A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (59 page)

The war would never end, Falkenhayn had come to believe, until Britain was induced to give up on it. Playing artfully on Kaiser Wilhelm’s resentment of his mother’s homeland, he had been declaring as early as the autumn of 1915 that Britain had to be considered not just one of Germany’s enemies but the archenemy, committed absolutely to the destruction of Germany. “She is staking everything on a war of exhaustion,” he wrote. “We have not been able to shatter her belief that it will bring Germany to her knees. What we have to do is dispel that illusion.”

But Britain herself, beyond the reach of the German army, was invulnerable. The only way to bring her to the peace table was to demonstrate that a continuation of hostilities would be pointless. Falkenhayn saw two ways of making this happen. One was a campaign of submarine warfare aimed at commercial shipping, at starving the British Isles. This was a momentous decision, as important as anything Falkenhayn did or decided to do during his tenure as chief of the general staff. He was an exception among German generals in his political sophistication—vastly more sophisticated than Ludendorff, for example—and in the aftermath of the sinking of the
Lusitania
he had sided with Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg in demanding an end to the first submarine campaign. Since then, however, his pessimism had deepened, and when their disaster at Gorlice-Tarnow failed to weaken the Russians’ resolve, he had stopped hoping that anything could. When Admiral von Tirpitz assured him that the growing U-boat fleet could destroy Britain’s ability to wage war within two months (other naval leaders said it would take four months—or six), he found the prospect irresistible. “There can be no justification or military grounds for refusing any further to employ what promises to be our most effective weapon,” he declared. “We should ruthlessly employ every weapon that is suitable for striking against England on her home ground.” His response to Bethmann’s fears of American anger was that the United States “cannot intervene decisively in the war in time.” This view echoed the dismissal of British intervention by the generals who had decided to invade Belgium.

The other thing Germany had to do, as Falkenhayn saw the situation, was to remove Britain’s nearest and most important ally, France, from the war. Like France’s Pétain, he had been convinced by the bitter disappointments of 1914 that victory in the west was not going to be achieved through a classic breakthrough and envelopment of the enemy. He understood, as Joffre and Haig did not, that such a thing was simply not possible in this new industrial kind of war, a kind of gigantic siege in which networks of railways made it possible to seal any break in the line by moving masses of troops quickly. The sole available alternative, he concluded, was to break France’s
will
to fight. In reaching this conclusion he was influenced by what he knew—and his data were better than those available to the Entente’s generals—of the disparity between French and German casualties. “France has arrived almost at the end of her military effort,” he told the kaiser. “If her people can be made to understand clearly that in a military sense they have nothing more to hope for, the breaking point will be reached and England’s best weapon knocked out of her hand.” Falkenhayn entertained no dreams of defeating France outright on the field of battle, of sweeping her armies aside and entering Paris in triumph. His thoughts were focused on driving the French to despair and, once they came to terms, making Britain despair as well. These hopes underlay his strategy at Verdun.

Powerfully influenced by Joffre’s evident willingness to pay almost any price in the pursuit of limited objectives, Falkenhayn devised a plan for luring the French into a German-built killing machine. His idea was to threaten some piece of ground that the French would do almost anything to hold, some piece of ground dominated by German artillery. Under such circumstances, he said, “the forces of France will bleed to death.”

Deciding where to install his machine was not difficult. Verdun, the little city nestled at the center of a bristling network of fortresses, had held out against the German advance at the start of the war and had been left as a kind of spear point jutting into the German line. Strategically its importance had diminished considerably since 1914; the French no longer needed the kind of anchor it had provided during the Great Retreat, and withdrawing from it would have put nothing in jeopardy. But it had been a bone of contention between the Germans and the French for many years, and aside from Paris itself there was no place on the map to which the French people would be likely to attach more importance. That made it perfect for Falkenhayn’s purposes.

Verdun had a further advantage too, at least where persuading the kaiser was concerned. It lay opposite the German Fifth Army, which was commanded by Crown Prince Wilhelm. Responsibility for executing Falkenhayn’s plan would fall to the prince, and success would give the Hohenzollern family a particularly personal kind of triumph.

