On the other side of the lines, Pétain had been having more trouble with his impetuous subordinate, Mangin. Within three weeks of his reinstatement after the Douaumont débâcle, and only a few days after the collapse of the German attack on July 11th, Mangin had launched a counter-attack on a divisional scale to retake Fleury. The division chosen was the unhappy 37th African, which had given so poor an account of itself during the first days of the battle, in February, and now — with a new commander — was eager to regain its honour. But the attack was hopelessly precipitate; the divisional command had no time to become familiar with the ground, and artillery support was poorly co-ordinated. Once again the Verdun slopes were carpeted with the khaki-clad figures of Tirailleurs and Zouaves. After this latest Mangin fiasco, Pétain — short circuiting Nivelle — wrote him a long and unusually testy letter. Henceforth, he saw to it that there would be no more of these grandiose but ill-prepared attacks. The Second Army was to conserve its forces for the mighty counter-stroke that Pétain had had in mind ever since his appointment in the dark days of February. From early September onwards, as French offensive preparations went into top gear, and Hindenburg ordered a halt to all German activity, a sinister and uneasy calm descended over the ravaged battlefield for the first time in nearly seven months. But before Pétain’s plans could reach fruition the French were to suffer one further disaster, hideous and un-anticipated.
* * *
The Tavannes Tunnel, whose eastern exit the Germans had so nearly reached on July 11th, was merely a single-track railway tunnel on the main Metz-Verdun line. It ran for some 1,400 yards beneath the Meuse Hills, and had the enemy ever succeeded in capturing it intact it would have led them like a Trojan Horse behind the wall of the last line of forts, straight to the heart of Verdun. On February 24th, a nervous General Herr had actually telephoned Joffre for permission to blow up the tunnel. But this was not its only significance. For the whole sector of the front from Fort Souville eastwards it had for months fulfilled the role that Fort Douaumont served for the Germans. Along its track were combined the functions of barracks, stores and first aid posts, of a shelter and a communication trench. Several senior command posts were located in it, and there was accommodation for some three or four thousand men. Reserves on their way to make a counter-attack lodged there, and when it failed, there they returned to seek refuge and surgery. Even the little Arab donkeys used to penetrate several hundred yards into it when shelling became too intense for them to unload outside.
In the narrow, soot-blackened tunnel, dimly lit only in certain sections, men on the move to or from the front stumbled over the bodies of the sleeping and wounded alike. Sometimes they were electrocuted by brushing up against naked power cables. The hubbub, chaos and stench were phenomenal. Territorial Lieutenant Louis Hourticq describes the tunnel in the spring of 1916:
This subterranean existence suppresses any distinction between the day and the night… the activity, the movement, the noise, are the same, continued without pause, without cease, from midnight to mid-day… Under lamps black with flies the surgeons sew up the torn flesh. The General Staff of a brigade is seated nearby, in its little wooden cell from which radiate out runners and telephone wires.
Captain Delvert, passing through the tunnel on his way to R.I, was struck by the filth inside it. Men unable to reach the exits (both were under incessant shellfire) simply relieved themselves in the gutters at the side of the track. Periodically fatigue parties were detailed to sluice down these gutters; then there were cries of:
‘Attention la merde… Otez les gamelles! Le jus coule part-out.’… The joke [says Delvert] never lost its point.
At last, the Divisional Commander occupying the tunnel in July was forced to abandon cleaning operations; fearful of the spread of disease that might be caused by stirring up the polluted mire. According to Delvert,
a night passed there, and men become pale, their features drawn, they can no longer support themselves on their legs.
And yet with what joy they sought its refuge; for as Lieutenant Pierre Chaine remarked:
There one experienced the most pleasant satisfaction that one could experience under shellfire; that of having a mountain above one’s head.
Despite the warning of the terrible catastrophe that had struck Fort Douaumont, in the prevailing chaos at Tavannes Tunnel it seemed inevitable that something similar would happen there sooner or later. It happened late in the evening of September 4th, probably when fire somehow broke out among a cargo of rockets that mules had just brought into the tunnel. As at Douaumont in May, in a matter of seconds a chain reaction took place; the rockets set off a grenade depot, which ignited petrol used on the lighting generator, which in turn set off more grenades. A major, one of the few surviving eye-witnesses of the disaster, told Delvert:
A shattered body flew into me, or rather poured over me. I saw, three metres away, men twisting in the flames without being able to render them any help. Legs, arms, flew in the air amid the explosion of the grenades which went off without cease.
Hourticq recalled that
our doctor, who was walking about near the exit, was hurled outside; thrown to the ground. He rose to see the mouth of the tunnel inflamed and rumbling… a great silence followed the banging of the detonations, and fire, fed by a violent current of air, consumed during several hours everything contained in the tunnel.…
Inside the holocaust, a mortal panic broke out as men found flight made impossible by the wooden bunks and partitions in the narrow tunnel, as well as by the struggling bodies of their comrades. At the eastern exit, half-asphyxiated men rushed out into the open, only to be caught in the German bombardment. They surged back again, blocking that exit until a colonel forced them out again at revolver point. Several of the terror-stricken wretches were killed by the shells. For three days the fire raged inside and none could enter. When at last it subsided, rescue parties found many charred bodies piled up beneath an airshaft, through which men had apparently tried to escape in vain. More than 500 dead were counted; the victims included a Brigade Commander and his staff, and almost the whole of two companies of Territorials.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE COUNTERSTROKES
In February the Germans created the battle of material, but they had unfortunately forgotten to reserve exclusive rights in it.—ARNOLD ZWEIG, Education Before Verdun
No historical remains I have even seen since, however impressive, not even the Coliseum or the Temples of Paestum moved me so profoundly as the Forts of Vaux and Douaumont.— JEAN DUTOURD, The Taxis of the Marne
THE preparations for the French counter-offensive reveal the Verdun team of Pétain-Nivelle-Mangin working together in greater harmony than ever before. Appropriately enough, Mangin, ever-straining at the leash, was to execute the attacks; Nivelle, to be responsible for all the detailed planning; Pétain, for the overall planning, for the scale and timing of the attacks — and above all for restraining his eager subordinates from the folly of yet another premature effort. This time it was going to a set-piece battle of the kind Pétain had wanted all his army career. It would not proceed until local superiority had been achieved, especially in artillery. The frontage of the initial attack would be rather wider than that of the Germans on June 23rd, and the objective — nothing less than Fort Douaumont itself. There would be three divisions in the first line, followed by three more, with a further two in reserve. From every corner of the French front, Pétain garnered his guns; over 650 in all, half of which were heavies (facing an estimated 450–500 German cannon). Above all, the ‘super-heavies’. Even before Mangin’s 370s had failed to make any impression on Douaumont in May, Pétain had been pestering Joffre (who once opined to Repington of The Times that the ‘super-heavies’ were ‘chiefly for the diversion of the public and the press’) for something more powerful. Now, at last, two brand-new 400 millimetre railway guns had arrived, and lay swaddled in camouflage netting well behind the lines. With their longer range and greater p
enetrating power, these Schneider-Creusot monsters — the heaviest guns France had yet used during the war — were an even deadlier version of the Krupp ‘Big Berthas’. All through September and early October the ammunition trains converged on Verdun; bringing up some 15,000 tons of shells for the guns. This time, as Pétain had promised his soldiers in the past, they would not be called upon to go over the top, singing the Marseillaise with no cannons behind them.
The great contribution of Nivelle, the gunner, was in organising the ‘creeping barrage’ behind which the attacking waves would advance — one of the first times that this technique had been tried out. The infantry were to move forward at a steady and precise 100 yards in four minutes; seventy yards behind the field-gun barrage and 150 yards behind that of the heavier guns. Troops and shellfire would advance together like a relentless flail threshing the countryside. No longer would there be that fatal tell-tale lifting of the bombardments as the infantry went in. The success of the creeping barrage (as well as the avoidance of disasters from short-falling shells that had so frequently disheartened French troops at Verdun in the past) all depended upon a liaison between infantry and artillery of an unprecedented excellence. This Nivelle planned to achieve by laying telephone wires in trenches six feet deep, that would — for once — be virtually immune to shellfire. It was a gargantuan task.
The capture of Douaumont itself had been allotted to General Guyot de Salins’ 38th Division, composed largely of Mangin’s beloved African troops. Among them were two untried battalions of Senegalese; big, tough, fearless soldiers, profoundly dreaded by the Germans because of their summary way with captives. These arrived at Verdun in September, were entranced like children by the novelty of the ‘firework display’, and then propelled into a minor attack to see what they could do. At once they ran amuck, beyond all control of their officers, captured some German positions and butchered the survivors. Then the Germans recovered their nerve and set up a machine gun. The wretched Africans, never having been under such fire before, incapable of understanding where all the bullets were coming from, all grouped together in their bewilderment. Those that escaped the massacre that day were quickly pulled out of the line for further intensive training. After this unfortunate incident, preparation of the infantry to be used in the attack proceeded with meticulousness similar to that being lavished on the artillery programme. At Stainville, near Bar-le-Duc, a replica of the battlefield — including Fort Douaumont in full-scale outline — had been laid out, over which units were subjected to ‘battle-courses’ until they knew it blindfolded. Meanwhile, Pétain and Nivelle, determined that Douaumont once regained should on no account be lost again and especially mindful of the tragic lesson of Fort Vaux, summoned to Verdun a French engineer who had organised fresh water supplies during the excavation of the Panama Canal. Within a short time he had devised an ingenious system of transportable canvas pipes for getting water across the shell-ground to the fort.
As the mighty French preparations reached their zenith, even the habitually optimistic Mangin had never been more confident. He reminded a junior officer who saw him at this time of a cat, as ‘his eyes narrowed and his tongue passed over his lips’ in anticipation of the losses he was about to inflict on the enemy. He had moved his HQ to a corn-merchant’s villa in a Verdun suburb, which was lent a vaguely Arab aroma by a curtain of tent cloth hung behind his desk. In the room was a large model of the ground to be reconquered; pointing to it, he told his visitors repeatedly:
You will see my Colonials entering in Douaumont over there.
When Joffre called on the eve of the attack, he was assured
in four hours, Mon Général, I shall give you twenty-two battalions.
Mangin’s confidence this time was widely shared in the army. General de Salins told his men dramatically:
The hour has arrived… your victory is certain; chastisement is close for the horrid Boche.
And an officer of one of the other divisions in the first wave, noting the comforting masses of artillery and supplies, remarked bitterly:
If only we had been thus provided at the beginning of the war, we should not now be fighting in France.
It was a very different picture in the Crown Prince’s camp. The elation of an army on the offensive had given way to the uncertainty of an army that has lost the initiative and knows it is about to be attacked. Aware that the new High Command was only awaiting a psychologically propitious moment before it abandoned the present forward positions at Verdun, senior officers transmitted their uneasiness to the troops. The men themselves were exhausted, many either having spent a grisly summer on the Somme, or just too long at Verdun — like the units of von Zwehl’s VII Reserve Corps that had been there without relief since February. Germany’s inferiority in manpower had never been more grimly apparent, and exhaustion was revealing itself in matériel too. Worn-out guns were dropping their projectiles short with a disconcerting frequency that had hither-to been largely a French preserve. Meanwhile, the misery of the men holding the exposed forward trenches grew from day to day. For weeks the French had kept up a steady bombardment — what Mangin called ‘not burying the hatchet’ — effectively preventing any improvement in the defences or the erection of wire. Then rain drilling into the pulverised earth had frozen in the bitter Verdun autumn weather, thawed again, and refrozen, causing the wholesale collapse of trenches quite as efficiently as Mangin’s guns. Day after day the constant rain, freezing at night, was profoundly demoralising. A steady stream hobbled to the rear on frost-bitten feet, augmented by men who had eaten putrid horse flesh in the desperate hope of being hospitalised; anything to get away from Verdun. By September, desertions had reached such unprecedented numbers that General von Lochow issued a special decree, ordering that cowardice be shown no mercy. Fifth Army officers could not remember when, since the war began, esprit de corps had fallen to such depths.
Inside Fort Douaumont discipline since the May catastrophe had been tightened up, stricter anti-fire precautions taken, and additional exits dug, but otherwise life had gone on much as usual throughout the summer. The fort was constantly jammed with coming and going troops (it being noticed that, very humanly, units tended to be quicker entering than leaving the blessed sanctuary of ‘Old Uncle Douaumont’, as it was affectionately called). None of this had been much interfered with yet by the non-stop French bombardment. The months’ long pounding, however, had surreptitiously achieved one thing; inch by inch the protective layer of earth covering the fort (in some places, once nearly eighteen feet deep) had been eroded away. Unknown to its tenants, mighty Douaumont was now like Samson with his hair partially shorn.
On October 19th, the French preliminary bombardment blasted forth. A whole row of ‘Saucisses’ seemed to be peering down on the fort, while observation planes swarmed overhead. On the 21st, the artillery observation turret was shattered by a heavy shell, its officer crushed under tons of concrete, without however the vitals of the fort being penetrated. Douaumont still smiled, confident and aloof; this was all old hat. The 22nd also passed reasonably quietly. Then, shortly before midday on the 23rd the whole structure was shaken by an abnormally powerful concussion. Lights were extinguished and in the dark each man of the garrison experienced a moment of unparalleled private terror; was there about to be a repetition of May 8th? Some minutes elapsed before it was discovered that a huge shell had evidently burst inside the fort’s sick bay on the upper floor. The whole casemate had been reduced to a shambles, and fire still raged inside. Some fifty medical personnel and wounded had been killed. Ten minutes later, many in the fort heard the sickening shriek of another enormous projectile on its way down, followed by a crashing thud close at hand. A fraction of a second later the time fuse exploded, and once again the fort rocked. This time the barrack-room of Casemate 8 had been wiped out. It was clear that the French were using something heavier than they had ever possessed before. At horribly predictable intervals of ten to fifteen minutes the 400 mm. shells came down. Their
accuracy was remarkable; few missed the fort, several penetrated what remained of the earth, and the eight-foot thick concrete carapace, before exploding within the fort’s vitals. The bakery was smashed; two successive hits destroyed Casemates 11 and 17, and either the fourth or fifth shot brought down the roof over the main corridor on the upper floor, completely blocking it.
As each hit carried with it fresh disaster, the fort Commandant, Major Rosendahl, was having difficulty quelling panic. With little option, he ordered the immediate evacuation of the upper works. Nevertheless, cowering on the cellar floor where Gardien Chenot and his Territorials had been captured in February, the fort garrison was still not out of danger. Through the huge hole in the roof that had been ripped above the main corridor, Hit No. 6 fell and burrowed its way right through into the principal Pioneer Depot at the bottom of the fort, which was filled with small arms ammunition and rockets. A powerful explosion followed, asphyxiating fumes crept through the fort, and once again it seemed that the May holocaust would be repeated; for near the Pioneer Depot was a magazine full of unexpended French shells for the heavy turrets. It was the end, thought Major Rosendahl; such a risk could not be taken again. Though every exit had been effectively blanketed by French gas shells, he issued the order to abandon the fort. Only a small suicide squad stayed behind to try to extinguish the fires in the Pioneer Depot. At nightfall the French railway guns ceased their murderous work, but still the fires raged. It seemed hopeless; all the fort’s water had been exhausted, and the firefighters were reduced to using the bottled mineral water stocked for the wounded. Thus during the night of the 23rd the last of Douaumont’s garrison withdrew.
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