The Price of Glory

by Alistair Horne

  If a badly injured man survived the brutal jolting in the two-man handcarts used by the French to collect the wounded, the crude attention of over-worked medicos in the clearing stations, and the long bumping about in the ambulances with their solid tyres and unyielding springs, even then his prospects were poor. At the beginning of the war Clemenceau’s L’Homme Libre had violently denounced the insanitary railway cattle-trucks used to transport the wounded back to base hospital, in which many that had endured so far now contracted fatal tetanus. Though the paper was promptly suppressed by the censors, conditions improved only a little as the war went on. Even at the base hospitals the mortality rate was high. The surgery itself was often as crude as the steel that made it necessary. Over-worked surgeons operating under impossible conditions instantly divided the wounded into three categories; those who would die anyway, and were therefore not worth operating on: those who would probably survive, but would be of no further use to the war effort; and those who could eventually be returned to duty. On this third category, the doctors lavished most of their attention; this was known as the ‘conservation of effectives’. The second category was just patched up as well as time would allow. The results were often horrifying; describing them, Duhamel says in one terrible sentence — ‘Il y avait Sandrap, qui faisait ses besoins par un trou dans le côté….’

  When the final reckoning on war casualties came to be made, it was hardly surprising that of the three Western Powers France led with easily the highest ratio of deaths to wounded; on top of a total of 895,000 killed in action, another 420,000 had died of their wounds or of sickness…

  * * *

  To a sociologist studying human behaviour during the First War one of the most astonishing revelations must be the extent to which the fighting men of all nations adjusted themselves to, and then accepted over so long a duration the mutilations, the indignities, the repeated displays of incompetence by the leaders, and the plain bestiality of life in the trenches. When, in the course of the ensuing battle, one reads of episodes where courage failed, and when one attempts to visualise just what the maintenance of courage might have involved at Verdun, one can only be amazed that these ‘failures’ did not happen more often, did not become the norm of of human behaviour. Could we of the mid-20th Century, one asks oneself, stand one quarter of what the men of the First War had to put up with? Their stoical capacity to endure could undoubtedly be partly explained by the strong leavening of tough, hardy peasants in their ranks (and especially in France, where the strange solitude and emptiness of French villages today still testifies to their terrible losses). But all the men of 1914 had been conditioned under Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes’, established by the long years of Victorian solidity and its continental equivalents. They had been brought up to accept. Steady convictions and the unquestioning ‘theirs not to reason why’ that imparted total confidence in the wisdom of superior powers were their inheritance; ‘sureties’ that were to be erased forever by the First War.

  By 1916 ‘acceptance’ was really the operative word. Those who in 1914 had groused about conditions had by now either vanished or submitted. For every individual who tortured himself trying to think out a reason for life under these conditions, there were ten who dumbly, helplessly and unreflectingly accepted it as it was. In this mute acceptance of conditions there was a certain cynicism about the soldier of 1916, but it was a tough kind of cynicism. He no longer considered himself fighting for such noble symbols as Alsace, Belgium, the Vaterland or rule of the seas. He fought simply out of a helpless sense of habit, to keep going, to keep alive. Eighteen months in the trenches had taken the edge off the fine ideologies of 1914. Nevertheless, it seemed as if the man at the front could continue to accept almost indefinitely. Physically and morally, both the French and the Germans had become toughened to the act of acceptance; as it were, inocculated against the afflictions of war. Cases of pneumonia in the snow-bound trenches were almost unheard of, as were disciplinary lapses requiring a court martial. The troops that faced each other at Verdun represented the peak that the war was to produce. Like steel that has been tempered for just the right length of time, they were hard and tensile, but not yet brittle; no longer the green enthusiasts of 1914, nor yet the battle-weary veterans of 1917-18. Verdun was to be the watershed; beyond it neither army would be quite the same again.

  * * *

  After over a week of waiting and alerts, nerves at Verdun were showing perceptible signs of strain. The volatile French had come to regard the enemy’s exasperating passivity as all part of a diabolical campaign to wear down the strength of the defenders. On February 17th, there had been a mild morale-booster in the shape of news of a great Russian triumph against the Turks. But Erzerum was far away, and the French had long ago begun to take announcements of ‘decisive victories’ with the correct amount of salt. Still the bad weather continued. Then, on the 19th, the sun appeared and the mud slowly started to dry out. Joffre made a last visit to Verdun and congratulated Herr on his preparations. That night frost set in. The 20th was a radiant, almost spring-like day. Everyone knew it must be coming soon. At Grand Quartier Général, Colonel Renouard, Chief of the Troisième Bureau, was heard to remark gleefully: ‘What a hornet’s nest they will fall upon!’ In the Bois des Caures, more realistically, Driant wrote in a last letter to his wife: ‘The hour is near… I feel very calm… In our wood the front trenches will be taken in the first minutes…. My poor battalions, spared until now!’ And to a friend: ‘As for me, I have always had such good fortune that it will not abandon me, and I hope to be writing to you when we have crossed the worst passage.’ To encourage the nervous troops, at 1600 hours that afternoon, the French artillery opened up for the first time, with an hour’s bombardment. General Herr issued his final orders to his troops, incorporating the formula that was almost standard among French First War Commanders: ‘Resist whatever the cost; let yourselves be cut to pieces on the spot rather than fall back.’

  Night fell. At Revigny, thirty miles behind Verdun, the vigilant crew of a 75 fired at, and brought down in flames a Zeppelin setting out to raid communications; an unprecedented feat. Meanwhile between the lines a superbly clear, cold moonlight had lit up the tranquil landscape. In the Bois des Caures the Chasseurs stood watch with an affected casualness, hands in pockets, gazing at the mysterious dark shapes of the woods to their front and wondering what would emerge from them on the morrow. Behind them in the shadows there was an occasional cracking of twigs and the murmuring of muffled voices as ration parties brought up the last supplies; otherwise silence. Far off the sleepless Chasseurs could hear the steady rumble of the German trains moving ammunition in the Forest of Spincourt. Closer, over a No-Man’s-Land made beautiful by the flattering moonlight that erased the blemishes of war, there came a sound of German soldiers singing.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE FIRST DAY

  Il n’y a que la première gorgée qui coûte.

  PAUL CLAUDEL, Ballade

  When I knew it [war] I passionately loved it.… I shall not cease to love it, for all the splendour in which it has clad the most humble.—CAPTAIN LA TOUR DU PIN, Le Creuset

  DEEP in a wood near Loison one of Herr Krupp’s naval guns raised its immense barrel slowly through the camouflage netting. For the tenth time the sleepy crews went through their drill. They were getting fed up with being tumbled out night after night in the bitter pre-dawn cold — and all to no purpose. But today it seemed to be the real thing. Once again the battery commander lovingly checked the fuse on the shell that stood nearly as high as himself. There was a ring on the field telephone. The long-awaited order had arrived. The monster projectile was hoisted up and rammed into the breech. The crews turned their backs to the muzzle, raised their hands to their ears, and braced themselves as the officer shouted ‘FEUER!’

  Nearly twenty miles away the shell exploded with an earth-shaking roar in the courtyard of the Bishop’s Pa
lace in Verdun, knocking a corner off the cathedral. After all the repeated gun drill of the past days, it was not a good shot; instead of hitting one of the vital Meuse bridges it merely provided Allied propaganda with yet another example of German ‘frightfulness’. Somewhere in the vast labyrinth of Vauban’s Citadel where once British POWs had been lodged during the Napoleonic Wars, a bugler sounded a warning to take cover. The shells began to fall at a steady tempo. Another 380 millimetre gun firing on Verdun station was rather more successful than its sister piece; after a few shots the rails of the marshalling yard were standing in the air like twisted fragments of wire. Operation ‘Execution Place’ had begun.