Falkenhayn spent several days in December in discussions with the crown prince and the Fifth Army’s chief of staff, General Konstantin Schmidt von Knobelsdorf. He won their support but was less than forthright in doing so. By not being clear about what his objective actually was (to capture Verdun, or to draw the French army into destroying itself in a defense of Verdun?), he planted seeds of misunderstanding that would later bear bitter fruit. He then met with the kaiser at Potsdam, and Wilhelm approved everything. Preparations for the campaign began immediately and in the strictest secrecy. It was essential to take the French by surprise, and to do so before Joffre upset everything by launching an offensive of his own.

The French of course knew nothing of the plan. But neither did Falkenhayn know that, throughout the weeks when he was developing his ideas and getting them approved, Verdun was the centerpiece of a controversy involving not only the French military but the most senior levels of the government in Paris. The origins of the controversy reached back to the first days of the war, when Joffre, seeing the speed with which the Germans had destroyed the fortress networks at Liège and Namur, lost whatever faith he had once had in the value of such fortifications. Before the end of 1914, with the Germans trying to push westward out of Alsace and Lorraine, he had ordered the abandonment of Verdun. The senior French general in the region, the same Maurice Sarrail who now commanded the multinational force bottled up at Salonika, had disregarded this order and managed to hold on even as the Germans almost succeeded in encircling him. Unimpressed, Joffre in 1915 began stripping the Verdun salient of guns and men in order to add muscle to his offensives. The aged General Herr, upon becoming governor of the Fortified Region of Verdun in August, warned that its defenses were deficient and asked for reinforcements. But his predecessor had been sacked for making exactly the same complaint. Though Herr was not dismissed, he got little of the help he requested.

Herr was not alone. Other generals both in Paris and in the field shared his fears, as did a more junior officer, Émile Driant, who though sixty years old and a mere lieutenant colonel had more influence and, apparently, more political courage than most of the others. Thirty years before the war, early in his career, Driant had been an aide to (and married the daughter of) a bizarre character named General Georges Boulanger. A blustering, hapless, ultimately ludicrous figure, Boulanger rose to become minister of war and seemed in a moment of national hysteria in the 1880s to be on the verge of establishing a kind of Bonapartist dictatorship, but he failed to seize his opportunity at the moment of crisis and ended by committing suicide on his mistress’s grave. Driant’s association with Boulanger, and afterward with a militant right-wing faction called the Boulangists, had made him an object of suspicion among the antiroyalist, anticlerical republicans who dominated the army at the turn of the century. When he found himself at age fifty still a major and without hope of promotion, Driant resigned his commission and turned to politics and writing. He was elected to the National Assembly (a position he retained even after returning to active duty at the start of the war) and wrote a number of popular books calling for a revival of national élan in preparation for the war with Germany that he regarded as inevitable. He wrote urgently of the need to strengthen France’s defenses along the eastern border, and among his works was a treatise on fortress warfare.

Perhaps because of his age, perhaps also because the cloud that had driven him out of the army still hung over his head, Driant was assigned to an obscure staff position. This position happened to be inside Verdun’s central citadel. Throughout most of 1915 Verdun was practically out of the war, never seriously threatened. In time Driant managed to get himself transferred out of the citadel and placed in command of two infantry battalions posted at a hilly piece of woodland called the Bois des Caures, directly opposite the German lines.

Driant was certain that Verdun would be attacked sooner or later, and his trained eye saw how grossly unprepared it was. Unlike his superiors, he was not content to send his complaints up the chain of command and accept the lack of response. By August he was communicating with colleagues in the Assembly. “Should our front line be overrun in a massive attack,” he wrote the Chamber’s president, “our second line is inadequate and we’re not managing to build it up:
not enough men to do the job,
and I add:
not enough barbed wire.
” Driant asked that his concerns be brought to the attention of General Gallieni, the unacknowledged hero of the Battle of the Marne who was now minister of war, and this was done. Gallieni, a strong-minded man though in precarious health, was himself by this time stewing with impatience at the conduct of the war and increasingly skeptical about Joffre’s strategy. His frustration is apparent in what he wrote in his diary on December 16: “In the morning, Council of Ministers, discussion about Joffre and the trenches. Worry about the next German attack. At certain points, the defensive fortifications are not prepared. The matter is grave. Must do what is necessary towards Verdun.”

