The Price of Glory

by Alistair Horne

  Had we held to the stiff defence which had hitherto been the rule, I am firmly convinced that we should not have come through the great defensive battles of 1917.

  The superb triumph at Douaumont was to father France’s greatest disaster of the war.

  Pétain and two other Army Group commanders were extremely sceptical, but the politicians (including the mistrustful Lloyd George who had recently replaced Asquith) were thoroughly swayed by Nivelle’s charm, eloquence, and — as usual — superlative confidence. Even the morale of the war-weary poilus was raised to fresh heights by Nivelle’s repeated promises that the end of their sufferings was close at hand. ‘You won’t find any Germans in front of you,’ he assured one of his Army Commanders, echoing to perfection what Falkenhayn had told his generals the previous February. To the troops as they waited to go into battle, he declared:

  The hour has come. Courage. Confidence: Nivelle.

  Meanwhile Mangin was telling his Sixth Army:

  I am ready; the day after tomorrow my headquarters will be at Laon.

  Unfortunately Nivelle’s assurances had also reached German ears. Security had been even worse neglected than before the Douaumont fiasco the previous May, and some six weeks ahead of the offensive the defenders knew exactly what to expect. The huge weight of Nivelle’s artillery preparation came down like a haymaker swung into thin air. The Germans had simply pulled back from their forward positions. On April 16, 1917, the French infantry — exhilarated by all they had been promised — left their trenches with an élan unsurpassed in all their glorious history. They advanced half-a-mile into a vacuum, and then came up against thousands of intact machine guns. Angry, demoralised, bitterly disillusioned men flooded back from the scene of the butchery. By the following day, there had been something like 120,000 casualties. Nivelle had predicted 10,000 wounded; the Medical Services had added another 5,000 to this estimate, but in the event the offensive required over 90,000 evacuations. In the rear areas, some two hundred wounded literally assaulted a hospital train.1 Still Nivelle, as his ambitions collapsed in fragments around him, tried to persist with the hopeless offensive. But he had broken the French Army.

  Details of the slaughter on the Chemin-des-Dames — appalling though the truth itself was — became fiercely exaggerated. With them the kind of incidents that had occurred sporadically at Verdun multiplied throughout the army. Again the macabre, sheep-like bleating was heard among regiments sent up to the line; this time mingled with cries of ‘Down with the war!’ and ‘Down with the incapable leaders!’ Men on leave waved red flags and sang revolutionary songs. They beat up military police and railwaymen, and uncoupled or derailed engines to prevent trains leaving for the front. Interceding officers — including at least one general — were set upon.

  On May 3rd the mutiny proper broke out. The Nivelle Offensive was still continuing, broken-backed, and the 21st Division (which, significantly enough, had experienced some of the worst fighting at Verdun in June of the previous year)1 was ordered into battle. To a man it refused. The ringleaders were weeded out, summarily shot or sent to Devil’s Island. Two days later the division went back into action, and was decimated. That touched off the powder keg. Next the 120th Regiment refused to move into the line; the 128th ordered to show it an example, followed suit. Unit after unit refused duty, some of them the finest in the French Army, and over twenty thousand men deserted outright. Regiments elected councils to speak for them, ominously like the Soviets that had already seized power in the Russian Army, and set off to Paris en masse.2 The 119th Regiment mounted machine guns on its trucks, and attempted to reach the Schneider-Creusot works, with the apparent intention of blowing it up. By June these acts of ‘collective indiscipline’, as the French Official War History euphemistically termed them, spread to fifty-four divisions — or half the French Army. At one time, only two out of twelve divisions in the Champagne were reckoned to be loyal, and there was not one single reliable division between Soissons and Paris. But the most astonishing feature of the whole mutiny was that no inkling of it was picked up by German Intelligence until order had been completely restored, and even Lloyd George and Haig were little better informed.

  To this day, nearly half a century on, details of the French Mutinies remain veiled in exceptional mystery and secrecy, and of no aspect is less known than the true extent of the reprisals carried out in quelling them. Haig, in his diaries of November 1917, notes that he had then been told that ‘there were 30,000 “rebels” who had to be dealt with’. Only a few dozen of the ringleaders were officially reported tried and shot, but how many more were shot summarily can only be guessed. From time to time accounts have seeped out, unofficially, of whole units marched to quiet sectors and then deliberately haché by their own artillery. What is known is that the wretched Russian Division in France, which news of the revolution at home and brutal losses under Nivelle had reduced to a state of complete rebellion, was encircled by loyal French troops and then crushed by point-blank cannonfire.

  Eventually, for all their reluctance, the French politicians now had to turn imploringly to the one man capable of restoring order in the army. Then, for the second but not the last time, France called for Pétain. Resisting pleas for draconian measures from various Corps Commanders, the new C-in-C approved only a minimum of death penalties, concentrating his ‘cure’ on relatively minor improvements of conditions, so flagrantly needed in the French Army. Leave was properly organised at last, station canteens (comparable to the British YMCA) were instituted, proper lavatories, showers and sleeping accommodation were ordered, cooks were sent to learn how to cook, and both the quality and flow of the precious pinard was improved. Above all, visiting a hundred divisions in person, Pétain assured the men that there would be no more Nivellesque offensives. Repeatedly, he said: ‘We must wait for the Americans and the tanks.’ For all its simplicity, the cure was remarkably effective, but only Pétain could have administered it. Through his presence he made the troops feel what the Second Army had felt while he commanded it at Verdun; that here was a leader who would not squander their lives vainly. Many of them never forgot it. In all his long, and later sad, career, he never made a greater contribution to France — not even his saving of Verdun in February 1916 — and he always regarded his rôle in the Mutinies as the most anxious task of his life.

  But, for all Pétain achieved as ‘le Médécin de l’Armée’ the French Army was not the same; never again would it be able to repeat the stubborn heroism it had shown at Verdun. As Sergeant Boasson (who left Verdun to take part in the Nivelle Offensive) remarked:

  Pétain has purified the unhealthy atmosphere. But it will be difficult for him to wipe out the impression of defiance which now rests in the heart of the soldier towards those whom he should have considered his leaders, his guides, his protectors, his paternal friends.… They have ruined the heart of the French soldier.

  France limped through the remainder of 1917, carrying out only a few limited, inexpensive but highly successful operations (including one which finally dislodged the Germans from the Mort Homme, laid on by Pétain to complete the restoration of morale). But when, in 1918, the hour approached for the final offensive blow to end the war, Pétain, genius of the defence, was clearly no longer the man to execute it. Twice he had saved France, but he was not cast for the new rôle. Following the Mutinies, that deadly fatalistic pessimism with which the horrors of Verdun had infected him had taken an even firmer hold. When the last desperate German gamble, the Ludendorff Offensive of March 1918, was at its peak and for a moment all seemed in jeopardy, Haig commented bluntly in his diary:

  Pétain had a terrible look. He had the appearance of a Commander who was in a funk and had lost his nerve.

  At last, at the very eleventh hour, the Allies hit upon the best combination for the job yet found; Pétain was to remain C-in-C of all the French forces, but Foch — who, though still the very spirit of L’Attaque, had learned more than any other Allied leader in the course of the wa
r — was to be Supreme Commander, for the first time, of all the Allied Armies in France. Under Foch the Allies hammered forward all along the line in the summer of 1918, until even Ludendorff realised the war was lost. On November 8th, troops of the U.S. 26th Division reoccupied the Bois des Caures, where Driant and his Chasseurs had fought and died so gallantly in February 1916. Three days later, French, American and German troops joined in celebrating the end of the war round a huge bonfire lit on the ‘High Battery’ at Damloup.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  AFTERMATH

