* * *
If the effects of Verdun did not confine themselves to the period of the First War, neither were they limited to strictly military and strategic considerations. As France in the inter-war period buried herself beneath the concrete of the new super-Douaumonts of the Maginot Line, so spiritually she sought refuge behind the ‘miracle’ of Verdun. Because of Pétain’s ‘Noria’ system and the sheer length of the battle, something like seven-tenths of the whole French Army had passed through Verdun. The list of names in Verdun’s Book of Honour is an impressive one; President Lebrun, Major of Artillery; President Coty, Private First Class; President de Gaulle, Captain of Infantry; Marshal Pétain, Marshal de Lattre, Admiral Darlan…. A whole generation of French leaders passes before one’s eyes. Of all the battles of the First War, Verdun was the one in which the most Frenchmen had taken part — as well as being the one that made the most profound and most painful impact. Year after year the veterans, ‘Ceux de Verdun’, with their black berets, rosettes and rubans rouges, made the pilgrimage in their thousands to the shrines of Verdun; to Vaux and Douaumont and the towering new Ossuaire that straddles the Thiaumont Ridge, its revolving beacons restlessly scanning the battlefield by night. On the anniversaries of February 21st or of the recapture of Douaumont, on Jeanne d’Arc Day, Armistice Day or July 14th, the torch-light processions filed up from Verdun to the Meuse Heights to attend sombre and moving commemorations (as often as not addressed to the Glorious Dead in the vocative). Depicting the sacredness of one of these regular pilgrimages, Henri de Montherlant wrote:
Je marchais sur cette terre humaine comme sur le visage même de la patrie.
And Anna de Noailles:
Passant, sois de récits et de geste économe,
Contemple, adore, prie et tais ce que tu sens.
With the passage of the years, the symbol of Verdun attained ever-increasing sanctity and at the same time it grew — more dangerously for France — to be a touchstone of national faith. This ex-Verdun generation of Frenchmen, to whom the political world since 1918 bafflingly seemed to have become more, not less, menacing, gradually arrived at the mystic belief that, since France had triumphed in this most terrible of all battles, somehow it would always be able to ‘se débrouiller’. In that grim duel, France had proved her virility; finally and forever. (The attitude is not without its parallel in today’s Micawberish Briton, who secretly reassures himself that, because of the Battle of Britain in 1940, there is bound to be another miracle somewhere round the corner that will save Britain from economic disaster, without any further undue personal effort on his part.)
Hand in hand with the mystique of the Eternal Glory of Verdun went another influence, less perceptible but infinitely more pernicious.
This war has marked us for generations. It has left its imprint upon our souls [wrote Artillery Lieutenant de Mazenod from Verdun in June 1916]. All those inflamed nights of Verdun we shall rediscover one day in the eyes of our children.
Two of the infantrymen who were later killed saw it more precisely, and prophetically. In a letter to his wife of June 13, 1916, Sergeant Marc Boasson admitted having had
the most horrible thought… Germany and France will emerge from the struggle exhausted for a long time. And France for longer than Germany, her low birth rate insufficient during these last years will strike its blow amid the consequences of the war.
A month later he writes in a rage:
This is not heroism. It is ignominy. What kind of a nation will they make of us tomorrow, these exhausted creatures, emptied of blood, emptied of thought, crushed by superhuman fatigue?
Like an answering voice Jubert declared as he left for his second spell on the Mort Homme, ‘… they will have to resort to those who have not lived out these days….’
