The Price of Glory

by Alistair Horne

  To us it all seems almost unbelievably petty and childish — though one only has to recall Lloyd George and Haig to realise that the relationship between Falkenhayn and Conrad was by no means the exception in the First War. With this background of personal animosity alone, it was perhaps hardly surprising that the two warlords never saw eye to eye on the conduct of hostilities. But, apart from this, their strategic philosophies were in sharp discord. Falkenhayn was essentially, as has been noted earlier, a ‘Westerner’, though his policy of ‘security at all points’ precluded a knock-out offensive anywhere. Partly influenced by his Austrian orientations, Conrad was an ‘Easterner’, as well as being a disciple of von Schlieffen to the extent of believing that the Central Powers could only win by concentrating on their enemies one at a time. Agreeing in principle with Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who wanted to stand on the defensive in France until Russia was smashed, at the same time he felt that successive minor blows should dispatch from the war the weaker Allies — Serbia, Montenegro and Italy — which would then release Austria’s full strength for use against Russia. Conrad’s belief that the biggest plums were to be plucked in the East was substantially endorsed by the huge success of the Gorlice Offensive in May 1915. No campaign of the whole war produced greater material results than Gorlice; 1,500,000 prisoners and 2,600 guns taken, and an advance of 430 kilometres (the equivalent in five months at Verdun: 65,000 prisoners, 250 guns and ten kilometres). And Gorlice had sprung originally from an idea of Conrad’s; to his fury, when it succeeded Falkenhayn claimed it for his own.

  The final, fatal rift between Falkenhayn and Conrad occurred later in 1915. Falkenhayn had agreed to lend German troops to finish off Serbia (there was a certain parallel with the Germans and Italians in Greece in 1941) where the Austrians — many of them Croats, with little desire to fight against their blood brethren — had been struggling ineptly since 1914. Characteristically, he insisted that all forces there should be placed under a German, General von Mackensen. Conrad resisted, but had to climb down when the Bulgarians supported Falkenhayn. When Conrad attempted to exert some influence over the course of the campaign (where the majority of the troops engaged were still Austrian) he was coldly informed that Mackensen could only receive orders from the German High Command.

  As soon as Serbia was conquered, Conrad, true to his philosophy, announced that he was going on alone to liquidate Montenegro. In mid-December, he wrote to Falkenhayn that ‘now the campaign in Serbia is over, it is considered that the subordination of the Third Army under Mackensen is also ended’. On receiving this letter, Falkenhayn expostulated: ‘That would tear up the agreement with the Bulgarians.’ But before he could protest to Conrad, Conrad had already marched on Montenegro. Livid with rage, Falkenhayn declared that it was ‘a breach of solemn promises’ and broke off all personal relations with Conrad.

  After he had successfully concluded the operation against Montenegro, Conrad wrote a conciliatory letter to Falkenhayn. He received no acknowledgement. About this time, he also wrote proposing a blow to knock out Italy in 1916, using sixteen Austrian divisions and four German, plus another four German divisions to relieve Austrian forces on the Russian front that would be required for the offensive. He received a cold, almost insulting, reply. In his Memoirs, Falkenhayn contemptuously dismissed the scheme on the grounds that Italy was of no military importance.1 Meanwhile Falkenhayn was busy with his plans for Verdun. Motivated partly by his obsession for secrecy, but also without any doubt by his pique with Conrad, Falkenhayn never breathed a word of what was to be Germany’s principal effort for 1916 to his chief ally.

  It was incredible. When he first heard of the offensive in February, Conrad was quite understandably almost speechless with rage. If the Germans treated him this way, well then he too would go his own way without consulting them. With a secrecy that would have commended itself to Falkenhayn, he set about planning an offensive against the Italians single-handed. Five of the best Austrian divisions were withdrawn, without replacement, from the Russian front and transferred to the Tyrol. Unfortunately for Conrad, the Alpine weather was against him; late snows caused the postponement of the offensive for the best part of a month, until May 15th, by which time the element of surprise had been lost. The Italians at Asiago suffered heavy losses, but within a month they had stopped Conrad’s advance.

  Suddenly one of the worst disasters of the whole war hit the Austrians. In answer to President Poincaré’s desperate pleas to the Czar for a relief offensive to loosen the Germans’ teeth from Verdun, Russia’s ablest commander, General Brusilov, attacked with forty divisions on June 4th. He struck the Austrians in Galicia at the weakest point in the line; just where Conrad had withdrawn his five crack divisions for the offensive in Italy. The blow fell without any warning, and the Austrian front collapsed like the walls of Jericho. Off galloped the artillery, leaving the infantry in their thousands to the mercy of the charging Cossacks; but frequently the Slavs in the hotchpotch Austro-Hungarian Army did not even wait for the guns to depart before they threw down their arms. By the time the Brusilov Offensive petered out, 400,000 prisoners had been taken. It was Russia’s supreme moment, and the only successful campaign of that war to go down in history adorned with its author’s name.

  It seemed as if the whole Austro-German line in the East might cave in. On June 8th, the day the new German offensive was unleashed at Verdun, Conrad came to Falkenhayn in Berlin, pleading for German assistance. Falkenhayn, now seeing the whole of his grand strategy falling in ruin, hardly spared him in this hour of greatest humiliation.

  Just as Moltke had transferred two vital army corps to meet the Russian threat to East Prussia, thereby crippling the German lunge into France in 1914, so now Falkenhayn was forced to dispatch hastily eastwards three divisions from the Western Front. At Verdun, the Crown Prince received orders to suspend the offensive temporarily; there were unmistakable signs that the long-awaited British offensive in the West could not be very far off, and more reserves would be required to meet that. For over a week Falkenhayn hesitated. During this time, the Crown Prince seized the opportunity once again to persuade Falkenhayn to give up the Verdun offensive for good. Once again he was thwarted by his father and Knobelsdorf. His memories of this period, he wrote later, were ‘amongst the most painful of the whole war… I was absolutely opposed to the idea of continuing the attack, yet I had to obey orders’.

  But the danger from the East soon began to look less menacing; in the West the British batteries had not yet opened their ranging fire, and Falkenhayn was still Knobelsdorf’s man. The resumed effort against Fort Souville was now fixed for June 23rd. However, the critical moment for the French had meanwhile passed. Nivelle — thanks to Brusilov — had to some extent been able to replenish his desperately low reserves and repair his defences.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE CRISIS

  One more effort, said the Commander, and we have it. They said it in March, April… and up to the middle of July, and then they said it no more.—ARNOLD ZWEIG, Education Before Verdun

  In their minds there appeared a vision, pale and bloody, of the long procession of their dead brothers in Feldgrau. And they asked: Why? Why? And in their tormented hearts most of them found no answer.—Reichs Archives, Vol. 14

  FORT SOUVILLE commanded the last of the major cross-ridges running down to the Meuse on which the Verdun defences had been based. Behind it lay only Belleville Ridge, with its two secondary forts which were not reckoned capable of any serious resistance. Otherwise from Souville it was downhill all the way to Verdun, less than two and a half miles away, and once the fort (which constituted part of Pétain’s original ‘Line of Panic’) fell into enemy hands it would be but a matter of time before the city itself was rendered untenable. The approach to Souville in front lay along a connecting ridge, placed like the bar in a letter ‘H’, linking the Souville heights to those that ran from Froideterre to Douaumont. The distant end of the bar was commanded by the disputed Ouvrage
de Thiaumont, currently in French hands, and astride it lay the important village of Fleury. Both these had to be captured before an assault on Souville could be made.

  For the attack, Knobelsdorf had somehow scraped together 30,000 men — including General Krafft von Dellmensingen’s recently arrived Alpine Corps, one of the most highly rated units in the German Army. Compressed within a frontage of attack of about three miles, the new effort represented a greater concentration of force than even the initial thrust of February. Despite Brusilov’s interruption, von Knobelsdorf — in sharp contrast to his Army Commander — was brimming over with optimism. He would be in Verdun within three days. Already he had ordered up the colours and bands of the various regiments for the triumphal entry to follow, and invited the Kaiser to watch the administering of the coup de grâce from Fifth Army Headquarters. During the days before the attack, Colonel Bansi, commanding the German heavy guns, noted rapturously the joy of once again being able to gallop his horse from battery to battery, ‘through the glorious summer weather, and fresh blooming fields.… That gave one heart and courage, a freer and fresher feeling.’ The Germans’ light-hearted confidence was not entirely braggadocio nor just wishful-thinking. Von Knobelsdorf had one last trick up his sleeve.

