The Price of Glory

by Alistair Horne

  Fort Vaux had done its duty, Major Raynal decided. Shelled by Big Berthas, besieged, attacked by gas and fire, cut off from France, with nothing more imposing than machine guns for its defence, it had held off the weight of the Crown Prince’s army for a week. Even after the Germans had actually penetrated the fort, they had been able to advance no more than thirty or forty yards underground in five days of fighting. Only thirst had conquered Vaux. What wonders could not mighty Douaumont have achieved had it been commanded by a Raynal!

  Having made his decision, to Raynal late that night there came a last flicker of hope when once again the French guns flared up. Was Nivelle coming to save them after all? But by midnight a strangely eery silence fell over the whole battlefield. There would be no new relief attempt.

  At 3.30 on the morning of June 7th, sleepy observers in Fort Souville picked up the corrupted fragment of a last blinker message from Vaux. ‘… ne quittez pas…’ was all that could be deciphered. A few hours later the fort surrendered amid scenes of pre-twentieth century courtesy, an appropriate epilogue to what was one of the most heroic isolated actions of the war. From behind a barricade in the northwest corridor, Lieutenant Werner Müller of the German Machine Gun Corps saw a French officer and two men bearing a white flag. They handed over a formal letter addressed ‘To The Commander of the German Forces Attacking Fort Vaux’. Barely able to conceal his joy, Müller fetched his captain and together they were led to Raynal past a guard of French soldiers, standing rigidly to attention, ‘like recruits’, in the dimly-lit tunnel. The terms of surrender were formally signed, and then Raynal handed over to the Germans the highly ornamented bronze key of the Fort.

  The evacuation of the captive garrison began. To one German war correspondent, its survivors presented ‘the living image of desolation’. Nothing was more demanding of compassion than the spectacle of the captured, imitating Raynal’s dog and crawling on their stomachs to drink frenetically of the putrid water from the very first shellhole. As they counted heads, the Germans were as surprised by the numbers of the garrison as they were by the sight of the cocker at Raynal’s heels, bedraggled, battle-worn, but still alive. The garrison had suffered about a hundred casualties, including less than a score killed. To take Fort Vaux (which, but for thirst, could almost certainly have held out longer) the four German battalions (plus their Pioneers) directly concerned had alone expended 2,678 men and sixty-four officers. It was hardly surprising that French military thinkers would soon be making some far-reaching deductions about the value of underground forts.

  Next day Raynal was taken to see the Crown Prince at Stenay. He was at once agreeably surprised to note that ‘he is not the monkey our caricaturists have made him out to be… has none of that Prussian stiffness’. Speaking fluent French, the Crown Prince heaped praises on the French defenders, several times using the word ‘admirable’. He congratulated Raynal on being decorated by Joffre with one of the highest degrees of the Légion d’Honneur; a piece of news that had not reached him in the fort. Finally, observing that Raynal had lost his own sword, as a supreme token of military esteem he presented him with the captured sword of another French officer.

  * * *

  Though Raynal and his men were on their way to two-and-a-half years in a prisoner-of-war camp, there remained one more tragic scene to be played out at Fort Vaux. Since June 2nd, Nivelle had ordered five separate attempts to be made to relieve the fort. Each, inadequate to the task, had foundered with bloody losses. Following the failure of the attack on June 6th that had broken the heart of Vaux’s garrison, Nivelle had immediately ordered yet a sixth attack, this time to be carried out in brigade strength, by a special ‘Brigade de Marche’ formed from crack units drawn from various parts of the Verdun front. It would be unleashed at dawn on June 8th. At a conference attended by some twenty of the generals under his command, vigorous protests were raised. Even Nivelle’s evil genius, Major d’Alenson, seems to have been opposed to this new attempt. But Nivelle was adamant; his reputation was involved. When the German radio broadcast the news of the surrender of Fort Vaux the following day, he declared it to be a German hoax — just like the one in March.

  The two regiments designated for the ‘Brigade de Marche’ were the 2nd Zouaves and the Régiment d’lnfanterie Coloniale du Maroc; both comprised of North African troops that were far from fresh. The commander, Colonel Savy, was told by Nivelle in person that they had been chosen.

  for the finest mission that any French unit can have, that of going to the aid of comrades in arms who are valiantly performing their duty under tragic circumstances.

  Hastily the North Africans were pushed up to the front, under an avalanche of rain. Meanwhile, at the identical moment that they were to go in, the German 50th Division was about to capitalise on the capture of Vaux by thrusting out towards Fort Tavannes. The two attacks met head on.

  Thirty-two-year-old Sergeant-Major César Méléra had been detailed — to his evident annoyance — to take up the rear of his battalion of the Régiment Colonial, and stop stragglers falling back. He describes tersely the ensuing action as viewed from the immediate rear. Leaving for the front, a man committed suicide, ‘tired of the war which he neither understood nor saw’. On the approach march:

  The clay is so slippery and so difficult to climb that one marches as much on one’s knees as one’s feet. Arrived in a sweat at Souville Plateau where the Battalion is awaiting its rearguard. Lost the Machine-Gun Company. Found them again after half an hour.… Have to hold on to the coat of the man in front so as not to lose oneself. Fall into a hole. Arrive in a glade. Halt; the machine-gunners lost again. Three-quarters of an hour’s pause.

  At 4 a.m. Méléra reached Fort Tavannes, where he spent the day of the 8th. That night,

  runners bring news. The attack has miscarried… At the moment we were going to sortie, the Germans appeared at other points… the two infantries massacred by each other’s artillery, obliged to return to their lines, 1st Battalion reaches Vaux. The Boche evacuate. Our own are forced to do the same. The Boche return. The 8th advances as far as the wood on the right. The Boche evacuate. Ours are again forced to do the same. As for the Zouaves, situation similar. Nothing to be gained by attacking. The German infantry has again diminished in quality. A pile of mediocre men supported by a fantastic artillery. The Vaux garrison has capitulated. Nothing is left in the attacking battalions but debris.

  The Zouaves, in fact, had never left their point of departure. Caught in an annihilating barrage of 210 mm. howitzers designed to clear the way for the Germans’ own attack, the C.O. and all but one of the Zouave officers were killed. The survivor, a second lieutenant, led what remained of the battalion back to its starting position. The Moroccans alone attacked. Of the centre battalion, seven out of eight officers fell, and companies were reduced to an average of twenty-five men apiece. Inside Fort Vaux, which Colonel Savy’s force had been told was still in French hands, the embrasures were tenanted by German machine-gunners. They waited until what remained of the attackers were within a few yards, then mowed them down at almost point-blank range.

  In all the ten months’ battle it would be difficult to find an action that was both more futile and bloody. That day Pétain, enraged at the slaughter, intervened in what was strictly his subordinate’s prerogative, and ordered Nivelle to make no more attempts to retake Vaux.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  DANGER SIGNALS

  If Verdun is taken one day, what a disaster! If it is saved, how can we ever forget the price?—RAYMOND POINCARÉ, Au Service de la France

  FORT VAUX, the Allied propagandists hastily told the world, was ‘not a vital point in the Verdun defences’. But this was a view shared by neither of the forces locked together at Verdun. Vaux formed one of the principal buttresses in the ‘Line of Resistance’ designated by Pétain in February, and the French command now betrayed the significance of its loss by setting every available man (including Delvert and the thirty-seven half-dead survivors of h
is company) to digging trenches close to the city. Even Nivelle now began considering an evacuation of the whole Right Bank. On the German side, the ponderous offensive had awaited only the elimination of Fort Vaux before it could move forward again.

  Von Knobelsdorf’s immediate aim was to secure the flanking positions for the supreme punch through the centre that would take Fort Souville, the last effective major strongpoint between him and his goal. The new attacks were hardly aided by the weather, for since the fall of Vaux it had rained for days on end, as if the Heavens were mourning Raynal and his brave men. On the left, towards Fort Tavannes, they made disappointing headway. In terms of terrain conquered, results on the right flank were not much more encouraging. Here the objective was a fortified position called the Ouvrage de Thiaumont. Somewhere between a large bunker and a small fort, but mounting no artillery, the importance of the Ouvrage was its uniquely commanding position. It sat (close to where the monstrous Ossuaire is now sited) on a geographical crossroads, formed by the intersection of two ridges. One of these runs from Douaumont south-west to Froideterre, the other south-east through the village of Fleury and Fort Souville. Whoever held Thiaumont was master of the approaches to Souville, and for the next two months it was to provide virtually the focus of the Verdun fighting. On June 8th, the Ouvrage de Thiaumont was taken by the Germans, but almost immediately reoccupied, with heavy losses on both sides. Fourteen more times it changed hands during the course of the summer, indicative in itself of the constantly mounting frenzy of the battle; the French, with their back ever closer to the wall, the Germans seeing the long-promised triumph nearly within their grasp and feeling each time that this must be the final effort.

  In the course of the initial fighting for Thiaumont there occurred an episode that was to become one of the great French legends of the First War, the Tranchée des Baïonnettes. Guarding the Ravine de la Dame immediately below and to the north of Thiaumont were two regiments from the Vendée, traditionally the home of France’s most stubborn fighters, and among whose officers was one destined many years later to become a Marshal of France; de Lattre de Tassigny. No. 3 Company of the 137th Infantry Regiment was holding a line of trenches on the northwestern slopes of the Ravine, tactically an ill-chosen position that was well observed by the German artillery. All through the night of June 10th and the succeeding day, the regiment was deluged by shells from the German 210s. At roll call on the evening of the 11th, there were only seventy men left out of 164 in 3 Company, and the bombardment continued with even greater ferocity that night–probably augmented by short-falling French 155s. By the following morning, the 137th no longer existed (its Colonel declared that all he saw of its remnants afterwards was one second lieutenant and one man), and de Lattre’s regiment was moved up hastily to close the gap. It was not until after the war that French teams exploring the battlefield provided a clue as to the fate of 3 Company. The trench it had occupied was discovered completely filled in, but from a part of it at regular intervals protruded rifles, with bayonets still fixed to their twisted and rusty muzzles. On excavation, a corpse was found beneath each rifle. From that plus the testimony of survivors from nearby units, it was deduced that 3 Company had placed its rifles on the parapet ready to repel any attack and — rather than abandon their trench — had been buried alive to a man there by the German bombardment.

  When the story of the Tranchée des Baïonnettes was told it caught the world’s imagination, and an American benefactor preserved it for posterity by encasing the trench in a sombre concrete shrine. In the light of later research, however, it seems probable that the real story was somewhat different. To begin with, it is taxing probability to extremes to believe that a whole section of trench, some thirty yards long at least, could have been filled in on top of its occupants by simultaneously exploding shells, and that not one single soldier — seeing the fate of some of his comrades — was able to escape interment. A much more plausible explanation is that the men of 3 Company indeed died at their post, but that the advancing Germans, finding the trench full of corpses, buried them where they lay, planted a rifle above each in lieu of a cross. But whatever the truth of the Tranchée des Baïonnettes it detracts nothing from the gallantry of the Vendéens, and both in its circumstances and the fact that none survived to tell the tale, it testifies further to the new degree of intensity in the June fighting at Verdun.

  With this intensification of the battle there came to Nivelle and Pétain daily more and more disquieting evidence of a slump in French morale. Because of Joffre’s stubborn holding back of fresh units for the Somme offensive, both Pétain’s Noria system and its beneficent effects were running down. During the June fighting, divisions forced to remain longer in the line were losing an average of 4,000 men each time they went into action. Many troops had now experienced the peculiar horror of Verdun for the second, and even third time.

  On top of all that the men at Verdun had to endure, thirst was now superimposed as a new regular torment. Typical was the experience of a brigade holding the line at Fleury in mid-June. In a first abortive attempt to get water up to them, barrels and wagons had all been blown to pieces by the German artillery. During two more days of scorching heat the brigade had nothing to drink. Eventually 200 men were detailed to carry water up from La Fourche, over a mile away. When the thirst-crazed men reached the water supply, they became oblivious both to their orders and the German shelling, and a chaotic scramble ensued. After they had satisfied their own thirsts, they set off with what remained of the water in buckets for their comrades, but under the shellfire most of it slopped away en route. The brigade suffered yet another day of thirst. Physical conditions were getting to be more than human nerves could stand; added to which, the psychological effects of months of steady retreat, liberally sprinkled with disasters but not even a minor tangible triumph, were beginning to tell. No sooner had the Second Army got over the depression that followed the failure of the counter-attack on Douaumont than Fort Vaux was lost. Now the Germans were grinding ahead again, apparently supported by an even mightier artillery than ever before, and who could tell where it would end?

  In Paris, President Poincaré noted that the defeatist Bonnet Rouge was becoming more active than ever. At the front, the feelings of the more articulate soldiers were probably accurately represented by the letters of a thirty-year-old art historian, Sergeant Marc Boasson. At the outbreak of war, Boasson — a Jewish convert to Catholicism — had joined up gaily, filled with ‘the patriotism of the warrior’ and a powerful hatred for the enemy. Verdun had changed all that. On June 4th from near Douaumont, Boasson wrote his wife:

  One begins to ask oneself where is Victory, and whether it might not lie in any kind of a peace which would at least save the race. An artery of French blood was cut on February 21st, and it flows incessantly in large spurts.…

  A few days later the former militarist was recounting to his wife his supreme joy on having been transferred to a non-combatant unit. (It gave him an extension of life of nearly two years.) Later he puts his finger on the psychological exhaustion felt by all the men at Verdun:

  I have changed terribly. I did not want to tell you anything of the horrible lassitude which the war has engendered in me, but you force me to it. I feel myself crushed… I am a flattened man.

  Morale was running down, and for the first time in the war manifestations of this began to show in the French Army. Reporting from his comfortable staff quarters ‘certain acts of indiscipline’ that had followed the Douaumont fiasco, the G.Q.G. Liaison Officer at Second Army noted that

  in the 140th some fifty men refused to return to the trenches. The attitude of these soldiers has been excused by all the officers up to and including the Brigade Commander. They were brought before a Court Martial but only received sentences insignificant in relation to the offence committed.

  In the 21st Division, in particular the 64th (Regt), protests were formulated against sending this unit back into the Verdun butchery.

 
Similarly in XII Corps rumours have been circulating about a sit-down strike.…

  It was an alarming preview of what was to overtake the French Army on a vast scale just under a year later. To tackle this ‘crise de tristesse sombre’, as Louis Madelin so eloquently described it, Nivelle ordered all his officers to adopt the sternest measures, reiterating at the same time the well-worn exhortation: ‘Ne pas se rendre, ne pas reculer d’un pouce, se faire tuer sur place’. These measures soon had to be invoked in an arbitrary and tragic fashion.

  After the fall of Vaux, the terrain to the right of the Ouvrage de Thiaumont was held by the 52nd Division under General Boyer. During the night of June 7th its forward regiments had been subjected to the same murderous bombardment that descended on the Tranchée des Baïonnettes. When the German assault waves moved in the following morning, one battalion of the 291st Regiment surrendered almost in toto after its C.O. had been killed. Its neighbour, the 347th, had suffered even worse under the shelling (which, as so often, had included a goodly sprinkling of French 155s), and was reduced to six officers and some 350 men before the attack even began. Still it held to its position. Later that day a Second Lieutenant Herduin, seeing his company — now down to some thirty-five men — about to be encircled, gave the order to withdraw; thereby contravening the Nivelle mandate. His order appears to have released a chain reaction; elements of the 347th broke, and some of its men did not stop running until they reached the very suburbs of Verdun. The default of the two regiments momentarily created a dangerous gap in the centre of the line. There were questions from Nivelle, and General Boyer ordered Herduin and another young Ensign, Millaud, to be shot — without trial — for cowardice. The sentence was carried out by the officers’ own platoons, with tears in their eyes. The official account of the death of Herduin says that he was granted the ‘favour of commanding the firing squad to fire’, and that his last words allegedly were: