Germans sprawled out on the ground just above their heads, nonchalantly smoking pipes and occasionally making insulting gestures for their consumption. Meanwhile, during the contest for the galleries, Raynal had hastened to build sandbag barricades inside the corridors leading to them from the central fort.
As soon as both galleries had been occupied, Lieutenant Rackow, who had now assumed control of all operations on the fort, ordered a party under Lieutenant Ruberg of the Pioneers to break into the fort proper along the north-east corridor. Obediently Ruberg and a handful of men set off down a dark narrow passage, similar to the one that had confronted Sergeant Kunze in Douaumont three months earlier. A long flight of steps led down under the moat and then up again, and soon Ruberg came to a steel door barring his path. Behind it he could hear French voices whispering. Swiftly he prepared a charge out of hand-grenades (because of General von Deimling’s acceleration of the attack on Vaux the Pioneers had had no time in which to prepare proper demolition charges), pulled the pin out of the last grenade and ran.
Behind the steel door was Raynal himself, inspecting a hastily erected barricade which was not entirely to his liking. From the noises made by Ruberg, he realised what was afoot and quickly ordered his men back. Just in time; for the barricade ‘disintegrated in a powerful explosion.’ On the other side of the door, the five-and-a-half-second grenade fuse had not given Ruberg time to get clear, and he was hurled backwards by the explosion, lacerated with splinters. The force of the blast and the wounding of their chief caused the Germans to hestitate before re-entering the deadly tunnel just long enough for Raynal to rebuild his barricade and site a machine gun behind it. For the time being the French remained masters of the corridor.
That night Raynal, with all his telephone lines to the rear already severed, sent off the first of his four pigeons bearing a report of the situation.
Early on the 3rd of June, German assault troops worked their way round to the south of the fort. Vaux was now completely cut off, even from R.1 which still maintained a tenuous link with the rest of the Second Army. The siege was on, and a curious stalemate was established with a German commander, Rackow, on top of the fort, and a French commander, Raynal, underground. All through the day the main battle continued ferociously in the two corridors leading to the heart of the fort. In each the French had built sandbag barricades several feet thick, defended by one brave grenadier. The German pioneers had meanwhile brought up more powerful explosives, so that it was only a matter of time before the French grenadier was knocked out, and his rampart demolished. But beyond was yet another barricade, from behind which a machine gun spewed death on the attackers at point-blank range, while the French were preparing yet a further series of obstacles to its rear. Yard by yard the Germans advanced, but at heavy cost.
Of all the horrors in the fighting at Verdun, it is difficult to imagine any much more appalling than the struggle that took place day after day in the underground corridors of Fort Vaux. Here the battle went on in pitch darkness, relieved only by the flash of exploding grenades, in a shaft for the most part no more than three feet wide and five feet high, in which no grown man could stand upright. Machine-gun bullets ricochetting from wall to wall inflicted wounds as terrible as any dum-dum, and in the confined space the concussion of the grenades was almost unendurable. Repeatedly men of both sides felt themselves asphyxiating in the air polluted by TNT fumes and cement dust stirred up by the explosions. Added to it was the ever-worsening stink of the dead, rapidly decomposing in the June heat, for whom there was no means of burial inside the fort.
The two attacking German battalions had already suffered grave losses. Before being silenced, Vaux’s gallery machine guns had cut swathes in the attackers, and by the evening of June 2nd the battalion of the 53rd Regiment had only one officer left unwounded. Meanwhile, Rackow and his men on the roof of the fort were being exposed to an ever-increasing intensity of French gun-fire, to which the deadly 155 in nearby Fort Moulainville now added its voice. On the night of June 3rd both battallions had to be withdrawn exhausted. But for Raynal and his six hundred there was no relief.
Out at R.1 Delvert had meanwhile successfully repulsed two more German attacks, and spent the rest of the day under heavy bombardment. He noted in his diary that he had not slept for seventy-two hours. At 10 o’clock that night, Captain Delvert was overjoyed by the arrival of a subaltern, bringing a company of reinforcements. But the company numbered only eighteen men. An hour later, another subaltern appeared, claiming to have brought up a company.
‘How many men have you?’ asked Delvert.
‘One hundred and seventy.’
Delvert counted them. There were twenty-five.
Back at Sector Headquarters, General Lebrun had received Raynal’s pigeon message, and — under heavy pressure from Nivelle — prescribed an immediate counter-attack to regain the fort. Almost hysterically, Lebrun told the wretched general commanding the 124th Division that he was, if necessary, to lead the attack in person. At dawn on the 4th, the French went in in six dense waves, actually reaching the western extremity of the fort. But fresh replacements of Düsseldorf Fusiliers were already in position, and they drove off the attackers at bayonet point.
For Raynal, June 4th was to be the grimmest day so far. It nearly proved fatal. The previous night German Pioneers had managed, with a great effort, to bring up six flame-throwers on to the fort superstructure (four having been destroyed by artillery fire en route). They would smoke Vaux’s heroic garrison out like rats. At a given moment, the Germans attacking below ground were withdrawn, and the nozzles of the infernal devices were inserted into apertures and breaches in the fort exterior. (Fortunately for the garrison a detachment of Germans trying to seal hermetically the fort by filling in one of the larger breaches was dispersed by the vigilant crew of the Moulainville 155.) The first warning Raynal had was a cry of ‘Gas!’ from all parts of the fort. Almost immediately an asphyxiating black smoke poured into the central gallery. Down the north-west corridor fled its defenders, faces blackened and burnt, their barricades abandoned. Flickers of flame began to appear in the main body of the fort, and for a moment mass panic threatened. Then the flame-throwers ceased. Reacting quickly, and with almost superhuman courage, Lieutenant Girard darted back into the smoke-filled north-west corridor. He reached the abandoned machine gun there a second before the Germans. Wounded several times in the ensuing action, he held on until the situation was re-established; then fell unconscious from the toxic effects of the smoke. Meanwhile, Raynal had ordered the opening of all possible vents to clear the smoke, and to minimise the recurrence of such an attack.
A similar German attempt to rush the defenders in the north-east corridor had also failed, while an attack on the bunker at the south-west corner of the fort had ended in a minor French triumph. All the German Pioneers had been killed, and their flame-throwers captured. With this acquisition the garrison were able to keep the southern moat of the fort clear of the enemy. The net result of the new German effort had been dreadful burns for some fifteen members of the French garrison and the capture of twenty-five yards of the north-west corridor, with one of Raynal’s three observation cupolas.
Shortly before midday Raynal dispatched his last pigeon with the message:
We are still holding. But… relief is imperative. Communicate with us by Morse-blinker from Souville, which does not reply to our calls. This is my last pigeon.
Badly gassed in the recent attack, the wretched bird fluttered around half-heartedly, returning to settle on the loophole of Raynal’s Command Post. After several more failures, it was finally coaxed into the air. It reached Verdun, was delivered of its message, then — like Pheidipp
ides at Marathon — fell dead. (The only one of its species to be ‘decorated’ with the Légion d’Honneur, the noble emissary was stuffed and sits to this day in a Paris Museum.)
Reaction to the message brought by Raynal’s last pigeon was speedy. Fort Souville, which suspected that Vaux had already succumbed and its signals were a German trick, now blinked out an encouraging message to Raynal, and the mounting of yet another relief attack was prepared.
Grave as had been the events of the morning, something far more menacing transpired in the fort that afternoon. Says Raynal:
A sergeant of the fort Quartermaster’s Staff came to me, requesting a word in private, and said in a choking voice: ‘Mon Commandant, there is practically no water left in the cistern.’
I leaped up, I shook the sergeant, I made him repeat his words;
‘But this is treachery!’
‘Non, mon Commandant, we have distributed only the quantities you indicated, but the gauge was inaccurate.’
The agony began. I gave the order to preserve what little remained and to make no distribution today.1
The three-hundred odd supernumerary troops inside the fort had now become useless mouths that could endanger the whole garrison. Somehow, Raynal realised, it was imperative to evacuate them. But Vaux was encircled by the enemy. A desperate risk had to be taken. Summoning Officer Cadet Buffet, a nineteen-year-old brought up in an orphanage, he ordered him to scout a way out from the fort late that night. The bulk of the escaping troops would then follow in small, well-spaced packets.
While in the acrid darkness of the fort the garrison knew and cared little about the weather outside, Delvert in R.1 recorded that the 4th was a beautiful sunny Sunday. There were more German attacks, but in the June sunshine Delvert had time to comment lyrically on the essential beauty of the grenadiers poised to hurl their missiles, ‘avec le beau geste du joueur de balle’. Unfortunately, the day was later spoilt by a new prolonged bombardment from French guns, and by maddening thirst exacerbated by the heat. That night at 9.30, Delvert ordered his company to stand by to be relieved. The men were almost too tired to rejoice. An hour and a half later a runner arrived from regimental headquarters postponing the relief, ‘because of circumstances’. Mercifully, there was rain the next day, and the company put out groundsheets to catch the water. Meanwhile, in the German trenches opposite there were signs of unprecedented activity. Communication trenches were being widened, all of which could only mean a new all-out attack on R.1. Would relief come before the remnants of Delvert’s heroic company were submerged?
After dark on the 5th, the awaited relief at last arrived. But the ordeal was not yet over. With no communication trench to provide cover, Delvert’s company were silhouetted targets for the machine guns installed in R.2. Then followed a dreadfully accurate artillery barrage. When the company reached safety, it numbered only thirty-seven broken men; but — on German figures — it had inflicted over three hundred casualties. For another three days Delvert’s successors continued the valiant defence; then R.1 fell to the Germans with 500 prisoners.
For Raynal and his men there could be neither relief nor rainwater to assuage their growing thirst. June 5th, the fourth day of the siege, had begun at dawn with a shattering explosion near the Casemate de Bourges on the south-west corner of the fort. A huge breach had been blown in the wall, and German Pioneers were on the spot at once with a flame-thrower. But a freak current of air blew the flame back in their faces. A grenade-thrower counter-sally, led by Lieutenant Girard, restored the situation. In the course of it, Girard was wounded again.
Through peepholes Raynal could now see the Germans, thwarted in their attacks up the corridors, digging fresh mineshafts under other parts of the fort from the outside.
It was not a pleasant sight. He flashed a message to Souville, requesting ‘hit them quick with artillery’. The reply came with gratifying alacrity; there was a muffled thud, and the watching Raynal saw ‘German bodies hurled into the moat. Work above us ceased at once.’
Outside the fort, the latest failure of the flame-throwers had flung the attackers into acute depression. The infernal machines, it was felt, were causing them more casualties than the besieged, and they were withdrawn. Little did the Germans realise how close the flame-throwers had come to breaking Vaux’s resistance the day before; or that its water had run out. All they could see was the heavy toll exacted by the incessant French gunfire on the fort’s superstructure, and the almost negligible progress being made along the underground corridors. The fort indeed seemed impregnable. Perhaps the men inside could hold out for another month, or a year. Finally, to make things worse, the Pioneers had received an insulting message from General von Deimling, declaring that the fort had been taken, but that a few isolated groups of French were still holding out in one or two cellars. These were to be ‘mopped up’ forthwith.