  As the German storm-troops passed by the artillery emplacements on their way up to the line, their eyes fell upon great piles of shells all painted with bright-green crosses. There was a deliberate air of mystery and secrecy surrounding the unfamiliar markings, but it was widely sensed that it had something to do with the leaders’ assurances that this time they were going to break through to Verdun, and no mistake.

  * * *

  On the evening of June 22nd, Lieutenant Marcel Bechu, an officer on the staff of the French 130th Division, was sitting down to supper with his general at his command post near Souville. It was a beautiful summer night without a breath of wind, spoilt only by the German bombardment that had raged all day. Abruptly all the German guns ceased. For the first time in days there was silence, total silence; a silence that seemed ‘more terrible than the din of the cannonade’. The officers glanced at each other with suspicion in their eyes; for, as Bechu remarked, ‘man is not afraid of fighting, but he is terrified of a trap.’ The French guns went on battering away, but for once were unanswered. For minutes that seemed like hours the uncanny silence continued, while in the shelter disquiet mounted. Then there came a sound above, said Bechu poetically,

  of multitudinous soft whistlings, following each other without cessation, as if thousands and thousands of birds cleaving the air in dizzy flight were fleeing over our heads to be swallowed up in swarms in the Ravine des Hospices behind. It was something novel and incomprehensible.…

  Suddenly a sergeant burst into the shelter, without knocking or saluting, his mouth trembling with agitation.

  ‘Mon Général, there are shells — thousands of shells — passing overhead, that don’t burst!’

  ‘Let’s go and have a look,’ said the General.

  Outside, Bechu could now hear the distant rumble of the German guns, but still no sound of exploding shells. Then, out of the ravine, as they stood listening, crept ‘a pungent, sickening odour of putrefaction compounded with the mustiness of stale vinegar.’

  Strangled voices whispered: ‘Gas! It’s gas!’

  In the neighbouring 129th Division, Lieutenant Pierre de Mazenod heard the silent shells falling all round his battery of 75s. It was, he thought, just like ‘thousands of beads falling upon a large carpet’. For a few moments of blissful delusion, his men believed that the Germans were firing duds. Then came the first strangling sensations of the vile-smelling gas. The pack-horses plunged and reared in frenzy, broke from their tethers and ran amuck among the battery. Swiftly the gunners whipped on their gasmasks and ran to man their cannon. The masked men struggling at their guns reminded de Mazenod of ‘the Carnival of Death’. The crude gasmasks of those days so constrained breathing that every action required several times the normal effort, but at least they saved one from asphyxiation. Now, however, men with their masks on still coughed and retched and tore at their throats in a desperate struggle for air. In some ghastly way the gas seemed to be getting through the masks.

  It was supposed to. For months German scientists had been experimenting with a new formula. At last they had produced a gas against which they discovered that captured French gasmasks were only partially effective, and now it was being tried out for the first time. Phosgene was its name — or ‘Green Cross Gas’ as the German Army called it, on account of its shell markings — and it was one of the deadliest gases ever used in war. Little wonder that the Germans had such confidence in this new attack.

  The ‘Green Cross Gas’ attacked every living thing. Leaves withered and even snails died; as one minor blessing, the flies swarming over the corpse-infested battlefield also disappeared temporarily. Horses lay, frothy-mouthed and hideously contorted, along all the tracks leading up to Souville. The chaos was indescribable; abandoned mobile soup-kitchens stood tangled up with artillery caissons and ambulances. None of the supplies of cartridges and water that the front-line infantry had been calling for frantically all the previous day could get through the gas curtain, which in the stillness of the night lingered undissipated. Its effects extended to the rear areas, and even behind Verdun. A wounded subaltern recalls being treated by a spectre-like surgeon and his team, all wearing gas masks, while nearby a ‘faceless’ Chaplain gave absolution to the dying. Occasionally the medicos clutched their throats and fell.

