A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (61 page)

Verdun: Execution

“It wouldn’t take anything, just a slightly harder blow, for everything to collapse.”

—A
NONYMOUS
F
RENCH SOLDIER

A
nyone inclined to believe that some dark force beyond human comprehension intervened again and again to make the Great War long and ruinous would have no difficulty in finding evidence to support such a thesis. There is no better example than the Battle of Verdun, which in its length and cost and brutality and finally in its sheer pointlessness has always and rightly been seen as a perfect microcosm of the war itself.

Nothing at all was inevitable about the battle. Though Falkenhayn may have been right in thinking that Germany had to take the offensive somewhere early in 1916, he had other targets to choose from, even on the Western Front. Ludendorff, if given the chance, could have argued persuasively for action in the east.

And if Verdun was in fact the right choice, Falkenhayn’s tactics were questionable at best. They stripped his troops of the opportunity that his artillery had created to capture the heart of Verdun’s defenses. They gave the French, who by midday on February 21 were in no condition to withstand an attack in force, time to pull themselves together.

The French for their part had little real need to hold Verdun. Their front was firm at all points at the start of 1916, and historians have argued that they would have been wiser to abandon Verdun, fall back on the hill country to the southwest, and oblige the Germans to settle for a symbolic victory of minor strategic value. But the fates decreed otherwise. The defense of Verdun fell to men who were not willing to consider even an advantageous retreat. And so it continued.

The second day began with a German bombardment as shattering as that of February 21. The French could do nothing but curl up at the bottom of whatever bunkers or holes they could still find amid the rubble and pray not to be vaporized or buried alive. This time the Germans began their advance at the end of morning, and they came forward in far greater numbers. They found the French forward positions even more obliterated than on the previous afternoon, and they had hours of daylight in which to keep moving.

The courage of the French troops in the face of all this defies belief. On the first day they had held their ground first with rifle and machine-gun fire, then with grenades, and finally, even in the face of that horrific new weapon the flamethrower, with gun-butts and stones. Now they somehow managed, even before the lifting of the barrage, to launch small, scattered, and uncoordinated counterattacks. It was, once again, the French doctrine of attacking whenever possible and trying immediately to recapture any lost ground. It confused and slowed the Germans, but it also led the French into exactly the kind of slaughter upon which Falkenhayn had built his hopes.

An entire German division was sent to the Bois des Caures, still held by the surviving members of Émile Driant’s battalions, with orders to take it at all costs. During the first day’s bombardment an estimated eighty thousand shells had fallen on the Bois des Caures, an area measuring five hundred by one thousand yards. Now, on the second morning, thousands more had come screaming down. Driant lost still more of his men, most of his bunkers were unrecognizable, and his position was nearly surrounded. Coolly, he burned his papers and ordered a withdrawal during which he was killed—shot in the forehead, according to men who were with him.

When the day ended, the Germans had again pushed the French back, but their gains were again less than spectacular. Casualties on the German side were as light as Falkenhayn could have hoped: the two infantry divisions on the cutting edge of the attack would report fewer than two thousand men killed or missing in the first
month
of the battle. By contrast, French deaths exceeded twenty-three thousand in the first five days. Of this total, nearly twenty thousand were listed as “missing,” which meant they had been taken prisoner or, more commonly, that their bodies had been destroyed or buried by the shelling. It was a rare case—extremely rare for the Western Front—of defenders suffering substantially heavier losses than their attackers. Three-fifths of the troops with which the French began the battle became casualties within two weeks.

On the third day, after a night of intense cold that deepened the misery of the troops on both sides and ended the lives of hundreds of the wounded scattered across the landscape, the situation appeared to stabilize. The French troops continued to display an astonishing willingness to die rather than surrender or retreat, and they were inspired by the arrival of reinforcements from the rear and by increasing artillery support. The Germans again advanced, but their gains again were modest. The situation appeared to be moving toward a restoration of the old and familiar stalemate.

But suddenly on the fourth day, February 24, the French line began to fall apart. The day was a series of disasters for the defenders, and the first occurred hours before dawn. The Germans had been threatening the town of Samogneux on the right bank of the Meuse some four miles southeast of the Bois des Caures. On the night of February 23 a unit of French troops outside Samogneux broke in the face of an attack. After fleeing through the town, these soldiers told everyone they encountered, wrongly if understandably, that Samogneux had been lost. In fact it was still in French hands, but the commanders in the rear were sent reports of its fall. One general ordered a counterattack. Another directed artillery fire onto the town. At fifteen minutes after midnight French shells began falling both on the French in Samogneux and on those hurrying to retake it. By four
A.M.
the Germans were in possession.

The German artillery continued to blast away, and when dawn came and the infantry returned to the offensive, it quickly broke through a new line of defense that Castelnau had ordered to be put in place during his visit to Verdun late in January. With the breaching of this line, which had proved to be a powerful obstacle until it was overrun, French resistance seemed to dissolve. When the Germans attacked the next line in their path, the French ran. The Germans gained more ground on this day than on the first three days of the battle. They advanced three and a half miles, stopping only when the great bastions of Fort Douaumont and Fort Vaux, the two strongest points on the east side of the Meuse, blocked their way. French reinforcements continued to arrive, but as they did so they were sent off to whatever points appeared to be in greatest trouble without being concentrated or coordinated. They were quickly shot up without achieving anything. “It wouldn’t take anything, just a slightly harder blow,” said a French ambulance driver observing the situation, “for everything to collapse.”

The French general with overall responsibility for the Verdun region, Fernand de Langle de Cary, telephoned Joffre to say that he wanted to withdraw from the Woëvre plain, the expanse of gently sloping farmland several miles east of the city. This was an astonishing proposal: the Germans had not even attacked on the Woëvre. Withdrawal there would gravely compromise the French army’s ability to threaten the Germans’ great salient at St. Mihiel, south of Verdun. It would imply eventual abandonment of the entire east bank. Joffre, however, responded with the preternatural calm for which he was by now famous. Telling Langle de Cary to do as he thought best, he returned to his supper. Langle de Cary went ahead with the withdrawal. Almost as soon as he did so, German troops moved in from the north to fill the vacuum. It was another part of the spreading French collapse.

Shortly after Joffre finished his meal, Castlenau arrived to tell him of the deteriorating situation. He recommended that the French Second Army, commanded by General Henri-Philippe Pétain and currently being rested at the town of Noailles in Normandy, be sent to the west bank at Verdun. Joffre agreed and retired for the night. At eleven
P.M.,
having received alarming reports of fresh reverses, Castelnau was again at Joffre’s door. When a frightened aide reminded him that the commander in chief’s rest was not to be disturbed, Castelnau swept past him. Joffre, roused from his sleep, listened impassively to the latest news. He remained confident that the attack at Verdun was not a serious threat—his intelligence staff had assured him that it was a diversion in advance of a bigger German offensive planned for Champagne. When Castelnau asked permission to proceed to Verdun with authority to do there whatever he found to be necessary, Joffre again assented. He returned to bed and Castelanau departed by automobile.

At Noailles, meanwhile, another little drama was being played out. Castelnau’s telegram ordering the Second Army to Verdun had been delivered to Pétain’s headquarters, but Pétain himself was not there. He had left earlier in the day without telling anyone his destination. His aide, Bernard de Serrigny, knew his chief well. He summoned a car and set out through the dark countryside for Paris. It was almost three
A.M.
when he entered the sleeping city and directed his driver to the hotel at the Gare du Nord. There he roused the night manager. When she insisted that no General Pétain was on the premises, he refused to believe her. A search of the upper floors proved him right. Outside the door to one of the guest rooms stood a pair of army boots of yellowish leather—Pétain’s boots. Next to them—all suspicions confirmed—was a dainty pair of ladies’ slippers.

General Noël de Castelnau
Rushed to Verdun at start of battle.

When he answered the knock on his door and saw who was there, Pétain stepped into the hall in his nightclothes. Serrigny briefed him, displaying the message instructing him to meet with Joffre at Chantilly at eight that morning. From inside the dark room came the sound of a woman weeping. Pétain, as calm as Joffre had been, told Serrigny to take a room, get some sleep, and meet him in the lobby at seven. Four hours later the two were speeding northward out of the city toward Chantilly.

At about the same time, miles to the east, Castelnau was arriving at Verdun, where the sun was rising over an icy landscape and the German Fifth Army was beginning the fifth day of its offensive. The French were in such disarray, and so demoralized, that they almost certainly would have been routed if hit with sufficient force. The crown prince and Knobelsdorf saw the opportunity and were eager to exploit it, but their meager reserves had already been committed. The main German reserve force was still under the control of Falkenhayn, who refused to release it. He thereby wasted his second chance to take Verdun. He was sticking with his plan and in so doing was fatally outsmarting himself.

All that day Castelnau traveled from place to place, bringing order out of confusion and quietly taking stock. As he did so, stunning news reached him. Mighty Fort Douaumont, the centerpiece of the Verdun defensive system, a stronghold built to be impregnable, and impregnable in fact when properly defended, had been captured by the Germans. This was not supposed to happen.

The story of how it happened is like something out of Kafka. The Germans had brought to bear upon Douaumont the same monster howitzers with which they had destroyed the Belgian forts a year and a half earlier, but this time their bombardment failed. The latest improvements had covered Douaumont’s interior with alternating layers of reinforced concrete and loose rock and earth, a shock-absorbing dome that no shell could penetrate. The fort remained intact through explosion after explosion, the men inside badly rattled but unhurt.

Those men, however, numbered only sixty. Most of the fort’s garrison, along with every piece of artillery that could be moved, had been sent away months before. On February 25 the troops who remained were huddled deep in the interior, as far as possible from the mayhem above. Three little parties of Germans—one of them consisting of a solitary sergeant—crept up on the fort at different points and met no resistance. Each party, unaware of the others, found an undefended entrance. Once inside they wandered unchallenged through empty chambers and passageways. After much confused exploring during which the solitary sergeant discovered a commissary and paused to gorge on hard-boiled eggs, they eventually and half-accidentally took the French by surprise, capturing them and the fort itself. German reinforcements were quicker than the French to rush forward, so that one of the anchors of Verdun fell into German hands without a shot being fired by either side.