Later that same day, Raynal suffered two new reverses. A second after the blinker operator had completed a message to Souville a shell landed on the post, killing three men, and wounding several others, while destroying the signal equipment. In the course of the day’s subterranean fighting along the north-east corridor, the enemy had taken the entrance to the last accessible latrine; an important morale factor in the already foully stinking fort. By now of the eight surviving officers under Raynal, one was gravely wounded; three had been wounded to a lesser extent (two of them at least twice), but stayed at their posts; a fourth had a bad case of fever, while Raynal himself was shivering with recurrent malaria. That evening he inspected his men,
crushed with fatigue, silent and gloomy. If I were to ask one more effort of them, they would have been incapable. Therefore I decided to distribute to them the last drops of water.…
This amounted to less than a quarter of a pint per person, for men who had not had a drop the previous twenty-four hours — and it reeked vilely of corpses. There was no question of eating any of the highly salted ‘singe’ (of which there was a plentiful supply); Raynal noted that no food had passed his lips for two days. How much longer could the garrison keep up its strength? That night, rigging up an ad hoc blinker, Raynal signalled Fort Souville:
Imperative be relieved and receive water tonight. I am reaching the end of my tether…
Suddenly, into this atmosphere of extreme dejection burst a mud-stained figure from another world. It was young Buffet, proudly wearing a bright new medal. The garrison crowded around him, fatigue and thirst temporarily forgotten.
He had achieved the impossible. It transpired that most of the escapers had been cut down by German machine guns, or taken prisoner, but Buffet and eight others had made it. Reaching the refuge of Fort Tavannes, he had been passed from the Brigadier to the Sector Commander, General Lebrun, and finally on to Nivelle himself, who had decorated him and told of an imminent counter-attack being prepared which would, this time, succeed. At once the nineteen-year-old Officer Cadet volunteered to creep through the German lines again to take the news back to the fort. The sergeant accompanying him was wounded and had to be abandoned on the way, but a second time Buffet got through.
Eagerly the garrison officers pressed Buffet for details of the promised relief attack. It was to begin at 2 a.m. the following morning, said Buffet, and a whole battalion would be taking part. ‘I saw the faces of my officers darken,’ recalls Raynal, ‘and I guessed what was going on inside them, because I shared their thoughts; the operation, as conceived, seemed to be, a priori, inadequate.’
Shortly after midnight the fort defenders heard the characteristic scream of French 75 mm. shells. But not a single explosion. The ‘softening-up’ barrage was falling, quite harmlessly, well over the fort. At 2 a.m., the garrison took up positions to give support to the relief force. The barrage lifted, and anxiously the besieged searched the horizon for their deliverers. At 2.30, still no sign. Finally, towards 3 a.m., a message from the Casemate de Bourges reported sighting a small force, of about platoon strength, pinned down by German machine-gun fire a fe
w yards from the fort. The observers watched in despair as the isolated French were picked off one by one and then rose from their shell-holes, hands above their heads. It was all Vaux saw of the relieving attack that Nivelle had promised Buffet. The relief force had done its best, and suffered terrible losses, with a sergeant-major taking over command of the battalion when every single officer was either killed or wounded.
Morale inside the fort fell to its lowest point. Under the strain, a young lieutenant went off his head and threatened to blow up the grenade depot. It would be impossible to hold out much longer. Raynal blinked out another message, pleading ‘intervene before complete exhaustion… Vive la France!’ But there was no longer any response from Souville, once again convinced that the fort must have succumbed. Later that day a huge shell landing on the fort caved in part of the vault of the central gallery, and now the threat of being buried alive was added to that of asphyxiation and thirst. Still the Germans could make no headway along the underground corridors. But by evening the suffering from thirst was indescribable. Over the past three June days each of the garrison had received a total of one half-glass of foul water. In their despair, men tried to lick the moisture and slime off the fort walls. As he inspected the fort, leaning heavily on his stick, Raynal found men fainting in the corridors, others retching violently — having drunk their own urine. Worst of all was the plight of the ninety-odd wounded, with no drop of water to assuage their raging fever, some atrociously burnt, and many lying in the dark, foul lazaret without proper attention since the beginning of June.
The Price of Glory Page 32