The Price of Glory (41 page)

Verdun marked the final eclipse of this ‘terror weapon’ which had brought the Germans such cheap and unattended successes at the beginning of the war. From February onwards the 420s had kept the Verdun forts under steady bombardment from their one ton projectiles. After the fall of Douaumont, Fort Moulainville — Douaumont’s ‘twin’ to the east of Verdun — had become their principal target. Perhaps because its concrete carapace was less efficiently cushioned than Douaumont, Moulainville had suffered the most structural damage of any Verdun fort. One (fortunately unexploded) 420 shell was discovered to have penetrated six feet of earth, ten feet of concrete and finally a wall thirty inches thick. In several places the shells burst inside the fort, with terrible effects. Casualties were high, with many simply asphyxiated by the deadly TNT gases trapped inside the fort. The Commandant at once ordered the removal of all the covers that the garrison — with typical French horror of ‘
courants d’air’
— had placed over the fort’s ventilators; but the moment his back was turned they were replaced! The terrifying noise of the descending shell (described as like ‘an express rushing over a metal viaduct’), followed by the atrocious concussion that was felt throughout the fort — to say nothing of the sheer suspense of waiting for the daily bombardment to begin — drove many of the occupants out of their wits. After one bad shelling, the Commandant, finding himself confronted with a minor mutiny by shell-shocked ‘lunatics’, was forced to round them up at pistol point and lock them up in a casemate. Then the fort M.O. himself went mad and ran out of the fort into the neighbouring woods, where he was later discovered sitting on a tree stump, in a state of complete amnesia. But gradually the garrison became acclimatised to the bombardment. A nineteen-year-old Sergeant noted that from an observation post on top of the fort he could see the flash of the ‘Big Bertha’ firing from behind the Jumelles d’Ornes, seven miles away, and that thereafter he had a whole 63 seconds to warn the fort, and take cover himself. The knowledge that the giant projectiles would not plunge down on the fort unawares seemed to ease nerves; at last, when the shelling was at its worst, the Commandant took the simple expedient of evacuating the whole garrison during the day, into trenches outside.

The Germans made a serious tactical error in concentrating the
420s on Moulainville. They had primarily been persuaded by the need to knock out its 155 mm. turret which had caused much annoyance. But in fact the fort — never in the front line — was only of secondary importance. Much more promising candidates for the undivided attention of the ‘Big Berthas’ would have been Forts Vaux and Souville. Though neither mounted guns, Souville was the vital nerve centre of the whole French defence on the Right Bank — as well as being its chief observatory — and its thinner protection might well have caused it to succumb. Equally an all-out bombardment might have rendered Fort Vaux uninhabitable. But two other factors had further impaired the efficacy of the 420s. By June they had all fired far more shots than the maximum allowed for by Krupp. Barrels were badly worn so that shells had a habit of ‘key-holing’, sometimes turning end over end in flight, which seriously reduced penetrating power. More than one gun had actually blown up, with nasty conseqences for their crews.

The immobile 420s had also suffered heavily from French counter-battery fire, in which French artillerists excelled. Minutes after the ‘dud’ 420 shell had embedded itself in Fort Moulainville, experts arrived to compute from its position the angle of its trajectory, and thereby pinpointed the gun that fired it. An endless battle of David and Goliath went on, the French opposing the 420 mm. giants with light, but long-barrelled pieces of 155 mm. or less. One of the high-precision naval batteries brought to Verdun specially for this purpose was commanded by Lieutenant — later Admiral — Darlan. The odds were against the Goliaths, which were exceedingly vulnerable because of their immobility, the hugeness of their ammunition stockpiles, and their short range that forced them to come perilously close to the front. One by one they were knocked out, and one vast dump containing 450,000 heavy shells in the Forest of Spincourt was sent skyhigh by the French naval gunners early in the battle. To support its attack on Fort Vaux in June, the Fifth Army possessed only four worn-out ‘Big Berthas’ out of the original thirteen of the previous February.