Gallieni reacted quickly upon learning of Driant’s warnings, dispatching an inspection team to Verdun. When the team issued a report that supported all of Driant’s warnings, Gallieni passed it on to Joffre, requesting a response. Joffre, who was notoriously quick to see inquiries from the government as intolerable interference and skillful at giving no answers, responded in a kind of haughty and dismissive rage. “I consider that nothing justifies the fears you have expressed in the name of the government,” he told Gallieni, claiming that the construction of “three or four successive defensive positions” was either “finished or on the road to completion.” This was an outright lie, and in time it would contribute to Joffre’s fall. At the end of 1915, however, he was still strong enough politically to feel free not only to lie to the government but to take the offensive against anyone who dared to challenge him. He demanded to know where Gallieni had been getting his information. In adding that “I cannot permit soldiers under my command to make their complaint or discontent about my orders known to the government through channels other than those which the military has established,” and in referring to “officers serving at the front” and “politicians in uniform,” he made it plain that he already knew. His failure to have Driant dismissed, transferred, or court-martialed may be explained by a reluctance to break with Gallieni, who had strong political allies and was not a man to be crossed.

Matters might have rested there except for mounting evidence of German activity opposite Verdun and rumors, reported by Entente agents in Berlin, that an offensive was coming. Rail traffic behind the German lines increased sharply, as did the use of aircraft to keep French scouts at a distance. Finally the pressure became too great for Joffre to ignore. On January 24 he sent General Noël-Edouard de Castelnau, who had recently returned to his staff after a year as an army commander, to Verdun to conduct an inspection. A Franco-Prussian War veteran who by this point had lost three sons in combat, Castelnau was alarmed by what he found. He ordered immediate steps to strengthen the defenses on the east bank of the Meuse—Herr had been concentrating his troops on the west bank—and ordered reinforcements to be brought in from other places. The first two divisions would not arrive until February 12—the day Falkenhayn had chosen for the start of his attack.

A kind of blind race now began in which both sides hurried with their preparations and neither knew what the other was doing. That the French now regarded the situation as an emergency was signaled when not only President Poincaré but even Joffre himself, perhaps eager to cover up his long neglect, paid brief visits to Verdun and some of its outlying forts. Everything possible was done to make the best of available resources, which included far too little artillery, and to bring in more men and guns. On the east bank of the Meuse, where the Germans were massing a hundred and fifty thousand men and more than eight hundred guns, Herr was able to place only about thirty-five thousand troops. Though he had more than nine hundred pieces of artillery, more than half were light field guns and many were semiobsolete models without rapid-fire recoil mechanisms. At the center of the preparations, exactly where any German attack was likely to strike first, were Driant and the thirteen hundred men under his command. They were hastily constructing concrete strongpoints in the Bois des Caures.

The Germans meanwhile were accomplishing prodigious feats in getting everything in place. Helped by the hilly, wooded countryside and the cloudy winter weather of the Verdun region, they were doing an astonishingly good job of keeping the French from learning what they intended to do, or when, or even exactly where. No fewer than five new railway lines were constructed across the German-held portion of the Woëvre plateau immediately to the east of the Verdun hills. In a seven-week period between late December and early February, thirteen hundred trains—not railcars but entire
trains—
hauled in 2.5 million shells. Earth-moving equipment, construction machinery, and everything required to prepare the offensive and support three hundred thousand troops in winter came rolling up to Verdun. The guns were positioned in the woods and covered with camouflage—a new development in warfare, made necessary by air reconnaissance. Underground chambers capable of holding as many as five hundred men each were excavated opposite the French lines and lined with steel and concrete. In the sky above all this was the greatest concentration of aircraft yet seen on any front, one hundred and fifty aircraft, a German umbrella so impenetrable that, even on the rare days when visibility was good, the French pilots were unable to get a close look at what was happening.