The Price of Glory (26 page)

Early on the morning of March 4th, the remnants of the 33rd were mopped up and the fragmented stones that had once been Douaumont village fell to the Germans. Still the local commander attempted to retake it by one of those spontaneous counter-attacks, but Pétain now intervened, crying hold, enough. With the fall of the village the first phase of the battle ended, and an even grimmer one began.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

REAPPRAISALS

Up till March the impression was that Verdun was a German victory….—GENERAL LUDENDORFF

There are military leaders who need no advice, who evaluate things themselves and decide; their entourage has only to carry things out. But these are stars of the first order, which are barely produced once in a hundred years. In the majority of cases, the commander of an army will not wish to dispense with advice….—MOTKE THE KLDER,
Italian Campaign of 1859

O
N
February 27th, Franz Marc, the artist, wrote home in an awed tone from the Verdun front; ‘… the whole French line is broken through. No man, who has not experienced it can have an idea of the fantastic rage and force of the German attack…’ adding, with a characteristic note of compassion, ‘the poor horses! ‘A letter dated March 2nd already betrays some misgiving through its protestation: ‘I don’t for one minute doubt about the fall of Verdun.’ March 3rd, pure gloom; ‘For days I have seen nothing but the most terrible things that can be painted from a human mind.’ The next day a French shell put an end to the correspondence, and to a great talent.

One of the things that makes war so fascinating to its students and so frustrating to its participants is that in a moment of supreme crisis it is rarely given for one side, obsessed by its own difficulties, to see just how bad things are in the enemy camp. Though the hard-pressed French could not see it at the time, something had in fact gone dramatically wrong with the meticulous German plans; that is, with the
Crown Prince’s plans.
For all its terrifying initial impetus, by the end of February the attack had bogged down, and to a large extent of its own accord. In one most important sense, the bogging down was quite literal. Pursuant to Falkenhayn’s scheme of grinding the French Army to pieces by sheer weight of artillery, the Fifth Army’s guns had orders to move up to new positions as soon as the enemy first line had been overrun. The timetable for leap-frogging them forward had been a masterpiece of staff work, but—as not infrequently occurs to the end products of the thorough German military mind — one small omission arose to defeat it. No
allowance had been made for the physical difficulty of getting heavy guns over a battlefield where all roads had been obliterated and every inch of ground thrown up into huge mounds and craters by the attackers’ own bombardment.
¹
The thaw which had so earnestly menaced France’s lifeline to Verdun became, on balance, more her ally than her foe; it turned the pulverised earth into a glutinous quagmire that sucked off the close-fitting knee-boots of the German infantry; the 8-ton howitzers sank up to their axles in it, and the Germans’ new motor tractors were too few and too under-powered to extract them. There remained only the horses and human muscle. With brute strength (it took at least ten horses to shift even one medium field gun), the Germans eventually moved their guns forward but the delays involved meant that many of the deadly 210s, so essential a part of the German offensive technique, were
hors de combat
over long periods of the battle during its most critical phase.

Caught out in the open, the German guns had a heavy toll exacted by the long-range French 155s, now arriving in ever-increasing quantities. A splinter killed the commander of III Corps Field Artillery, brave old General Lotterer who had seldom been far from his forward guns during the first phase of the battle. Particularly terrible was the suffering of Franz Marc’s horses; in one day alone, 7,000 died, and 97 were killed by a single shot from a French naval gun. The mere wear-and-tear of the prolonged firing contributed to German losses; after superhuman efforts, one of the monster 420s had been moved up to the Bois des Fosses in order to knock out Fort Souville, but on the third shot a shell exploded in the worn barrel, killing almost the entire crew. When at last the guns were in position, utter exhaustion on the part of the gunners sorely reduced both the rapidity and accuracy of their fire. Finally, over the devastated battlefield and the approach roads — the latter rendered quite chaotic by the even more viscous mud of the Woevre, and clogged with the moving gun-teams — it was impossible to bring up enough ammunition to sustain anything like the rate of fire of the first four days. Supplies became so critical that by March 3rd several batteries of howitzers had to be withdrawn altogether.

The effect of this decline in German firepower at a moment when the French artillery, reorganised by Pétain, was beginning to be effective, was immediate and lethal. More and more frequently the assaulting infantry discovered that French machine-gun nests had been left untouched by the artillery. It was all becoming depressingly similar to the mournful experiences of every Allied offensive on the Western Front. What, now, of Falkenhayn’s promise that the infantry would just walk into Verdun once the artillery had done its stuff? The casualty lists were growing longer and longer. In the period February 21st-26th, the French losses amounted to 25,000 men, and, although during that time the ratio of French and German casualties was reliably estimated at three to one, by the 29th German losses had already passed the 25,000 mark. On March 1st a French listening post overheard a German remark on the telephone: ‘if it goes on like this we shan’t have a man left after the war’. In III Corps, one battalion of the Prussian Leib Grenadiers had been reduced to 196 strong in the fighting for Douaumont village, and another regiment of the same brigade had, by the second day of March, lost 38 officers and 1,151 men. In XVIII Corps, the three Hessian regiments of the brigade that had overwhelmed Driant in the Bois des Caures had also lost over a thousand men each. Both Corps had to be pulled out of the line, exhausted, on March 12th; by which time the XVIIIth alone had lost 10,309 men and 295 officers.

But perhaps the most punishing — and undeserved — losses had been suffered by von Zwehl’s VII Reserve Corps, which had done so brilliantly in the first days of the battle. In its rapid advance up the right bank of the Meuse, it had increasingly exposed its flank to the French on the hills the other side of the river. By February 27th Pétain had amassed a powerful array of heavy batteries there. Even though, forged before the introduction of recoil mechanism, they bounced back and had to be relaid after each shot just like cannon of the Napoleonic era, the elderly French 155s cracked and thundered with remarkable accuracy. Firing visually into the dense grey packs moving across their front on the slopes opposite, only a few thousand yards off, gunners can seldom have had so superb a target. One particularly exposed ravine running down to the Meuse was nicknamed the ‘Bowling Alley’ by the Germans, and indeed the image was an apt one. With extremely heavy losses, the advance of the 77th Brigade over Talou Ridge was stopped in its tracks.
The usury paid merely to hold the conquered ground became daily more prohibitive. Nowhere seemed to be safe from the searching French guns; during the first days of March one regiment lost more men while behind the lines in reserve than during its assault on Haumont Wood the first day of the offensive. Worse, the Germans seemed helpless to stop the slaughter. Every available battery was brought to bear on the French guns, but many of these had taken up position behind the parapets of the forts clustered on the Bois Bourrus ridge and were consequently most difficult to hit.

To General von Zwehl the slaughter of his triumphant corps was particularly galling. On three separate occasions before the war he had taken part in manoeuvres dedicated to the capture of Verdun, and each had ended with the conclusion that the attack would have to be made simultaneously on both banks to obviate the danger of flanking fire. Before the offensive began he had tried in vain to impress this upon his superiors. Now it was his men that were paying the penalty. In desperation he attempted at dawn on the 27th to throw a force across the Meuse at Samogneux, but the attackers were caught up on wire entanglements hidden beneath the flooded river. Almost all of them were either drowned or captured. Von Zwehl now dispatched his Chief of Staff to the Crown Prince to urge once again, and in no uncertain terms, that a full-scale attack be launched on the Left Bank.

As the German losses mounted, an eye-witness tells of a battle-shocked captain, summoned to his Battalion Commander, exclaiming: ‘What!… Battalion? Is there still such a thing?’ Elsewhere a General described the spectacle of wounded men that streamed back uncontrollably past his HQ as being ‘like a vision of hell’. Each commander began to beseech his immediate superior for reinforcements. But, by February 25th, the day when the way to Verdun was wide open, the whole Fifth Army had only one fresh regiment left in reserve. The Crown Prince telephoned Falkenhayn urgently for the reinforcements he had been promised. They were not, and would not be, forthcoming. Battalions that had lost four hundred men received half that number of replacements, in driblets. Meanwhile, the two promised divisions, which, had they been available at the right moment, would almost certainly have presented Verdun to the Germans, were still firmly held at Metz, two day’s march away. And Falkenhayn had no intention of releasing his grip on them until the bulk of the French Army had been lured into his trap. The
remainder of the German reserves on the Western Front were sitting uselessly opposite the British, awaiting the relief offensive that Haig manifestly had neither the will nor the wherewithal to make. Thus Falkenhayn through his pusillanimity, his passion for half-measures and his obsession with the ‘bleeding white’ experiment, on February 25th-26th lost the opportunity of bringing off one of the greatest triumphs of the war. It was one that would never recur. Little did he know then, but he had thrown away probably the last good chance that Germany had of winning the war.

Among the German miscalculations that on various historical occasions have seemed Heaven-sent to save the Allies, Falkenhayn’s denial of reserves to the Crown Prince reminds one of Hider halting his Panzers before they closed in on the BEF at Dunkirk, different though the motives may have been. But whatever blame for the German failure in the first week at Verdun may attach to Falkenhayn (and in his Memoirs the Crown Prince heaps all of it on him), the Fifth Army Command was not entirely beyond reproach. It is felt by responsible military critics, French and German, that the Crown Prince could still have taken Verdun on the initial thrust
without
the reserves withheld by Falkenhayn. Certainly, in its execution of the attack the Fifth Army had displayed a cumbersomeness and excess of caution that would never have been countenanced by most of Hider’s captains. By limiting itself to cautious probing on the 21st (all except for the disobedient von Zwehl who had registered the day’s only success), it had lost a valuable day. As late as the 24th, when it was obvious the whole French front was collapsing, the German storm troops still waited for a renewed artillery preparation, and then moved circumspectly, as if half-expecting to walk into some kind of trap. It seemed as if, after eighteen months of complete stalemate on the Western Front, with neither side able to make a breakthrough, the subordinate German commanders at Verdun had lost confidence to succeed where so many others had failed.

On the last day of February a conference took place between the Crown Prince and his staff, and General von Falkenhayn. What was the Fifth Army to do next? The atmosphere was hardly warm. All Falkenhayn could set against the Fifth Army’s disappointment at Verdun was the news that the simultaneous U-boat campaign (as ordained in his Memorandum to the Kaiser) had already had outstanding success. As he dwelt particularly on the menace of the French positions on the Left Bank, the Heir to the Throne must have
had some difficulty hiding a note of ‘I-told-so-you-so’. For Falken-hayn, in his insistence on limiting the attack to one bank only, had stood in an isolation that was hardly splendid. General de Rivières, the creator of Verdun fortress had warned that its Achilles Heel lay on the Left Bank. There was the lesson of the pre-war German manoeuvres, and the fact that all Falkenhayn’s artillery advisers had stressed the necessity of attacking on both sides of the Meuse. And even Crown Prince Rupprecht, far removed from Verdun, had warned him days before the offensive began that the advance would be halted by flanking fire from the Left Bank. But the cold, aloof Commander-in-Chief had asked no one for advice, and had taken none. In his Memoirs he claims feebly he had foreseen the dangers, but believed that with the limited forces available an attack on the Left Bank would have been stopped by the ‘well-constructed’ enemy position. (In fact, the French lines there on February 21st were no better prepared than they had been on the Right Bank, and the rejoinder that if he had not had adequate forces he should
not
have undertaken the offensive in the first place is almost too obvious).

Asked for his views on the future of the offensive, the Crown Prince said, however, that he thought it should continue. Undoubtedly progress would henceforth be more difficult now surprise had been lost, but the prospects of a ‘considerable moral and material victory’ were still immensely enticing. He insisted on three conditions. Firstly, the offensive must be spread at once to the Left Bank; not, now, because this might represent the best way to Verdun, but ‘rather on the tactical necessity of relieving our main attack’. Secondly, he must be ‘absolutely assured that the High Command was in a position to furnish us with the necessary men and material for the continuance of the offensive, and that not by driblets, but on a large scale’. Thirdly, the campaign should be halted the moment ‘we ourselves were losing more heavily and becoming exhausted more rapidly than the enemy’.