* * *

June 1st was a glorious summer day; it was also, in the view of the
Reichs Archives,
‘one of the very few days of German victories not clouded over by some failure’. On each previous occasion attacks on Fort Vaux had been stopped dead before even approaching
the fort by enfilading fire from the denuded slopes of la Caillette and Fumin woods. These lay between Vaux and Douaumont and were still in French hands. With startling rapidity, the massed storm troops of the 1st and 7th German divisions now swept down la Caillette, across the Vaux Ravine, and up again on to the Fumin promontory that abutted Fort Vaux; a distance of about 800-1,000 yards. By the evening the French sector commander, General Lebrun, was forced to admit to Nivelle the ‘total disappearance’ of the units holding the lost ground. He got back the inevitable order to counter-attack immediately. But it was already too late; with one leap the Germans had eliminated the flanking fire that covered the approaches to Fort Vaux. Although the German plans envisaged no attack on the fort itself until four days later, at 6 p.m. that evening the commander of XV Corps, General von Deimling, called his staff together and told them that the day’s successes had been so encouraging that he intended now to rush Fort Vaux with a surprise attack at 3 a.m. the very next morning. Taken aback, his Chief-of-Staff complained that there simply was not enough time to make preparations. But the General insisted.

The only success registered that day by the French was the maintenance of a position called R.1.
¹
Bois Fumin was defended by three concrete entrenchments running along it from Northwest to Southeast, respectively R.3, R.2 and R.1; the last lying only 400 yards from Fort Vaux. R.3 and R.2 fell within a matter of hours, but R.1, occupied by a company of the 101 Regiment under command of Captain Charles Delvert, was to hold out against enormous odds for a full week. Delvert’s own account of its defence ranks among the most realistic of the whole battle. His company had arrived at the front just before the Douaumont attack, for which he had had a grandstand seat. As he moved up towards Vaux, the communication trench crowded with soldiers, twilight glinting upon their helmets made him think of being

on the ramparts of Elsinore and among sentinels being relieved during the night. But the sentinels here were not being relieved.

At the Regimental Command Post, chaos. The Colonel could spare no men to provide Delvert with a guide, so for two hours his company wandered lost in the dark, among exploding shells and howling wounded men who blocked what remained of the communication trenches. When he finally reached R.1, it was, he discovered, little more now than a chain of shell holes; his own Company HQ ‘a niche under a slab of reinforced concrete torn up by a 380 shell’. The soil in the Bois Fumin itself ‘had been so churned up by the shells that the earth had become as fluid as sand and the shell holes now resembled sand dunes’. The unit relieved by Delvert told him that fifteen of its men had been killed by their own 75s during the past four days; it was ‘very encouraging’.

As soon as the German bombardment had lifted on the morning of June 1st, Delvert saw the German infantry swarm out of their trenches, ‘like ants when one has kicked an antheap’. Out of range, there was nothing he could do but watch, once again, ‘as if from a balcony’. Soon he could see the enemy jumping into the French front-line trenches on the Caillette slopes; ‘puffs of white smoke showed us that a hand-to-hand grenade battle was taking place. Then silence returned.…’ Then the blue-clad figures were falling back ‘in disorder’, down into the valley below the Bois Fumin, with shells bursting in their midst. Next, there was a thin line of the same blue-clad figures sixty to eighty strong moving in the opposite direction, without weapons. Prisoners! A short time later, coalscuttle helmets were seen bobbing up and down in the trench immediately to Delvert’s front, little more than 25 yards distant. A spirited exchange of fire — ‘the kind of fighting that excites everyone’ — took place. At Delvert’s side a nineteen-year-old soldier collapsed with a hole in his forehead. Then suddenly there was a shout that the enemy had reached R.2, 200 yards away, on Delvert’s left flank; ‘a lively fusilade. They are resisting! At last!’

By 2.30 that afternoon, R.2 had been overwhelmed too. ‘Almost immediately, the conquering Germans were observed beginning to dig sap-heads towards us. Now the ravine alone separates us from them. Are we going to be trapped here like mice?’

For the rest of that day Delvert’s machine guns managed to keep the enemy on two sides at a respectful distance, while in the afternoon heat a nauseating plague of bloated bluebottles descended on the dead in the trench.

Friday, June 2nd.
A night of anxiety and constant alerts… No rations reached us yesterday. Thirst is particularly troublesome. Biscuits are foul…

Abruptly Delvert’s writing was interrupted by a violent concussion and he was covered with earth. A French 75 shell had landed in the next dugout, blowing to pieces his quartermaster-sergeant. The rest of the day passed in an exchange of rifle fire. That evening the Germans opposite made their first attack:

I issued grenades all round, because at such close range rifles are useless.

The enemy was repulsed. Suddenly, flame and smoke billowed out behind Delvert. It must be an enemy flamethrower! ‘Even the boxes of grenades began to catch fire!’ (Actually, as it transpired later, Delvert’s absent-minded runner, Champion, ordered to send up a red rocket appealing for an artillery barrage, had set it off between his legs and ignited the rest of the rockets.) At 10 o’clock that night an
homme soupe
arrived with five water bottles — one of which was empty — for the whole company. That meant two gallons between sixty-eight men and three officers — and it ‘smelt of corpses’.

But there was worse to come for the men inside Fort Vaux.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

FORT VAUX

Verdun has brought war back into honour, the sort of war in which the individual man and personal courage are given their full chances of values.—H. H. VON MELLENTHIN,
The New York Times Monthly Magazine
(June 1916)

F
ORT
V
AUX
was the smallest in the whole Verdun system, covering less than one-quarter the area of Douaumont. It had no 155 mm. turret, only one bearing a single 75. But this had been completely destroyed when a German 420 detonated a three-quarters of a ton demolition charge laid there in the panic following the fall of Douaumont. As Vaux too had had all its flanking 75s removed by Joffre, by June 1916 it possessed no armament bigger than a machine gun. None of these was mounted in an armoured turret. Apart from the shattering of the 75 turret, one of the underground corridors had been opened by a shell, and was now blocked with sandbags; most of the outlying galleries had been damaged in some degree, and an enormous crack ran disquietingly along the length of the underground barracks. Otherwise the fort had withstood the bombardment well. Less satisfactory was the work carried out (or rather,
not
carried out) under Pétain’s orders of February to rehabilitate the forts. No deep underground approach tunnel had been dug (as the Germans had done at Douaumont) to link the fort with the rear — so that it could easily be cut off. Worse still, nothing had been done to improve the water supply, despite grave warnings. Both these shortcomings were to have serious consequencs.

In command of the fort was Major Sylvain-Eugène Raynal, a tough Colonial soldier from Bordeaux, aged forty-nine, to whom promotion had not been particularly kind. Badly wounded several times in the war already, he limped on a cane and should by rights have been invalided out of the army. He had however managed to persuade his seniors to send him back to the front, on fortress duty, which was considered less arduous than the trenches. On May 24th, the day the attempt to recapture Douaumont failed, Raynal reached his new post at Vaux. His first impression of the fort was of soldiers crowded together:

in such numbers that it is extremely difficult to move, and I took a very long time to reach my command post.… If an attack materialised all the occupants would be captured before they could defend themselves.

Apart from its regular garrison, the fort was filled with stray stretcher-bearers, signallers and the debris of regiments that had lost contact with their units in the chaos of the German onslaught and had come to seek refuge. Raynal at once tried to chase these fugitives out, but still more arrived and soon it became impossible for troops to leave the fort. Thus when the siege began, instead of the maximum complement of 250 for which it was designed, Raynal found himself with over 600 troops in his charge, many of them wounded. In addition, Vaux’s garrison numbered four carrier pigeons and a cocker-spaniel brought in by the survivors of a signal unit.