The Price of Glory (43 page)

While in the acrid darkness of the fort the garrison knew and cared little about the weather outside, Delvert in R.1 recorded that the 4th was a beautiful sunny Sunday. There were more German attacks, but in the June sunshine Delvert had time to comment lyrically on the essential beauty of the grenadiers poised to hurl their
missiles,
‘avec le beau geste du joueur de balle’.
Unfortunately, the day was later spoilt by a new prolonged bombardment from French guns, and by maddening thirst exacerbated by the heat. That night at 9.30, Delvert ordered his company to stand by to be relieved. The men were almost too tired to rejoice. An hour and a half later a runner arrived from regimental headquarters postponing the relief, ‘because of circumstances’. Mercifully, there was rain the next day, and the company put out groundsheets to catch the water. Meanwhile, in the German trenches opposite there were signs of unprecedented activity. Communication trenches were being widened, all of which could only mean a new all-out attack on R.1. Would relief come before the remnants of Delvert’s heroic company were submerged?

After dark on the 5th, the awaited relief at last arrived. But the ordeal was not yet over. With no communication trench to provide cover, Delvert’s company were silhouetted targets for the machine guns installed in R.2. Then followed a dreadfully accurate artillery barrage. When the company reached safety, it numbered only thirty-seven broken men; but — on German figures — it had inflicted over three hundred casualties. For another three days Delvert’s successors continued the valiant defence; then R.1 fell to the Germans with 500 prisoners.

For Raynal and his men there could be neither relief nor rainwater to assuage their growing thirst. June 5th, the fourth day of the siege, had begun at dawn with a shattering explosion near the
Casemate de Bourges
on the south-west corner of the fort. A huge breach had been blown in the wall, and German Pioneers were on the spot at once with a flame-thrower. But a freak current of air blew the flame back in their faces. A grenade-thrower counter-sally, led by Lieutenant Girard, restored the situation. In the course of it, Girard was wounded again.

Through peepholes Raynal could now see the Germans, thwarted in their attacks up the corridors, digging fresh mineshafts under other parts of the fort from the outside.

It was not a pleasant sight. He flashed a message to Souville, requesting ‘hit them quick with artillery’. The reply came with gratifying alacrity; there was a muffled thud, and the watching Raynal saw ‘German bodies hurled into the moat. Work above us ceased at once.’

Outside the fort, the latest failure of the flame-throwers had flung
the attackers into acute depression. The infernal machines, it was felt, were causing them more casualties than the besieged, and they were withdrawn. Little did the Germans realise how close the flame-throwers had come to breaking Vaux’s resistance the day before; or that its water had run out. All they could see was the heavy toll exacted by the incessant French gunfire on the fort’s superstructure, and the almost negligible progress being made along the underground corridors. The fort indeed seemed impregnable. Perhaps the men inside could hold out for another month, or a year. Finally, to make things worse, the Pioneers had received an insulting message from General von Deimling, declaring that the fort had been taken, but that a few isolated groups of French were still holding out in one or two cellars. These were to be ‘mopped up’ forthwith.

Later that same day, Raynal suffered two new reverses. A second after the blinker operator had completed a message to Souville a shell landed on the post, killing three men, and wounding several others, while destroying the signal equipment. In the course of the day’s subterranean fighting along the north-east corridor, the enemy had taken the entrance to the last accessible latrine; an important morale factor in the already foully stinking fort. By now of the eight surviving officers under Raynal, one was gravely wounded; three had been wounded to a lesser extent (two of them at least twice), but stayed at their posts; a fourth had a bad case of fever, while Raynal himself was shivering with recurrent malaria. That evening he inspected his men,

crushed with fatigue, silent and gloomy. If I were to ask one more effort of them, they would have been incapable. Therefore I decided to distribute to them the last drops of water.…

This amounted to less than a quarter of a pint per person, for men who had not had a drop the previous twenty-four hours — and it reeked vilely of corpses. There was no question of eating any of the highly salted ‘
singe
’ (of which there was a plentiful supply); Raynal noted that no food had passed his lips for two days. How much longer could the garrison keep up its strength? That night, rigging up an
ad hoc
blinker, Raynal signalled Fort Souville:

Imperative be relieved and receive water tonight. I am reaching the end of my tether…

Suddenly, into this atmosphere of extreme dejection burst a mud-stained figure from another world. It was young Buffet, proudly wearing a bright new medal. The garrison crowded around him, fatigue and thirst temporarily forgotten.

