The Price of Glory (31 page)

After twenty months of fighting, where twenty times I should have died [Raymond Jubert admitted] I have not yet seen war as I imagined it. No; none of those grand tragic tableaux, with sweeping strokes and vivid colours, where death would be a stroke, but these small painful scenes, in obscure corners, of small compass where one cannot possibly distinguish if the mud were flesh or the flesh were mud.

Of all the participants qualifying for the title of hero at Verdun, probably none deserved it more than three of the most humble categories: the runners, the ration parties and the stretcher-bearers. As a regular lieutenant in charge of the divisional runners at Souville stated, simply: ‘The bravery of the man isolated in the midst of danger is the true form of courage.’ With telephone lines no sooner laid than torn up by shellfire, and the runner become the sole means of communication at Verdun, the most frequently heard order at any HQ was ‘send two runners’. From the relative protection of their holes, the infantry watched in silent admiration at the blue caps of the runners bobbing and dodging among the plumes of exploding TNT. It was an almost suicidal occupation. Few paths were not sign-posted by their crumpled remains, and on the Mort Homme one regiment lost twenty-one runners in three hours.

Perhaps demanding even more courage, though, was the rôle of
the
cuistot, ravitailleur
, or
homme-soupe
, as the ration parties were variously called, in that it was played out in the solitariness of night.

Under danger, in the dark, one feels a kind of particular horror at finding oneself alone. Courage requires to be seen [noted Jubert]. To be alone, to have nothing to think about except oneself… to have nothing more to do than to die without a supreme approbation! The soul abdicates quickly and the flesh abandons itself to shudders.

On account of the shelling, motor transport could approach no closer than a cross-roads nicknamed ‘Le Tourniquet’ at the end of the
Voie Sacrée
. The massacre of the horses, unable to take cover upon the warning whistle of a shell, had become prohibitive. Thus all rations for the men at the front had to come up on the backs of other men. The
cuistots,
three or four to a company, were generally selected from among the elderly, the poor shots and the poor soldiers. One of the most moving pictures printed in
L’Illustration
during the war was of one of these unhappy
cuistots
crawling on his stomach to the front at Verdun, with flasks of wine lashed to his belt. Each carried a dozen of the heavy flasks, and a score of loaves of bread strung together by string, worn like a bandolier. They often made a round trip of twelve miles every night; even though, bent under their loads, at times they could barely crawl, let alone walk, in the the glutinous mud. They arrived, collapsing from fatigue, only to be cursed by comrades, desperate from hunger and thirst, on finding that the flasks of precious
pinard
had been punctured by shell fragments, the bread caked with filth. Frequently they never arrived. Fixed enemy guns fired a shell every two or three minutes on each of the few well-known routes with the accuracy of long practice. Crossing the worse danger zones was like some horrible game of ‘Last Across’; they told you that forty
cuistots
had got across safely since the last casualty; you waited for the explosion, then staggered frantically over the open space, knowing that if you were No. 41 the next shell probably had your name on it.

For all the gallantry and self-sacrifice of the
cuistots
, hunger and thirst became regular features at Verdun, adding to the sum of misery to be endured there. Second Lieutenant Campana, whom we have seen earlier on the Mort Homme, recalls dispatching a ration party of eight men one night in March. The following morning
five came back — without rations. That night another eight set out. None returned. The next night some hundred men from all companies set forth, but were literally massacred by violent gunfire. After three days without food, Campana’s men were reduced to scavenging any remnants they could find upon the bodies lying near their position. Many had been decomposing for several weeks. The experience was more the rule than the exception; so too, as winter sufferings gave way to a torrid summer, was this spectacle:

I saw a man drinking avidly from a green scum-covered marsh, where lay, his black face downward in the water, a dead man lying on his stomach and swollen as if he had not stopped filling himself with water for days…

Worst of all was the lot of the stretcher-bearers, which usually fell — until the supply was used up — to the regimental musicians. The two-wheeled carts that comprised the principal means of transporting the wounded on other French sectors proved quite useless over the pock-ridden terrain at Verdun; the dogs used to sniff out the wounded went rabid under the shelling. Unlike the runners or the
cuistots
, when carrying a wounded man the unhappy
musiciens/brancardiers
could not fling themselves to the ground each time a shell screamed overhead. Often the demands simply exceeded what human flesh could obey. Response to pleas for volunteers to carry the wounded was usually poor, and the troops at Verdun came to recognise that their chances of being picked up, let alone brought to medical succour were extremely slim.

During the Second World War, there were cases when the morale of even veteran British Guardsmen suffered if, in the course of an action, they were aware that surgical attention might not be forthcoming for at least five hours. On most Western battlefields, it was normally a matter of an hour or two. Surgical teams and nursing sisters — copiously provided with blood plasma, sulfa-drugs and penicillin, worked well forward in the battle area, so that a badly wounded man could be given emergency treatment without having to be removed along a bumpy road to hospital. For the more serious cases, there was air transport direct to base hospital, possibly hundreds of miles to the rear. In contrast, at Verdun a casualty — even once picked up — could reckon himself highly fortunate if he received any treatment within twenty-four hours. During the desperate
days of July, the wounded lingered in the foul, dark, excrement-ridden vaults of Fort Souville for over six days before they could be evacuated.

Poorly organised as were the French medical services, demand far outstripped supply almost throughout the war, but several times at Verdun the system threatened to break down altogether. There were never enough surgeons, never enough ambulances, of course no ‘wonder drugs’, and often no chloroform with which to perform the endless amputations of smashed limbs. If a casualty reached the clearing station, his ordeals were by no means over. Georges Duhamel, a doctor at Verdun and later a member of the Academy, vividly describes the chaos in one of these primitive charnel houses in ‘
La Vie des Martyrs
.’ Arriving during the early stages of the battle, he noted in despair, ‘there is work here for a month’. The station was overflowing with badly wounded who had already been waiting for treatment for several days. In tears they beseeched to be evacuated; their one terror to be labelled ‘untransportable’. These, not merely the hopelessly wounded, but those whose wounds were just too complicated for the frantic surgeons to waste time probing, or who looked as if they would be little use to the army again, were laid outside in the bitter cold. It was not long before German shells landed among this helpless pile, but at least this reduced the doctors’ work. Inside, the surgeons, surrounded by dustbins filled with lopped–off limbs, did the best they could to patch up the ghastly wounds caused by the huge shell splinters.

Later Duhamel and his team were visited by an immaculate Inspector-General who told them they really ought to plant a few flowers around the gloomy station. As he left, Duhamel noticed that someone had traced ‘
Vache
’ in the dust on the brass-hat’s car.

At the clearing stations the backlog of even the partially repaired mounted alarmingly as, with the constant demand of the
Voie Sacrée
supply route, all too few vehicles could be spared for use as ambulances. British Red Cross sections appeared on the front (among them the poet Laurence Binyon), and later American volunteers. Though the crews drove 24 hours at a stretch, unable to wear gasmasks because they fogged up, still there seemed to be more wounded than the ambulances could hold. Meanwhile in the overcrowded, squalid base hospitals, those who had survived so far were dying like flies, their beds immediately refilled. Clyde Balsley, an American very badly wounded with the ‘Lafayette Squadron’ noted in contrast that

the miracles of science after the forced butchery at Verdun… made a whole year and a half at the American Hospital pass more quickly than six weeks in the [French] hospital at Verdun.

The wounded in these hospitals lived in terror of the periodical decoration parades; because it had become a recognised custom to reward a man about to die with the
Croix de Guerre
. Of slight compensation were the visits of the ‘professional’ visitors, such as the patriotic, exquisite, ‘Lady in Green’, described by Duhamel, who spoke inspiredly to the
grands mutilés
of

the enthusiastic ardour of combat! The superb anguish of bounding ahead, bayonet glittering in the sun….

Equipment in these hospitals was hopelessly inadequate, but at Verdun the situation was exacerbated still further by the poisonous environment, virulently contaminated by the thousands of putrifying corpses. Even the medically more advanced Germans noted the frequency of quite minor wounds becoming fatal. Gas gangrene, for which an effective cure was not discovered till a few weeks before the Armistice, claimed an ever-increasing toll; during the April fighting on the Right Bank, one French regiment had thirty-two officers wounded of whom no fewer than nineteen died subsequently, mostly from gas gangrene. In an attempt to reduce infection of head wounds, Joffre issued an order banning beards; the
poilus
complained bitterly, and still the wounded died. After the war, it was estimated that, between February 21st and the end of June, 23,000 French alone had died in hospitals as a result of wounds received at Verdun. How many more died before ever reaching hospital can only be conjectured.

So much for the physical; and what of the spiritual effects of this piling of horror upon horror at Verdun? Many were affected like the young German student, highly religious and torn with doubts about the morality of the war, who wrote home shortly before being killed at Verdun on June 1st:

Here we have war, war in its most appalling form, and in our distress we realise the nearness of God.

As in every war men confronted with death who had forgotten,
or never knew how, began to pray fervidly. Sergeant Dubrulle, the Jesuit priest, was revolted above all by the hideous indignities he had seen TNT perpetrate upon the bodies God had created. After one terrible shelling early in the battle when human entrails were to be seen dangling in the branches of a tree and a ‘torso, without head, without arms, without legs, stuck to the trunk of a tree, flattened and opened,’ Dubrulle recalls ‘how I implored God to put an end to these indignities. Never have I prayed with so much heart.’ But, as day after day, month after month, such entreaties remained unanswered, a growing agnosticism appears in the letters from the men at Verdun. Later, on the Somme, even Dubrulle is found expressing singularly un-Catholic sentiments:

Having despaired of living amid such horror, we begged God not to have us killed — the transition is too atrocious — but just to let us be dead. We had but one desire; the end!

At least this part of Dubrulle’s prayers was answered the following year.

For every soldier whose mind dwelt on exalted thoughts, possibly three agreed with Sergeant Marc Boasson, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, killed in 1918, who noted that at Verdun ‘the atrocious environment corrupts the spirits, obsesses it, dissolves it.’

Corruption revealed itself in the guise of brutalisation. As twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Derville (killed on the Aisne, 1918) predicted at Verdun well before the battle even started:

Perhaps we shall soon all reach the degree of brutishness and indifference of the soldiers of the First Empire.

It was indeed not very exalting to watch wounded comrades-in-arms die where they lay because they could not be removed. One Divisional Chaplain, Abbé Thellier de Poncheville, recalls the spectacle of a horse, still harnessed to its waggon, struggling in the mud of a huge crater. ‘He had been there for two nights, sinking deeper and deeper,’ but the troops, obsessed by their own suffering, passed by without so much as casting a glance at the wretched beast. The fact was that the daily inocculation of horror had begun to make men immune to sensation. Duhamel explains:

A short time ago death was the cruel stranger, the visitor with the flannel footsteps… today, it is the mad dog in the house… One eats, one drinks beside the dead, one sleeps in the midst of the dying, one laughs and one sings in the company of corpses… The frequentation of death which makes life so precious also finishes, sometimes, by giving one a distaste for it, and more often, lassitude.

A period of conditioning on the Verdun battlefield manufactured a callousness towards one’s own wounded, and an apathetic, morbid acceptance of mutilation that seem to us — in our comfy isolation — almost bestial. Captain Delvert, one of the more honest and unpretentious of the French war-writers, describes his shock on approaching the Verdun front for the first time, when his company filed past a man lying with his leg shattered by a shell:

Nobody came to his assistance. One felt that men had become brutalised by the preoccupation of not leaving their company and also not delaying in a place where death was raining down.