A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (62 page)

In spite of the disasters occurring all around him, Castelnau decided that Verdun could be held. Being a firm adherent of the doctrine that when unable to attack the French should never give ground, he did exactly what Falkenhayn would have wanted him to do: he resolved that Verdun
must
be held.

Meanwhile not everything was going well for the Germans. For reasons that will never be known because every witness was instantly reduced to his constituent molecules, an enormous German ammunition dump at the village of Spincourt suddenly blew up. Four hundred and fifty thousand shells disappeared in an explosion that seemed to rend the heavens, leaving the Germans instantly and gravely short of ammunition. And from the west bank of the Meuse, a haven for French artillery because of Falkenhayn’s refusal to include it in his offensive, long-range guns were methodically putting the big German howitzers out of action one by one.

At three-thirty in the afternoon Castelnau telephoned Joffre and told him of his decision to stand and fight. He announced another decision as well: all the other senior generals in the area having been found wanting, Pétain should be given command not just of the west bank but of the entire theater. When Pétain arrived near midnight, at the end of a day that had included a pro forma meeting with the sphinxlike Joffre and long hours on crowded wintry roads, he was coming down with what appeared to be a bad cold. Castelnau briefed him, gave him handwritten orders to take command and to hold the east bank at all costs, and departed. Pétain slept for a few hours in an armchair in an unheated room, and when he awoke he was burning with fever. A doctor was called in, and after a hurried examination he declared that the general had double pneumonia. This condition was debilitating and potentially lethal in the days before antibiotics, especially for a man of sixty. Pétain would have been amply justified in declaring himself unable to continue. Instead, issuing strict orders that his illness be kept secret, he organized a system in which members of his staff would serve as his eyes, ears, and voice, and he himself would rarely have to leave his room. For most of the next week he reorganized the defense of Verdun from a sickbed. During part of that week his life hung in the balance.

The appointment of Pétain put Verdun in the hands of a man who, probably more than any other in the French army, was capable of organizing an effective defense while at the same time protecting his troops from unnecessary destruction. Pétain was an infantryman who had taken the trouble, in the course of his long career, to make himself expert in the science of artillery. At a time and in a place that put nearly unendurable pressure on France’s common soldiers, he was unique in his ability to understand the troops under his command: in his unwillingness to throw their lives away, and in his willingness to share their dangers. He was a leader, and the poilus responded to him. His was a remarkable case of the right man being in the right place at the right time.

From his first day in command, too weak to stay on his feet, Pétain began moving men and guns back into the strongholds that Joffre had all but abandoned. He ordered an end to hopeless attacks on lost positions, Fort Douaumont included. He installed a so-called “line of panic” where the French could gather for a last stand if the Germans broke through. He took charge both of the artillery and of the system by which Verdun was supplied. The guns were positioned, and their fire coordinated, to inflict maximum damage on the German assault troops as they came forward through the gullies between the hills. This turned the tables on Falkenhayn. Now the Germans were advancing not just against battered infantry but into a concentrated barrage. The French soldiers were soon aware of the change, and their morale rose swiftly.

Generals Ferdinand Foch (left) and Henri-Philippe Pétain

Though still concealed behind his wall of secrecy, Pétain saw that Verdun’s greatest vulnerability was its tenuous line of supply. Because it was a salient, a bulge in the line left exposed by the Germans’ 1914 advances to the east and south, the city had only one connection to the rear: a road that ran northward from the ancient hill town of Bar-le-Duc, forty miles to the south. Everything needed to sustain the fight—men, guns, ammunition, food—had to travel along this road. It had been widened in 1915, providing barely enough room for two trucks side by side. Never in history had an embattled army the size of Pétain’s been supported for an extended period through such a thin line.

Pétain’s staff could find only seven hundred trucks. All of France was searched for more, so that ultimately thirty-five hundred would be streaming north and south day and night. At the peak of the conflict, trucks arrived in Verdun at a rate of one every fourteen seconds. Any vehicle that broke down was rolled into the ditches that lined the road, and at any given time as many as fifteen thousand men were at work keeping the roadbed in usable condition. Upon unloading, the trucks would be filled with men—not with the wounded only, but with soldiers being sent away for recuperation from the horror of an unending artillery barrage—and returned to Bar-le-Duc. This too was part of Pétain’s plan: he ordered a constant rotation of units into and out of the combat zone, so that relatively fresh troops were always arriving and the men under fire had something more to look forward to than remaining under fire until they were dead. In time three-fourths of the entire French army—125 divisions—would be rotated through Verdun, so that it more than any other battle of the war became a shared national experience. The French writer and politician Maurice Barrès would call the Bar-le-Duc road the Voie Sacrée, the Sacred Way, and it has been remembered by that name ever since.

The actions taken by Pétain, coupled with the Germans’ lack of reserves, changed the character of the fight. On February 27, barely forty-eight hours after standing on the brink of taking the city, the Germans for the first time captured no new ground at all during a full day of combat. Kaiser Wilhelm, after days of waiting at his son’s headquarters to enter Verdun in triumph, gave up and left the area.