He had achieved the impossible. It transpired that most of the escapers had been cut down by German machine guns, or taken prisoner, but Buffet and eight others had made it. Reaching the refuge of Fort Tavannes, he had been passed from the Brigadier to the Sector Commander, General Lebrun, and finally on to Nivelle himself, who had decorated him and told of an imminent counter-attack being prepared which would, this time, succeed. At once the nineteen-year-old Officer Cadet volunteered to creep through the German lines again to take the news back to the fort. The sergeant accompanying him was wounded and had to be abandoned on the way, but a second time Buffet got through.

Eagerly the garrison officers pressed Buffet for details of the promised relief attack. It was to begin at 2 a.m. the following morning, said Buffet, and a whole battalion would be taking part. ‘I saw the faces of my officers darken,’ recalls Raynal, ‘and I guessed what was going on inside them, because I shared their thoughts; the operation, as conceived, seemed to be,
a priori,
inadequate.’

Shortly after midnight the fort defenders heard the characteristic scream of French 75 mm. shells. But not a single explosion. The ‘softening-up’ barrage was falling, quite harmlessly, well over the fort. At 2 a.m., the garrison took up positions to give support to the relief force. The barrage lifted, and anxiously the besieged searched the horizon for their deliverers. At 2.30, still no sign. Finally, towards 3 a.m., a message from the
Casemate de Bourges
reported sighting a small force, of about platoon strength, pinned down by German machine-gun fire a few yards from the fort. The observers watched in despair as the isolated French were picked off one by one and then rose from their shell-holes, hands above their heads. It was all Vaux saw of the relieving attack that Nivelle had promised Buffet. The relief force had done its best, and suffered terrible losses, with a sergeant-major taking over command of the battalion when every single officer was either killed or wounded.

Morale inside the fort fell to its lowest point. Under the strain, a young lieutenant went off his head and threatened to blow up the grenade depot. It would be impossible to hold out much longer. Raynal blinked out another message, pleading ‘intervene before
complete exhaustion…
Vive la France!
’ But there was no longer any response from Souville, once again convinced that the fort must have succumbed. Later that day a huge shell landing on the fort caved in part of the vault of the central gallery, and now the threat of being buried alive was added to that of asphyxiation and thirst. Still the Germans could make no headway along the underground corridors. But by evening the suffering from thirst was indescribable. Over the past three June days each of the garrison had received a total of one half-glass of foul water. In their despair, men tried to lick the moisture and slime off the fort walls. As he inspected the fort, leaning heavily on his stick, Raynal found men fainting in the corridors, others retching violently — having drunk their own urine. Worst of all was the plight of the ninety-odd wounded, with no drop of water to assuage their raging fever, some atrociously burnt, and many lying in the dark, foul lazaret without proper attention since the beginning of June.

Fort Vaux had done its duty, Major Raynal decided. Shelled by Big Berthas, besieged, attacked by gas and fire, cut off from France, with nothing more imposing than machine guns for its defence, it had held off the weight of the Crown Prince’s army for a week. Even after the Germans had actually penetrated the fort, they had been able to advance no more than thirty or forty yards underground in five days of fighting. Only thirst had conquered Vaux. What wonders could not mighty Douaumont have achieved had it been commanded by a Raynal!

Having made his decision, to Raynal late that night there came a last flicker of hope when once again the French guns flared up. Was Nivelle coming to save them after all? But by midnight a strangely eery silence fell over the whole battlefield. There would be no new relief attempt.

