The Price of Glory

by Alistair Horne

  At least, not quite the last. There remained two solitary soldiers manning the gallery in the far northwest corner of the fort. They had not been unduly disturbed by the 400s striking elsewhere in the huge fort; they had not seen the garrison pulling out, they had received no orders to abandon their post, and — like good German soldiers — they stayed at it, alone and forgotten, for another two days. Meanwhile, at about 7 a.m. the following morning, a Captain Prollius with a small group of signallers and runners from a nearby artillery unit, wandered into the fort, and discovered (no doubt to his considerable surprise) that it was empty. Quickly he reconnoitred it to find a reason why. The fires in the Pioneer Depot were still burning, but no longer out of control and the danger of the magazines blowing up seemed to have passed. The fort was cut in two on the upper floor by the blocked corridor, but it could still be traversed via the cellar. To Prollius it appeared both feasible and — with the French attack clearly imminent — highly desirable that Fort Douaumont should still be defended; provided he could gather together enough men. All he had available were some twenty odd. Urgently he sent a runner to the rear.

  Out in the open the German infantry in their shallow, partially inundated trenches had suffered as never before from the French ‘softening up’. Some were luckier than others — like a wily battalion of Mecklenburgers, who, noticing that the French opposite them had pulled back from their first line of trenches just before the bombardment began (no doubt to keep out of the way of the inevitable ‘shorts’!), promptly hopped in and thus escaped the worst of the shelling. For three days the dreadful bombardment continued without pause until unit after unit reported back that its capacity to resist had been reduced to virtually nil. Then, on the afternoon of the 22nd the French guns fell silent and the Germans heard the sound of cheers from the enemy assault trenches. At last the attack was about to begin! It was almost a relief. Swiftly the front line observers sent word back to their guns to begin the counter-barrage. Down came a curtain of shells on where the French assault waves should now be advancing. But they weren’t! Not one man had actually left the enemy trenches.

  It was all an ingenious trap laid by Nivelle. The German field guns that had hitherto been lying silent waiting, like the kettledrums in an orchestra, for this one moment, profitlessly betrayed their positions and now drew a smothering fire from the French 155s. For yet another day and a half the counter-battery work continued, by which time only ninety German batteries out of some 158 were still in action, and many of the remainder had been savagely mauled. When the French ‘softening-up’ really came to an end, nearly a quarter of a million rounds had been fired. What little remained of the defending infantry’s backbone began to crumble.

  On the morning of the 24th a thick autumnal mist hung over the Meuse hills. It seemed as if Douaumont, sensing that its second hour of destiny was at hand, sought to avoid the issue by concealing itself in obscurity — as indeed it had done on February 25th. The German defenders enjoyed one last fleeting moment of relief; nobody could attack in this visibility. Then suddenly through the fog they heard the high-pitched French bugles, sounding the well-known call to charge:

  Il y a de la goutte à boire là haut…

  In fact, with all their training on the simulated battlefield, the weather could not have been more propitious for the French. What were left of the German field guns did not open fire for twelve minutes after the French had left their trenches; by this time they were already in the defenders’ first line. The summer-long disputed bastions of Fleury and the Ouvrage de Thiaumont fell within minutes, and General de Salins’ division surged on down into the Ravin de la Dame (the scene of the ‘Tranchée des Baїonnettes’ in June) where they captured a Battalion Commander and his staff. The battlefield became carpeted with packs and haversacks as the French troops, exhilarated by the sense of pursuit, shed their heavy burdens So rapid was the advance that one senior German officer was taken in his underpants. Bunkers were by-passed and left for the second waves to mop up; in one a French sergeant counted 200 prisoners. The Germans seemed to be surrendering with a readiness never encountered before. A French listening post overheard one detachment report back:

  I have only one man left, all the others have run away.

  Some of the Germans told their captors they had had no food for six days, and everywhere the French were impressed by the destruction their guns had executed.

  For the French, the most important single factor in the attack that day was a battalion of the Régiment d’Infanterie Coloniale du Maroc — the distinguished regiment that alone in the French Army wore no number on its lapels, only an anchor, and that had suffered so badly in the final effort to relieve Vaux. Now it was the sole unit equipped for the kind of close-in fighting that might be expected once Douaumont was reached. Yet for one dreadful moment it seemed to have got lost in the fog. Its commander, Major Nicolai, a tall, imposing figure with fierce gauloises moustaches who reminded his men of a Nineteenth-Century cavalryman, had just arrived from Indo-China, and this was his first battle on the Western Front. Compass in hand, he had led his battalion forward into the obscurity at the prescribed 100 yards every four minutes. Soon landmarks were recognised indicating that the battalion was erring well to the left of its objective. Either the compass or the commander was at fault. An agonising interlude; which way was Douaumont? Abruptly, as if by a miracle, the fog opened like a curtain, and there — just ahead and to the right — lay the great dome of the fort lit up in a patch of sunshine. It was an inspiring, yet rather terrifying sight. Before his men could be deterred by the menacing mass they had come to take, Nicolai ordered the battalion forward onto the fort. There was only light opposition. In a matter of minutes, the stout Battalion Adjutant, Captain Dorey, was the first officer to clamber up on to the Fort glacis, puffing and panting with the exertion. Quickly sappers and skirmishers were dispatched into the openings of the fort. Here and there resistance held up the attackers for an hour or two. But none of Captain Prollius’ urgent pleas for support had been answered, and soon the French flame-throwers and grenades, striking from every quarter, had put paid to his handful of men. Early that evening Sapper Dumont, a ‘fly’ little Parisian soldier and maître-ouvrier in civil life, together with one other private, stumbled upon Prollius’ command post in the cellar of Douaumont. Prollius, four officers and twenty-four men — constituting all that remained of the fort’s garrison — surrendered to Dumont. Once again Douaumont was French. That it should have been both captured and recaptured virtually empty was, as a French commander remarked,

  a singular fate for a fort which during eight months had been the key to a field of battle watered with the blood of hundreds of thousands of men.…

  At his battle command post in Fort Souville, Mangin had experienced the most anxious day of his career. After the last of the horizon-bleu waves had been swallowed up by the fog, hours passed before any news came back. About midday the steady straggle of prisoners began, and from Souville could be seen above the mist an immense cloud of dust and smoke as the creeping barrage advanced; but no sign of the infantry behind it. Even the brigadiers had lost all touch with their subordinate formations. Exhausted, breathless runners arrived from time to time, but the picture they provided was a disjointed, and often confused one. Despite its complete superiority over Verdun, the French Airforce could offer little assistance. Courageous pilots flew their cages à poules at dangerously low levels in an attempt to pierce the obscurity. Some twenty planes were lost that day; many through crashing in the fog, or brought down by splinters from the ground barrage itself. Briefly Douaumont’s crest was glimpsed like a reef emerging from a sea of fog, then it disappeared again.

  Not until well on in the afternoon did the airforce provide the first positively encouraging news. To General Passaga, the commander of the 133rd Division — otherwise known as ‘La Gauloise’ — was brought the fragment of a map dropped from an aircraft. On it was sketched the French line established level with and to th
e right of Fort Douaumont and scrawled across it:

  La Gauloise 16 hours 30. Vive la France!

  About the same time the anxious watchers in Fort Souville suddenly saw to their front Douaumont expose itself, clad in a beguiling rosy light as a ray of autumnal sunshine touched it. On top of the dome were three Moroccan soldiers vigorously waving their arms. It reminded one of the generals in Mangin’s entourage of le Beau Soleil d’Austerlitz.

  It was indeed as an Austerlitz that France would greet the recapture of Douaumont, but at first — having learnt prudence through past disasters — the French censors played cautious with the news until it was certain the fort would not be lost again. Already on the afternoon of the 24th a German counter-attack was thrown in, but collapsed feebly. After this no further attempts were made, and the Crown Prince acceded to losing most of the conquered terrain at Verdun; something only the deadly psychological demands posed by a symbol had precluded his doing upon the removal of Falkenhayn. On November 2nd, the French Second Army retook Fort Vaux, which had been previously evacuated and partially demolished by its garrison. Amid the bitterest winter weather of the war, they launched the second of their major counterstrokes on December 15th (‘this black day’, the Crown Prince called it), recapturing Louvemont and Bezonvaux (both lost in February), and pushing the line a comfortable two miles beyond Douaumont.1 Though a mere shadow of its former glory — open to the skies in several places and with mud and water inches deep in its corridors — the fort was safe. And with it Verdun was safe.

  By a strange coincidence, the French counter-offensives ended on the same day that a year earlier Falkenhayn had gained the Kaiser’s approval for his ‘Operation GERICHT’. Banking on the shortness of public memory, German propaganda did its best to play down the importance of Forts Vaux and Douaumont, but the loss of Douaumont in particular was regarded as a grave defeat throughout the army. It was, remarked one soldier, ‘like losing a fragment of the Fatherland’. Said Hindenburg candidly of the October attack:

  On this occasion the enemy hoisted us with our own petard. We could only hope that in the coming year he would not repeat the experiment on a greater scale and with equal success.

  Compared with the incredible stubborness they had shown during the previous months, the fight put up by the Germans in October–December had, admittedly, been half-hearted. Nevertheless, nothing could detract from the fact that France had won her most brilliant victory since the Marne. On the one day of October 24th alone, Mangin’s men had reconquered ground the Crown Prince had taken four and a half months to gain. They had advanced three kilometers over glutinous clay and the most shell-pocked ground ever known; an outstanding achievement by First War standards, which, had the Germans been able to emulate it on June 23rd or July 11th, would have brought them to the suburbs of Verdun in one bound. Nivelle’s ‘creeping barrage’ had proved itself an outstanding success; one of the great inventions of the war, it seemed. For once, during the French series of counter-offensives, German losses had actually been higher than the attackers’; that 11,000 prisoners and 115 guns were taken in December alone was indicative of just how far the Fifth Army had deteriorated. Nonetheless, French casualties, had also been painfully severe. Nicolai’s battalion of the R.I.C.M. returned from Douaumont with little more than a hundred out of 800 sent to Verdun four days earlier, and the total men consumed during the counter-offensives came to 47,000.1 In December the relentless determination of Nivelle and Mangin to achieve their ends without regard to the cost resulted in some ominous incidents. They revealed that Verdun had left a mark on the soul of the French Army not lightly to be erased. Poincaré, arriving to decorate the troops, had stones thrown at his car, accompanied by cries of ‘Embusqués!’ On the roadside out of Verdun someone had scrawled ‘Chemin de l’Abattoir’, and on the night of December 10th a whole division bound for the final offensive took to bleating like sheep. Though that same division fought heroically, it was a sinister preview of what was to come in 1917.

  None of this was visible to the public of France. All it could see was a tremendous, resounding victory worthy of La Grande Nation. While all over the world Allied propagandists suddenly rediscovered the incomparable significance of Vaux and Douaumont (one French historian likened their recapture to Charlemagne avenging Roland on the field of Roncevaux), France jubilantly celebrated her El Alamein of the First War. She had also discovered her Montgomery, so she thought. Joffre was eclipsed; Pétain’s role in preparing the way for triumphant counterstrokes was forgotten. Nivelle was the man of the moment. In a sketch glorifying the new star, L’lllustration wrote:

  Here is a chief in the Latin sense of the word, that is to say une tête… confident hope rings a carillon of bells in our hearts.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE NEW LEADER

  Victory was to be bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat.—WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, The World Crisis

  From Verdun, city of suffering, will stem for France a new era of glory.—HENRY BORDEAUX, The Captives Delivered

  TECHNICALLY, the Battle of Verdun was over. But fighting over the corpse-ridden battlefield would continue sporadically, with occasional savage flare-ups, until the end of the war, and the wider effects of Verdun would endure even longer.

  The most immediate result of the battle was the downfall of the once all-powerful ‘Papa’ Joffre. In June, the first Secret Session had revealed to French parliamentarians the full measure of the High Command’s neglect of Verdun’s defences that had cost the nation such a hecatomb of lives. Now the summit of all Joffre’s strategy, the Somme, was recognised to have been just one more Allied failure; attended this time with even greater casualties than the vain offensives of 1915. All through the summer, since that Secret Session, the rumbles against Joffre had been steadily growing louder. With the arrival of the third winter of the war and the collapse of the Somme they had become quite deafening. After some shabby manipulating in the Paris couloirs, the old Titan who had so nearly lost France the war, and yet without whose serene nervous system defeat would have been equally inevitable in the early days, was shuffled out of his post. On December 27th he was promoted Marshal of France and then joined in obscurity the scores of inept or unlucky commanders that he himself had limogé so ruthlessly in the past. None had been speedier to recognise the wind of change than Joffre’s satraps in G.Q.G.; in a classic passage Pierrefeu describes his leave-taking at Chantilly:

  The new Marshal summoned his heads of department to the Villa Poiret to bid them farewell. It was a sad leave-taking.… The Marshal, whose rank entitled him to three orderly officers, asked who among those present would accompany him in his retirement. Major Thouzelier alone raised his hand. The Marshal expressed his surprise at this, whereupon General Gamelin1 said gently to him, ‘General, you must not blame those who have their career to make.’ And in truth, Joffre bore no ill-will. When everyone had left, the Marshal glanced once more over the villa which had housed so much glory. Then he smiled, and, giving a friendly pat to the faithful Thouzelier, he made his favourite exclamation as he passed his hand over his head. ‘Pauvre Joffre! Sacré Thouzelier!’

  Well before Joffre’s actual downfall, G.Q.G. had been adjusting itself to the idea of his successor. In all branches one heard glorification of the coming C-in-C. And his name? Robert Nivelle. The logical successors, de Castelnau and Foch (the latter in disfavour after the failure of the Somme) had been by-passed. So too, had been Nivelle’s immediate senior, Pétain. The rejection of Pétain had resulted pardy from the politicians’ apprehension at having a C-in-C with such virulent declared contempt of themselves; Poincaré for one having never forgotten Pétain’s unfortunate sally to the effect that ‘nobody was better placed than the President himself to be aware that France was neither led nor governed.’

  On the other hand, Nivelle was renowned for his ability to charm the peoples’ elected. But more than that, in December 1916 France’s volatile imagination was not seized by so
self-effacingly modest a leader as Pétain. After the reconquest of Douaumont, Nivelle was the great hero, the man who would now smash through to victory. He was, says Pierrefeu with praiseworthy candour,

  not only a rash commander, he was representative of the national temperament. This is the reason that he was blindly followed.

  On the opening of the last of the Verdun counter-offensives, Nivelle, the artillery Colonel of 1914, left Souilly for his new command. A week later, on December 22nd, Mangin also left, to take over the Sixth Army. On the eve of his departure, Nivelle repeated the slogan with which he had arrived — ‘We have the formula’ — and added ‘the experience is conclusive. Our method has proved itself. Victory is certain, I give you my assurance.…’ While decorating Mangin’s Moroccans, he was also heard to say ‘we shall see them again in the spring’.

  Pushed on by the dying d’Alenson, Nivelle at once began to plan the great Spring Offensive, the offensive that would end the war in one swift blow ‘of violence, brutality and rapidity’, as he described it. The bull-headed attrition methods of Joffre discarded once and for all, this decisive blow would ‘erupt’ through to the third and fourth enemy lines all in the same day. The spirit of de Grandmaison would ride again, and it would be a purely French affair. The chosen sector was the Chemin des Dames, a long barrow overlooking the River Aisne, one of the most strongly defended bulwarks of the German line. The method employed would be that which had succeeded so brilliantly at Douaumont; the saturation bombardment, followed by the ‘creeping barrage’. Nivelle, however — ignoring the lesson of the Germans’ ‘Green Cross’ gas attacks at Verdun — forgot one of the essential axioms of war; that success seldom succeeds twice. The Germans had now had two separate occasions at Verdun, in October and December, to study Nivelle’s technique — and they were never slow to learn. Describing the evolution of a new system of defence in depth, the Crown Prince wrote: