PENGUIN BOOKS
THE PRICE OF GLORY
Sir Alistair Horne was born in London in 1925, and has spent much of his life abroad, including periods at schools in the United States and Switzerland. He served with the R.A.F. in Canada in 1943 and ended his war service with the rank of Captain in the Coldstream Guards attached to MI5 in the Middle East. He then went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read English Literature and played international ice-hockey. After leaving Cambridge, Sir Alistair concentrated on writing: he spent three years in Germany as correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and speaks fluent French and German. His books include Back into Power (1955); The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (Hawthornden Prize, 1963); The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1970–71 (1965); To Lose A Battle: France 1940 (1969); Small Earthquake in Chile (1972, paperback reissued 1999); A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–62 won both the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize and the Wolfson History Award in 1978 (revised paperback edition 2006). His other publications include The French Army and Politics 1870–1970 (1984), which was awarded the Enid Macleod Prize in 1985, Harold Macmillan, Volumes I and II (1988–91), A Bundle from Britain (1993), a memoir about the USA and World War II; The Lonely Leader: Monty 1944–1945 (1996); Seven Ages of Paris: Portrait of a City (2003); Friend or Foe: A History of France (2004) and The Age of Napoleon (2004). In 1969 he founded a Research Fellowship for young historians at St Antony’s College, Oxford. In 1992 he was awarded the CBE; in 1993 he received the French Légion d’Honneur for his work on French history and his Litt.D. from Cambridge University. He was knighted in 2003. He is currently working on an authorised biography of Henry Kissinger, as well as a second volume of his own memoirs.
ALISTAIR HORNE
THE PRICE OF GLORY
VERDUN 1916
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Great Britain by Macmillan 1962
First published in United States of America by St Martin’s Press Inc. 1962
Abridged edition first published in Penguin Books 1964
Unabridged edition with new Preface published in Penguin Books 1993
Copyright © Alistair Horne, 1962, 1964 ,1993
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193752-6
CONTENTS
Preface
1 La Débâcle
2 Joffre of the Marne
3 Falkenhayn
4 Operation Gericht
5 The Waiting Machine
6 The First Day
7 The Fall of Colonel Driant
8 Breakthrough
9 Fort Douaumont
10 De Castelnau Decides
11 Pétain
12 The Take-over
13 Reappraisals
14 The Mort Homme
15 Widening Horizons
16 In Another Country
17 The Air Battle
18 The Crown Prince
19 The Triumvirate
20 ‘May Cup’
21 Fort Vaux
22 Danger Signals
23 The Secret Enemies
24 The Crisis
25 Falkenhayn Dismissed
26 The Counterstrokes
27 The New Leader
28 Aftermath
Epilogue
Bibliography of Principal Sources
Reference Notes
Index
To Francis and Jacqueline
ILLUSTRATIONS
1 The Kaiser at the Crown Prince’s Headquarters at Stenay.
2 General Joffre and General de Castelnau.
3 General Erich von Falkenhayn.
4 Lt.-General Schmidt von Knobelsdorf.
5 German 210 mm howitzer.
6 Lt.-Colonel Driant at his command post in the Bois des Caures.
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.
14 German small-gauge munitions locomotive, used to supply artillery at Verdun.
15 Commandant Raynal.
16 Group of German artillery officers.
17 General Nivelle.
18 Captain Oswald Boelcke.
19 German staff officers observing Verdun.
20 Poilu with artificial legs.
21 French first-aid post at Froideterre.
22 North of Fort Douaumont.
23 The glacis of Fort Vaux.
24 Post-war plaque on Fort Vaux.
25 General Mangin after the war.
26 The author with Ex-Lt. Radtke.
CARTOONS
The Sower
Wearing-Down Tactics
MAPS AND PLANS
The Western Front, 21st February 1916
The Verdun sector, 1916
Plan of Fort Douaumont
Plan of Fort Vaux
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It would be nearly unthinkable to undertake any book on the First War without reference to the Imperial War Museum, and for their unstinting help I am greatly indebted; equally to the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine of the University of Paris, with its unique collection of First War books, and to the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart, which made up in helpfulness for the material lost during the Second World War.
I should also like to record my appreciation to Captain Liddell Hart (almost as indispensable a sine qua non to writers on the First War as the Imperial War Museum) for his guidance and encouragement at an early stage; to General de Cossé-Brissac of the Service Historique of the French Army; to Lt-Colonel Morell of the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt of the Bundeswehr; to General Robert Huré, Commandant of the École d’ Artillerie, and Colonel de la Ruelle of the École de Guerre; to General Henry Blanc, Director of the Musée de l’Armée at the Invalides; to Colonel Goutard and Commandant Homant, Chaplain at the Ossuaire de Douaumont; to Major Diggle, late of the 9th Lancers, for accompanying me round some of the battlefields with a professional eye; to Mrs Philip Pollock for reading the manuscript; to Mrs Alvarez, who did much of the work on cross-referencing and typing; to Mrs St G
eorge Saunders for help on the bibliography (in the interests of compactness, the bibliography and source notes contained in the original edition have had to be excised in this edition), and to the Research and Information Bureau of Chambers’ Encyclopaedia for some material on air/ground communication in 1916; and finally to the French Embassy in London.
For photographs I am particularly grateful to J. S. Cartier and Anthony Meldahl, of the USA, and to the following: Weltkriegsbücherei, Stuttgart; Musée de la Guerre (Université de Paris) Vincennes; Kurt von Klüfer, Seelenkräfte im Kampf um Douaumont; V. Wienskowski, Falkenhayn (Siegismund Verlag, Berlin 1937); Radio Times Hulton Picture Library, London; Imperial War Museum, London.
The maps and plans were drawn by W. Bromage.
This Western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it again but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the Mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers…. This was a love-battle – there was a century of middle-class love spent here…. All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love….
F. SCOTT-FITZGERALD, Tender is the Night
PREFACE
In November of this year (1993), three-quarters of a century will have passed since the Armistice of November 1918 brought to a close the ‘War to End All Wars’, while it is now exactly thirty years since The Price of Glory was first published. Miraculously, it has remained in print ever since. It was written in a time of (relative) peace and prosperity. The Korean War had ended ten years previously. In the ‘you’ve-never-had-it-so-good’ years, Harold Macmillan and John F. Kennedy were at the helm; in Europe, de Gaulle and Adenauer had clasped hands on a new entente between the French and the Germans, marking an end to that old, murderous rivalry. The thought of another European war seemed to belong to a distant age of darkness and folly. At about the same time, several of us British writers, in our thirties, who had grown up or served in World War II, wrote books about that first conflict. In our latter-day superiority we chastised our foolish ancestors for letting it all happen, almost by mistake as it were, and letting it happen that way. They were donkeys. In our enlightened world, the Somme and Verdun could never be repeated, said Scott Fitzgerald’s Dick Diver, stricken by a visit to Verdun a few years after the battle. If there ever had to be war again, then World War II with its tanks and aircraft and Blitzkriegs showed that there were better ways of waging it than by hurling tens of thousands of men to certain death across the mud of No-Man’s-Land.
Our generation knew better.
Through the finely tuned balance of terror between the two superpowers that later became known as MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), and was perhaps not so mad after all, the Verduns and Sommes continued unthinkable. Perhaps in our self-satisfaction we chose to suppress the unpalatable truth that World War II had not really been won by tanks and aircraft, but by the Verduns fought out of sight of our Western eyes in the East, at Stalingrad and before Leningrad; where hundreds of thousands of Soviet and German infantrymen had died, in appalling battles of attrition, just as they had a quarter of a century previously. The reality is that, between two equally powerful modern industrial states, total war costs lives.
From the recent release of records in Havana and Moscow, we now discover that during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 – the very month that The Price of Glory was first published – the world had actually come closer to a nuclear Götterdämmerung than we, or even our enlightened leaders, had ever understood at the time; the deaths from which would have made Verdun look like a little local skirmish. Since then, apart from a series of quick but indecisive wars in the Middle East, we have had the prolonged nightmare of Vietnam, so demoralising to a generation of Americans, and with it the attendant horrors of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, a holocaust every bit as bloodily evil as anything seen at Verdun. We have seen the seven-year-long war of attrition between Iraq and Iran, with its static battles that were miniatures of the Western Front. And then, barely was the Cold War won than, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and with the disappearance of MAD, there was war, murderously vicious, in Europe once again; in those very same Balkan provinces of old Austro-Hungary where the ineluctable descent to Verdun had all begun in 1914.
Have we learnt anything?
The genesis of The Price of Glory dates back to the 1950s, when – as a young foreign correspondent in Germany – I lived amid the visible legacy of that last bout of Franco-German hostility, which was then still all too tangible. Now that relations between France and Germany, the root of evil in the world I had grown up in, had already taken such a miraculous turn, I began thinking of a book (it ended as a trilogy) which might trace the lethal course of these relations over the preceding century. A first visit to the sinister hills of Verdun engendered emotions that were never quite to leave me alone – fascinated by the story, and its profound historic consequences, admiring of the staggering courage of those, on both sides, who fought there, but appalled by the waste and sheer stupidity.
No other book I have ever written affected me quite so deeply; the tears came again and again. It was, unashamedly, an anti-war book.
Over the past thirty years, gratifyingly, the letters have flowed in from all over the world (perhaps most, curiously enough, from the United States), with the powerful reactions of readers to the battlefield, old photographs, the reminiscences of survivors and descendants, and sometimes deeply moving verses. Earlier, there were the ghosts, the reappearance of those long-assumed dead – like Lieutenant Eugen Radtke, the first German officer into ‘impregnable’ Fort Douaumont (see p. 124), making, in the 1960s, his first appearance in Paris from East Germany, the only time in his seventy years that he had travelled further west than Douaumont (He died shortly afterwards.)
Surprisingly, in all the volume of correspondence, little caused me to want to change more than a line or two in successive editions. There was the elderly Frenchman, ex-Lieutenant Kléber Dupuy, a hero of both wars, and very probably the last officer to stand in the way of the final German, last-gasp, effort to take Verdun, atop Fort Souville on 12 July 1916. He complained that – in the (not very immaculate) French translation – I had suggested that he had taken refuge within the fort (see pp. 299–300, 346). Unhesitatingly, I altered the record; we became firm pen pals. Otherwise, there was virtually nothing. The record seemed to stand on its own.
At Verdun today, one of the forts, Troyon, has been sold off (for a mere 100,000 francs) as a mushroom farm; the sad little plaque on Fort Vaux, once placed there by an unknown French mother, ‘To my son, since your eyes were closed mine have never ceased to cry’, has disappeared, vandalised. The pine forests that were once planted to hide, mercifully, the tormented soil of the Mort Homme have now been felled and replanted. But the hard core of Verdun will, one feels, survive as long as the French nation itself. In the wilderness, battered and crumbling, there still lie concealed, like Shelley’s Ozymandias, half-forgotten monuments to the folly, pride and heroism that epitomised what we still call ‘the Great War’. They continue to take their toll, at regular intervals, from the foolhardy tourist rashly questing for trophies or the ruins of deserted forts, and stumbling up against a still lethal shell. The busloads of Germans continue to flow up to Fort Douaumont, seeking the place where a grandfather or great-grandfather fell.
In the half-dozen or more times that I have been there since writing The Price of Glory, I never fail to be haunted by the majesty of the place – and the sadness. In 1966, at the sombre fiftieth annive
rsary commemorations, I found myself within a few feet of General de Gaulle. Erect as a ramrod he stood until the lengthy Son et Lumière presentation reached the date when he, de Gaulle, had fallen wounded in the battle and had been captured. Then he turned on his heel and left. Perhaps it was too much to bear, even for that icy titan. (Nearly two decades later it was also to Verdun that de Gaulle’s successor, François Mitterrand, came solemnly to seal the end of Franco-German enmity by shaking hands with Chancellor Kohl on that savage battlefield.
When I was last there, lecturing to a battalion of Grenadier Guards, the young officers were reduced in short order to respectful silence by the tragedy of the place, for all its distance in history. One remarked to me, ‘Do you know, there are no birds here.’ Until that moment, I had thought that I was the only person to have experienced that peculiar sense of utter desolation.
One of the most dread aspects of Verdun was how, after the first three months, the battle seemed somehow to have rid itself of all human direction and to have taken over. One German thought there could be no end to it
until the last German and the last French hobbled out of the trenches on crutches to exterminate each other with pocket knives …
Strangely, Scott Fitzgerald called Verdun ‘a love-battle’. Between the simple, slaughtered infantrymen on opposing sides, there was indeed a special kind of compassion, almost amounting to love. But there was too much hatred at the top which kept the battle going. For 1916 would, in a rational world, have been a good year to have ended the war, along lines of exhaustion. That courageous old nobleman, Lord Lansdowne, tried, but was shouted down as little better than a traitor.
As civil war rages in the Balkans and old animosities between Britain and Germany seem to be bursting forth anew, one realizes with alarm just what a frightening amount of hatred there is loose in today’s world. Could a Verdun ever happen again? There were moments during the Cold War – perhaps some would conclude that October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis, was one of them – when, for the West to survive, it had to show itself at least morally prepared to fight a Verdun. Of all the thousands of epitaphs written on the Battle of Verdun, the one that remains ever in my mind is that written by a Frenchman, Jean Dutourd, deploring the moral debility of his countrymen in 1940: ‘War is less costly than servitude,’ he declared; ‘The choice is always between Verdun and Dachau.’ Perhaps it still is; but it would be hard to find a more terrible choice for the human race.
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