At 3.30 on the morning of June 7th, sleepy observers in Fort Souville picked up the corrupted fragment of a last blinker message from Vaux. ‘…
ne quittez pas
…’ was all that could be deciphered. A few hours later the fort surrendered amid scenes of pre-twentieth century courtesy, an appropriate epilogue to what was one of the most heroic isolated actions of the war. From behind a barricade in the northwest corridor, Lieutenant Werner Müller of the German Machine Gun Corps saw a French officer and two men bearing a white flag. They handed over a formal letter addressed ‘To The Commander of the German Forces Attacking Fort Vaux’.
Barely able to conceal his joy, Müller fetched his captain and together they were led to Raynal past a guard of French soldiers, standing rigidly to attention, ‘like recruits’, in the dimly-lit tunnel. The terms of surrender were formally signed, and then Raynal handed over to the Germans the highly ornamented bronze key of the Fort.

The evacuation of the captive garrison began. To one German war correspondent, its survivors presented ‘the living image of desolation’. Nothing was more demanding of compassion than the spectacle of the captured, imitating Raynal’s dog and crawling on their stomachs to drink frenetically of the putrid water from the very first shellhole. As they counted heads, the Germans were as surprised by the numbers of the garrison as they were by the sight of the cocker at Raynal’s heels, bedraggled, battle-worn, but still alive. The garrison had suffered about a hundred casualties, including less than a score killed. To take Fort Vaux (which, but for thirst, could almost certainly have held out longer) the four German battalions (plus their Pioneers) directly concerned had alone expended 2,678 men and sixty-four officers. It was hardly surprising that French military thinkers would soon be making some far-reaching deductions about the value of underground forts.

Next day Raynal was taken to see the Crown Prince at Stenay. He was at once agreeably surprised to note that ‘he is not the monkey our caricaturists have made him out to be… has none of that Prussian stiffness’. Speaking fluent French, the Crown Prince heaped praises on the French defenders, several times using the word ‘
admirable
’. He congratulated Raynal on being decorated by Joffre with one of the highest degrees of the
Légion d’Honneur;
a piece of news that had not reached him in the fort. Finally, observing that Raynal had lost his own sword, as a supreme token of military esteem he presented him with the captured sword of another French officer.

* * *

Though Raynal and his men were on their way to two-and-a-half years in a prisoner-of-war camp, there remained one more tragic scene to be played out at Fort Vaux. Since June 2nd, Nivelle had ordered five separate attempts to be made to relieve the fort. Each, inadequate to the task, had foundered with bloody losses. Following the failure of the attack on June 6th that had broken the heart of
Vaux’s garrison, Nivelle had immediately ordered yet a sixth attack, this time to be carried out in brigade strength, by a special ‘
Brigade de Marche
’ formed from crack units drawn from various parts of the Verdun front. It would be unleashed at dawn on June 8th. At a conference attended by some twenty of the generals under his command, vigorous protests were raised. Even Nivelle’s evil genius, Major d’Alenson, seems to have been opposed to this new attempt. But Nivelle was adamant; his reputation was involved. When the German radio broadcast the news of the surrender of Fort Vaux the following day, he declared it to be a German hoax — just like the one in March.

The two regiments designated for the ‘
Brigade de Marche
’ were the 2nd Zouaves and the
Régiment d’lnfanterie Coloniale du Maroc
; both comprised of North African troops that were far from fresh. The commander, Colonel Savy, was told by Nivelle in person that they had been chosen.

for the finest mission that any French unit can have, that of going to the aid of comrades in arms who are valiantly performing their duty under tragic circumstances.

Hastily the North Africans were pushed up to the front, under an avalanche of rain. Meanwhile, at the identical moment that they were to go in, the German 50th Division was about to capitalise on the capture of Vaux by thrusting out towards Fort Tavannes. The two attacks met head on.

Thirty-two-year-old Sergeant-Major César Méléra had been detailed — to his evident annoyance — to take up the rear of his battalion of the Régiment Colonial, and stop stragglers falling back. He describes tersely the ensuing action as viewed from the immediate rear. Leaving for the front, a man committed suicide, ‘tired of the war which he neither understood nor saw’. On the approach march:

The clay is so slippery and so difficult to climb that one marches as much on one’s knees as one’s feet. Arrived in a sweat at Souville Plateau where the Battalion is awaiting its rearguard. Lost the Machine-Gun Company. Found them again after half an hour.… Have to hold on to the coat of the man in front so as not to lose oneself. Fall into a hole. Arrive in a glade. Halt; the machine-gunners lost again. Three-quarters of an hour’s pause.