February 28 brought a thaw, melting the ice and snow and turning frozen earth to mud—and threatening to make the Bar-le-Duc road impassable. Thousands more men were assigned to shoveling gravel and scrap metal and whatever else was available onto and into the mud, and the trucks kept moving. Between February 24 and March 6 twenty-five thousand tons of supplies and a hundred and ninety thousand men were carried into Verdun.

For the Germans, the thaw was a disaster. Their roads had been severely damaged by French artillery fire, and as they softened into a quagmire, the movement of guns and shells became nearly impossible. Howitzers in forward positions remained short of ammunition and under fire. Forward units of German infantry found themselves under a barrage little less deadly than the one that had descended on the French a week earlier. Much of this fire was coming from a long ridge west of the Meuse that for centuries had borne the ominous and suddenly prophetic name of Le Mort Homme, the Dead Man. With every new day the Germans were paying a higher price for Falkenhayn’s refusal to include the west bank in his offensive.

Even at this juncture, one way remained open for the Germans to deliver a mortal blow without expending infantry. They could have directed artillery fire onto the Bar-le-Duc road, the Verdun lifeline, which was jammed to capacity around the clock and in constantly deteriorating condition. In preparation for his offensive, Falkenhayn had sent batteries of long-range naval guns to Verdun; the road was within their range. The Germans also had almost total control of the air over Verdun at this early stage; with bombing and strafing their aircraft could have reduced the road to chaos. Somehow—another of the war’s many mysteries—the Germans failed to make use of these opportunities. They continued to allow men and equipment to pour into Verdun even as movement of their own forces became all but impossible.

German troops struggling to move a piece of light field artillery

On the last day of the month, February 29, the crown prince and Knobelsdorf met with Falkenhayn to decide the biggest possible question: whether the offensive, which had obviously come to nothing, should be continued. There was much to be said for stopping, with German losses not yet at all painful by Great War standards. The capture of Douaumont alone was sufficient for propaganda purposes. The assembled generals surely were mindful of the reasons for stopping: among military strategists it has long been a truism that prolonging an unsuccessful offensive invariably proves futile.

The crown prince, however, appears to have been seduced by visions of what might have been achieved if his ideas rather than Falkenhayn’s had been allowed to shape the attack of February 21. He and Knobelsdorf declared themselves in favor of continuing if three conditions were met. The offensive must be widened to include the hills west of the Meuse, the French artillery positions around Le Mort Homme especially. The reserves held back by Falkenhayn must be brought forward and used. Finally, this widening of the fight and raising of the stakes must not be open-ended. The entire operation had to be called off, the crown prince said, as soon as it became clear that the Germans were losing as many men as the French. Falkenhayn agreed. His goal remained what it had been all along: “not to defeat but to annihilate France.”

And so the Germans, having in the space of a week thrown away two opportunities to capture Verdun, cast aside the chance to get out cheaply.

Background

THE LIVING DEAD

BY 1916 THE ARMIES OF BRITAIN, FRANCE, AND GERMANY
were being diminished not just by the numbers of men killed and wounded but by something so new to human experience that the English had to coin a name for it: shell shock. By the thousands and then the tens of thousands, soldiers on the Western Front were being turned into zombies and freaks without suffering physical injuries of any kind.

The phenomenon appeared in 1914, and at first no one knew what to make of it. The medical services on both sides found themselves confronted with bizarre symptoms: men in a trancelike state, men shaking uncontrollably, men frozen in weird postures, or partly paralyzed, or (though unwounded) unable to see or hear or speak. By December British doctors were reporting that between three and four percent of the BEF’s enlisted men and up to ten percent of its officers were displaying symptoms of this kind. Their German counterparts would record almost twelve thousand such cases in the first year of the war.

The victims got little sympathy. Career officers were accustomed to separating soldiers into four groups: the healthy, the sick, the wounded, and the cowards. They were predisposed to put men with nervous and mental disorders into the last category, to order them back to duty, and to mete out harsh punishment to any who failed to obey. But the number of men unable to obey became too big to be ignored or to be put in front of firing squads; it has been estimated that twenty-four thousand had been sent home to Britain by 1916.

The army’s career physicians agreed with their generals: this was not illness but malingering, and the solution was punishment. Any who failed to agree were met with contempt. But doctors who had been brought out of private practice with mobilization looked for medical explanations. Theories were offered. An early favorite was that the soldiers’ nervous systems were being damaged in some mysterious way by shock waves from high explosives. Thus the term shell shock came into general, even diagnostic, use.

Gradually it became clear that the words did not fit the facts. Many of the victims had not been shelled—at least had not been exposed to shellfire shortly before breaking down. More oddly, none of the victims had been physically injured. By 1916 a more sophisticated understanding was emerging. Charles Myers, a young English psychiatrist, decided after making a close study of the subject that shell shock was “a singularly ill-chosen term.” The condition, he said, had nothing to do with the physics of shellfire or with physical damage to nerves. It rose out of the peculiar conditions of trench warfare, an experience beyond anything the human psyche was built to endure. The troops were cracking because they could not absorb what was happening to them, because they knew themselves to be utterly powerless (bravery had little survival value when one was on the receiving end of a bombardment), and because they had no confidence that the generals who had put them in danger knew what they were doing. Men whose courage was beyond challenge could and did break down if subjected to enough strain of this kind. Conversely, many shell shock victims recovered sufficiently to be returned to action, and some performed heroically after doing so.