The Price of Glory (52 page)

Not until well on in the afternoon did the airforce provide the first positively encouraging news. To General Passaga, the commander of the 133rd Division — otherwise known as ‘
La Gauloise
’ — was brought the fragment of a map dropped from an aircraft. On it was sketched the French line established level with and to the right of Fort Douaumont and scrawled across it:

La Gauloise
16 hours 30.
Vive la France!

About the same time the anxious watchers in Fort Souville suddenly saw to their front Douaumont expose itself, clad in a beguiling rosy light as a ray of autumnal sunshine touched it. On top of the dome were three Moroccan soldiers vigorously waving their arms. It reminded one of the generals in Mangin’s entourage of
le Beau Soleil d’Austerlitz
.

It was indeed as an Austerlitz that France would greet the recapture of Douaumont, but at first — having learnt prudence through past disasters — the French censors played cautious with the news until it was certain the fort would not be lost again. Already on the
afternoon of the 24th a German counter-attack was thrown in, but collapsed feebly. After this no further attempts were made, and the Crown Prince acceded to losing most of the conquered terrain at Verdun; something only the deadly psychological demands posed by a
symbol
had precluded his doing upon the removal of Falkenhayn. On November 2nd, the French Second Army retook Fort Vaux, which had been previously evacuated and partially demolished by its garrison. Amid the bitterest winter weather of the war, they launched the second of their major counterstrokes on December 15th (‘this black day’, the Crown Prince called it), recapturing Louvemont and Bezonvaux (both lost in February), and pushing the line a comfortable two miles beyond Douaumont.
¹
Though a mere shadow of its former glory — open to the skies in several places and with mud and water inches deep in its corridors — the fort was safe. And with it Verdun was safe.

By a strange coincidence, the French counter-offensives ended on the same day that a year earlier Falkenhayn had gained the Kaiser’s approval for his ‘Operation
GERICHT
’. Banking on the shortness of public memory, German propaganda did its best to play down the importance of Forts Vaux and Douaumont, but the loss of Douaumont in particular was regarded as a grave defeat throughout the army. It was, remarked one soldier, ‘like losing a fragment of the Fatherland’. Said Hindenburg candidly of the October attack:

On this occasion the enemy hoisted us with our own petard. We could only hope that in the coming year he would not repeat the experiment on a greater scale and with equal success.

Compared with the incredible stubborness they had shown during the previous months, the fight put up by the Germans in October–December had, admittedly, been half-hearted. Nevertheless, nothing could detract from the fact that France had won her most brilliant victory since the Marne. On the one day of October 24th alone, Mangin’s men had reconquered ground the Crown Prince had taken four and a half months to gain. They had advanced three kilometers over glutinous clay and the most shell-pocked ground ever known; an outstanding achievement by First War standards, which, had the
Germans been able to emulate it on June 23rd or July 11th, would have brought them to the suburbs of Verdun in one bound. Nivelle’s ‘creeping barrage’ had proved itself an outstanding success; one of the great inventions of the war, it seemed. For once, during the French series of counter-offensives, German losses had actually been higher than the attackers’; that 11,000 prisoners and 115 guns were taken in December alone was indicative of just how far the Fifth Army had deteriorated. Nonetheless, French casualties, had also been painfully severe. Nicolai’s battalion of the R.I.C.M. returned from Douaumont with little more than a hundred out of 800 sent to Verdun four days earlier, and the total men consumed during the counter-offensives came to 47,000.
¹
In December the relentless determination of Nivelle and Mangin to achieve their ends without regard to the cost resulted in some ominous incidents. They revealed that Verdun had left a mark on the soul of the French Army not lightly to be erased. Poincaré, arriving to decorate the troops, had stones thrown at his car, accompanied by cries of
‘Embusqués!’
On the roadside out of Verdun someone had scrawled
‘Chemin de l’Abattoir’
, and on the night of December 10th a whole division bound for the final offensive took to bleating like sheep. Though that same division fought heroically, it was a sinister preview of what was to come in 1917.

None of this was visible to the public of France. All it could see was a tremendous, resounding victory worthy of
La Grande Nation.
While all over the world Allied propagandists suddenly rediscovered the incomparable significance of Vaux and Douaumont (one French historian likened their recapture to Charlemagne avenging Roland on the field of Roncevaux), France jubilantly celebrated her El Alamein of the First War. She had also discovered her Montgomery, so she thought. Joffre was eclipsed; Pétain’s role in preparing the way for triumphant counterstrokes was forgotten. Nivelle was the man of the moment. In a sketch glorifying the new star,
L’lllustration
wrote:

Here is a chief in the Latin sense of the word, that is to say
une tête
… confident hope rings a carillon of bells in our hearts.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE NEW LEADER

Victory was to be bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat.—WINSTON S. CHURCHILL,
The World Crisis

From Verdun, city of suffering, will stem for France a new era of glory.—HENRY BORDEAUX,
The Captives Delivered

T
ECHNICALLY
, the Battle of Verdun was over. But fighting over the corpse-ridden battlefield would continue sporadically, with occasional savage flare-ups, until the end of the war, and the wider effects of Verdun would endure even longer.

The most immediate result of the battle was the downfall of the once all-powerful ‘Papa’ Joffre. In June, the first Secret Session had revealed to French parliamentarians the full measure of the High Command’s neglect of Verdun’s defences that had cost the nation such a hecatomb of lives. Now the summit of all Joffre’s strategy, the Somme, was recognised to have been just one more Allied failure; attended this time with even greater casualties than the vain offensives of 1915. All through the summer, since that Secret Session, the rumbles against Joffre had been steadily growing louder. With the arrival of the third winter of the war and the collapse of the Somme they had become quite deafening. After some shabby manipulating in the Paris
couloirs,
the old Titan who had so nearly lost France the war, and yet without whose serene nervous system defeat would have been equally inevitable in the early days, was shuffled out of his post. On December 27th he was promoted Marshal of France and then joined in obscurity the scores of inept or unlucky commanders that he himself had
limogé
so ruthlessly in the past. None had been speedier to recognise the wind of change than Joffre’s satraps in G.Q.G.; in a classic passage Pierrefeu describes his leave-taking at Chantilly:

The new Marshal summoned his heads of department to the Villa Poiret to bid them farewell. It was a sad leave-taking.… The Marshal, whose rank entitled him to three orderly officers, asked who among those present would accompany him in his retirement. Major Thouzelier alone raised his hand. The Marshal expressed his surprise at this, whereupon General Gamelin
¹
said gently to him, ‘General, you must not blame those who have their career to make.’ And in truth, Joffre bore no ill-will. When everyone had left, the Marshal glanced once more over the villa which had housed so much glory. Then he smiled, and, giving a friendly pat to the faithful Thouzelier, he made his favourite exclamation as he passed his hand over his head.
‘Pauvre Joffre! Sacré Thouzelier!’

Well before Joffre’s actual downfall, G.Q.G. had been adjusting itself to the idea of his successor. In all branches one heard glorification of the coming C-in-C. And his name? Robert Nivelle. The logical successors, de Castelnau and Foch (the latter in disfavour after the failure of the Somme) had been by-passed. So too, had been Nivelle’s immediate senior, Pétain. The rejection of Pétain had resulted pardy from the politicians’ apprehension at having a C-in-C with such virulent declared contempt of themselves; Poincaré for one having never forgotten Pétain’s unfortunate sally to the effect that ‘nobody was better placed than the President himself to be aware that France was neither led nor governed.’

On the other hand, Nivelle was renowned for his ability to charm the peoples’ elected. But more than that, in December 1916 France’s volatile imagination was not seized by so self-effacingly modest a leader as Pétain. After the reconquest of Douaumont, Nivelle was the great hero, the man who would now smash through to victory. He was, says Pierrefeu with praiseworthy candour,

not only a rash commander, he was representative of the national temperament. This is the reason that he was blindly followed.

On the opening of the last of the Verdun counter-offensives, Nivelle, the artillery Colonel of 1914, left Souilly for his new command. A week later, on December 22nd, Mangin also left, to take over the Sixth Army. On the eve of his departure, Nivelle repeated the slogan with which he had arrived — ‘We have the formula’ — and added ‘the experience is conclusive. Our method has proved
itself. Victory is certain, I give you my assurance.…’ While decorating Mangin’s Moroccans, he was also heard to say ‘we shall see them again in the spring’.

Pushed on by the dying d’Alenson, Nivelle at once began to plan the great Spring Offensive, the offensive that would end the war in one swift blow ‘of violence, brutality and rapidity’, as he described it. The bull-headed attrition methods of Joffre discarded once and for all, this decisive blow would ‘erupt’ through to the third and fourth enemy lines all in the same day. The spirit of de Grandmaison would ride again, and it would be a purely French affair. The chosen sector was the Chemin des Dames, a long barrow overlooking the River Aisne, one of the most strongly defended bulwarks of the German line. The method employed would be that which had succeeded so brilliantly at Douaumont; the saturation bombardment, followed by the ‘creeping barrage’. Nivelle, however — ignoring the lesson of the Germans’ ‘Green Cross’ gas attacks at Verdun — forgot one of the essential axioms of war; that success seldom succeeds twice. The Germans had now had two separate occasions at Verdun, in October and December, to study Nivelle’s technique — and they were never slow to learn. Describing the evolution of a new system of defence in depth, the Crown Prince wrote:

Had we held to the stiff defence which had hitherto been the rule, I am firmly convinced that we should not have come through the great defensive battles of 1917.

The superb triumph at Douaumont was to father France’s greatest disaster of the war.

Pétain and two other Army Group commanders were extremely sceptical, but the politicians (including the mistrustful Lloyd George who had recently replaced Asquith) were thoroughly swayed by Nivelle’s charm, eloquence, and — as usual — superlative confidence. Even the morale of the war-weary
poilus
was raised to fresh heights by Nivelle’s repeated promises that the end of their sufferings was close at hand. ‘You won’t find any Germans in front of you,’ he assured one of his Army Commanders, echoing to perfection what Falkenhayn had told his generals the previous February. To the troops as they waited to go into battle, he declared:

The hour has come. Courage. Confidence:
Nivelle.

Meanwhile Mangin was telling his Sixth Army:

I am ready; the day after tomorrow my headquarters will be at Laon.

Unfortunately Nivelle’s assurances had also reached German ears. Security had been even worse neglected than before the Douaumont fiasco the previous May, and some six weeks ahead of the offensive the defenders knew exactly what to expect. The huge weight of Nivelle’s artillery preparation came down like a haymaker swung into thin air. The Germans had simply pulled back from their forward positions. On April 16, 1917, the French infantry — exhilarated by all they had been promised — left their trenches with an
élan
unsurpassed in all their glorious history. They advanced half-a-mile into a vacuum, and then came up against thousands of intact machine guns. Angry, demoralised, bitterly disillusioned men flooded back from the scene of the butchery. By the following day, there had been something like 120,000 casualties. Nivelle had predicted 10,000 wounded; the Medical Services had added another 5,000 to this estimate, but in the event the offensive required over 90,000 evacuations. In the rear areas, some two hundred wounded literally assaulted a hospital train.
¹
Still Nivelle, as his ambitions collapsed in fragments around him, tried to persist with the hopeless offensive. But he had broken the French Army.

Details of the slaughter on the Chemin-des-Dames — appalling though the truth itself was — became fiercely exaggerated. With them the kind of incidents that had occurred sporadically at Verdun multiplied throughout the army. Again the macabre, sheep-like bleating was heard among regiments sent up to the line; this time mingled with cries of ‘Down with the war!’ and ‘Down with the incapable leaders!’ Men on leave waved red flags and sang revolutionary songs. They beat up military police and railwaymen, and uncoupled or derailed engines to prevent trains leaving for the front. Interceding officers — including at least one general — were set upon.