by G. J. Meyer
All along the cutting edge of the attack, German officers were reporting that the suspension of their advance was unnecessary, that the defenses, where not annihilated, were in serious disarray. The mortars fell silent yet again. An order went out from the headquarters of the German Fifth Army for the attackers to move forward in force and take possession of as much ground as possible. But the order came too late: the sun was down, the last of the light gone. When the Germans went to ground for the night, they did so, in most cases, along what had been the first and most thinly defended French line. Their long-range guns continued to pound away as here and there snow flurries blew across the ravaged terrain. The French had been given a reprieve: one long winter night in which to reassemble their stunned troops, shore up what remained of their entrenchments, and start bringing their own artillery forward.
And so began the Battle of Verdun, the longest battle of the Great War and one of the most terrible ever fought. It had its roots in the state of the Western Front as 1915 ended. Both sides, as they settled in for the war’s second winter, had found reason to be satisfied but also many reasons for concern. The leaders of the Entente, especially, looked back on a year-long series of disappointments punctuated by disaster. Serbia had collapsed, and most of its army had been destroyed. Russia had lost Poland and Galicia. In the Gorlice-Tarnow campaign alone, a hundred and fifty thousand Russians had been killed, six hundred and eighty thousand wounded, and nearly nine hundred thousand taken prisoner. Erich von Falkenhayn told Kaiser Wilhelm that the tsar’s army was “so weakened by the blows it has suffered that Russia need not be seriously considered a danger in the foreseeable future.”
Though the French had been on the attack repeatedly during the year, they had accomplished essentially nothing and had done so at almost incredible cost. In the Champagne and Artois regions alone, three hundred and thirty-five thousand of their soldiers had been killed (though many were listed as missing rather than dead, their bodies lost in the chaos). This had brought to two million the number of French casualties since the start of the war. Some two hundred thousand British were dead—nearly twice the number with which the BEF had begun the war—out of total casualties of more than half a million.
Italy’s entry into the war, an event that at first promised to be decisive, had simply produced another stalemate. Far off to the East, in the Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian Seas, the Russians and Turks were colliding on yet another front where heavy loss of life was producing no results that mattered.
Still, there was optimism in Paris, in London, and even in Petrograd. The Entente’s manpower advantage on the Western Front was greater than ever and growing. If the Italians had not achieved the hoped-for southern breakthrough, they had nonetheless brought many hundreds of thousands of troops into the struggle. Even if they could win no battles, those troops were tying up Austro-Hungarian divisions that otherwise would have been free to go elsewhere. Russia’s military administration had been put under honest and competent leadership—a phenomenon that would prove to be short-lived—and its battered armies were being refitted and rebuilt. The little army with which Britain had begun the war was growing beyond recognition in spite of its heavy losses.
By the start of 1916 the British had nearly a million troops on the continent, and that number was increasing by almost one hundred thousand monthly. Every newly arrived battalion increased the price that the Germans were having to pay for their failed bet that by invading Belgium they could take France out of the war before Britain could get fully in. Britain’s and France’s armies were being steadily augmented by the arrival of troops from the colonies that both nations had around the world. The Germans and Austrians had no such resources to draw on and no possibility of moving troops by sea. The extent of London’s commitment to the war was demonstrated in January 1916 with Parliament’s passage of the Military Service Act. This measure, far from entirely popular even within the government (Prime Minister Asquith declined to take a position on it), was driven through the House of Commons by the steely will of David Lloyd George. It introduced conscription to Britain for the first time, ensuring that millions more men would be sent to the BEF despite a precipitous decline in enlistments. In all the nations of the Entente, the shell crisis was coming under control.
The British and French general staffs believed that their advantage was greater than it really was. Their intelligence analysts continued to assure them that the Germans were squandering troops at an unsustainable rate and soon would be exhausted. Actually, the opposite was true. The Germans had generally been far more careful than the British and French in husbanding their manpower, and their casualties through 1915 were only about half those of their enemies. Joffre and Haig, happy to accept the wishful thinking of their staffs, believed that the challenge for 1916 was simply to find the best way to overwhelm an enemy who lacked the means to respond. The answer seemed obvious: to stay on the offensive and go on killing Germans until Berlin could no longer keep its lines intact. Less obvious was where to do this, and when, but such questions do not appear to have troubled either commander very much. They concluded that their 1916 offensive, when it came, should take place everywhere. Determining exactly when mattered less than ensuring that all the armies attacked at the same time, making it impossible for the Germans to shift troops from one place to another to meet a sequence of threats. It was hard to imagine how, under such conditions, the Germans could avoid collapse.
The certainty that the Entente’s numerical advantage could only increase with time was obvious in Berlin. Thus the Germans could find scant comfort in their successes on the Eastern Front and in fending off Joffre’s offensives. They understood that the time available for bringing the war to a satisfactory conclusion was finite on their side—that regardless of how effectively they might fight a defensive war, remaining on the defensive would mean gradual exhaustion and defeat. They also understood, however, that as 1916 began they had enough troops in the west to compete effectively: ninety-four divisions on the line plus another twenty-six in reserve, versus ninety-one and fifty-nine respectively for the Entente. They understood that they needed to defeat someone somewhere while they were still capable of doing so. They had no way to decide on a specific course of action, however, without igniting the antagonism between Falkenhayn on one side and Hindenburg and Ludendorff on the other: the wearying argument about west versus east. Among the many questions for which there were no clear answers, two things seemed certain: Russia was crippled and likely to remain so for months; and the French could be depended on to continue their attacks no matter what the cost and how limited the potential gains.
The biggest strategic questions facing both sides were answered before the end of 1915. On December 6, at the great riverside château that was his headquarters in Chantilly, Joffre played host to a meeting of all the Entente’s top army leaders. Britain, Russia, Belgium, Italy, and even Japan were represented. The assembled generals had no difficulty in agreeing that the Germans, fatally weakened, could be finished off with one great symphonic offensive involving all the major combatants on every major front. They agreed also that this tremendous climax should not take place until late summer. There seemed no need for hurry, and a half-year delay would give all the allies time to assemble overwhelming quantities of artillery and ammunition. It would provide time for Britain to continue the seasoning of its green new armies, and for the Russians to recover.
Later in the month Joffre and Haig met again to settle on the outlines of their part of the overall plan, the Western Front offensive. Joffre wanted it to take place in France, north of Paris, where the front was bisected by the River Somme. Haig preferred Belgium, farther north, where success could lead to the recapture of the lost Channel ports, a prime strategic prize. Joffre’s Somme plan offered little chance of achieving any strategic objectives at all—nothing beyond a general pushing-back of the German line and the killing of more Germans. He prevailed nevertheless, in large part by virtue of
owning a majority interest in the enterprise. Forty French divisions were to participate, while the British would contribute only twenty-five. An attack by sixty-five divisions promised to be unstoppable, especially with the Russians simultaneously launching a comparably massive offensive in the east and the Italians striking at the Austrians.
While the Entente commanders refined their plans, their German counterpart was putting together a scheme of his own. Working in his customary solitude, the secretive and deeply introverted Falkenhayn spent the first half of December ordering his thoughts. No option beyond the Western Front, he decided, could possibly produce results sufficient to Germany’s need. Confident that “the Russian armies have not been completely overthrown but their offensive powers have been shattered,” and believing that Russia was approaching revolution and collapse (in this he showed himself to be a man of sharp if premature insight), he thought it unwise to focus his limited resources on such an enfeebled foe. Ludendorff would have disagreed vigorously. But he was far off at the northern end of the Eastern Front, organizing the administration of conquered territories almost equal to France in size, and he was neither told anything nor asked for his opinion.
The war would never end, Falkenhayn had come to believe, until Britain was induced to give up on it. Playing artfully on Kaiser Wilhelm’s resentment of his mother’s homeland, he had been declaring as early as the autumn of 1915 that Britain had to be considered not just one of Germany’s enemies but the archenemy, committed absolutely to the destruction of Germany. “She is staking everything on a war of exhaustion,” he wrote. “We have not been able to shatter her belief that it will bring Germany to her knees. What we have to do is dispel that illusion.”
But Britain herself, beyond the reach of the German army, was invulnerable. The only way to bring her to the peace table was to demonstrate that a continuation of hostilities would be pointless. Falkenhayn saw two ways of making this happen. One was a campaign of submarine warfare aimed at commercial shipping, at starving the British Isles. This was a momentous decision, as important as anything Falkenhayn did or decided to do during his tenure as chief of the general staff. He was an exception among German generals in his political sophistication—vastly more sophisticated than Ludendorff, for example—and in the aftermath of the sinking of the Lusitania he had sided with Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg in demanding an end to the first submarine campaign. Since then, however, his pessimism had deepened, and when their disaster at Gorlice-Tarnow failed to weaken the Russians’ resolve, he had stopped hoping that anything could. When Admiral von Tirpitz assured him that the growing U-boat fleet could destroy Britain’s ability to wage war within two months (other naval leaders said it would take four months—or six), he found the prospect irresistible. “There can be no justification or military grounds for refusing any further to employ what promises to be our most effective weapon,” he declared. “We should ruthlessly employ every weapon that is suitable for striking against England on her home ground.” His response to Bethmann’s fears of American anger was that the United States “cannot intervene decisively in the war in time.” This view echoed the dismissal of British intervention by the generals who had decided to invade Belgium.
The other thing Germany had to do, as Falkenhayn saw the situation, was to remove Britain’s nearest and most important ally, France, from the war. Like France’s Pétain, he had been convinced by the bitter disappointments of 1914 that victory in the west was not going to be achieved through a classic breakthrough and envelopment of the enemy. He understood, as Joffre and Haig did not, that such a thing was simply not possible in this new industrial kind of war, a kind of gigantic siege in which networks of railways made it possible to seal any break in the line by moving masses of troops quickly. The sole available alternative, he concluded, was to break France’s will to fight. In reaching this conclusion he was influenced by what he knew—and his data were better than those available to the Entente’s generals—of the disparity between French and German casualties. “France has arrived almost at the end of her military effort,” he told the kaiser. “If her people can be made to understand clearly that in a military sense they have nothing more to hope for, the breaking point will be reached and England’s best weapon knocked out of her hand.” Falkenhayn entertained no dreams of defeating France outright on the field of battle, of sweeping her armies aside and entering Paris in triumph. His thoughts were focused on driving the French to despair and, once they came to terms, making Britain despair as well. These hopes underlay his strategy at Verdun.
Powerfully influenced by Joffre’s evident willingness to pay almost any price in the pursuit of limited objectives, Falkenhayn devised a plan for luring the French into a German-built killing machine. His idea was to threaten some piece of ground that the French would do almost anything to hold, some piece of ground dominated by German artillery. Under such circumstances, he said, “the forces of France will bleed to death.”
Deciding where to install his machine was not difficult. Verdun, the little city nestled at the center of a bristling network of fortresses, had held out against the German advance at the start of the war and had been left as a kind of spear point jutting into the German line. Strategically its importance had diminished considerably since 1914; the French no longer needed the kind of anchor it had provided during the Great Retreat, and withdrawing from it would have put nothing in jeopardy. But it had been a bone of contention between the Germans and the French for many years, and aside from Paris itself there was no place on the map to which the French people would be likely to attach more importance. That made it perfect for Falkenhayn’s purposes.
Verdun had a further advantage too, at least where persuading the kaiser was concerned. It lay opposite the German Fifth Army, which was commanded by Crown Prince Wilhelm. Responsibility for executing Falkenhayn’s plan would fall to the prince, and success would give the Hohenzollern family a particularly personal kind of triumph.
Falkenhayn spent several days in December in discussions with the crown prince and the Fifth Army’s chief of staff, General Konstantin Schmidt von Knobelsdorf. He won their support but was less than forthright in doing so. By not being clear about what his objective actually was (to capture Verdun, or to draw the French army into destroying itself in a defense of Verdun?), he planted seeds of misunderstanding that would later bear bitter fruit. He then met with the kaiser at Potsdam, and Wilhelm approved everything. Preparations for the campaign began immediately and in the strictest secrecy. It was essential to take the French by surprise, and to do so before Joffre upset everything by launching an offensive of his own.
The French of course knew nothing of the plan. But neither did Falkenhayn know that, throughout the weeks when he was developing his ideas and getting them approved, Verdun was the centerpiece of a controversy involving not only the French military but the most senior levels of the government in Paris. The origins of the controversy reached back to the first days of the war, when Joffre, seeing the speed with which the Germans had destroyed the fortress networks at Liège and Namur, lost whatever faith he had once had in the value of such fortifications. Before the end of 1914, with the Germans trying to push westward out of Alsace and Lorraine, he had ordered the abandonment of Verdun. The senior French general in the region, the same Maurice Sarrail who now commanded the multinational force bottled up at Salonika, had disregarded this order and managed to hold on even as the Germans almost succeeded in encircling him. Unimpressed, Joffre in 1915 began stripping the Verdun salient of guns and men in order to add muscle to his offensives. The aged General Herr, upon becoming governor of the Fortified Region of Verdun in August, warned that its defenses were deficient and asked for reinforcements. But his predecessor had been sacked for making exactly the same complaint. Though Herr was not dismissed, he got little of the help he requested.
Herr was not alone. Other generals both in Paris and in the field shared his fears, as did a more junior officer, Émile Driant, who though
sixty years old and a mere lieutenant colonel had more influence and, apparently, more political courage than most of the others. Thirty years before the war, early in his career, Driant had been an aide to (and married the daughter of) a bizarre character named General Georges Boulanger. A blustering, hapless, ultimately ludicrous figure, Boulanger rose to become minister of war and seemed in a moment of national hysteria in the 1880s to be on the verge of establishing a kind of Bonapartist dictatorship, but he failed to seize his opportunity at the moment of crisis and ended by committing suicide on his mistress’s grave. Driant’s association with Boulanger, and afterward with a militant right-wing faction called the Boulangists, had made him an object of suspicion among the antiroyalist, anticlerical republicans who dominated the army at the turn of the century. When he found himself at age fifty still a major and without hope of promotion, Driant resigned his commission and turned to politics and writing. He was elected to the National Assembly (a position he retained even after returning to active duty at the start of the war) and wrote a number of popular books calling for a revival of national élan in preparation for the war with Germany that he regarded as inevitable. He wrote urgently of the need to strengthen France’s defenses along the eastern border, and among his works was a treatise on fortress warfare.
Perhaps because of his age, perhaps also because the cloud that had driven him out of the army still hung over his head, Driant was assigned to an obscure staff position. This position happened to be inside Verdun’s central citadel. Throughout most of 1915 Verdun was practically out of the war, never seriously threatened. In time Driant managed to get himself transferred out of the citadel and placed in command of two infantry battalions posted at a hilly piece of woodland called the Bois des Caures, directly opposite the German lines.
Driant was certain that Verdun would be attacked sooner or later, and his trained eye saw how grossly unprepared it was. Unlike his superiors, he was not content to send his complaints up the chain of command and accept the lack of response. By August he was communicating with colleagues in the Assembly. “Should our front line be overrun in a massive attack,” he wrote the Chamber’s president, “our second line is inadequate and we’re not managing to build it up: not enough men to do the job, and I add: not enough barbed wire.” Driant asked that his concerns be brought to the attention of General Gallieni, the unacknowledged hero of the Battle of the Marne who was now minister of war, and this was done. Gallieni, a strong-minded man though in precarious health, was himself by this time stewing with impatience at the conduct of the war and increasingly skeptical about Joffre’s strategy. His frustration is apparent in what he wrote in his diary on December 16: “In the morning, Council of Ministers, discussion about Joffre and the trenches. Worry about the next German attack. At certain points, the defensive fortifications are not prepared. The matter is grave. Must do what is necessary towards Verdun.”
