A grim quandary had faced Pétain from the start. There is little doubt that, tactically, in accordance with his ideals of firepower on the defensive and of limiting losses, had it been left to him he would have evacuated the murderous salient on the Right Bank, abandoned Verdun, and ‘bled white’ the Crown Prince’s army as it advanced through a series of carefully prepared lines. Soon after taking up his command he had prepared highly secret plans for just such a withdrawal, and put them under lock and key. After the war, Joffre claimed that on at least two occasions Pétain had to be prevented from evacuating the Right Bank; the claim should perhaps be taken with a judicious amount of salt, but at least it infers that the thought was never far from Pétain’s mind. But, whatever he might have liked to do out of good, tactical commonsense, it was brutally apparent to him that on the first move towards evacuation he would instantly be sacked by Joffre and de Castelnau; almost certainly to be replaced by an attaque à outrance general with none of Pétain’s concern about husbanding lives. Thus, to a very real extent, his hands were tied. Nevertheless, in compensation for fighting a battle he disliked, he was at least able to mitigate conditions firstly by placing the strictest permissible limits on French offensive action at Verdun, and partly through getting Joffre to agree to a system of rapid replacements, known as the ‘Noria’.
Pétain, from his own combat experience augmented by what he saw daily from the Mairie at Souilly, had at once sensed the rapid decline in the fighting value of troops that had been too long in the line at Verdun. Under the Noria system, divisions were pulled out after a matter of days, before their numbers were decimated and morale was impaired, and sent to rest far from the front where they could peacefully regain their strength and assimilate replacements. In contrast, the Germans (perhaps banking on the national ability to accept horror more phlegmatically than their opponents) kept units in the line until they were literally ground to powder, constantly topping up levels with replacements fresh from the depots. The weaknesses of this system have already been commented on. By May 1st, forty French divisions had passed through Verdun, to twenty-six German. The discrepancy had two important effects upon the Germans: firstly, it tended to demoralise the men in the field, who asked themselves repeatedly ‘where do the French get all these fresh men from?’; secondly, it deceived the German Intelligence into assuming that French losses were far heavier than they in fact were — thus further encouraging Knobelsdorf to continue the offensive. (To the French, it also meant that more men of that generation would have the memory of Verdun engraved upon their memory than any other First War battle.)
Back at Chantilly, Joffre was becoming increasingly restive at Pétain’s conduct of the battle. Admittedly the territorial losses had been minute, but since his appointment Pétain seemed to have done nothing but surrender ground, and by the beginning of April he was still refusing to contemplate a major counter-stroke. It was strictly against the book! Moreover — with their miraculous arithmetical process, described by Pierrefeu as simply adding ‘a hundred thousand or thereabouts’ every fortnight — the Deuxième Bureau placed German casualties by April 1st at 200,000 to only 65,000 French. (Strangely enough, the magical figure of 200,000 was also the figure selected by Falkenhayn as representing French losses up to that date; as has already been noted, the true totals were in fact 81,607 Germans to 89,000 French.) Deceived by these estimates, Joffre could not believe the enemy would be able to maintain his effort much longer; goaded on by the Young Turks of G.Q.G., Pétain’s tic worsened, but he stood firm. At Chantilly, it was noted that for the first time in his career as Generalissimo, the mighty Joffre found his authority thwarted. Worse still, the needs of Pétain’s Noria were draining the reserves that Joffre had been hoarding for the great Anglo-French ‘push’ on the Somme that summer, upon which he had staked his all. In his Memoirs, Joffre claims that if he had yielded to all Pétain’s demands for reinforcements ‘the whole French Army would have been absorbed in this battle…. It would have meant accepting the imposition of the enemy’s will.’ In fact, by ‘accepting’ Falkenhayn’s challenge at Verdun in the first place, the French High Command had obviously done just that; and, with the hand de Castelnau had dealt Pétain in February, it looked to the man on the spot as if the securing of Verdun would indeed require ‘the whole French Army’.