As the veterans of Verdun stood to attention outside the Ossuaire during those torchlight commemorations, and the emotive speeches brought the tears welling up, as well as the glory and the superhuman heroism, they remembered the horrors of the ceaseless shelling, the wounded men agonising untended, the hideous mutilations, the runners not returning, the reliefs and ration parties not arriving, the thirst, the hunger, the stench, the misery, the fear; above all, always the shells. Privately to themselves they wondered if they could do it again, if any other Frenchman could? The answer they felt was NO. No human being could do Verdun again. Then in paralysing pessimism they watched across the Rhine, at the books once entitled ‘The Tragedy of Verdun’ now becoming replaced by themes of ‘The Heroic Struggle’ or ‘Song of Heroism’; at Germany’s resurgent numbers threatening to swamp France’s own enfeebled birth-rate; at the memories and lessons of Verdun swept aside by the hurricane of the Nazi determination for revanche. During the inauguration of the Ossuaire in 1927, Pétain remarked that
the constant vision of death had penetrated him [the French soldier] with a resignation which bordered on fatalism.
It was a condition with which the whole generation that had fought at Verdun remained infected. Resignedly it sat down behind the new Douaumonts Maginot and Pétain had built for it as Czecho-Slovakia was sold down the river. Morally it had been bled white. In his book, ‘The Taxis of the Marne’ that so savagely castigates the ‘Men of Fifty’ of 1940 — that is, the Verdun generation — Jean Dutourd (who was then twenty) declares brutally that France was betrayed
not by the Fifth Column. She was betrayed by you, men of fifty. She was betrayed by what should have been her vital forces.
But was it their fault that they had lost their vitality?
The German soldier of the First War — the Reichs Archives admit — was more deeply affected by Verdun than by any other campaign of the war. Each post-war year the German survivors also trekked to Verdun by the hundred, trying to find the positions where they had fought so long and so desperately, or merely visiting the innumerable cemeteries with their well-tended black crosses; and one of the favourite games to a generation of German children was playing at the capture of Fort Douaumont. One might in truth add that the blood-letting, just as it had devitalised France’s ‘Men of Fifty’, had contributed to a vacuum of leadership in Germany into which rushed the riff-raff of the Himmlers and Goebbels, but somehow Verdun itself never left quite so potent a lingering effect in Germany. It was perhaps because, inhuman as conditions at Verdun had been for the Germans, they had nearly always been one degree worse for the French; or because, relative to the number of combatants, only a quarter as many Germans as French had fought there — thus the impact of the battle was spread somewhat thinner over the post-war generation as a whole.
Most significant of all was the immense influence Verdun had upon the thinking of the Wehrmacht leaders, a quite remarkable number of whom were actually involved in the battle as junior officers. Von Manstein was a staff officer to General von Gallwitz during most of the campaign on the Left Bank; Paulus fought as an infantry officer through the worst fighting round Fleury from June to August. Guderian was Assistant Intelligence Officer at Fifth Army HQ throughout the offensive phase at Verdun; von Brauchitsch, Hitler’s Army C-in-C, took part in the see-saw battles of August to September on the Right Bank, and witnessed the recapture of Fort Douaumont; Keitel, the Wehrmacht Chief-of-Staff from 1938 until the end of the Third Reich, was a captain on the staff of X Reserve Corps (Right Bank) in the summer of 1916. (Though they never fought in the actual battle, Rommel took part briefly in the Crown Prince’s first attempts to seize Verdun in late 1914, and von Kluge was badly wounded on this front later in the war.)1
Militarily, as we know, the Germans solved the problem of the First War deadlock in another way to the French. Being the attackers, they had seen Verdun from a different angle. In its essentials, their problem was that which had faced Ritter von Epp, bogged down amid the limitless horrors of the shellground in the Thiaumont ‘Quadrilateral’; how to prevent an attack losing its impetus and simply becoming ground to pieces by the enemy artillery. Having tenanted Douaumont through most of the Battle, they
also sensed rather better than the French what were the Achilles Heels of permanent fortifications. The solution to both problems was provided by the Panzer columns of Guderian and Manstein; the lessons of the battle in which they had participated over so many months being lost upon neither of them.
On May 14th, 1940, the Panzers smashed through at Sedan where Louis-Napoleon had surrendered so ignominously seventy years earlier. Exactly a month later German troops again stood before the gates of Verdun, led by a divisional commander who had been three times in the line there during 1916. Once again, briefly, there was heavy fighting on Côte 304 and the Mort Homme, but at 11.45 the following morning Douaumont surrendered — to a battalion commander who had served in the fort himself twenty-four years previously. None of Douaumont’s new gun turrets had fired a shot. A quarter of an hour later Fort Vaux surrendered, and the German Panzers rushed on to Verdun. At the Citadel a company of army bakers was taken by surprise as it leisurely baked bread for the men in the garrison, and by the afternoon of June 15th the Swastika flew over Verdun. Its conquest had lasted little more than twenty-four hours and had cost the Germans less than two hundred dead. The next day France’s ‘Men of Fifty’, unable to help themselves, called in eighty-four-year-old Pétain as receiver in bankruptcy. An armistice was requested forthwith.
In his éloge to the Académie on being elected to the vacancy created by Pétain’s death — one of the most difficult speeches any Frenchman could have been called on to make — André François-Poncet recounted a parable of Croesus and Solon. Croesus finds Solon weeping and asks why.
I am thinking [came the reply] of all the miseries that the Gods are reserving for you, as the price of your present glory.
Seldom have the elements of Classical Tragedy been more poignantly arrayed than in the last years of Pétain. We see the old man, about to retire twenty-six years earlier to the cottage at St. Omer, now called back in his dotage to assume a responsibility Frenchmen in their prime quail before. The deep-rooted pessimism and bitterness towards Britain surges to the fore; and who indeed in France in the summer of 1940 does not believe that Britain will have ‘her neck wrung like a chicken’? The huge majority of Frenchmen are solidly behind the Hero of Verdun, the man who saved the French Army in 1917 (though, in five years time, many crying ‘traitor’ will conveniently try to forget this). Once again, he is the one man the Army will venerate and obey. Only an eccentric handful, brave to the point of folly, rallies to the Cross of Lorraine raised by Pétain’s former subaltern and erstwhile admirer, Charles de Gaulle.
In vain the Marshal believed that France’s conquerors, being themselves soldiers, would grant her an honourable peace. Pressed by Hitler to total, dishonourable collaboration, he resisted, but had little to resist with. The wily Laval treated him contemptuously as an ornamental front to cover his own ambitions, presented disastrous documents for him to sign late in the evening when his old mind was befuddled. But never was he completely Laval’s or Hitler’s man. Derided, misguided, isolated and betrayed he stayed on at his invidious post; ‘If we leave France now, we shall never find her again,’ he said repeatedly. Above all he stayed in the apparently genuine belief that somehow he alone stood for the safety of the million of his beloved soldiers captive in Germany. In his name, things were done by Vichy France that shocked the world, and especially her former Ally; but how much worse might it have been without that aged hand at the helm? Steadfastly Pétain refused to give Hitler bases in Algeria or surrender the French fleet. Though battered, his honour remained intact, accompanied to the end by a certain tragic nobility; fifty French hostages are to be shot, eighty-six-year-old Pétain offers himself in their stead as a single hostage.
Finally, as the Allies landed in North Africa, Hitler, breaking his word, invaded Unoccupied France. ‘Fly to Africa,’ the faithful Serrigny urged Pétain. No, he replied. If I leave, a Nazi Gauleiter will take over, and then what about our men in Germany? ‘A pilot must stay at the tiller during a tempest…’ You are wrong, replied Serrigny, reproaching him gently:
You think too much about the French and not enough about France.
Victorious, de Gaulle returned to France; Pétain was spirited away to Germany by the Nazis. As the Third Reich collapsed, alone of the Vichy survivors he begged to be allowed to return to France to face trial.
At my age, there is only one thing one still fears. That is not to have done all one’s duty, and I wish to do mine.
Through Switzerland he returned to France. He was met by General Koenig. He put out his hand. Koenig refused to take it. By edict of the man who had once applied to join the Regiment he commanded, and to whose son he was godfather, Pétain was placed on trial for his life, clad in the simplest uniform of a Marshal of France, and wearing just the Médaille Militaire — the only decoration shared by simple soldiers and great commanders. Urged by his lawyers to take his baton with him into court, Pétain replied scornfully ‘No, that would be theatrical.’ At the beginning of the trial he made one simple, dignified statement to the French people over the head of the Court, which he insisted had no power to try the Chief of State. Modestly he outlined his career in the service of France, ending:
When I had earned rest, I did not cease to devote myself to her. I responded to all her appeals, whatever was my age or my weariness. She had turned to me on the most tragic day of her history. I neither sought nor desired it. I was begged to come. I came. Thus I inherited a catastrophe of which I was not the author… History will tell all that I spared you, whereas my adversaries think of reproaching me for what was inevitable…. If you wish to condemn me, let my condemnation be the last.
Through much of the lengthy hearing he nodded and dozed. As its last witness, the defence produced a general blinded at Verdun, who admonished the court prophetically:
Take care that one day — it is not perhaps far distant; the drama is not yet finished — this man’s blood and alleged disgrace do not recoil on the whole of France, on us and our children.
Finally Pétain spoke his last words;
My thought, my only thought, was to remain with them [the French] on the soil of France, according to my promise, so as to protect them and to lessen their sufferings.
The Court was unmoved. France can be savage in the retribution she exacts, and now, amid the passions of victory and with the wounds of the war still unhealed, the clemency Pétain accorded the mutineers of 1917 is not for him. Guilty of High Treason is the verdict, and the ninety-year-old Marshal is sentenced to death.
Ultimately the sentence was commuted to one of life imprisonment, and for six years Pétain was confined to the Ile de Yeu, off the Vendée coast; during which time he never uttered one word of recrimination, Regularly he was visited by Madame Pétain,1 who took a room near the prison. At ninety-two, his health began to decline and Madame Pétain was allowed to move into the prison precincts. Shortly after his ninety-fifth birthday, his mind became no longer lucid and at the end of June 1951 he was freed. Within a month, he died — two days after the ex-Crown Prince — and was buried under an austere tomb in a little naval cemetery. At Verdun, his portrait in the ‘Room of Honour’ beneath the Citadel had been removed; his name chopped out from the head of the wooden plaque that bears the names of the ‘Freemen of the City’. There are no statues — Pétain forbade the erection of any during his lifetime — but in front of the Ossuaire the gardiens will show you an empty plot of ground where Pétain had hoped eventually to rejoin his beloved soldiers.
‘Perhaps,’ they say, in a questioning tone, ‘Perhaps, le Maréchal will be permitted to come back here after all.’
1. The Kaiser at the Crown Prince’s Headquarters at Stenay. Behind the Kaiser, the Crown Prince; on his left, Lt.-General Schmidt von Knobelsdrof.
2. General Joffre (centre) and General de Castelnau (left).
3. General Erich von Falkenhayn.
4. Lt.-General Schmidt von Knobelsdorf.
5. German 210 mm howitzer.
6. Lt.-Co
lonel Driant at his command post in the Bois des Caures, January 1916.
7. Pioneer Sergeant Kunze.
8. Lieutenant Radtke.
9. Lieutenant Navarre.
10. Lieutenant Rackow.
11. General Pétain.
12. The Crown Prince visiting men of the Fifth Army at the Front.
13. French troops ‘de-bussing’ on the Voie Sacrée, April, 1916.
14. German small-gauge munitions locomotive, used to supply artillery at Verdun.
15. Commandant Raynal, with his captors after the fall of Fort Vaux, June 1916; described as ‘the living image of desolation’.
16. Group of German artillery officers at Verdun.
17. General Nivelle.
18. Captain Oswald Boelcke.
19. German staff officers observing Verdun bombardment from a destroyed windmill.
20. French propaganda photograph at a base hospital. Original caption, as printed in New York Times in 1916, read: ‘A Soldier Who Has Lost Both Feet. Yet Walks Fairly Well With Clever Substitutes’.
21. French first-aid post at Froideterre.
22. North of Fort Douaumont, Christmas Eve 1916.
The Price of Glory Page 42