A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (58 page)

Chapter 19

Verdun: Preparation

“The forces of France will bleed to death.”

—E
RICH VON
F
ALKENHAYN

S
hortly after seven
A.M.
on February 21, 1916, the third consecutive clear morning after a week of snow and muddy cold, an eight-mile sector of the German lines a hundred and fifty miles east of Paris erupted in a blaze of artillery the likes of which the world had never seen. More than twelve hundred guns, among them thirty of the gigantic mortars that had destroyed the Belgian forts at the start of the war and naval cannon capable of firing two-thousand-pound projectiles twenty miles, suddenly began blasting away at French positions on the eastern bank of the River Meuse. All through the morning and most of the afternoon they sent up a hundred thousand rounds of high explosive, shrapnel, and gas per hour—12,500 shells hourly on each mile of front. French reconnaissance aircraft reported that it was impossible to identify specific enemy gun emplacements: a solid wall of flame was rising into the sky from the woods behind the German lines. The woods on the French side were being reduced to stumps and craters amid leaping fountains of earth. Observers on both sides found it difficult to believe that any of the troops huddled in those woods could possibly survive. “Thousands of projectiles are flying in all directions, some whistling, others howling, others moaning low, and all uniting in one infernal roar,” a French officer wrote after sending one of his men to repair a severed cable. “From time to time an aerial torpedo passes, making a noise like a gigantic motor car. With a tremendous thud a giant shell bursts quite close to our observation post, breaking the telephone wire and interrupting all communication with our batteries. It seems quite impossible that he should escape in the rain of shell, which exceeds anything imaginable; there has never been such a bombardment in war. Our man seems to be enveloped in explosions, and shelters himself in the shell craters which honeycomb the ground; finally he reaches a less stormy spot, mends his wires, and then, as it would be madness to try to return, settles down in a crater and waits for the storm to pass.”

After noon, just as abruptly as it had started, the “rain of shell” came to a stop. The fire from the Germans’ long-range guns began probing deeper, while the short-range pieces fell silent. Thinking that the worst was over, expecting that as usual the barrage would be followed by an infantry assault, the French did exactly what the Germans wanted them to do. They came up out of their hiding places, showing their heads aboveground in order to survey the damage and watch for the coming attack. German spotters observed them and directed fire onto every point where the French had revealed themselves. The bombardment went on for hours more.

At four-forty-five
P.M.,
with the sun already slipping below the horizon, the barrage again ended. This time German troops did appear, clambering out of holes in the ground and starting toward the French. Their advance was both surprisingly timed—infantry almost always opened new offensives in the morning—and surprisingly limited in comparison with the mayhem that had preceded it. Nine divisions came forward but did so tentatively, not in a mass but in clusters scattered across four and a half miles, making use of all the protection afforded by rough hill country. Their assignment was not to overrun the French but to feel them out, to see where and to what extent the first line of defenders had survived. Wherever they encountered resistance, they stopped. In places they pulled back. The mortar fire resumed, again lobbing explosives onto whatever French soldiers had shown themselves.

All along the cutting edge of the attack, German officers were reporting that the suspension of their advance was unnecessary, that the defenses, where not annihilated, were in serious disarray. The mortars fell silent yet again. An order went out from the headquarters of the German Fifth Army for the attackers to move forward in force and take possession of as much ground as possible. But the order came too late: the sun was down, the last of the light gone. When the Germans went to ground for the night, they did so, in most cases, along what had been the first and most thinly defended French line. Their long-range guns continued to pound away as here and there snow flurries blew across the ravaged terrain. The French had been given a reprieve: one long winter night in which to reassemble their stunned troops, shore up what remained of their entrenchments, and start bringing their own artillery forward.

And so began the Battle of Verdun, the longest battle of the Great War and one of the most terrible ever fought. It had its roots in the state of the Western Front as 1915 ended. Both sides, as they settled in for the war’s second winter, had found reason to be satisfied but also many reasons for concern. The leaders of the Entente, especially, looked back on a year-long series of disappointments punctuated by disaster. Serbia had collapsed, and most of its army had been destroyed. Russia had lost Poland and Galicia. In the Gorlice-Tarnow campaign alone, a hundred and fifty thousand Russians had been killed, six hundred and eighty thousand wounded, and nearly nine hundred thousand taken prisoner. Erich von Falkenhayn told Kaiser Wilhelm that the tsar’s army was “so weakened by the blows it has suffered that Russia need not be seriously considered a danger in the foreseeable future.”

Though the French had been on the attack repeatedly during the year, they had accomplished essentially nothing and had done so at almost incredible cost. In the Champagne and Artois regions alone, three hundred and thirty-five thousand of their soldiers had been killed (though many were listed as missing rather than dead, their bodies lost in the chaos). This had brought to two million the number of French casualties since the start of the war. Some two hundred thousand British were dead—nearly twice the number with which the BEF had begun the war—out of total casualties of more than half a million.

Italy’s entry into the war, an event that at first promised to be decisive, had simply produced another stalemate. Far off to the East, in the Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian Seas, the Russians and Turks were colliding on yet another front where heavy loss of life was producing no results that mattered.