Thus began the rift between Joffre and Pétain. Joffre was determined not to abandon the Somme offensive, determined to give it first priority in men and material; but, at the same time, he also wanted Pétain to strike an offensive attitude at Verdun. Pétain, growing ever more aggrieved at G.Q.G.’s lack of sympathy, was convinced that — if Verdun were to be held — the major French effort for 1916 must be devoted to it; eventually moving to the extreme position that the Somme should be left entirely to the British. He also left Joffre in no doubt that he thought that a break-through would not be achieved on the Somme with the means available. As a general, Pétain certainly had his limitations. He had none of the broad strategic grasp of Foch or de Castelnau; with his gaze concentrated upon his immediate front (as so often happens to field commanders), he lacked the overall vision of the war that was accessible to Joffre. All this is true. But, though Pétain may have seen Verdun as everything, what he saw there in terms of human intangibles the French Army mutinies of spring 1917 proved he saw with far greater clairvoyance than Joffre, Foch or de Castelnau.
Within a matter of weeks of Pétain’s appointment, Joffre was thoroughly regretting it and already contemplating ways of removing him. But Pétain, regarded as the ‘saviour of Verdun’, was already the idol of France, while Joffre’s own popularity — following the stories that had begun to creep out about Verdun’s unpreparedness — was at its lowest ebb since the first disastrous month of the war. Those inveterate intriguers at Chantilly counselled that it would be professional suicide to sack Pétain now. Suddenly, the advent of a new star at Verdun presented Joffre with a ready-made solution.
General Robert Nivelle, 58 at the time of Verdun, came from an old military family and had a mixture of Italian and English blood. Though he afterwards chose to become a gunner, he had passed through the famous cavalry school of Saumur, and still retained all the panache of a French cavalryman. At the Marne, Nivelle had been a colonel in command of an artillery regiment. When the French infantry in front of him broke, Nivelle drove his field-guns through the retreating rabble and engaged von Kluck’s troops at close range with such speed and precision that they too broke and ran. In October 1914, Nivelle was promoted brigadier; a divisional commander three months later, and by December 1915 he had been put in command of III Corps. Meteor-like, his orbit was swift and brilliant; also like a meteor, he was to disappear without a trace. In the rapidity of his early promotion he resembled Pétain, but no further. He was an out-and-out Grandmaisonite, and like Foch he believed that victory was purely a matter of moral force. His ambition was as boundless as his self-confidence. When it came to casualty lists among the infantry he commanded, he combined the blind eye of an artilleryman with the unshakeable belief that so long as the end was success the means mattered not. But, in complete antithesis to both Pétain and Joffre, the supreme attribute of Nivelle — cultured, courteous, suave and eloquent — was his ability to handle the politicians. His allure seems to have been almost hypnotic. Abel Ferry, the youngest and most critical member of the parliamentary Army Commission, gives a typical description of the impact of Nivelle:
Good impression; clear eyes which look you in the face, neat and precise thoughts, no bluff in his speech, good sense dominates everything.
Poincaré was utterly captivated; even Pierrefeu, the cynical chronicler of G.Q.G., fell at first sight, and Lloyd-George, for all his generic, instinctive distrust of generals, was seduced into endorsing the disastrous offensive that bore Nivelle’s name, in 1917. With an English mother, Nivelle’s perfect English may have played its part here, but it was his irradiating self-confidence that really swept people away. His square shoulders gave a
potent impression of strength and audacity. His face burned with ruthless determination, and when he expressed an intent his audience was somehow made to feel that it was already fait accompli. It was he, not Pétain as is sometimes thought, who gave birth to the immortalised challenge at Verdun:
‘Ils ne passeront pas!’
But Nivelle was in reality a triumvirate. His left hand was his Chief-of-Staff, a sombre and sinister character called Major d’Alenson. Immensely tall and bony, with a cavernous face and arresting eyes:
Always badly dressed, with untidy hair and beard, he walked about the corridors with his hand in the belt of his breeches, seeing no one, lost in thought with the air of a melancholy Quixote… [says Pierrefeu].
One of the most brilliant officers that ever passed through Staff College, d’Alenson was Nivelle’s éminence grise. He was also dying of consumption, but only he knew it. Feverish, enflamed, sometimes apparently verging on insanity, he believed it was his mission to save France before he died. ‘Victory must be won before I die,’ he remarked later, ‘and I have but a short time to live’. To one under sentence of death himself, the lives of others cannot have assumed undue importance. On and on he drove the hardly unwilling Nivelle into the attack. It was he, more than anyone, who was to fire his commander’s imagination with the fatal 1917 offensive on the Chemin des Dames which broke the French Army. A few weeks later he was dead.
Nivelle’s right hand, his chief executive, his hatchet-man, was the toughest general in the whole French Army; Charles Mangin, sometimes known to his troops as ‘the butcher’ or ‘eater of men’. At the time of his entry into this account, Mangin was commanding the 5th Division in Nivelle’s III Corps, aged 49. Born in the ‘Lost Territories’, Mangin was the French colonial soldier par excellence. Two-thirds of his peacetime career had been spent in the colonies; much of the time engaged in ‘pacification’, during which he had been wounded three times. In 1898, as a lieutenant he had led the advanced guard of Marchand’s remarkable expedition across Africa to Fashoda, which had so nearly brought France to blows with Britain. When he returned to France to lead a brigade to war, he still slept whenever possible in a desert tent — regardless of the obvious dangers. He was a staunch admirer of the qualities of African troops; though this admiration often inflicted terrible massacres upon the wretched colonials thrown into his offensives.
Mangin was a killer, and he looked the part. His face was burnt and eroded by the Sahara; his square jaw seemed permanently set, like a terrier with its teeth clamped into a rat that it was vigorously worrying to death. His mouth was wide, thin-lipped and cruel; his jet-black hair stood up fiercely en brosse. He walked with a quick, nervous gait, and had a Napoleonic habit of standing with his hands behind his back, his head thrust forward. An American correspondent (who whole-heartedly approved of Mangin) remarked that ‘his whole appearance gave the impression of an eagle searching for prey’. Seeing him again at the Victory Parade, the same correspondent noted that as Mangin approached the Arc de Triomphe, characteristically ‘his sword rises and sweeps back in the most splendid salute ever seen’. The only unexpected thing about this savage-looking soldier was his surprisingly high-pitched voice and great charm.
Whatever else might be said about Mangin, he was one of the technically most competent generals in the French Army. Precise to a fault, nobody was better at co-ordinating an attack and at getting his troops over the top at zero hour. Every bit as self-confident as Nivelle, he assured his men that he possessed ‘Baraka’ (an Arab expression for heaven-endowed good fortune). They believed it, and sacrificed themselves again and again for him — even after 1917. Teddy Roosevelt, too, was apparently swept away by Mangin’s infectious vigour (perhaps the excitement at meeting so kindred a spirit proved too much for him) in the spring of 1914, and cancelled his visit to Berlin, deciding to stake his money on France — so the story goes. Mangin’s motto was: ‘concentrate all at one point; but then, right to the limit!’ The trouble was he knew no limit. Fear and death meant nothing to him. A real front-line general, more than once he had been wounded during the war while taking grotesque risks. After his disgrace in 1917 there was no doubting his sincerity when he expressed the wish to re-engage as a simple soldier; nor is there any doubt that, had he been allowed to do so, he would have given his life as carelessly as he had required the men under his command to give up theirs. Winston Churchill sums him up brilliantly:
… reckless of all lives and of none more than his own, charging at the head of his troops, fighting rifle in hand when he could escape from his headquarters, thundering down the telephone implacable orders to his subordinates and when necessary defiance to his superiors, Mangin beaten or triumphant, Mangin the Hero or Mangin the Butcher as he was alternately regarded, became on the anvil of Verdun the fiercest warrior-figure of France.
As Mangin’s erstwhile chief in Morocco, the great Lyautey remarked of him,
there is no man more capable of getting you into a mess… and there’s no one more capable of getting you out of it!
But could France, in 1916, afford the cost of extrication in terms of the so precious blood of her youth?
Shortly before the Battle of Verdun began, Nivelle had saved Mangin from disgrace when Territorials under his command (apparently pressed too hard) broke badly. From that moment until the end of Nivelle’s brief meteoric career, the two were inseparable. At the end of March, III Corps, commanded by the Nivelle triumvirate was transferred to Verdun and allocated the sector opposite Douaumont on the Right Bank. On the very day Mangin arrived, April 2nd, news reached him that a surprise German attack had taken the important Bois de la Caillette. Immediately he threw the only regiment at his disposal into the counter-attack. The wood was retaken three days later. The attack heralded a new French posture on the Right Bank. Few days now went by without some vigorous small-scale attack being launched by Nivelle-Mangin. Were they worth the cost? The Crown Prince admits they contributed to dislocating German plans for resuming the offensive that side of the Meuse; but they were probably less effective than the stubborn defensive battle ordained by Pétain on the Left Bank or the German’s own internal difficulties. Meanwhile Pétain fretted at their costliness and did his best to restrain Nivelle. But matters were soon to be placed beyond his control. On April 10th, Joffre visited Nivelle’s sector and
was so agreeably impressed by the results obtained that I asked Pétain to give General Nivelle the means of pursuing his advantage on the right and left of Douaumont. But Pétain’s demands became more and more pressing….
Joffre now had his opportunity. Instead of sacking the obdurate Pétain, he would promote him.
On April 19th, de Castelnau telephoned Pétain from Chantilly. The Commander-in-Chief, he said, had decided to limoger de Langle de Cary, Commander of Army Group Centre; Pétain was to move into his shoes; and Nivelle would take over the Second Army at Verdun. Pétain would still be in indirect control of the battle, insofar as the Second Army lay in his group, but henceforth he would exercise this control from the distance of Bar-le-Duc, while Nivelle would be the man on the spot. It was an admirably neat solution. Joffre explained it to posterity as a
means of withdrawing General Pétain from the battlefield of Verdun, hoping that by giving him a more distant perspective… he would take in the general situation with a clearer view.… He was not pleased.
It was a mild understatement. Bitter, frustrated, and thoroughly pessimistic at what he sensed lay ahead for ‘his’ troops at Verdun, Pétain packed up his simple one-room HQ at Souilly. On May 1st, Nivelle arrived. As he mounted the steps of the Mairie, the departing Serrigny heard him declare to d’Alenson, evidently for the consumption of the world at large: ‘We have the formula!’ Within a few days of Pétain’s withdrawal, Joffre followed up by renouncing the Noria system; henceforth whatever miracles it might be required to perform, the army at Verdun could expect no more regular supplies of battle-fresh troops.
* * *
When
Mangin (then in another part of the front) heard of the German capture of Fort Douaumont, he told his officers: ‘the retaking of the fort by our troops would be a feat of arms that would excite the imagination of the Universe’. Now, as he peered out from his new HQ in Fort Souville at Douaumont’s great dome just two miles away, he fell prey to the same irresistible magnetism that had acted upon Haupt and his Brandenburgers. He could think of nothing else but its recapture. The fort was indeed a crippling thorn in the French side. Most of the Nivelle-Mangin counter-attacks had collapsed bloodily, owing to the mere fact of German occupancy of Fort Douaumont. Though its turret guns were no longer functional, the Germans had burrowed several new entries to the north and used it as a gigantic Stollen, from which fresh and rested troops could sally the moment there was a French threat. Every night, an average of a thousand men passed through the fort in each direction. But above all it provided the finest observation point on the whole front. One of Mangin’s machine-gunners, Robert Desaubliaux, describes its impact on the April-May fighting:
They dominate us from Fort Douaumont; we cannot now take anything without their knowing it, nor dig any trench without their artillery spotting it and immediately bombarding it.
The Price of Glory Page 29
