At 3 p.m., however, he telephoned de Castelnau, gravely pessimistic, expressing fears for the safety of the great bulk of the French artillery that still lay on the Right Bank, and begging for the third time that Joffre get the Somme Offensive advanced.
Joffre and his supporters later cited this conversation as further evidence that Pétain was still contemplating a voluntary evacuation of the Right Bank, and was only forestalled by the resolution of Joffre and Nivelle. It was not so. On the Right Bank were positioned one-third of all the French guns at Verdun, and it would take an estimated three days to move them. Pétain feared — with reason — that if the German offensive continued, the defenders would be physically hurled across the Meuse, thereby losing all these guns; a sacrifice which, for France, would be second only to the capture of Verdun itself. In fact, Nivelle himself — though afterwards he was quick to claim that he had never been daunted — obviously shared Pétain’s fears. He had already ordered the withdrawal of some of the guns in the Bras-Froideterre sector; in Verdun itself, the Governor was set frantically to digging trenches in the streets, fortifying houses for street fighting and preparing Vauban’s ancient citadel for siege. Even Joffre’s own actions belied his subsequent claim ‘I was never worried’; hastily he sent Pétain four of the divisions he so zealously had been hoarding for the Somme; in Paris, one of his officers admitted to Clemenceau that Joffre was ‘prostrated’ — upon which ‘the Tiger’ commented: ‘These people will lose France!’
It was all very well for Joffre to write sanctimoniously in his Memoirs that ‘Pétain had once more allowed himself to be too much impressed by the enemy.’ Perhaps Pétain had fallen prey too readily to his ever-deepening pessimism. But without a shadow of doubt June 23rd was a frighteningly close-run thing. Who could tell that night that the lethal ‘Green Cross’ bombardment would not be repeated, that an equally potent thrust might not roll up the French defences on the morrow?
It was something only Knobelsdorf and his commanders knew. The course of German fortunes that day could hardly be better illustrated than by the letter of a twenty five-year-old former student of Munich University, Hans Forster (killed near Verdun later in the year). Forster was an NCO with the 24th Bavarian Regiment, detailed to advance between Fleury and Froideterre. Waiting in shell-holes early that morning, he had noted that hardly any enemy shells fell, a pleasant contrast to the two previous days. At 7 a.m., coloured Very lights were fired, and the regiment surged forward. Within a few minutes it had reached its first objective, a French redoubt referred to as the ‘A’ Work.
Forward! The French are flooding back; on the order of an officer they halt and take position again. ‘Hand-grenades’ is the shout among us. On all sides the defenders are falling — others surrender. One more powerful blow — the ‘A’ Work is ours!!! We go on through a hollow. In front of us a railway embankment; to the right a curve in it. There forty-fifty French are standing with their hands up. One corporal is still shooting at them — I stop him. An elderly Frenchman raises a slightly wounded left hand and smiles and thanks me.… Over the railway.… In a shell-hole ten yards to the left of me is our Company Commander, Lt. A. He calls out: ‘It’s gone wonderfully!’ and laughs; then he becomes serious, for he sees that some men have gone ahead and are in danger of getting into our own fire. He stands up to shout — then — shreds of his map fly up, he clasps his hands to his breast and falls forward. Some men run to him, but in a few minutes he is dead. Forward again. No pause. Over the Fleury barbed wire; in ten minutes it’s ours. With rifles slung, cigarettes in our mouths, laughing and chatting, we go on. Captured French are coming back in hundreds.… [Though he must have been mistaken, Forster then claims to have seen, at the end of a long valley — probably the Ravine des Vignes — the suburbs of Verdun] Oh, Verdun — what rapture! we shake each others’ hands with glowing faces. To the right of Fleury village stands Prince Henry [of Bavaria, later wounded in the battle], moved with joy. It is a sight — so great and sublime; time 8.20 a.m. The sun is shining.… At about midday, the enemy gets together a counter-attack, but we overrun it and occupy a line of trenches one and a half kilometers in front of Fleury. Gunfire is mounting. We can no longer remain in the open, and we hunt for shelters.… That evening when we creep out of our holes we notice, to our horror, that the position was evacuated at 7 o’clock and that only our handful from the 24th and a few from the 10th were holding a line 500 yards wide. That was impossible. Lieutenant E. gave the order to move back under cover of dark, as we had been forgotten. Then, as early as 7.30 our own artillery began shooting up our positions.… Until 3 a.m. we lay in a hole. Immense thirst. At last it rained, so we could lick the brims of our helmets, and the sleeves of our jackets.…
Forster then headed back towards the German lines, half-carrying an NCO of the Leib Regiment who had been severely wounded in the groin. As it grew light he recognised the wounded man to have been a fellow student at Munich. Together they got back safely to Fort Douaumont.
A number of factors had contributed to the ebb of the German attack that day. The effects of the ‘Green Cross Gas’ had been a little disappointing. French gasmasks had on the whole proved more effective (the French in fact reported only 1,600 gas casualties) than expected, and the gas tended to settle heavily in the hollows, so that French batteries on high ground were relatively protected. There had also been only enough ‘Green Cross’ shells to blanket the centre of the line, but the French guns on either flank were not knocked out. Above all, in their mistrust of novelty the German commanders had committed an error typical of the 1914-18 military mind; just as a hesitant Haig was later to throw away the supreme surprise value of the tank, so Knobelsdorf had decided not to risk all on Phosgene. Thus, three or four hours before the infantry went in, the gunners had been ordered to cease the gas shelling and revert to normal ammunition, giving the French a vital respite to get their guns back into action.
Tactically, too, the Germans had made the error of attacking (once again) on too narrow a front with too few reserves. This was partly due to the failure, during the preliminary offensive which began on June 8th, to consolidate their flanks by capturing Thiaumont on one side and the ‘High Battery’ position at Damloup on the other. Again, on the 23rd, brilliant though the German success had been in the centre, the attack had completely failed to burst the French line at the seams. Thus the French had been able to concentrate on blocking the direct menace to Fort Souville via Fleury. By the afternoon of the 23rd, Ritter von Epp had to report that the Leib Regiment could make no further progress. It had already lost fourteen of its officers, and 550 men.
In the sultry midsummer heat of one of the hottest days of the year at Verdun, thirst set the final seal on German hopes. That afternoon, the C.O. of one of the Bavarian Leib battalions signalled back from Fleury: ‘If no water can be brought up, the battalion will have to be taken out of the line.’ His neighbour, Prince Henry, reported that without water he feared his battalion might suffer ‘serious reverses’. During the night, Ritter von Epp sent ninety-five water carriers to the Leib Regiment from Fort Douaumont; only twenty-eight arrived. Under these conditions, the regiment was physically incapable of continuing the attack the next day.
The fact mat Boelcke’s newly formed ‘Flying Circus’ had been withdrawn from Verdun (following the death of Immelmann) just as it was proving highly effective, also contributed to the day’s failure; insofar as the French had once more regained air superiority with all the disadvantages that entailed for the German gunners. But, basically, the foundering of the German attack all boiled down to the shortage of manpower. At the critical moment in the battle, the German Reichs Archives note that the French defence was stretched to such an extent that one regiment of Chasseurs were left holding 1,500 yards of line, and in their estimate the presence of just one more German unit would have led to a breakthrough. What would have happened if Knobelsdorf had had available one of the three divisions Falkenhayn had sent to Russia, or if he had not been f
orced to interrupt the early offensive on June 12th, can be all too readily imagined.
That evening Knobelsdorf knew that his supreme bid to take Verdun had failed. Some four thousand French prisoners were claimed (their total casualties during this battle amounted to about 13,000), but the German losses had also been depressingly high. The Fifth Army was exhausted, French resistance was stiffening, and soon the inevitable counter-attacks could be expected. There was not enough ‘Green Cross’ ammunition left for a second effort; nevertheless the weary, thirsty troops would have to go on battling just to hold on to the gains of the 23rd. A disappointed Kaiser returned to his HQ at Charleville-Mézières, and surreptitiously the regimental colours and bandsmen were dispersed to their depots.
As night fell over the French lines, even Pétain’s pessimism had lifted a little. Nivelle issued a dramatic Order of the Day, ending with the famous words:
‘You will not let them pass!’
Mangin — who had returned from his temporary eclipse on the very eve of the battle, now promoted to command a whole sector on the Right Bank — was as impetuous as ever, and all for launching an immediate counter-attack. This time he was right. The German advance had led itself into a narrow, tongue-like salient, with its apex, at Fleury, on an exposed forward slope. The next day, French counter-attacks hacked into the salient from both sides, and massed artillery gave the thirst-craved Bavarians a taste of what the French in their larger salient around Verdun had been experiencing ever since February. For a week Mangin attacked almost incessantly, making eight separate attempts to regain the Ouvrage de Thiaumont, and with the Germans striking back hard all the time. Casualties were heavy, one of Mangin’s battalions losing thirteen out of fourteen officers in an abortive attack on Fleury, and the result in terms of ground reconquered was nil.
But it hardly seemed to matter any longer.
* * *
For the past months British wall-scribblers had been busy chalking up exhortations (so reminiscent of the 1942-4 ‘Second Front’ slogans) of ‘SAVE VERDUN’ and ‘STRIKE NOW IN THE WEST’. Unmoved by public opinion or pressure from the French, Haig had stolidly adhered to his date of mid-August for the opening of the Somme Offensive. Then on May 26th, Joffre (pushed by Pétain) had come to see him in a state of uncharacteristic agitation. If the British did nothing till August, ‘the French Army could cease to exist,’ shouted Joffre. Haig (according to his Diaries) had soothed him with some 1840 brandy, and subsequently agreed to have the offensive advanced to the end of June. On June 24th, following the bad news from Verdun, Premier Briand himself came to beg Haig to bring the attack forward again. Haig said it was too late now, but he would accelerate the preliminary bombardment, and start that very day. The rumble of the British guns, which could be heard in the South of England, at German Supreme Headquarters was accompanied in the ears of Falkenhayn (who appears to have been about the only German not certain even at the eleventh hour just where the Big Push was going to be) with the sound of his whole war strategy collapsing.
For seven days the bombardment raged, the longest yet known. Then, on July 1st, the French and British infantry went over the top. Whereas, in Joffre’s original plan outlined at the Chantilly Conference the previous year, Foch was to have attacked with forty divisions and Haig with twenty-five, the needs of Verdun had now whittled down the French contribution to a mere fourteen. But it was Foch’s men — in the van, the famous ‘Iron Corps’, now recovered from its mauling before Verdun in February — who were to mark up the only real successes. They worked forward in small groups supported by machine guns, using the land with pronounced tactical skill, in the way they had learned at Verdun, and emulating where possible the German’s own infiltration techniques there. On the first day they overran most of the German first line before getting stuck, and with comparatively light casualties. It was otherwise with the British forces. Led into battle largely by inexperienced officers of the ‘Kitchener Army’, trained by generals who believed that what had been good enough for Wellington was good enough for them, commanded by a man who — in his insular contempt for the French Army — felt there was nothing to be gained from its experiences, and weighed down by sixty-six-pound packs, Haig’s men advanced in a line that would have earned credit at Dettingen. At a steady walk (laden as they were it would have been impossible to run), spaced regularly — as ordered — with not more than ‘two or three paces interval’, they advanced across No-Man’s-Land, into what Winston Churchill described as being ‘undoubtedly the strongest and most perfectly defended position in the world’. The enemy machine guns (a weapon described by Haig as ‘much overrated’) had not been knocked out by the bombardment. Back and forth they swept across the precisely arrayed British line. As its men fell in rows, so other lines came on at regular 100-yard intervals, displaying courage that the Germans found almost unbelievable. The majority of the attackers never even reached the forward German posts.
By the night of July 1st, Haig’s army alone had lost nearly 60,000 men; among them 20,000 dead.1 Of the day, Haig’s chronicler, Colonel Boraston, had the impertinence to write that it ‘bore out the conclusions of the British higher command, and amply justified the tactical methods employed’. It would have been more accurate to call it, as did a recent British writer: ‘probably the biggest disaster to British arms since Hastings’. Certainly never before, nor since, had such wanton, pointless carnage been seen; not even at Verdun, where in the worst month of all (June) the total French casualty list barely exceeded what Britain lost on that one day. For another five months the bull-headed fight continued. Later, in defence of his Verdun operation, Falkenhayn and his supporters claimed that by thus weakening the French Army there, the Germans had been saved from disaster on the Somme; in fact, all Verdun probably did was to save the Allies from still greater losses there.
Nevertheless, at hideous cost, Britain had done her part to relieve Verdun. Honour was satisfied.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
FALKENHAYN DISMISSED
Possession of the fortress of Verdun itself has become a purely incidental matter as far as its strategical importance is concerned.—H. H. VON MELLENTHIN, New York Times Magazine (August 1916)
Here are the walls upon which broke the supreme hopes of Imperial Germany.—PRESIDENT POINCARÉ (September 13, 1916)
JUNE 23rd, 1916, represented the climax and the crisis of the Battle of Verdun. It was also the turning point in the Great War; though this fact may not have been so dramatically apparent as it was in the case of the defensive battles of Alam Halfa and Stalingrad in the autumn of 1942, after which the Axis never ceased to retreat. Nevertheless, the failure to break through to Fort Souville and Verdun, followed so closely by the first appearance of the new mass armies of Britain on the Somme, ended the Germans’ last real opportunity of a military knockout against the Allies. From now on their inferior resources of manpower would force them increasingly to remain on the defensive. Russia would fall apart under her own revolutionary stresses, thus allowing Germany to concentrate her forces for one last desperate gamble in the West. But — however much it may have looked like succeeding at one moment — Ludendorff’s offensive would come too late, when Germany herself was too weak. Meanwhile the vast weight of the United States would have been placed on the balances of war; for where the exploits of the Lafayette Squadron had focussed American sentiments on French heroism at Verdun, the halting of the German thrust on June 23rd played its part in finally convincing hard-headed American businessmen and politicians that the Central Powers were not going to win the war after all.
Yet, though the critical moment had passed, that ‘oak-hard’ general, Knobelsdorf, still refused to admit defeat before Verdun. In keeping with the curious, and peculiarly Teutonic instinct for self-immolation and Götterdämmerung that loosed off the offensives of March 1918 and the Ardennes at the end of 1944, and enacted the melodrama of the Führerbunker, he persuaded Falkenhayn to make one last attempt on Verdun. The omens were hardly pro
mising; along with its novelty, the ‘Green Cross Gas’ had lost its capacity to provoke unreasoning terror; some of the Fifth Army’s heavy guns had already been sent off to the Somme, and there would be no fresh reinforcements for the attack — Falkenhayn having made it clear to Knobelsdorf that whatever he had in mind would have to be accomplished with his own depleted forces. But Knobelsdorf was insistent; the Fifth Army had indeed seemed to come so close to success on the 23rd, so once again Falkenhayn acquiesced.
The attack would be limited to a front even narrower than that of the 23rd, using the equivalent of only three divisions (of which one regiment, the 3rd Jäger, had already suffered twelve-hundred casualties during the fighting of the last month). It was to start on July 9th, and even during the preliminaries the Germans had — by a cunning ruse — registered a useful success that dismayed the French. Almost ever since the fall of Vaux, the Damloup ‘High Battery’ situated to the south of the fort had effectively blocked the advance on Fort Souville from the east. On the lip of a ridge commanding a wide field of fire, the ‘High Battery’ was a heavily armoured artillery position with concrete bunkers and shelters capable of housing a company and a half of infantry. It had repulsed countless attacks by the enemy, who had however managed to dig themselves in uncomfortably close. In the early morning of July 3rd, troops of the German 50th Division that had taken Vaux began firing a heavy, short-range mortar at the battery at regular intervals. As expected, the French garrison all took cover in their concrete shelters. Meanwhile, the German infantry crept stealthily up to within a few yards of the ‘High Battery’. At 2 a.m. the mortars took to firing bombs with their fuses removed. The French, hearing the solid thud of these falling unexploded assumed that they were duds and that, the bombardment still continuing, the enemy would not yet be attacking. But the Germans, on the sound of the first ‘dud’, were already swarming over the parapet. Almost without fighting the ‘High Battery’, three machine guns and a hundred men were taken.
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