The ablest and most scientific general — ‘penny-wise, pound foolish’ — who ever ruined his country by refusal to take calculated risks.
Enough has been said of the inability of the French High Command — nagged at by the ghosts of 1870 — to cede one inch of terrain for a tactical advantage; an obsession fatally shared by Hitler in Russia. The case has also been made that it might have been sensible for France to have cut her losses in February 1916, and to have abandoned the sorely neglected fortress, but honour transcended commonsense. More open to argument is the issue of whether Joffre or Pétain was right in the dispute of April onwards; that is, should Verdun — once the principle of its defence à outrance had been embraced — or should the planned Somme offensive assume priority? Theoretically, Joffre as C-in-C was entirely justified in not being deflected from his strategy by the German initiative at Verdun, in not allowing the enemy to impose their will upon him. Had this strategy in fact led to a victorious breakthrough on the Somme, History would doubtless have rated Joffre one of her greatest marshals, but his tactics, brutally simple as they were, denied him this title. One of Falkenhayn’s German apologists claims that Verdun was successful in that instead of contributing forty divisions to the Somme as agreed at the Chantilly Conference in 1915, France’s contribution was in fact reduced to fourteen. But there was never a hope of a percée on the Somme, with or without Verdun. Joffre’s rigid rationing of replacements to Pétain merely meant, by and large, that more French troops would be available to be killed on the Somme instead of at Verdun; on the other hand, it brought Pétain’s defence perilously close to collapse in June, and by overtaxing the endurance of the men of the Second Army germinated the seeds of mutiny that were to sprout the following summer.
Neither side ‘won’ at Verdun. It was the indecisive battle in an indecisive war; the unnecessary battle in an unnecessary war; the battle that had no victors in a war that had no victors. As Prince Max of Baden noted in his memoirs,
the campaign of 1916 ended in bitter disillusionment all round. We and our enemies had shed our best blood in streams, and neither we nor they had come one step nearer to victory. The word ‘deadlock’ was on every lip.
By the end of 1916, territorially all the Germans had to show for ten months of battle and their third-of-a-million casualties was the acquisition of a piece of raddled land little larger in area than the combined Royal Parks of London. Falkenhayn could claim with some justification that Verdun led to the breaking of France’s superbly courageous armies. However, the German Army was also never quite the same again after Verdun; as the Crown Prince admitted, ‘The Mill on the Meuse ground to powder the hearts as well as the bodies of the troops’.
For the first time, the Army’s confidence in its leaders was fundamentally shaken, and morale never quite recovered. Both at the front and at home, war weariness manifested itself, and it was symptomatic that Germany’s first peace proposals came soon after the close of the Verdun campaign. By 1917 the Germans had, for the time being, no strength left to take advantage of Falkenhayn’s ‘bleeding-white’ of the French Army.
One American war correspondent later assessed Verdun to be the Gettysburg of the First War, the recapture of Fort Douaumont its Pickett’s Charge; and writing of the Nivelle Offensive of 1917, Waterloo was the analogy that sprang to his mind: ‘the political Waterloo of Europe’.
Verdun was as much a historic turning-point for the other Allies as it was for France. One of its direct results was that from July 1, 1916 — that grim landmark in British history — the main burden of the Western Front devolved upon Britain. Verdun’s rôle in bringing the United States a stage closer to belligerency has already been noted, and it is reasonable to add that after the Nivelle Offensive and the French Mutinies, the war could no longer have been won without American troops. Indirectly, it was Verdun that made America’s participation in the war essential and inevitable, with all its enormous implications for the future of Europe and the world.
* * *
Of the principal actors in the Verdun tragedy, some disappeared speedily into oblivion; others lived to play another part in European History.
The fall of Nivelle had been attended by a shaming scene at G.Q.G. when, refusing to resign, he had been literally propelled out of office, bitterly blaming Mangin for the failure on the Chemin des Dames. Afterwards he was given a command in North Africa and never again permitted to come near the Western Front. When the war ended, he made a limited return to grace; was nominated a member of the Supreme War Council in 1920, and sent to represent France in the U.S.A. at the tercentenary of the arrival of the Mayflower later that year. He died in 1924, still in his mid-sixties, leaving no memoirs and having made no attempt to justify the calamitous offensive that bears his name and will probably be discussed as long as the war itself.
Of the Nivelle triumvirate, the shadowy éminence grise, d‘Alenson, whom one must deem responsible for much of Nivelle’s rashness, both at Verdun and subsequendy, died of consumption almost immediately after the Chemin des Dames. Mangin, brought before a Court of Inquiry, was absolved from all blame but nevertheless — once again — removed from his command. True to form, he begged the Minister of War to be allowed to re-engage as a simple soldier. The boon was refused and for several months he fretted, unemployed, and pettily forbidden to reside within thirty miles of Paris. Then Clemenceau and Foch came to power, and the order went out: ‘To Mangin a corps.’ After six months of probation, Mangin redemptus was once more at the head of an Army; just in time for the great crisis of 1918. Churchill describes him superbly as
like a hungry leopard on a branch [who] sees Incomparable Opportunity approaching and about to pass below.
Opportunity arrived when Foch selected Mangin to launch the first of the victorious counter-strokes against Ludendorff’s spent offensive, and the Leopard, leaping out of his lair in the Forest of Villers-Cotterets did not fail this time. A few months later Mangin rode magnificently into Metz, distributing copies of Verlaine’s Lamentation to his troops. When peace came, he was put in charge of the French occupation of the Rhineland. Here he was seized with the inspiration to become a new ‘Germanicus’, the re-constructor of Germany. He became closely involved with the Rhineland separatist movement, but before his scheme could bear fruit, he died — aged only fifty-eight — in 1925. For many years rumours persisted that like Germanicus, he had been poisoned; possibly by German nationalists.
Following his downfall, Joffre’s obscurity became almost complete. They gave him a small office in the École de Guerre, where he was attended by his faithful ‘Sacré Thouzelier’ and a minute staff. Haig, in his diary, describes paying a visit to this office in October 1918:
No one hears a word of poor old Joffre now; he has quite disappeared. We found an A.D.C. in the office but were told that the Marshal does not come back after his déjeuner. I fancy the old man has this fine office, but nothing to do. Clean blotting paper and a few maps were waiting ready for use.
When the great victory cavalcade passed through the Arc de Triomphe, there were those in the crowd who wondered who was the portly peasant figure jouncing about on the reluctant chestnut, to the left of the immortal Foch. For another twelve years, Joffre pottered about in his office in the École de Guerre, preparing his voluminous memoirs, but otherwise showing no flicker of interest in the other postmortems on the war in which, over so many crucial months, he had been the supreme power in France. In 1931 he died, having outlived Foch and most of the other French warlords; except de Castelnau, and of course, Pétain.
De Castelnau, denied his Marshal’s baton — it was always said — because of Clemenceau’s rabid anti-clericalism, retired and entered the Chamber of Deputies. Like Nivelle, he left no writings on the war,1 a notable loss to historians, though he lived to be ninety-seven, and to see a France ruled in adversity by his nominee of February 1916.
Of the lesser figures at Verdun, many like Colonels Driant and Nicolai, Captain Cochin, Lieutenants
Jubert and Joubaire, Sergeant-Major Méléra, and Sergeants Dubrulle and Boasson, either died there or on another battlefield. Among those that survived, Major Raynal, the Hero of Vaux, eventually went into politics on returning from prisoner-of-war camp and became a pacifist. His fellow POW, Captain de Gaulle, spent the years of internment developing his ideas on warfare and the French Army of the future. Officer-Cadet Buffet, who made the miraculous double journey in and out of Fort Vaux, still teaches at a school in Perpignan.
On the German side, Oberleutnant Brandis, after facing Nivelle on the Chemin-des-Dames, grew to be the idol of a whole generation of German school-children to whom he gave his sparkling lectures on the Conquerors of Douaumont. Colonel (later Major-General) Franz Ritter von Epp, commander of the Bavarian Leib in the two final assaults on Verdun, became one of the first to raise a Freikorps in post-war Germany, financed Hitler in his early Munich days, and was later appointed chief of the Nazi Party’s Department for Colonial Policy.
Of Schmidt von Knobelsdorf, sent off to command a Corps on the Eastern Front in 1916, little was ever heard again. As far as is known, he made no attempt to answer the many vociferous German critics who after the war accused him of being chiefly responsible for the disaster at Verdun.
When Falkenhayn relinquished the Supreme Command after the Battle of Verdun, General von Zwehl noted that his hair had turned completely white. Then there followed a brief moment of triumph. Declining the Kaiser’s consolation prize for a fallen favourite, the Ambassadorship in Constantinople, Falkenhayn was given command of the Ninth Army, which he led in a brilliantly conceived lightning campaign against Rumania.1 With the collapse of Rumania, he was sent to reorganise the crumbling Turkish Army in Palestine, arriving just in time to see Allenby capture Jerusalem. He ended the war covering the Bolsheviks in an unimportant Polish garrison post. After the war, life for Falkenhayn consisted of giving a series of lectures on the Rumanian Campaign at Berlin University, and compiling his memoirs — all in that extraordinary cold and remote third person singular. Although — uncommunicative to the end — he never gave any clue as to his real feelings, and until his death he still affected to believe that German losses at Verdun had been ‘not much more than a third of those of the enemy’, he appeared to be weighed down by his reflections on the battle. Rapidly his health began to deteriorate, starting with a breathing difficulty which doctors found hard to diagnose. To a former A.D.C. he wrote in 1921:
My complaint is an inflammation of the kidneys with horrible consequences, which I have been suffering from since the New Year… the real cause of it is doubtless psychological, not physical….
To a relative he confided about this time that, five years after Verdun, he still found it impossible to sleep at night. In April 1922, he died in a Schloss near Potsdam.
The Crown Prince too seems to have been pursued all his life (he long outlived Falkenhayn) by the ghosts of Verdun. In exile in Holland he sensed that even the Dutch thought of him as ‘that Boche — the murderer of Verdun!’ For five dreary years he lived in an abandoned parsonage on the polder of Wieringen, his leptic figure made to look even more bizarre by breeches, Dutch clogs and an oversize cloth cap. Begging his cousin, King George V, for a mitigation of his circumstances, he pointed out pathetically, that there was not even a bathroom in his place of exile. Then, in 1923, friends, hoping for a Hohenzollern reinstatement, spirited him back into Germany. The reinstatement never came. Instead, the Crown Prince flirted impetuously with the Nazis; then seems, with that highly-developed insight of his, to have foreseen where they would lead Germany, and swiftly recanted. Throughout the Nazi era and the Second World War, he lived in retirement in Germany. In May 1945 he was arrested at Lindau by the French First Army; its commander, a General de Lattre de Tassigny, the same who as a young Company-Commander had fought at Verdun through some of the worst days of June 1916. The Crown Prince asked for an interview with de Lattre, requesting that — as he had taken no part in the recent hostilities — he be allowed to go home. De Lattre, with fresh memories of all that France had suffered at German hands, and no doubt also recalling the days when he had faced the Crown Prince on the Meuse heights, was icy:
I remind you, monsieur, that you had a top place on the list of war criminals.1 You have had the extraordinary good luck of not having been shot.
Summarily dismissed, the Crown Prince retained the memory of what he conceived as a mortal insult to his dying day. That came six years later, in July 1951, strangely enough only two days before the death in prison of his erstwhile adversary, Marshal Pétain. The remaining years of his life he had shared in penury with his last mistress, a divorced hairdresser, once a Hohenzollern chambermaid.
Of the principal combatants at Verdun, there remains only Pétain, but his long and tragic subsequent career was so intertwined with the more distant effects of Verdun that he requires to be dealt with separately.
* * *
The consequences of the Battle of Verdun did not end with 1918. It is one of the singular ironies of History that although Falkenhayn failed to bring France to her knees, more than any isolated event of the First War, Verdun led to France’s defeat in 1940.
As has already been seen, Verdun contributed to its share of ‘firsts’ significant to the development of warfare. Flame-throwers and Phosgene gas made their debut as assault weapons on a large scale there; for the first time it was shown that an army could be supplied by road transport; above all, Verdun was the forge from which originated the conception of an airforce in the truest meaning of the word. Tactically, at Verdun the Germans perfected their infantry infiltration techniques, which — on a much larger scale — they employed with devastating effect against Gough’s Fifth Army in March 1918; the French perfected the ‘creeping barrage’, tried a second time with dismal results in 1917. But the full weight of the lessons of Verdun was not felt until after 1918. When the full bill of casualties then became available, military thinkers the world over were united on one point: no future war could ever be fought again like the last one. They differed only in their approach to deciding how it would be fought. The problem particularly concerned France, who, of all the belligerents, had suffered easily the highest losses in proportion to her total manpower, and the answer of that huge body of anciens combattants who had fought before Verdun was unhesitating. Already on August 23rd 1916, G.Q.G. had pointed to it in a remarkable recantation:
One fact dominates the six-month struggle between concrete and cannon; that is the force of resistance offered by a permanent fortification, even the least solid, to the enormous projectiles of modern warfare.
After the war, France remained hypnotised by the way Douaumont and the other forts at Verdun had stood up to the months of hammering. Major Raynal is to be found writing prefaces for military books, pointing to the lunacy of making men fight ‘in the open air’ and recalling how his Leonidean handful inside Fort Vaux had checked the whole German advance.
In an annex to his book, La Bataille de Verdun, Pétain remarks pointedly:
If from the beginning we had had confidence in the skill of our military engineers, the struggle before Verdun would have taken a different course. Fort Douaumont, occupied as it ought to have been, would not have been taken… from the first it would have discouraged German ambitions. Fortification, what little there was of it, played a very large rôle in the victory….
It was Pétain who systematised the new thinking. After the war, of the leaders that had emerged Marshals of France, none enjoyed more widespread prestige and affection throughout the Army than he who had entered the war as a superannuated colonel. Old age soon removed Foch from the public arena, leaving a still virile Pétain the principal arbiter of French military thought for the best part of two decades. As Inspector General of the Army, and later Minister of War, he harked back repeatedly to one of his favourite maxims:
One does not fight with men against material; it is with material served by men that one makes war.
Never a
gain, he promised, should such sacrifices be forced upon the youth of France. As early as 1922, he was calling for the creation of a ‘Wall of France’ that would protect her permanently against the restive, traditional enemy. His idea of this ‘Wall’ as it evolved was not of clusters, or even a line, of Douaumonts; for his 400’s had proved that even a Douaumont was mortal. Instead it would consist chiefly of a continuous chain of retractable gun cupolas (similar to those mounted at Douaumont and Moulainville that had proved almost indestructible), linked by subterranean passages burrowed so deep as to be beyond the reach of any projectile. For years Pétain could not persuade the governments of an impoverished France to foot the huge cost of his Great Wall. It was no coincidence that the politician eventually giving his name to it was Maginot, the ex-Sergeant who had been seriously wounded at Verdun and had led the attack on Joffre at the first Secret Session in 1916. Nor was it a coincidence that the Chief of the Army General Staff under whom the Maginot Line materialised was a General Debeney, who had commanded a division through some of the worst fighting at Verdun, on the exposed and completely unfortified Mort Homme. Among existing works to be incorporated in the Maginot Line system were Forts Vaux and Douaumont, both to some extent repaired and augmented with additional flanking turrets. As the threat of a new war approached, one French military writer declared:
The lessons of Verdun have not been lost; for the past fifteen years France has been working on her eastern frontier…. Be confident in this fortification with the most modern techniques.
As the poilus took up their posts deep in the bowels of the Maginot Line in 1939, the popular cries were ‘Ils ne passeront pas!’ and ‘on les aura!’
Thus, in France, since 1870 the wheel of military thinking had turned a fatal full cycle. In 1870 — in simplest terms — she had lost a war through adopting too defensive a posture and relying too much on permanent fortifications; in reaction against this calamitous defeat, she nearly lost the next war by being too aggressive-minded; and what resulted from the subsequent counter-reaction, the Maginot Line mentality, is almost too painful to recall.
The Price of Glory Page 41