  In the Bois des Caures, most of Colonel Driant’s Chasseurs slept on oblivious of what was going on behind them. Some three hours later, Corporal Stephane — known as ‘Gran’ père’ because of his 46 years — was gently awakening, to the homely sound of a coffee-grinder nearby. With it came the voices of two men arguing in the grumbly, good-natured way of soldiers in the early morning. From ‘Gran’ père’ Stephane’s dugout the day looked much like any other; if anything it promised to be better than the filthy weather one had had during the past few weeks. With all this talk about a German attack, a fine clear day like this might seem a bit ominous; yesterday evening, for the first time in a long while, there had been the unusual, and rather menacing spectacle of a German plane flying between the lines. But there had been these rumours almost non-stop since Christmas, and nothing had yet happened. One could almost believe it was all invented by the staff back in Verdun, just to get a little more work out of the poor sods of biffins. Lying between sleep and waking — a pleasurable state, were it not for the numbing cold — Corporal Stephane’s thoughts were all of the immediate problems of getting up and the more distant prospects of a leave that was due shortly.

  Suddenly, the whole world seemed to disintegrate around him. With the conditioned alacrity of old soldiers, the two men with the coffee-grinder disappeared below ground, cursing in unprintable French “why couldn’t the….. wait till I had finished my coffee!’ The air in the Bois des Caures seemed solid with whirling material. To Corporal Stephane, it was as if it were swept by ‘a storm, a hurricane, a tempest growing ever stronger, where it was raining nothing but paving stones.’ Upon the terrible din of the explosions were superimposed the splintering crashes of rending wood as the great 210 millimetre shells lopped off branches, or uprooted the trees themselves. Barely had the tree trunks fallen than they were spewed up into the air again by fresh eruptions. From his own position, still relatively immune to the shelling, Stephane watched its methodical progress with a certain macabre fascination. It was like a garden hose, he thought. First it swept Grande Garde 1,1 up at the front of the wood, then it ascended the ravine to Grande Gardes 2, 3 and 4, across to the concrete redoubt of R2 and the cross-roads, and back again to Grande Garde 1, repeating itself every quarter of an hour.

  At last, after about two hours that felt like the proverbial eternity, the bombardment crept towards Stephane’s little world at Company Headquarters. In quick succession, four heavy shells hit the nearby stretcher-bearers’ shelter, of which First-Aid Man Scholeck had been so proud — ‘four metres under the virgin earth, a metre for each man.’ To Stephane’s amazement, all four emerged by some miracle, clothes torn and covered with earth, but unharmed. Soon afterwards, another shell landed squarely on Stephane’s own dugout, reducing it to shambles. Barely reflecting on his own extraordinary good fortune, Stephane’s immediate thought was how aggravating to lose the balaclava helmet Madame Stephane had so patiently knitted for him.

  All morning the devastating bombardment continued. Then, about midday there was a sudden pause. Suspecting that the attack was now imminent, the shaken survivors in the Bois des Caures emerged from their cover. It was just what the Germans had hoped for, all part of the plan (though neither Stephane nor his commander, Driant, could know this). Now the German artillery observers could see which strong-points, which sections of trench in the French first line appeared to have withstood the terrible 210s. It became the turn of the precise, short-range heavy mortars to administer the coup-de-grâce with their huge packets of explosive, while the 210s lifted to new targets further back.

  At 6 o’clock1 that morning, Driant had left his permanent HQ at Mormont in the second line for the Battle Command Post in the Bois des Caures. Before leaving he handed his wedding ring and various personal objects into the safe-keeping of his soldier servant. He had been at his Command Post several minutes already when the first shells howled down. Quietly and composedly he finished giving his orders, then went down into the shelter, where the chaplain, Pèrede Martimprey, Rector of Beirut University in pre-war days, gave him absolution. Meanwhile, from 72 Div. HQ a Captain Pujo and another staff officer from XXX Corps had just arrived in the Bois des Caures by car and were leisurely inspecting German lines through binoculars, before calling in on Driant. But no sooner had the bombardment started than the two staff officers rapidly changed their minds and took the quickest route back to Div. HQ without stopping to see Driant.

  That morning, too, General Bapst himself had ridden forth on horseback from Bras, with the intention of examining the front-line at Brabant. He had got to Samogneux, half-way, when the curtain of fire descended. He rattled out some verbal orders to Lt-Col. Bernard, commanding the 351st Regiment, with instructions to alert units at Brabant, and then returned at a full trot to Bras. Every point in the Verdun sector seemed to be receiving the same terrible pounding as the Bois de Caures, all the way from Malancourt on the Left Bank down to the Eparges well south of Verdun. In the Bois de Ville, on 51 Div.’s front, the heavy shells were falling at a frequency of forty a minute. On the Vosges front, nearly a hundred miles away a French general who was to play an important role in the finale at Verdun heard the steady rumbling and wondered what was happening. In Verdun itself the deadly work of the long-range naval guns had already seriously upset the unloading of munitions trains.

  By 8 o’clock, after less than an hour’s bombardment, almost all telephone communications to the front were cut off, from brigade level downwards. One of the Brigade Commanders of 51 Div. organised an impromptu system of relay runners, each covering — if he lived that long — 300 yards. It was a form of martyrdom that was to become one of the hallmarks of the battle in later months, but under the initial deluge of steel the tenuous human linkage could hardly survive long. Nor could troop reinforcements penetrate the barrage; two companies sent by Bapst to bolster the line at Brabant only arrived, with cruel losses, when the bombardment had ended. It had taken them nearly eight hours to struggle forward some two miles. Effective command no longer existed. The German ‘boxing fire’ had succeeded even better than expected.

  Behind the line, the French gunners — those that had not already been knocked out by the intense gas barrage on their positions — helplessly watched the blasting of the infantry positions. Little could be done in the way of counter-battery work, because observation was useless. The few French spotter planes to penetrate the German aerial barrage reported that so many batteries were firing it was impossible to identify them; the woods hiding the German guns were said to be belching forth in one uninterrupted sheet of flame. Nevertheless some of the long range French guns nearly did better than they knew. At Billy, well behind the lines, their first shots blew up the Paymaster of the 24th Brandenburg Regiment, with his cash-box. At Vittarville, still further off, General von Knobelsdorf was in the midst of reporting to the Crown Prince on the effectiveness of the German bombardment, and on how feeble the French retaliation had been, when suddenly heavy shells began to fall around the Hohenzollern heir. In great haste, Fifth Army HQ withdrew to Stenay, where it remained for the rest of the battle. But apart from these two isolated minor coups, French artillery intervention was indeed practically negligible. By midday, General Beeg, the Crown Prince’s chief gunner, could report that only single guns were still functioning in most of the French batteries.r />
  To the German storm troops in the front line, the spectacle of the whole French defensive position disappearing in the vaulting columns of smoke had an effect like champagne. In the long wait in the Stollen, the damp had begun to rust the men as it had rusted their rifles, but now the miseries, fatigue and anguish of the past weeks were replaced by an intoxicated elation and optimism. During the afternoon, a young Hessian of the 8th Fusilier Regiment scribbled off a last note to his mother, exclaiming, ‘There’s going to be a battle here, the likes of which the world has not yet seen.’ German aviators returning from reconnaissance over the French lines gave vivid accounts of the terrible destruction they had seen; one told his commanding officer, ‘It’s done, we can pass, there’s nothing living there any more.’

  In the Stollen the infantry made their last preparations. The men unscrewed the spikes from their helmets, to avoid the risk of becoming entangled in the dense undergrowth of the French woods, and put on white brassards, so as to recognise each other. The officers turned their caps back to front, so they should not be recognised by French sharpshooters. No detail had been overlooked; every man had a large-scale sketch of the French defences opposite him, and squads of machine-gunners without their weapons were waiting to go in with the assault teams, to return to service at once any captured French weapon. At 3 p.m. the German bombardment rose to drumfire pitch; by 3.40 it had reached a crescendo, and company commanders eyed their watches. At 4 p.m. there was a cry of ‘Los!’ all along the line and the grey forms surged forward. On the left of the line a regiment of Brandenburgers went in singing Preussens Gloria.