Still, there was optimism in Paris, in London, and even in Petrograd. The Entente’s manpower advantage on the Western Front was greater than ever and growing. If the Italians had not achieved the hoped-for southern breakthrough, they had nonetheless brought many hundreds of thousands of troops into the struggle. Even if they could win no battles, those troops were tying up Austro-Hungarian divisions that otherwise would have been free to go elsewhere. Russia’s military administration had been put under honest and competent leadership—a phenomenon that would prove to be short-lived—and its battered armies were being refitted and rebuilt. The little army with which Britain had begun the war was growing beyond recognition in spite of its heavy losses.

By the start of 1916 the British had nearly a million troops on the continent, and that number was increasing by almost one hundred thousand monthly. Every newly arrived battalion increased the price that the Germans were having to pay for their failed bet that by invading Belgium they could take France out of the war before Britain could get fully in. Britain’s and France’s armies were being steadily augmented by the arrival of troops from the colonies that both nations had around the world. The Germans and Austrians had no such resources to draw on and no possibility of moving troops by sea. The extent of London’s commitment to the war was demonstrated in January 1916 with Parliament’s passage of the Military Service Act. This measure, far from entirely popular even within the government (Prime Minister Asquith declined to take a position on it), was driven through the House of Commons by the steely will of David Lloyd George. It introduced conscription to Britain for the first time, ensuring that millions more men would be sent to the BEF despite a precipitous decline in enlistments. In all the nations of the Entente, the shell crisis was coming under control.

The British and French general staffs believed that their advantage was greater than it really was. Their intelligence analysts continued to assure them that the Germans were squandering troops at an unsustainable rate and soon would be exhausted. Actually, the opposite was true. The Germans had generally been far more careful than the British and French in husbanding their manpower, and their casualties through 1915 were only about half those of their enemies. Joffre and Haig, happy to accept the wishful thinking of their staffs, believed that the challenge for 1916 was simply to find the best way to overwhelm an enemy who lacked the means to respond. The answer seemed obvious: to stay on the offensive and go on killing Germans until Berlin could no longer keep its lines intact. Less obvious was where to do this, and when, but such questions do not appear to have troubled either commander very much. They concluded that their 1916 offensive, when it came, should take place
everywhere.
Determining exactly when mattered less than ensuring that all the armies attacked at the same time, making it impossible for the Germans to shift troops from one place to another to meet a sequence of threats. It was hard to imagine how, under such conditions, the Germans could avoid collapse.

The certainty that the Entente’s numerical advantage could only increase with time was obvious in Berlin. Thus the Germans could find scant comfort in their successes on the Eastern Front and in fending off Joffre’s offensives. They understood that the time available for bringing the war to a satisfactory conclusion was finite on their side—that regardless of how effectively they might fight a defensive war, remaining on the defensive would mean gradual exhaustion and defeat. They also understood, however, that as 1916 began they had enough troops in the west to compete effectively: ninety-four divisions on the line plus another twenty-six in reserve, versus ninety-one and fifty-nine respectively for the Entente. They understood that they needed to defeat someone somewhere while they were still capable of doing so. They had no way to decide on a specific course of action, however, without igniting the antagonism between Falkenhayn on one side and Hindenburg and Ludendorff on the other: the wearying argument about west versus east. Among the many questions for which there were no clear answers, two things seemed certain: Russia was crippled and likely to remain so for months; and the French could be depended on to continue their attacks no matter what the cost and how limited the potential gains.

The biggest strategic questions facing both sides were answered before the end of 1915. On December 6, at the great riverside château that was his headquarters in Chantilly, Joffre played host to a meeting of all the Entente’s top army leaders. Britain, Russia, Belgium, Italy, and even Japan were represented. The assembled generals had no difficulty in agreeing that the Germans, fatally weakened, could be finished off with one great symphonic offensive involving all the major combatants on every major front. They agreed also that this tremendous climax should not take place until late summer. There seemed no need for hurry, and a half-year delay would give all the allies time to assemble overwhelming quantities of artillery and ammunition. It would provide time for Britain to continue the seasoning of its green new armies, and for the Russians to recover.

Later in the month Joffre and Haig met again to settle on the outlines of their part of the overall plan, the Western Front offensive. Joffre wanted it to take place in France, north of Paris, where the front was bisected by the River Somme. Haig preferred Belgium, farther north, where success could lead to the recapture of the lost Channel ports, a prime strategic prize. Joffre’s Somme plan offered little chance of achieving any strategic objectives at all—nothing beyond a general pushing-back of the German line and the killing of more Germans. He prevailed nevertheless, in large part by virtue of owning a majority interest in the enterprise. Forty French divisions were to participate, while the British would contribute only twenty-five. An attack by sixty-five divisions promised to be unstoppable, especially with the Russians simultaneously launching a comparably massive offensive in the east and the Italians striking at the Austrians.

While the Entente commanders refined their plans, their German counterpart was putting together a scheme of his own. Working in his customary solitude, the secretive and deeply introverted Falkenhayn spent the first half of December ordering his thoughts. No option beyond the Western Front, he decided, could possibly produce results sufficient to Germany’s need. Confident that “the Russian armies have not been completely overthrown but their offensive powers have been shattered,” and believing that Russia was approaching revolution and collapse (in this he showed himself to be a man of sharp if premature insight), he thought it unwise to focus his limited resources on such an enfeebled foe. Ludendorff would have disagreed vigorously. But he was far off at the northern end of the Eastern Front, organizing the administration of conquered territories almost equal to France in size, and he was neither told anything nor asked for his opinion.