April 21st was a red-letter date for the German Command at Verdun. It was the day the Crown Prince, swayed by von Mudra, came to the irrevocable conclusion that ‘Operation GERICHT’ had failed, and should be called off altogether. He writes:
I was now convinced, after the stubborn to-and-fro contest for every foot of ground which had continued throughout the whole of April, that although we had more than once changed our methods of attack, a decisive success at Verdun could only be assured at the price of heavy sacrifices, out of all proportion to the desired gains. I naturally came to this conclusion only with the greatest reluctance; it was no easy matter for me, the responsible commander, to abandon my dreams of hope and victory!
The Crown Prince could recall how, the previous year, when Hindenburg and Ludendorff had stood seemingly on the very brink of a Russian collapse, Falkenhayn had terminated the immensely successful Gorlice offensive. More recently, it was impossible to forget how he personally had been let down over the reserves pledged for the first phase at Verdun. On top of Falkenhayn’s natural indecisiveness, the Crown Prince now knew enough of what lay behind his frequent references to ‘bleeding the French white’ to suspect that, even once a critical point had been reached in the battle, the C-in-C could not be relied upon to provide replenishments for ‘heavy sacrifices’ involved. Thus all the Fifth Army’s efforts would end in a futile waste.
With one exception, says the Crown Prince, his views were supported by the Operations Staff of the Fifth Army; ‘that exception was my Chief-of-Staff’. That same day, Knobelsdorf replaced the pessimistic von Mudra by General von Lochow, the commander of the Prussian III Corps, who in his views on warfare was roughly equivalent to the more ardent disciples of the ‘attaque à outrance’ in France. His rôle was to ‘introduce a quicker tempo’ in the Verdun offensive. Also that day, to the Crown Prince’s surprise and considerable annoyance, Knobelsdorf engineered — without consulting him — the transfer of his own personal staff officer, Lieutenant-Colonel von Heymann, who was evidently the only officer in the Crown Prince’s entourage who could stand up to the iron will of Knobelsdorf. War was now declared between the Hohenzollern heir and his Chief-of-Staff.
On May 8th, the Crown Prince’s resolve was strengthened by a dreadful disaster that occurred inside Fort Douaumont. Repeatedly the Fort’s Artillery Officer had warned, in vain, against the danger of an accidental explosion. Though no eye-witness survived, there is reason to believe that it all began with some Bavarian soldiers brewing up coffee — in a delightfully careless South German way — on upturned cordite cases, using explosive scooped out of hand grenades as fuel! A small explosion resulted which detonated a store of hand grenades, which in turn set off a number of flame-thrower fuel containers. In a matter of minutes, the flaming liquid was flowing through the corridors of the fort. Before any action could be taken, it had reached a magazine full of 155 mm. shells. It exploded. Those of the fort’s garrison who were not instantly blown to pieces had their lungs burst by the blast waves travelling along the corridors. Further away, others that survived the explosion became asphyxiated by its fumes. All lights were extinguished, and panic broke out. An even more tragic fate befell many who, amid the crazed stampede, were able to get out of the fort. As they emerged through the smoke and chaos, with uniforms shredded and faces blackened, they were taken by their countrymen defending the fort outside to be that most feared of enemies — French African troops — and were relentlessly mown down. Six hundred and fifty Germans, including the whole Regimental Staff of the 12th Grenadiers, perished. To this day most of them lie walled-up in one of Douaumont’s casemates that were devastated by the explosion.
Five days after the disaster at Douaumont, on May 13th, the third major conference of the campaign took place at the Crown Prince’s headquarters. Lt.-Col. Hoffman von Waldau, the Chief-of-Staff of X Corps, which now formed the spearhead on the Right Bank, opened with a thoroughly gloomy report. Front-line troops were being used up quicker than units pulled out into reserve could recover; moreover, they were demoralised by what had happened inside Douaumont. The centre division of his corps, the 5th, was incapable of any further effort. But, poorly placed as X Corps was for any new attack, its position on either side of Fort Douaumont was so untenable that just by sitting still it was losing 230 men a day to French shellfire. Therefore, on balance he thought, reluctantly, it would be better to push forward on to the high ground on the line Thiaumont-Fleury. The other Chief-of-Staff from the Right Bank, Major Wetzell, was no more confident, making the old familiar complaint of the lack of forces available. Whereupon, the Crown Prince hastily intervened to say that ‘we were only bound to attack if leaders and troops were fully confident of success’. Obviously they were not, so he recommended that once again the ‘great offensive’ on the Right Bank be postponed. Surprisingly enough, Knobelsdorf agreed. Furthermore, he went so far as to express readiness to try to gain approval from Falkenhayn for the termination of all operations at Verdun. The Crown Prince was delighted.
But, on arriving at Charleville-Mézières, Knobelsdorf in fact took quite the opposite line with Falkenhayn. Pointing out that on the Left Bank, Côte 304 and most of the Mort Homme had now been captured, he urged the irresolute Commander-in-Chief that all could yet be won at Verdun, if only the offensive were continued on the Right Bank. Falkenhayn wavered, finally gave his permission for the new attack, and even allocated a fresh division for it.
When news of the new decision reached Stenay, the Crown Prince was thrown into ‘despair’:
I exclaimed: ‘Your Excellency tells me one thing today and another tomorrow! I refuse to order the attack! If Main Headquarters order it, I must obey, but I will not do it on my own responsibility!’ And, indeed, Main Headquarters shortly afterwards issued instructions for the continuance of the attack on Verdun!
Three days later, Falkenhayn himself arrived at Stenay. The Crown Prince writes, utterly disenchanted:
I now became quite clear in my own mind as to the agreement between him and General von Knobelsdorf. The attack now projected, with the aid of the promised reinforcements, was to be only a prelude to a further offensive on a great scale.
Of the three German principals, the Crown Prince was now all for ending the whole Verdun offensive; Falkenhayn had lost interest and could be wafted either way by the prevailing wind; there remained only Knobelsdorf, the most subordinate of the three, who in his conversion to Falkenhayn’s ‘bleeding white’ dogma had become more Catholic than the Pope, and who supported continuation at all costs. Konstantin Schmidt von Knobelsdorf was undoubtedly a most forceful personality. His contemporaries described him as being ‘oak-hard’, and in his photographs the bullet-head, the upswept moustaches and rather pig-like eyes remind one more of a typical Prussian Feldwebel, with all its connotations of brutal, unimaginative single-mindedness. No elegant, indecisive Falkenhayn this! Well can one imagine Knobelsdorf, swept along by ambition, seeing himself as the organiser of victory at Verdun, exalted to become the Ludendorff of the Western Front. Over both his superiors to some small extent he wielded a moral advantage; on the Army List, he was Falkenhayn’s senior and had been his immediate predecessor in command of the 4th Guard Regiment; and just before the war he had been the Crown Prince’s mentor in tactics and strategy. But, for all the toughness of Knobelsdorf, one may well ask why the Crown Prince, with his unique access to the ear of the All-highest, could not prevail over the views of his Chief-of-Staff? In the Sixth Army an order seldom went out without the full support of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria; why, then, was the influence upon policy by the heir to the throne of all Germany not still greater? The truth lies in the Crown Prince’s own background.
‘Little Willy’, as he had come to be nicknamed in Britain, was probably one of the most maligned figures of the whole war. The leptic, unfinished-looking figure, with the narrow, sloping shoulders and almost deformed Modigliani neck in its high collar, and the elongated features of an amiable greyhound, was a
boon to the caricaturists. The two whippets that accompanied him even at the front and the outsize shako of the Death’s Head Hussars he usually wore rounded out the picture. He looked an ineffectual fool, and in some ways he was both ineffectual and foolish. But this was not entirely his fault.
The Crown Prince was just six years old when his father came to the Imperial Throne, and from that moment on all communication — even the most personal — between himself and the Kaiser took place through the formal intermediary of the Chief of the Military Cabinet. His education was placed in the hands of a series of military tutors, and before the pathetic little boy was seven he had been appointed the youngest corporal in the Prussian Army and made to congratulate his father on his thirtieth birthday in full uniform. It was perhaps no wonder that he reacted against the spartan, puritanical environment of Potsdam. Initially his reaction took the form, from an early age, of a series of not always well-chosen amorous adventures. All his long life the taste never abandoned him. On a pre-war state visit to India, he outraged officialdom by cutting a banquet to slip away to a pretty Burmese princess he had met at the Middlesex Regiment Ball. During the war, his entourage was frequently scandalised by his affairs with Frenchwomen in occupied France, and when, in 1923, he was secretly smuggled back to Germany from exile in Holland, his friends hustled him through breakfast out of fear that he might fall in love with some hotel chambermaid and thus jeopardise the whole plot.
In many ways the Crown Prince’s relationship to his stern father bears a passing resemblance to that of the Prince of Wales and King George V. Like his cousin, he was intensely bored by pomp and ceremony; after an official visit to Königsberg, he dispatched a typical wire to the Kaiser, reporting ‘seventy-five speeches, four and a half hours’ duration and the usual horrible banquet’. On another occasion, he was actually placed under house arrest by the Kaiser for skipping a state function. He loved sport (from which his crippled father was of course precluded), and in 1909 shocked the Court by flying with Orville Wright. He had an eclectic, and democratic circle of acquaintances, and was in touch with social and political trends in Germany that to many seemed dangerously avant garde. Many were the times when he had his knuckles rapped sharply for meddling in politics or foreign policy. He had a genuine interest in the stage and opera (his longest-lived passion was the American singer, Geraldine Farrar). Most evenings after dinner there was music at his Head quarters in Stenay, with the Crown Prince himself sometimes playing the violin, at which he was a fair performer. Of all his kinsmen, it was hardly surprising that his favourite had been gay, great-uncle Edward — his father’s bête noire.
As the war approached, the Crown Prince had become closely identified with the warmongering, Pan-German faction. At the time of the Agadir crisis, he had declared bombastically that it was ‘high time this insolent clique in Paris should be made once more to feel what a Pomeranian Grenadier can do’. He edited a book for children, entitled ‘Germany in Arms’, glorifying war, and was fond of speaking to German youth about the forthcoming ‘happy — cheerful war’, whatever that meant. At dinner, he once shocked the wife of an Allied ambassador by saying that it was ‘his cherished dream to make war and lead a charge at the head of his regiment’. America’s ambassador in Berlin, James W. Gerard remarks that the Crown Prince
surrounded by his remarkable collection of relics and reminders of Napoleon, dreamed only of taking the lead in a successful war of conquest,… said that he hoped war would occur while his father was alive; but, if not, he would start a war the moment he came to the throne. However [adds Gerard] I cannot subscribe to the general opinion of the Crown Prince. I found him a most agreeable man, a sharp observer, and the possessor of intellectual attainments of no mean order.
For those bombastic outbursts, Gerard shrewdly blamed ‘the effect of his infernal military education, commencing when he was a child’, and here indeed, when one recalls the poses being struck throughout pre-war Europe, the Crown Prince appears as little more than a child of the age.
What was remarkable, and commendable, was that once the tragedy had begun, quicker than anybody else in Germany, the Crown Prince realised where it would lead. Impetuous, irresponsible playboy that he may have been, the Crown Prince was endowed beneath it all with an insight, a basic commonsense that was certainly deficient in his father. (Had he been permitted to use these qualities, who can tell how different the fate of Germany, and all Europe, might have been?) Long afterwards, giving evidence at the Nuremberg Trials in 1947, the Crown Prince made this interesting remark:
My father said that the Crown Prince has a woman’s instinct in political matters. I wished my father had listened more to me. When something unpleasant was about to happen, I always had a cold feeling — purely physical. I also had it in the World War. And if I had this cold feeling, the operation in most cases failed too.
At the time of the Marne, the Crown Prince had communicated his concern to the Kaiser about the difficulties von Kluck’s right wing had run into — only to receive the patronising rebuff: ‘My dear boy! Your fears are quite groundless.’ After the Marne, the Crown Prince astonished an American correspondent by stating openly at Stenay, ‘We have lost the war. It will go on for a long time but lost it is already.’ In December 1915, at the very time Falkenhayn was submitting his Memorandum, he was writing to his father about the possibility of a separate peace with England or Russia, ‘if we do not want our fatherland to keep on fighting until complete exhaustion’. At the end of April 1916, he is reputed to have expressed to General Gallwitz his readiness to come to terms with France, and even to hand back Metz.
That this playboy prince-cum-amateur-soldier should have seen the writing on the wall before the professionals hardly enhances one’s admiration of the First War military mind. And amateur he was indeed. A corporal at seven, captain at twenty-three and Major at twenty-five, his advancement had been deleteriously rapid. In 1911, aged twenty-nine, the Crown Prince was sent off to Danzig to command a Hussar Regiment (it was a fairly transparent form of exile to preserve him from the temptations of political and amorous indiscretion in Berlin), but he showed himself singularly adept at escaping from the tedium of regimental duties. Simplizissimus lampooned him as clad in tennis clothes and remarking: ‘Danzig, Danzig! I’ve heard that name somewhere before!’ Thus, when promoted general (aged thirty-two) on the outbreak of war, he was manifestly Germany’s most inexperienced commander. Herein lay one main source of the weakness of his position vis-a-vis Knobelsdorf.
Upon mobilisation, the Duke of Wurtemberg and the Crown Prince of Bavaria promptly received the command of an army each. It was dynastically imperative that the Prussian heir should be placed at the head of an army, too. But, unlike him, the other two were serious professional soldiers and were entitled to their commands on their own merits. The Kaiser left his son in no doubt about this fact. At the same time he appointed the Crown Prince’s former mentor, von Knobelsdorf, to be his Chief-of-Staff, with the injunction: ‘Whatever he advises you, you must do.’ And the Kaiser did everything he could to ensure that his son should be no more than a figurehead in the army given under his command. At a parade a few years before the war, when the Crown Prince was a major rising thirty, the Kaiser had shown him up before all his men by calling out to the Brigadier, ‘teach the boy how to ride!’, and now their relationship was as distant and difficult as ever. Although the war had had, in the words of Winston Churchill, ‘a sobering and concentrating effect upon a hitherto careless mind’, he was still rigidly refused direct access to his father. To Ludendorff, the Crown Prince complained:
If I want to talk personally with my father about something and am admitted to him, he talks for an hour about something or other and then the time of the talk is over and I have not been able to say what I had wanted to say. If I present my ideas in writing, my father marks them for the appropriate offices….
In 1915, Grand Admiral von Tirpitz confided to his diary: ‘The Kaiser does not give him a chanc
e.’
Thus, just at the moment when the Battle of Verdun was about to enter its grimmest phase, the one man on the German side who could have put an end to the butchery was impotent to do so. And a similar state of affairs had meanwhile come about on the other side of the lines.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE TRIUMVIRATE
We have the formula.
GENERAL ROBERT NIVELLE
Douaumont! Douaumont! Ce n’est le nom d’un village, c’est le
cri de détresse de la Douleur immense.—CHARLES LAQUIÈZE
ON March 24th, President Poincaré, clad in that para-military uniform of his own design that somehow contrived to make him look like an elderly chauffeur, and accompanied by Joffre and Prince Alexander of Serbia, made his first visit to Verdun since the battle began. Climbing up to a fort, he noted that Joffre had put on a lot of weight and was badly out of breath; in contrast, ‘Pétain has in his eyes a nervous tic, which betrays a certain fatigue.’ In fact, Pétain’s ‘tic’ betrayed more than that. Already the battle had made a deep emotional impression upon him. As he stood on the steps of his HQ in the Mairie at Souilly, watching the coming and going along the Voie Sacrée, he had deduced as clearly as through the eyes of a combatant the full horror of the fighting before Verdun. In a passage that reveals a compassion to be found virtually nowhere else in the writings of the other great French commanders, he says:
My heart leapt as I saw our youths of twenty going into the furnace of Verdun, reflecting that with the light-heartedness of their age they would pass too rapidly from the enthusiasm of the first engagement to the lassitude provoked by suffering…. Jolted about in their uncomfortable trucks, or bowed by the weight of their fighting equipment, they encouraged one another to feign indifference by their songs or by their badinage…. But how depressing it was when they returned, whether singly as wounded or footsore stragglers, or in the ranks of companies impoverished by their losses! Their expressions, indescribably, seemed frozen by a vision of terror; their gait and their postures betrayed a total dejection; they sagged beneath the weight of horrifying memories; when I spoke to them, they could hardly reply, and even the jocular words of the old soldiers awoke no echo from their troubled minds.
The Price of Glory Page 28
