The Price of Glory (39 page)

… reckless of all lives and of none more than his own, charging at the head of his troops, fighting rifle in hand when he could escape from his headquarters, thundering down the telephone implacable orders to his subordinates and when necessary defiance to his superiors, Mangin beaten or triumphant, Mangin the Hero or Mangin the Butcher as he was alternately regarded, became on the anvil of Verdun the fiercest warrior-figure of France.

As Mangin’s erstwhile chief in Morocco, the great Lyautey remarked of him,

there is no man more capable of getting you into a mess… and there’s no one more capable of getting you out of it!

But could France, in 1916, afford the cost of extrication in terms of the so precious blood of her youth?

Shortly before the Battle of Verdun began, Nivelle had saved Mangin from disgrace when Territorials under his command (apparently pressed too hard) broke badly. From that moment until the end of Nivelle’s brief meteoric career, the two were inseparable. At the end of March, III Corps, commanded by the Nivelle triumvirate was
transferred to Verdun and allocated the sector opposite Douaumont on the Right Bank. On the very day Mangin arrived, April 2nd, news reached him that a surprise German attack had taken the important Bois de la Caillette. Immediately he threw the only regiment at his disposal into the counter-attack. The wood was retaken three days later. The attack heralded a new French posture on the Right Bank. Few days now went by without some vigorous small-scale attack being launched by Nivelle-Mangin. Were they worth the cost? The Crown Prince admits they contributed to dislocating German plans for resuming the offensive that side of the Meuse; but they were probably less effective than the stubborn defensive battle ordained by Pétain on the Left Bank or the German’s own internal difficulties. Meanwhile Pétain fretted at their costliness and did his best to restrain Nivelle. But matters were soon to be placed beyond his control. On April 10th, Joffre visited Nivelle’s sector and

was so agreeably impressed by the results obtained that I asked Pétain to give General Nivelle the means of pursuing his advantage on the right and left of Douaumont. But Pétain’s demands became more and more pressing….

Joffre now had his opportunity. Instead of sacking the obdurate Pétain, he would promote him.

On April 19th, de Castelnau telephoned Pétain from Chantilly. The Commander-in-Chief, he said, had decided to
limoger
de Langle de Cary, Commander of Army Group Centre; Pétain was to move into his shoes; and Nivelle would take over the Second Army at Verdun. Pétain would still be in indirect control of the battle, insofar as the Second Army lay in his group, but henceforth he would exercise this control from the distance of Bar-le-Duc, while Nivelle would be the man on the spot. It was an admirably neat solution. Joffre explained it to posterity as a

means of withdrawing General Pétain from the battlefield of Verdun, hoping that by giving him a more distant perspective… he would take in the general situation with a clearer view.… He was not pleased.

It was a mild understatement. Bitter, frustrated, and thoroughly pessimistic at what he sensed lay ahead for ‘his’ troops at Verdun, Pétain packed up his simple one-room HQ at Souilly. On May 1st,
Nivelle arrived. As he mounted the steps of the Mairie, the departing Serrigny heard him declare to d’Alenson, evidently for the consumption of the world at large: ‘We have the formula!’ Within a few days of Pétain’s withdrawal, Joffre followed up by renouncing the
Noria
system; henceforth whatever miracles it might be required to perform, the army at Verdun could expect no more regular supplies of battle-fresh troops.

* * *

When Mangin (then in another part of the front) heard of the German capture of Fort Douaumont, he told his officers: ‘the retaking of the fort by our troops would be a feat of arms that would excite the imagination of the Universe’. Now, as he peered out from his new HQ in Fort Souville at Douaumont’s great dome just two miles away, he fell prey to the same irresistible magnetism that had acted upon Haupt and his Brandenburgers. He could think of nothing else but its recapture. The fort was indeed a crippling thorn in the French side. Most of the Nivelle-Mangin counter-attacks had collapsed bloodily, owing to the mere fact of German occupancy of Fort Douaumont. Though its turret guns were no longer functional, the Germans had burrowed several new entries to the north and used it as a gigantic
Stollen,
from which fresh and rested troops could sally the moment there was a French threat. Every night, an average of a thousand men passed through the fort in each direction. But above all it provided the finest observation point on the whole front. One of Mangin’s machine-gunners, Robert Desaubliaux, describes its impact on the April-May fighting:

They dominate us from Fort Douaumont; we cannot now take anything without their knowing it, nor dig any trench without their artillery spotting it and immediately bombarding it.

Mangin had already made one attempt on the fort, on April 22nd. Then, with remarkable élan, his men had actually reached the superstructure but had been driven off by the fort’s machine guns. On May 8th he had seen the huge plume of smoke billow out from Douaumont, and gradually the full significance of the disaster within seeped through to his HQ. Would there ever be a more propitious moment to carry the fort than now when its defenders were still in disarray? Mangin proposed to attack with two regiments on a front
of just one kilometre. Nivelle’s blessing was immediate. Pétain — who would have preferred to wait until sufficient troops were available to attack on a much wider front, thereby ensuring greater promise of success — was reluctant. However, great was the pressure from Joffre; the Douaumont explosion argued cogently; and finally the suave persuasiveness of Nivelle tipped the balance.

On May 13th, the same day that Knobelsdorf had pushed Falkenhayn into granting a resumption of the German Right Bank offensive, the first orders for the attack (scheduled for May 22nd) left Nivelle’s HQ. Within 48 hours the Germans knew every detail. All their offensive projects were immediately suspended and work began urgently on patching up Douaumont’s defences. Security was never one of Nivelle’s strongest points, as was to become tragically apparent the following year.

One day shortly before the attack, Mangin paid a visit to Fort Moulainville, the almost exact twin to Douaumont. Standing outside, apparently oblivious to the constant heavy shelling, he interrogated the Commandant as to what was the best way of taking a fort. What kind of guns are you going to use, he was asked? Some brand-new 370 mm. mortars, replied Mangin.
‘Mon Général,’
said the Commandant, whose fort had been under steady bombardment by German 420s for the past ten weeks and had not decisively suffered, ‘that’s quite inadequate.’ Mangin stumped away.

For the preliminary bombardment Mangin mustered some three hundred guns, including four of the 370 mm. mortars he set so much store in. It was the most powerful French concentration yet seen at Verdun. Daily for five days preceding the attack (thereby sacrificing what element of surprise there still remained) a thousand tons of shells rained down on the quarter of a square mile of mud that constituted the objective. Spotting conditions were excellent as the French had by now won mastery of the air over Verdun, and aerial photographs of the damage taken at zero hour minus forty were in the hands of Mangin’s intelligence officers before the attack went in. All the omens seemed favourable, and one of the battalion commanders was assured by Mangin that

the artillery preparation would permit us to reach the fort with our rifles slung, as it would be completely flattened.

Among the German troops out in the open the French bombardment levied the usual grim toll, and one of the first heavy shells
smashed the principal new entry into Douaumont from the North. From all sides the streams of whimpering wounded poured into the fort until its field hospital could take no more. The signal station on top of the fort was wiped out, together with its operators, and by May 22nd all the observation turrets had been knocked out. Dust and fumes from the exploding shells made the air inside almost unbreathable. Some elusive leaks in the exhaust of the donkey engine that had just been installed to supply the fort with electric light made matters still worse. When this was remedied, a blast brought a whole sandbag barricade down on top of the engine. With the fort now plunged into darkness inside, its eyes on the outside world blinded, an unpleasant atmosphere of apprehension grew in the fort. For some the strain was too much; three men had to hold down a company commander who had roamed through the pitch-black corridors, shrieking wildly that he wanted to shoot his C.O. A direct hit which opened up the southwest flanking turret forced its abandonment. The breach thus caused was to play a most important role during the French attack, but apart from this not even a crack was made in the main body of the fort by Mangin’s mortars. The Commandant of Moulainville had been right.

In the French jumping-off trenches, Guy Hallé, a twenty-three-year-old sergeant of the 74th Infantry Regiment, was experiencing that familiar knotting of the stomach. All his faculties were concentrated on a single thought, he wrote later;

to be able to comport oneself correctly in face of death. It’s not very difficult to say this little phrase; but, My God, what a terrible effort it demands! What a hideous thing; to say to oneself, at this moment, I am myself, I am completely whole in myself; my blood circulates and pulses in my arteries; I have my eyes, all my skin is intact, I do not bleed!… Oh to be able to sleep thinking that it is finished, that I shall live, that I shall have raptures, pains, grief, pleasures; that I shall not be killed!

Thirty-five minutes before zero hour two solitary German shells fell on the French trenches. Old hands like Hallé shuddered, knowing full well that this meant the Germans had their range and were just waiting for the attackers to show their heads. Despite the fact that early that morning French aircraft firing a new type of rocket destroyed five out of the six German observation balloons in the
sector, the German gunners had had such ample warning in which to sight their pieces that observation was hardly necessary, and as the first French soldier went over the top a murderously accurate counter-barrage swept the whole line. In a matter of minutes, the 129th Regiment, earmarked for the actual taking of the fort, found its companies reduced to an average of forty-five effectives; one had no more than a lieutenant and twenty-seven men left. A battalion of the 74th, commanded by fifty-year-old Major Lefebvre-Dibon, that had been appointed to the right wing of the attack, reached its objective to find that there was no sign of the battalion on its left which was to have seized the eastern side of Fort Douaumont. It had simply been wiped out; and the battalion of the 74th, that should have been supporting Lefebvre-Dibon to his right, never left the trenches, pinned down by German fire. On top of Fort Souville, Mangin, watching the course of the attack — as usual out in the open — had a lucky escape when a shell severely wounded the four staff officers with him.

Nevertheless, charging fearlessly and magnificently through the hail of shot and shell, what remained of the 129th reached the fort in eleven minutes flat. It was an incomparable display of the
Furia Francese.
Within half an hour, three-quarters of the fort superstructure, bounded by a line running from the northern apex to the southeast corner, was in French hands. From a distance,
Oberleutnant
Brandis looked on in utter dismay as the
horizon bleu
figures swarmed across ‘his’ Douaumont. The Crown Prince himself admitted afterwards, it indeed ‘seemed likely at one time that the work itself must be lost’. Inside the fort the shaking reverberations of heavy shellfire had meanwhile been replaced by a sharper sound. Hand grenades! At once there was a cry of ‘the French are here!’

A small group of French under Sergeant Piau had penetrated into the fort through the breach in the
Casemate de Bourges
at the southwest. Unchallenged, they reached, the main East-West passage, the very heart of the fort. For a few tense minutes it seemed as if Douaumont might change hands again. Then a German
Jäger
detachment arrived on the scene. Three of Sergeant Piau’s men were killed, the rest thrown back, and a machine gun was set up to ward off future intrusions. For the rest of the day fighting continued in the outer tunnels, but gradually the French were pressed back.

Outside, the French 129th Regiment had taken charge of the semiwrecked
Casemate de Bourges
and installed a well-protected
machine-gun nest on its roof. The position completely dominated the whole superstructure of the fort. Repeatedly, with courage but quite incredible stupidity, the German fort garrison sallied forth to take the machine-gun post frontally. Fifty men of the 20th Regiment charged it; thirty-three of them were mown down. Seventy
Jägers
tried their hand, and fifteen returned; of forty
Leibgrenadiers,
only a couple crawled back into the fort. Yet another assault was broken up with heavy casualties by the Germans’ own field artillery. Attempts to smoke out the machine-gun post failed, and all through the night of the 22nd and the following day it continued to control the fort superstructure.

On the evening of the 22nd, reports came back on both sides that the French were in possession of the fort. Mangin arrived at Nivelle’s HQ, followed by a staff officer carrying a huge satchel full of the dossiers of officers to be recommended for decoration, and pronounced, ‘Douaumont is ours!’ But the dice were heavily loaded against the attackers. The German ripostes now began in earnest. Under their blows, the French units holding the left flank of the advance melted away in the morning mists of the 23rd, and the two battalions left on the fort found themselves in a narrow salient caught by fire from three sides. On the right flank, Lefebvre-Dibon reported back to his colonel that he had by now lost over forty per cent of his men, and that it was becoming impossible to hold his front without reinforcements. But fresh units ruthlessly hurled forward by Mangin either arrived decimated or not at all. Company-Commander Charles Delvert who watched the whole action from a neighbouring position provides a description typical of these relief attempts: