The Price of Glory (22 page)

February 25th was, in the view of one foremost French authority, General Palat, ‘perhaps the darkest of the whole assault on Verdun’. That night nothing seemed to stand between the victorious Crown Prince and the conquest of France’s mightiest bulwark. It was no exaggeration to say, as he later wrote in his memoirs ‘We were, in fact, within a stone’s throw of victory! ‘Would he deny Falkenhayn the opportunity of trying out his ‘bleeding white’ experiment? There did indeed seem a possibility that the victim would the of shock before that sinister process could do its work.

Postscript
. When writing about the capture of Fort Douaumont, I was led to believe that Eugen Radtke was already dead. Several years after the German translation appeared, however, I was agreeably surprised to receive a long letter from him in Berlin, kindly commending me on the accuracy of my reconstruction, with the words: ‘I am amazed, Mr Home, where you gained this detailed knowledge of the assault Only we who were in the first wave could have had this knowledge…’

Later I met Radtke, then in his seventies, in Paris (his first visit to France since the Battle of Verdun fifty years previously) in a confrontation with the French veteran, Durassié (see
page 119
). When it came to the issue of the ‘false Zouaves’, the two old soldiers embarked on a violent dispute, that threatened to end in a resumption of the Great War.

CHAPTER TEN

DE CASTELNAU DECIDES

When one has the misfortune to make war in the interior of one’s own country, pure strategy cannot always have the last word.—LT.-COL. DE THOMASSON,
Les Préliminaires de Verdun

A
T
Chantilly, news of the first two days’ fighting had not particularly upset General Joffre. The placid,
petit bourgeois
routine of life had continued as ever. In the
Illustrated London News
a correspondent declared that Joffre had ‘been seen… literally rubbing his hands over the attack’. On the 23rd, however, even after percolating the softening filters of G.Q.G. the reports sounded so bad that Joffre was persuaded to dispatch his Assistant Chief of Staff, Colonel Claudel, to Verdun to make an on-the-spot report. Claudel seems to have possessed an abundance of the talents (notably optimism) required by his post. The following afternoon — i.e. the day the Germans made their most menacing gains — he telephoned that the attack had ‘slowed down and it looked as though we would be able to hold out and even make a counter-attack’. That evening, Joffre’s supper was interrupted by a telephone call from General de Langle de Cary (as Commander of Army Group Centre, the immediate senior to General Herr) with a much gloomier account. He asked permission to evacuate the whole of the Woevre Plain, now menaced by the rapid German advance on the Meuse Highlands. To a French general, conscious that in the usual manner of things there must soon be a hunt after scapegoats for the Verdun disaster, Joffre’s calmly non-committal response of ‘It’s up to you’ can hardly have been comforting. The Generalissimo returned to his meal. An hour later, Joffre’s second-in-command, General de Castelnau, arrived with three other generals to impress upon him the urgency of the situation at Verdun. De Castelnau recommended that the entire Second Army, currently in reserve, should at once be transferred to Verdun, to defend the Left Bank. Its commander was a General Philippe Pétain.

Joffre agreed. At 11 o’clock de Castelnau, by now in receipt of further intelligence which seemed to presage the total collapse of the defence on the Right Bank, was back in Joffre’s office. But, in
accordance with inflexible routine, the great man had already retired for the night. One version of what then ensued caused an uproar in France when it was published, a few months later, in
Le Matin
— through the evident complicity of a coterie of officers ardently desiring to install de Castelnau on Joffre’s throne. This account had it that de Castelnau was first turned away by the orderly officer, saying that on no account was the Commander-in-Chief to be disturbed. De Castelnau, however, persisted, and went to the Villa Poiret in person. There he sent in an ADC to awake Joffre, who, unbarring the double-locked door, then appeared in his night shirt. Telling Joffre how serious the situation had now become, de Castel nau requested authorisation to go to Verdun himself, armed with plenipotentiary powers, to take whatever measures he felt necessary. According to
Le Matin,
Joffre (responding in much the same way as he had to General de Langle earlier), said ‘let him do what he wants’ and then went back to sleep. Joffre firmly denied the episode; the Editor of
Le Matin
was killed at Verdun. Whatever really happened, two facts are certain: de Castelnau had his request granted, and Joffre completed his night’s rest. In Joffre’s own words, that night ‘I wished more than at any time of my life that I had the gift of omnipresence.’ But to have gone himself to Verdun at this hour would have demolished at a stroke the legend of imperturbability, upon which so much had been built, and the crash would have been deafening. Besides — and in the way the French Army of those days functioned it is hard to believe such considerations did not pass through Joffre’s mind — if things went badly wrong henceforth at Verdun, the Generalissimo’s responsibility would now be shared by another.

De Castelnau’s position at G.Q.G. was a curious one. Following the disasters of 1915, pressure from above (principally from Galliéni, the gifted but ailing Minister of War) had forced a purge of the G.Q.G. upon Joffre. Foremost among the changes had been the appointment in December of de Castelnau to be Chief-of-Staff, as a sort of
éminence grise
at Joffre’s side. It was hardly a secret that Galliéni, no admirer of Joffre (who, among other things, had stolen much of the honour due to Galliéni for the victory of the Marne), wanted eventually to pull him back to Paris in the largely administrative capacity of a CIGS, while placing the executive command of the armies in the field under de Castelnau. Although the latter once jocularly remarked to Briand, the Premier, that in his relationship
with Joffre ‘apart from sleeping together, we couldn’t do anything more to show our intimacy’, and although every afternoon — as part of the Chantilly ritual — he accompanied the Commander-in-Chief on his post-prandial stroll, Joffre and his coterie were as jealous as Turks of the brother-general placed so dangerously near the throne.

Noël Marie Joseph Edouard, Vicomte de Currières de Castelnau, to give him his full title, was a warm-blooded Pyrenean like Foch and Joffre, but he was also a nobleman and the scion of a long line of fighting generals. There were few French wars in which the de Castelnau clan had not distinguished itself; there had been a General de Castelnau under the great Napoleon, and another had been selected by Louis Napoleon to accompany him into exile after the dismal capitulation at Sedan. Now sixty-five, the present head of the clan had also fought in the Franco-Prussian War. Partly, perhaps, because of the impact of this degrading defeat, partly because of heritage, he had become the ‘High Priest’ of the de Grandmaison sect of
‘Attaque à outrance’
. It was he who in 1913 had told the Military Governor of Lille, General Lebas, that he would have ‘nothing to do’ with fortified strongholds. But, unlike most of the other apostles of this sect among the French General Staff, de Castelnau was a man of outstanding intellect, quick-witted and flexible. No force had taken a worse drubbing in the first mad onrush of Plan XVII than the Second Army that had then been under his command; yet, in the moment of defeat, he had made an astonishing turnabout. By a brilliant defence based on a clever choice of terrain that would have been beyond most of the other French generals at that time, de Castelnau saved the vital city of Nancy. In the defence of Verdun, it will be recalled, de Castelnau had already rendered an invaluable service in the ‘Intermediary Line’, hastily constructed as a result of his
coup d’oeil
in January, and — had there been time for the completion of the Third Position that he had also prescribed then — there seems a chance that the German breakthrough on the 24th might have been prevented altogether. Witness to de Castelnau’s very real ability was the fact that he had managed to rise so high in the French Army. For in Republican France, still on the rebound from the Dreyfus Affair, both his heredity and his religion told strongly against him. Known throughout the army as
‘le Capucin Botté’
(the Fighting Friar), in his entourage de Castelnau was always accompanied by his own private chaplain, a
Rabelaisian Jesuit who also happened to be his nephew. It is held that, although he lived until the end of the Second World War, his clericalism and conservatism alone deprived him of his Marshal’s baton.

Jean de Pierrefeu, who wrote a vivid and often caustic chronicle of the G.Q.G., describes de Castelnau as follows:

A jovial, dapper little man, of quick and kindly speech, he was, with his martial bearing and white moustache, the typical French cavalry officer. He was absolutely worshipped by all disinterested persons at G.Q.G. When he entered the hotel,
¹
tapping the floor with his stick and looking about him with the mischievous and bright glances of a boy, every one came up to him instinctively, only too pleased to see him. He had the art of lighting up the faces of those he met by a single kindly word, and so making them his admirers in a flash. This little man, so alert and cheerful, radiated honesty and trustworthiness.

It was not only the sophisticated staff officers at Chantilly who fell to the de Castelnau spell; soldiers at the front were equally susceptible. In some magical way, the sight of the dumpy figure in the long black cloak could rekindle the fighting spirit in utterly battle-weary troops.

For all that de Castelnau had learned since 1914, he was still very much a ‘fighting general’ of the Foch school. Indeed, according to Poincaré, when Foch himself expressed doubts about an Allied offensive in 1916, de Castelnau ‘exploded’ with impatience. During the worst weeks of the Verdun fighting, de Castelnau impressed Colonel Repington (the elephantine
Times
correspondent who, in between the purveyance of social tittle-tattle from one dining table to another, was a fairly astute military critic) on his way to dine at the Ritz, with the words: ‘Rather than accept slavery at German hands the French race would the upon the battlefield.’ To tradition and instinct, de Castelnau could add personal reasons for wanting to hit hard at the enemy; three of his sons had already laid down their lives for France.

Such was the man who departed post-haste for Verdun shortly after midnight on the 24th/25th of February. Brief as his rôle was to be in the battle, it was one of quite exceptional importance.

De Castelnau paused at Avize to quell the pessimism at de Langle’s HQ and to telephone ahead a warning to poor Herr not to yield any more ground, or ‘the consequences would be most grave for him [Herr]’. At breakfast time on the 25th, he reached Verdun. There he found General Herr ‘depressed’, and ‘a little tired’; though this was hardly surprising. Despite his sleepless night, de Castelnau at once went on to the Right Bank and plunged into the work of re-animating the defence. While, at the front, the rout had still to reach its climax, behind the scenes, in the various headquarters, a transformation took place that was, by all accounts, miraculous. That day ‘wherever he went, decision and order followed him’. As his eyes roved over the terrain, speedily the agile mind made its appreciation. At 3.30 on the 25th, almost the precise moment when Sergeant Kunze was leaping into the moat of Fort Douaumont, de Castelnau was telephoning his conclusions to G.Q.G. Verdun could be saved. An effective defence could be maintained on the remaining cross-ridges of the Right Bank. There must be no retreat to the Left Bank. Pétain, he recommended, should now be put in command not only of the Left Bank, but of the Right Bank as well; the ‘fatigued’ General Herr should be kept on for a while as Pétain’s adviser, then quietly
‘limogé’
. (He would not be among strangers; among those preceding him at that limbo for disgraced generals were the unfortunate Bapst, de Bonneval and Chrétien.) Making use of his plenipotentiary powers, de Castelnau then dispatched the necessary order to Pétain, without awaiting Joffre’s sanction.

De Castelnau’s snap decision was one that in its fateful implications would affect not merely the course of the Battle of Verdun, or even of the war itself, but also the whole stream of subsequent French history. Although, later, as the salvation of Verdun seemed assured, the Joffre coterie claimed the honours, there is nothing to suggest that, at the moment of de Castelnau’s departure from Chantilly, Joffre had definitely made up his mind not to retreat to the Left Bank. (One also has to recall Joffre’s preoccupation during the six months preceding the German attack with the establishment of a line-of-withdrawal
behind
Verdun, on the Left Bank.) So there seems little doubt that the vital decision was de Castelnau’s, and his alone. The little cavalryman, embodiment of all the ancient martial instincts and
panache
of the race, had taken up the German gauntlet. France had done exactly what Falkenhayn had expected (and hoped)
she would do. At least in his judgment of French national psychology, Falkenhayn’s appreciation had been accurate. Now the ‘bleeding white’ could begin.

After the passage of nearly half a century, how easy it is to criticise the decision taken by a general in the midst of a most desperate battle. Why did he not do this instead? Why could he not have foreseen what we see now? Already since the Second World War critics have arisen to castigate Montgomery for not pressing home with sufficient zeal the pursuit of the defeated Afrika Corps after Alamein. Perhaps they are right. But the stresses and strains of the moment, the all-important moral factors, tend to be submerged by time. In the vision of the military critic writing
ex
post facto
, the uncertain temper of the men of Britain’s Eighth Army after years of consistent defeat becomes obliterated behind the imposing shapes of tactical and material considerations. So at Verdun. In the light of what we in our omniscience now know of Falkenhayn’s intentions, and of the hideous tragedy that was to ensue at Verdun, we may say that France should not have decided to hold the city at all costs. Winston Churchill, with extraordinary perspicacity, wrote at the time: