The Price of Glory (11 page)

The contents of Driant’s letter reached the Minister of Defence (now Galliéni, the saviour of Paris, who had no high opinion of Joffre), and in December a delegation of the Army Commission was
sent to Verdun. On its return it confirmed to Galliéni all Driant had said. Galliéni passed the report to Joffre, asking for his comment. The intervention threw Joffre into one of his rare rages, and his reply, as Liddell Hart acidly remarked, ‘might well be framed and hung up in all the bureaux of officialdom the world over — to serve as the mummy at the feast.’

I cannot be a party [said Joffre] to soldiers under my command bringing before the Government, by channels other than the hierarchic channel, complaints or protests concerning the execution of my orders… It is calculated to disturb profoundly the spirit of discipline in the… To sum up, I consider nothing justifies the fear which, in the name of the Government, you express in your dispatch of December 16….

Probably only Driant’s heroic death saved him from the ignominy of a court martial, securing for him instead immortality among the French martyrs.

If Joffre, right up to the eleventh hour, persisted in his blindness to Verdun’s peril, it was partly because French intelligence was able to offer little help in penetrating Falkenhayn’s web of secrecy. Unfortunately for the
Deuxième Bureau
, it seems that just before Verdun the Germans had succeeded in breaking up an important spy network, operated behind the lines by a courageous Frenchwoman, Louise de Bettignies. Over sixty agents had vanished overnight, and a complete silence had descended. In despair, and some humiliation, the French had been forced to apply to the British for information, but it was not till late in January mat Royal Navy Intelligence was able to glean some definite information from the indiscreet talk of a high German official at a Berlin cocktail party. At Verdun itself, collation of intelligence was equally ineffective. Few patrols were sent out (the suspense of lying in wait in No-Man’s-Land was in any case about as alien to the French temperament as digging-in); instead, for intelligence at lower levels, the French depended largely on their not very reliable listening posts, that were occasionally able to pick up fragments of conversation from the enemy’s crude trench telephone system.

Until January 17th, bad weather had virtually ruled out any aerial photography of the German lines. There were in fact three reconnaissance
escadrilles
at Verdun; but, alas, there was not one single
officer on Herr’s staff who could analyse air photographs. (Nor was any expert provided until four days before the actual attack, when — though perhaps a little late in the day — he was able to predict the exact location of the main thrust.) On January 17th, a French plane that was twice intercepted by Fokkers of the German ‘barrage’ and had its camera smashed, nevertheless brought back some revealing shots of German guns behind the Côte de Romagne. Six days later a full scale reconnaissance penetrated again to the Romagne area, but neglected to photograph the huge gun concentrations in the nearby Forest of Spincourt. Half-hearted as the French reconnaissance efforts were, they proved that the German ‘aerial barrage’ was not watertight. If the French aerial reconnaissance failed, it did so more owing to a combination of bad weather, the artillery bombardment of their airfields, and pure lethargy. Up to the time of the German attack, only seventy gun emplacements had been identified from the air, thus the French were never aware of the full extent of the artillery confronting them. What the reconnaissance planes did record, however, was the absence of any new ‘jumping-off’ trenches in the front line; and this, as indeed the Germans had hoped it would, entirely persuaded G.Q.G. that no attack could be imminent.

For all the shortcomings of French intelligence, evidence of the preparations for
Gericht
was piling up daily. Some of the first rumours percolating to the nervous French had been rather wild; the Germans were building, it was whispered, a long tunnel fourteen metres wide beneath the French lines south of Verdun, to enable them to attack from the rear. Then the deserters, many of them Alsatians, began to creep over in ever-increasing numbers — always a sign of an impending ‘push’. With them they brought Herr details of the secret
Stollen,
the purpose of which he immediately comprehended. (But no, replied G.Q.G., doubtless these are purely defensive installations). Early in January, observers noticed that church spires behind the German lines, useful reference points for French counter-battery fire, were disappearing. On the 12th, Herr’s
Deuxième Bureau
reported that the German artillery had begun ‘ranging’; the 14th brought news of the establishment of new hospitals, and the 15th disquieting details of heavy troop transports passing through Longwy. As February came, deserters told of all leave being cancelled and voiced fears that ‘something terrible’ was about to happen.

In Paris, the Army Commission appeared less concerned at the
threat to Verdun than at the outrage to the capital perpetrated by a Zeppelin attack on January 29th (to the extent of forcing the Undersecretary of Air to resign); up to a few days before the attack Joffre could still assure Haig that it was Russia the Germans were planning to attack; while G.Q.G. Ops maintained that if there were an offensive in France the main blow could be expected to fall in either Artois or the Champagne. But alarm was in the air. A flood of visitors descended on the harassed Herr. On January 24th, Joffre’s right-hand man, de Castelnau, arrived to dictate that all work be switched to completing the first and second lines on the Right Bank, and to creating a new intermediary line between the two. Even President Poincaré, clad in his usual incongruous chauffeur’s cap and leggings, was there inspecting the front from a special little rail car drawn by two mules. Finally the great Joffre himself appeared; but by far the most important arrival of all was the reinforcements Herr had been clamouring for over the past six months. Time was running out fast. The two additional divisions were in fact only placed at Herr’s disposal on February 12th — the very day the Crown Prince’s guns were due to begin their dreadful work.

All was ready. Across this strip of pleasant French countryside a few miles long, over 850 German guns — including some of the heaviest ever used in land-warfare — faced a motley collection totalling 270, most of them short of ammunition; seventy-two battalions of elite, tough storm troops faced thirty-four battalions in half-completed positions. Had the attack gone in on schedule the French at Verdun would have been caught in the midst of moving house and a hideous disaster must have ensued. As it was, at the eleventh hour there occurred one of those rare miracles that alter the destinies of nations. In this case, it undoubtedly saved Verdun, and possibly France herself.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE WAITING MACHINE

But the god of the weather suddenly took it into his head to derange all our plans. —CROWN PRINCE WILLIAM,
My War Experiences

La guerre, mon vieux, tu sais bien ce que c’était.
Mais quand nous serons morts, qui done l’aura jamais su?

JACQUES MEYER

D
URING
the night of February 11th to 12th, French troops of the forward line at Verdun were ordered to stand-to in the first serious alert to be proclaimed. This was no false alarm. From his headquarters at Stenay-sur-Meuse the Crown Prince had issued on the 11th, for publication on the morrow, a proclamation which began: ‘After a long period of stubborn defence, the orders of His Majesty, our Emperor and King, call us to the attack!’ But as the morning of the 12th dawned, weary French outposts gazed out on an opaque white landscape. It was snowing hard, and through the thick mist and blizzard one could barely perceive the enemy front-lines. Over the whole front an uncanny silence prevailed; no suspicious noises, no unusual movements. Grumbling a little at their lost night’s sleep, the French troops resumed their normal positions. Their officers sighed with relief. On the other side of the lines, several hundred pairs of German eyes peering through artillery range-finders noted mat ‘less than a thousand metres away everything disappears into a blue-grey nothing.’ Farther back, generals anxiously studied the barometer; finally, at Stenay, the Crown Prince decided that both his proclamation and the offensive would have to be postponed twenty-four hours. If the all-important guns could not see, the battle could not proceed.

All the waiting German storm-troops heard of the postponement was when orders decreeing ‘interior duties’ were pinned up in the
Stollen.
On the day of the 13th, a second alert turned out the French, but once again they were stood-down on the morrow as the snow continued and the weather grew even colder. The notice of the previous day reappeared in the German
Stollen,
which the wags reinterpreted down the line as ‘in case of bad weather the battle will
take place indoors.’ Day after day the same entries were noted down in unit diaries: ‘snow again… snow thaws, but fog… rain and gales… still rain and gales. Another day’s respite… rain and gales. Not a sound of a cannon… wind and snow squalls… misty and cold.’ In its devotion to
la Patrie
, the perverse climate of Verdun could scarcely have shown more zeal.

By 1916 the infantryman had become, in the words of one of the great French war novelists, simply a ‘waiting machine’. To this latest, most unnerving waiting game, daily extended, the opposing forces settled down in their different ways. A few keen young French officers tried to get their men to work on the dilapidated defences, but in the hard ground little could be achieved but the further exhaustion of already fed-up troops. For the most part the
poilus
, huddled in their oversize greatcoats, resorted to the time-honoured techniques for mitigating trench boredom. Some continued months’-old work on delicately engraved bangles; bracelets for a wife made from the copper driving band of a shell; a ring for a fiancée from the aluminium of its fuse-cap, perhaps inset with the button off a German tunic; or a pen-cap for a child, made out of a spent rifle cartridge. Despite the crippling weight of his other kit, on his way to the front the
poilu
craftsman somehow always found room for his metal vice; his trinkets were capable of indefinite elaboration, often terminated only by a sniper’s bullet. Some gambled away their paltry
sous
of pay in endless games of
piquet.
In the Bois des Caures, a lieutenant of the
Chasseurs
toyed exultantly with a new trench mortar he had invented. Others stepped up the tempo of rat-hunting, simply as a means of keeping warm. Anything to silence the deadly question of WHEN?

To the taut nerves of the German storm-troops the protracted wait was even more painful. The
Stollen
had simply been intended as temporary shelter, and there was not sleeping accommodation in them for more than a fraction of their inmates. The remainder had to march as much as seven miles back to their billets each night through the snow and freezing sleet. The
Stollen
themselves revealed one important omission in the all-impressive attention to detail of the German plan; under the foul weather they rapidly filled with water and there was a critical shortage of pumps. So the elite German infantry often spent their days in baling out the
Stollen,
knee-deep in icy water. Day by day they subsisted on a monotonously unhealthy fare of chocolate and canned food, drawn from their
emergency rations. Wild rumours preyed on their nerves; a French spy dropped by parachute had been caught near Billy; reports that a French officer in German uniform was spying out the forward position gave rise to an order to arrest any ‘suspicious-looking officers’. Faraway to the North, Crown Prince Rupprecht wrote in his diary on February 14th—‘with any further delay there will not be much left of the intended surprise’—and his fear was shared by every man in the
Stollen.
After yet another postponement a priest, serving as an infantry subaltern, wondered ‘Is this Gethsemane we are undergoing?’ The Germans, k
nowing
to what they were committed, found it harder than their opponents to gain distraction. Even the more fortunate, surfeited with writing letters home, could find only temporary refuge in nostalgic, homely thoughts; some prayed with an unwonted, desperate earnest; others indulged, for probably the first time, in tormented thoughts about the senselessness of war. Each day the number of cases of acute stomach trouble mounted; whether owing to nerves or to the foul conditions in the frozen trenches and
Stollen
is not revealed. It was hardly the best way of keeping shock-troops in peak fighting trim.

* * *

As the unnatural lull stretches out between the two lines of tensely waiting soldiers, extending itself from day to day, it presents a good opportunity to look at the troops opposing each other before Verdun. We have seen the great warlords, but no battle in history was to be more of a ‘soldier’s battle’ than Verdun, and it was these humbler creations — more than the Joffres and the Falkenhayns — that were to be its principal actors.

Of the German assault troops waiting in the
Stollen,
on the extreme right wing lay VII Reserve Corps, its boundary running from the Meuse to Flabas. Its men were Westphalians, northern Germans drawn chiefly from Münster, Düsseldorf and the Ruhr; with a strong admixture of farming stock — stolid but enduring. At the beginning of the war, VII Reserve Corps had captured the French fortress of Maubeuge, for which its highly competent commander, General von Zwehl, had been given the top German decoration—the
Pour le Mérite.
Later, at the Battle of the Marne, it was this corps that had been hastily thrown in to plug the fatal gap between the Armies of von Kluck and von Bülow. Next in line, from Flabas to Ville, came
General von Schenck’s XVIII Corps, composed principally of men from Hesse, descendents of the famous mercenaries of yore. One of XVIII Corps’ regiments (the 80th) could trace its existence back to 1631, and during the German ‘War of Liberation’ against Napoleon, the Hessians had fought with equal distinction on both sides. In the Franco-Prussian War, the Corps’ 21st Division had won battle honours at Wissemburg, Worth and Sedan, its other division,
¹
the 25th, at Vionville and Gravelotte. In 1914 it had fought in the bloody battle of Neufchâteau, and later in the Marne, near Rheims. On XVIII Corps’ left, from Ville to Herbebois, was the vaunted III, or Brandenburger Corps, one of the elite units of the German Army. The Brandenburgers, had long been renowned for their dash and forcefulness on the attack; one of their regiments, the 24th, was soon to carry off a particularly notable feat at Verdun. Under von Alvensleben in 1870, III Corps had impetuously hurled itself against the whole of Bazaine’s retreating army at Vionville, thereby sealing off its escape route. In 1915 its commander, von Lochow, had won the
Pour le Mérite
for a brilliant action that threw the French across the River Aisne. One of its divisions, the 6th, had just returned from the Balkans, elated with its victory over the Serbs. It would be difficult to find three harder hitting corps in the whole German Army than these that comprised the main attacking force. In addition, on the left of the Brandenburgers, covering the line from Herbebois to Ornes, was XV Corps, though it was little concerned in the early stages of the battle. Finally, behind the lines and in the reserve, was V Reserve Corps, a unit of second-rate value with a strong element of elderly Silesian Poles, as well as men of Alsace-Lorraine, all of whom had an inconvenient habit of deserting to the French, bringing with them vital information.