  It seemed to us then as if a quite exceptional bond linked us with those few who had been with us at the time. It was not the normal sensation of affinity that always binds together men who have endured common hardships…. It derived from the fact that Verdun transformed men’s souls. Whoever floundered through this morass full of the shrieking and the dying, whoever shivered in those nights, had passed the last frontier of life, and henceforth bore deep within him the leaden memory of a place that lies between Life and Death, or perhaps beyond either….—Reichs Archives, Vol. I (WERNER BEUMELBURG, Douaumont)

  They will not be able to make us do it again another day; that would be to misconstrue the price of our effort. They will have to resort to those who have not lived out these days….—SECOND-LIEUTENANT RAYMOND JUBERT

  To Corporal Robert Perreau of the 203rd Regiment, the summit of the Mort Homme after the battle ebbed from it in the bitter winter of 1916-17

  resembled in places a rubbish dump in which there had accumulated shreds of clothing, smashed weapons, shattered helmets, rotting rations, bleached bones and putrescent flesh.

  The following year, Lieutenant Louis Hourticq, a former Inspector at the Paris Beaux Arts, back in the Verdun sector for the second time, described the countryside around Douaumont with its amputated, blackened tree trunks as being ‘a corpse with tortured features’. But, superficially, the recuperative powers of Nature are immense. Soon even the blasted trees began to put out new shoots. Staff-Sergeant Fonsagrive of the Artillery on his return in the summer of 1917 noted that the battlefield was carpeted with waving poppies; still, however, there was that all-pervading smell of decomposition. Slowly the city of Verdun, perhaps half of its houses destroyed or damaged to some extent, came back to life. The Verdunois returned whence they had been evacuated to set their town in order and retill the ravaged fields. To nine villages around Verdun, like Fleury, Douaumont, Cumières, the inhabitants never returned. The villages had literally vanished. The deeper scars of Nature took longer, far longer to heal. At the tragic cost of still more peasant lives lost when ploughs detonated unexploded shells, Champagne, Artois, Picardy, Flanders and even the Somme eventually came back into cultivation, with little trace of the horrors that had been enacted there. But Verdun defied man’s peaceful amends longer than all of them. In places the topsoil had simply disappeared, blasted and scorched away by the endless shellfire. Nothing would grow there any more. It seemed as if the Almighty wanted Verdun preserved to posterity as the supreme example of man’s inhumanity to man.

  And well it might be. It is probably no exaggeration to call Verdun the ‘worst’ battle in history; even taking in account man’s subsequent endeavours in the Second World War. No battle has ever lasted quite so long; Stalingrad, from the moment of the German arrival on the Volga to Paulus’ surrender, had a duration of only five months, compared with Verdun’s ten. Though the Somme claimed more dead than Verdun, the proportion of casualties suffered to the numbers engaged was notably higher at Verdun than any other First War battle; as indeed were the numbers of dead in relation to the area of the battlefield. Verdun was the First War in microcosm; an intensification of all its horrors and glories, courage and futility.

  Estimates on the total casualties inflicted at Verdun vary widely; the accounting in human lives was never meticulous in that war. France’s Official War History (published in 1936) sets her losses at Verdun during the ten months of 1916 at 377,231, of which 162,308 were killed or missing,1 though calculations based on Churchill’s ‘The World Crisis’ (1929) would put them as high as 469,000. The most reliable assessment of German losses for the same period comes to roughly 337,000 (Churchill: just under 373,000), and contemporary German lists admitted to over 100,000 in dead and missing alone. Whatever set of figures one accepts, the combined casualties of both sides reach the staggering total of over 700,000. Nor is that all, for although strictly speaking the ‘Battle of Verdun’ was limited to the fighting of 1916, in fact a heavy toll of lives had been enacted there long before Falkenhayn’s offensive, and bitter fighting continued on its blood-sodden ground through 1917. One recent French estimate that is probably not excessive places the total French and German losses on the Verdun battlefield at 420,000 dead, and 800,000 gassed or wounded; nearly a million and a quarter in all. Supporting this figure is the fact that after the war some 150,000 unidentified and unburied corpses — or fragments of corpses — alone were collected from the battlefield and interred in the huge, forbidding Ossuaire. Still to this day remains are being discovered. In comparison, it is perhaps worth recalling the overall British Empire casualties for the whole of the Second World War were: 1,246,025, of which 353,652 dead and 90,844 missing.

  Who ‘won’ the Battle of Verdun? Few campaigns have had more written about them (not a little of it bombastic nonsense) and accounts vary widely. The volumes of the Reichs Archives dealing with the battle are appropriately entitled ‘The Tragedy of Verdun’, while to a whole generation of French writers it represented the summit of ‘La Gloire’. The baneful results of France’s immortalisation of Verdun will be seen later, meanwhile it suffices to say that it was a desperate tragedy for both nations. Before one considers what either side did achieve through the Battle of Verdun, what could they have achieved?

  At the beginning of 1916, Falkenhayn could have resumed the attack on Russia, still reeling from the blows dealt it the previous year. Not only German military experts agreed with Prince Max of Baden, that

  the capture of St. Petersburg would have been an easy task compared with our efforts before Verdun. It would have struck the heart of the Russian war industry and knocked our eastern enemies out of the fight.

  But Falkenhayn chose Verdun. From the preceding resumé of casualties, it is clear that his novel ‘bleeding-white’ experiment did not succeed; that it ‘bled’ the Germans in nearly the same proportion as the French, and in fact hit them harder because of their constant inferiority in manpower. That it could not succeed must have been abundantly clear to Falkenhayn by mid-March, if not earlier. Yet he persisted. As for the Crown Prince’s interpretation of ‘Operation GERICHT’, i.e. the outright capture of Verdun, it is fair to assume that the Fifth Army could have taken Verdun on three separate occasions; on February 25th–26th, on June 8th–12th, on June 23rd–24th. If the Germans had taken Verdun in February, it would have constituted a great moral triumph, a dazzling military success, and one of the cheapest of the war. By itself, however, it would not then have knocked France out; although some responsible French critics felt that, had the victory been followed through, it could have led to a ‘rolling-up’ of the whole French front — perhaps with more disastrous consequences than in March 1918. But reserves were not available (though, at the beginning of 1916, they could still have been found) to enable the Crown Prince to break through to Verdun, let alone follow-up; for the simple reason that Falkenhayn was not prepared to make a decisive issue out of Verdun, or, for that matter, any other campaign.

  In mid-June the conquest of Verdun might have been attended with infinitely greater calamity, because both the honour and the life-blood of France had by now been totally committed to its defence. There might have been a dramatic collapse of the whole country, possibly preceded by an acceleration of the Mutinies of 1917, but even so this could have been no more than a gamble on the part of the Germans. However, by June German losses had become so heavy that the reserves needed for the final push could not be found an
ywhere — especially in view of the imminence of the Allied offensive on the Somme. Although, on several occasions the fate of Verdun did appear to balance on the edge of a razor, to us now it is clear that the Crown Prince was right (though tardy) in realising by April that whatever could still be achieved there would never be worth the cost.

  German military critics are more or less unanimous in condemning Falkenhayn for his inability to concentrate all at one point (in the Schlieffen-Ludendorff style), for his preference for limited, ‘no risk’ offensives, for being a tacit believer in the Allies’ philosophy of ‘attrition’ (which could only work against the Central Powers), and — last but by no means least — for his boundless indecision once he had taken the plunge at Verdun.

  We lost the war against an unlimited superiority, because we never succeeded in concentrating superiority at the decisive point.

  So says Ludwig Gehre (The Distribution of the German Forces during the World War — A Clausewitz Study). And Hermann Wendt (Verdun, 1916):

  The soul of the German Commander-in-Chief was not up to the huge task…. Verdun had conquered him, had become his master….

  At the end of 1915, when Falkenhayn composed his famous Memorandum, Germany still had a good chance of winning the war; or at least of achieving a good draw via a negotiated peace. It was her last chance. Falkenhayn squandered it at Verdun. The hand he passed on to Hindenburg and Ludendorff was a losing one. He was, in the words of Captain Liddell Hart’s memorable summary: