In July, General Dubail, commanding the Group of Armies East, in whose sector Verdun lay, told a visiting Army Commission delegation that, of course, G.Q.G. was quite right. The actual Governor of Verdun, General Coutanceau, disagreed and was promptly sacked for his temerity. The following month his successor, an elderly gunner called Herr, was instructed by Dubail (acting on direct orders from Joffre) that ‘Strongholds, destined to be invested, have no longer a rôle to play’. Verdun itself ‘must under no circumstances be defended for itself, and the General commanding there must at no price allow himself to be invested there’. Meanwhile, to meet the needs of the forthcoming Champagne offensive, the Verdun forts were stripped of their guns; notably those in the flanking blockhouses, and in fact virtually all but the cannon immovably fixed in the revolving turrets. By October the equivalent of forty-three heavy (plus 128,000 rounds) and eleven field-gun batteries had been removed. At a stroke the whole defence system of France’s mightiest strongpoint was transformed; it was, in the words of one French military historian, ‘an imprudence difficult to qualify.’
Meanwhile, General Herr, under orders from a High Command contemptuous of the fortresses on the Right Bank, began to prepare a line of defence on the Left Bank, i.e. behind Verdun. No sooner, however, had he asked the Corps Commander in situ for a defence plan than the corps was moved to the Champagne, and right up to February 1916 the unfortunate Herr was plagued by a shortage of hands, through forces being constantly withdrawn to feed other fronts. By February 10th, two days before the German attack was due to begin, the French were still pre-occupied with works on the Left Bank; yet, towards the end of January as the German threat began to filter through to G.Q.G.’s consciousness, Herr’s limited forces were called upon, in addition, to work on communications to Verdun and positions on the Right Bank. ‘Everything had been started, and nothing finished.’
Not only were the numbers for the job grossly lacking, but the spirit was too. In contrast to both the British and the Germans, the French soldier has never been renowned for ‘digging-in’. Then, the troops available to Herr were also either weary from the Champagne offensives, looking forward to a ‘cushy’ life on a quiet front, or else ‘old sweats’ who had been too long in the calm of Verdun to see any point in getting their hands blistered for the whims of some new general. A visiting officer, querying a soldier about the lack of communication trenches up to the front-line — those vital, life-saving arteries — was told: ‘It doesn’t matter. One can pass very easily, the Germans don’t shoot.’ The rot of the ‘phony war’ at Verdun had apparently spread to high levels; ‘In the Verdun zone of battle there was not a communication trench, not one underground telephone line, no barbed wire. But huge entanglements had been placed around the ramparts of the city itself… for the benefit of visitors.’ It was indeed ‘un terrain à catastrophe’; such was the immediate reaction on taking up his command of General Chrétien, the man whose corps was to bear the brunt of the German onslaught a few weeks later.
General Herr, perhaps a little too mild-mannered and ineffectual, cannot be absolved for the lethargy of those under his command, but he at least was alert to Verdun’s terrible weakness. Repeatedly he pleaded in vain for reinforcements to carry out the essential works. The poor man’s despair is reflected in his remark to an aide of Pétain in the autumn of 1915: ‘Every day I tremble; if I were attacked I could not hold; I’ve told the G.Q.G., and they refuse to listen to me.’ And later, to Galliéni, the Minister of Defence: ‘What was most terrible for me, was the Young Turks of G.Q.G. At every demand I addressed them for reinforcement in artillery, they replied with the withdrawal of two batteries or two and a half batteries; “you will not be attacked. Verdun is not the point of the attack. The Germans don’t know that Verdun has been disarmed.” ’
So G.Q.G. remained blind to the danger threatening Verdun and deaf to Herr’s appeals, until, quite unexpectedly Joffre’s Olympian calm was shaken by a mere Lieutenant-Colonel.
Emile Driant, however, was no ordinary colonel. Early in his army career (at the time of Verdun he was over sixty), he had been ADC to General Boulanger, subsequently marrying his daughter. A brilliant soldier, he had published several books on war, including one called La Guerre de Forteresse, but, probably on account of his political connections more than any other reason, he found himself passed over for promotion in five consecutive years. He finally decided to resign from the army, and became Deputy for a constituency close to Verdun. During the pre-war years he had repeatedly attacked the weaknesses in the French Army, and the German manoeuvres he attended in 1906 so alarmed him that he wrote an article for ‘L’Éclair’, predicting ‘we would be beaten as in 1870, but even more completely than in 1870…’ In 1914 he at once rejoined his old unit, the Chasseurs-à-pied, as a reserve officer. He was attached to the staff of the Verdun garrison, but, despite his age, requested an active command and was given two battalions of Chasseurs.1 After the Marne, his Chasseurs, the 56th and 59th, had been given the task of clearing the Bois des Caures to the northeast of Verdun, and there they had remained ever since.
The Bois des Caures was a wood about two miles long and half a mile wide, running northeast to southwest atop a small but dominant rise. In 1916 it comprised the centre of the Verdun first line on the Right Bank, and lay right across the axis of any direct German assault on the fortress. Thus Driant found himself entrusted with the defence of a key position of the first importance.
Like most of his rapid-marching, hard-fighting Chasseurs, Driant was a smallish man, but his fiercely aquiline, mustachioed face (a sub-specie of the race that by 1918 seemed to have become virtually extinct) radiated will-power. In a letter of January 1915, Driant declared the Germans ‘will not make one further step forward; they will never penetrate to Verdun, even if they bring up all their 420s.’ By July, obviously uneasy, he was complaining to his Brigade Commander that he would be unable to carry out the works ordered, while at the same time adequately manning the front line. On August 22nd he was writing to his friend Paul Deschanel, President of the Chamber of Deputies, predicting:
The sledge-hammer blow will be delivered on the line Verdun-Nancy. What moral effect would be created by the capture of one of these cities!… we are doing everything, day and night, to make our front inviolable… but there is one thing about which one can do nothing; the shortage of hands. And it is to this that I beg you to call the attention of the Minister (of Defence). If our first line is carried by a massive attack, our second line is inadequate and we are not succeeding in establishing it; lack of workers and I add: lack of barbed wire.
The contents of Driant’s letter reached the Minister of Defence (now Galliéni, the saviour of Paris, who had no high opinion of Joffre), and in December a delegation of the Army Commission was sent to Verdun. On its return it confirmed to Galliéni all Driant had said. Galliéni passed the report to Joffre, asking for his comment. The intervention threw Joffre into one of his rare rages, and his reply, as Liddell Hart acidly remarked, ‘might well be framed and hung up in all the bureaux of officialdom the world over — to serve as the mummy at the feast.’
I cannot be a party [said Joffre] to soldiers under my command bringing before the Government, by channels other than the hierarchic channel, complaints or protests concerning the execution of my orders… It is calculated to disturb profoundly the spirit of discipline in the… To sum up, I consider nothing justifies the fear which, in the name of the Government, you express in your dispatch of December 16….
Probably only Driant’s heroic death saved him from the ignominy of a court martial, securing for him instead immortality among the French martyrs.
If Joffre, right up to the eleventh hour, persisted in his blindness to Verdun’s peril, it was partly because French intelligence was able to offer little help in penetrating Falkenhayn’s web of secrecy. Unfortunately for the Deuxième Bureau, it seems that just before Verdun the Germans had succeeded in breaking up an important spy network, operated behi
nd the lines by a courageous Frenchwoman, Louise de Bettignies. Over sixty agents had vanished overnight, and a complete silence had descended. In despair, and some humiliation, the French had been forced to apply to the British for information, but it was not till late in January mat Royal Navy Intelligence was able to glean some definite information from the indiscreet talk of a high German official at a Berlin cocktail party. At Verdun itself, collation of intelligence was equally ineffective. Few patrols were sent out (the suspense of lying in wait in No-Man’s-Land was in any case about as alien to the French temperament as digging-in); instead, for intelligence at lower levels, the French depended largely on their not very reliable listening posts, that were occasionally able to pick up fragments of conversation from the enemy’s crude trench telephone system.
Until January 17th, bad weather had virtually ruled out any aerial photography of the German lines. There were in fact three reconnaissance escadrilles at Verdun; but, alas, there was not one single officer on Herr’s staff who could analyse air photographs. (Nor was any expert provided until four days before the actual attack, when — though perhaps a little late in the day — he was able to predict the exact location of the main thrust.) On January 17th, a French plane that was twice intercepted by Fokkers of the German ‘barrage’ and had its camera smashed, nevertheless brought back some revealing shots of German guns behind the Côte de Romagne. Six days later a full scale reconnaissance penetrated again to the Romagne area, but neglected to photograph the huge gun concentrations in the nearby Forest of Spincourt. Half-hearted as the French reconnaissance efforts were, they proved that the German ‘aerial barrage’ was not watertight. If the French aerial reconnaissance failed, it did so more owing to a combination of bad weather, the artillery bombardment of their airfields, and pure lethargy. Up to the time of the German attack, only seventy gun emplacements had been identified from the air, thus the French were never aware of the full extent of the artillery confronting them. What the reconnaissance planes did record, however, was the absence of any new ‘jumping-off’ trenches in the front line; and this, as indeed the Germans had hoped it would, entirely persuaded G.Q.G. that no attack could be imminent.
For all the shortcomings of French intelligence, evidence of the preparations for Gericht was piling up daily. Some of the first rumours percolating to the nervous French had been rather wild; the Germans were building, it was whispered, a long tunnel fourteen metres wide beneath the French lines south of Verdun, to enable them to attack from the rear. Then the deserters, many of them Alsatians, began to creep over in ever-increasing numbers — always a sign of an impending ‘push’. With them they brought Herr details of the secret Stollen, the purpose of which he immediately comprehended. (But no, replied G.Q.G., doubtless these are purely defensive installations). Early in January, observers noticed that church spires behind the German lines, useful reference points for French counter-battery fire, were disappearing. On the 12th, Herr’s Deuxième Bureau reported that the German artillery had begun ‘ranging’; the 14th brought news of the establishment of new hospitals, and the 15th disquieting details of heavy troop transports passing through Longwy. As February came, deserters told of all leave being cancelled and voiced fears that ‘something terrible’ was about to happen.
In Paris, the Army Commission appeared less concerned at the threat to Verdun than at the outrage to the capital perpetrated by a Zeppelin attack on January 29th (to the extent of forcing the Undersecretary of Air to resign); up to a few days before the attack Joffre could still assure Haig that it was Russia the Germans were planning to attack; while G.Q.G. Ops maintained that if there were an offensive in France the main blow could be expected to fall in either Artois or the Champagne. But alarm was in the air. A flood of visitors descended on the harassed Herr. On January 24th, Joffre’s right-hand man, de Castelnau, arrived to dictate that all work be switched to completing the first and second lines on the Right Bank, and to creating a new intermediary line between the two. Even President Poincaré, clad in his usual incongruous chauffeur’s cap and leggings, was there inspecting the front from a special little rail car drawn by two mules. Finally the great Joffre himself appeared; but by far the most important arrival of all was the reinforcements Herr had been clamouring for over the past six months. Time was running out fast. The two additional divisions were in fact only placed at Herr’s disposal on February 12th — the very day the Crown Prince’s guns were due to begin their dreadful work.
All was ready. Across this strip of pleasant French countryside a few miles long, over 850 German guns — including some of the heaviest ever used in land-warfare — faced a motley collection totalling 270, most of them short of ammunition; seventy-two battalions of elite, tough storm troops faced thirty-four battalions in half-completed positions. Had the attack gone in on schedule the French at Verdun would have been caught in the midst of moving house and a hideous disaster must have ensued. As it was, at the eleventh hour there occurred one of those rare miracles that alter the destinies of nations. In this case, it undoubtedly saved Verdun, and possibly France herself.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE WAITING MACHINE
But the god of the weather suddenly took it into his head to derange all our plans. —CROWN PRINCE WILLIAM, My War Experiences
La guerre, mon vieux, tu sais bien ce que c’était.
Mais quand nous serons morts, qui done l’aura jamais su?
JACQUES MEYER
DURING the night of February 11th to 12th, French troops of the forward line at Verdun were ordered to stand-to in the first serious alert to be proclaimed. This was no false alarm. From his headquarters at Stenay-sur-Meuse the Crown Prince had issued on the 11th, for publication on the morrow, a proclamation which began: ‘After a long period of stubborn defence, the orders of His Majesty, our Emperor and King, call us to the attack!’ But as the morning of the 12th dawned, weary French outposts gazed out on an opaque white landscape. It was snowing hard, and through the thick mist and blizzard one could barely perceive the enemy front-lines. Over the whole front an uncanny silence prevailed; no suspicious noises, no unusual movements. Grumbling a little at their lost night’s sleep, the French troops resumed their normal positions. Their officers sighed with relief. On the other side of the lines, several hundred pairs of German eyes peering through artillery range-finders noted mat ‘less than a thousand metres away everything disappears into a blue-grey nothing.’ Farther back, generals anxiously studied the barometer; finally, at Stenay, the Crown Prince decided that both his proclamation and the offensive would have to be postponed twenty-four hours. If the all-important guns could not see, the battle could not proceed.
All the waiting German storm-troops heard of the postponement was when orders decreeing ‘interior duties’ were pinned up in the Stollen. On the day of the 13th, a second alert turned out the French, but once again they were stood-down on the morrow as the snow continued and the weather grew even colder. The notice of the previous day reappeared in the German Stollen, which the wags reinterpreted down the line as ‘in case of bad weather the battle will take place indoors.’ Day after day the same entries were noted down in unit diaries: ‘snow again… snow thaws, but fog… rain and gales… still rain and gales. Another day’s respite… rain and gales. Not a sound of a cannon… wind and snow squalls… misty and cold.’ In its devotion to la Patrie, the perverse climate of Verdun could scarcely have shown more zeal.
By 1916 the infantryman had become, in the words of one of the great French war novelists, simply a ‘waiting machine’. To this latest, most unnerving waiting game, daily extended, the opposing forces settled down in their different ways. A few keen young French officers tried to get their men to work on the dilapidated defences, but in the hard ground little could be achieved but the further exhaustion of already fed-up troops. For the most part the poilus, huddled in their oversize greatcoats, resorted to the time-honoured techniques for mitigating trench boredom. Some continued months’-old work on delicat
ely engraved bangles; bracelets for a wife made from the copper driving band of a shell; a ring for a fiancée from the aluminium of its fuse-cap, perhaps inset with the button off a German tunic; or a pen-cap for a child, made out of a spent rifle cartridge. Despite the crippling weight of his other kit, on his way to the front the poilu craftsman somehow always found room for his metal vice; his trinkets were capable of indefinite elaboration, often terminated only by a sniper’s bullet. Some gambled away their paltry sous of pay in endless games of piquet. In the Bois des Caures, a lieutenant of the Chasseurs toyed exultantly with a new trench mortar he had invented. Others stepped up the tempo of rat-hunting, simply as a means of keeping warm. Anything to silence the deadly question of WHEN?
To the taut nerves of the German storm-troops the protracted wait was even more painful. The Stollen had simply been intended as temporary shelter, and there was not sleeping accommodation in them for more than a fraction of their inmates. The remainder had to march as much as seven miles back to their billets each night through the snow and freezing sleet. The Stollen themselves revealed one important omission in the all-impressive attention to detail of the German plan; under the foul weather they rapidly filled with water and there was a critical shortage of pumps. So the elite German infantry often spent their days in baling out the Stollen, knee-deep in icy water. Day by day they subsisted on a monotonously unhealthy fare of chocolate and canned food, drawn from their emergency rations. Wild rumours preyed on their nerves; a French spy dropped by parachute had been caught near Billy; reports that a French officer in German uniform was spying out the forward position gave rise to an order to arrest any ‘suspicious-looking officers’. Faraway to the North, Crown Prince Rupprecht wrote in his diary on February 14th—‘with any further delay there will not be much left of the intended surprise’—and his fear was shared by every man in the Stollen. After yet another postponement a priest, serving as an infantry subaltern, wondered ‘Is this Gethsemane we are undergoing?’ The Germans, knowing to what they were committed, found it harder than their opponents to gain distraction. Even the more fortunate, surfeited with writing letters home, could find only temporary refuge in nostalgic, homely thoughts; some prayed with an unwonted, desperate earnest; others indulged, for probably the first time, in tormented thoughts about the senselessness of war. Each day the number of cases of acute stomach trouble mounted; whether owing to nerves or to the foul conditions in the frozen trenches and Stollen is not revealed. It was hardly the best way of keeping shock-troops in peak fighting trim.
The Price of Glory Page 8