  It was the French artillery that bore the brunt of the ‘Green Cross’. In de Mazenod’s battery, gun crews were reduced to one or two men each, many of them ‘green like corpses’. One by one the French batteries on the Right Bank fell silent. As bad luck would have it, even the immensely useful 155 mm. gun in Fort Moulainville, which had stayed in action all through the battle and had not been affected by the gas, was at last knocked out that morning by a ‘Big Bertha’ shell exploding inside the fort. For the first time in the titanic, four-month-old artillery duel, one set of gunners had gained the upper hand over the other. By dawn on the 23rd, only a few scattered cannon were still firing. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the ‘Green Cross’ shelling ended, replaced once more by the thunderous barrages of high explosive. At 5 a.m. the German infantry moved forward in the densest formations yet seen, the reserves following closely behind the first waves. Before de Mazenod could get his 75s back into action, the Germans were too close. Soon he and the survivors of his battery found themselves keeping them at bay with rifles.

  * * *

  The main German blow struck right between the French 129th and 130th divisions, both suffering acutely from thirst, short of ammunition and badly demoralised by the lack of artillery support. French listening posts gloomily overheard German patrols reporting back that they had reached the French forward posts, and found them abandoned. A deep hole was punched with alarming rapidity right through the centre of the French line. In their first rush, the Bavarians overran the Ouvrage de Thiaumont and reached and momentarily encircled the Froideterre fortification. Other Bavarian units broke through to the subterranean command post on the edge of the Ravine des Vignes called ‘Quatre Cheminées’, which contained the HQs of no less than four separate French units. For several days the staffs remained besieged inside, with the Germans dropping hand-grenades on them down the ventilator shafts that constituted the ‘Four Chimneys’.

  To the left of the Bavarians, the greatest triumph of the day was won by von Dellmensingen’s Alpine Corps, its spearhead the Bavarian Leib Regiment and the Second Prussian Jägers. The Leib was commanded by Lt.-Col. Ritter von Epp. later to achieve fame in the early days of the Nazi Party; while the Regimental Adjutant of the Jägers was an Oberleutnant Paulus whose name would forever be associated with the ‘Verdun’ of a generation later — Stalingrad. High above the battle, watching it as from a grandstand, a French observer in a captive balloon, Lieutenant Tourtay, saw von E
pp’s men storm into the village of Fleury. It was only 8.15, and the Germans had already covered nearly a mile since the attack began three hours earlier. A few minutes later, Tourtay saw twenty-four German field guns arrive at a gallop to support their tenancy of Fleury. Then the French defence began to crystallise, and shortly after 9 o’clock Lieutenant Tourtay was overjoyed to see the first French barrages of the resuscitated French artillery beginning to take effect. All that day fighting raged in Fleury, but by the evening of the 23rd it was firmly in German hands.

  To the French there were moments when it looked as if, as one of the Brigadiers remarked, ‘tout allait craquer’. Every telephone call to Pétain’s HQ at Bar-le-Duc brought worse news. There were more reports of ‘défalliances’, indicative of that physical and moral exhaustion which especially alarmed Pétain. At Thiaumont, it appeared that nearly half of the 121st Chasseurs and eighteen of its officers had been taken prisoner; it was a bad omen when distinguished units like the Chasseurs surrendered so easily. Before midday an orderly officer came with a report that Germans were now only two and a half miles from Verdun as the crow flies, and within 1,200 yards of the final ridge, the Côtes de Belleville. On his heels another arrived to tell Pétain that Ritter von Epp’s men were firing their machine guns obliquely into the streets of Verdun itself, causing a minor panic. To his subordinates Pétain never revealed his alarm that day, displaying an apparent imperturbability worthy of Joffre himself and remarking only: ‘We have not been lucky today, but we shall be tomorrow.’