The Price of Glory (68 page)

¹
Contrary to popular belief, the super long-range gun that shelled Paris in 1918 was not called ‘Big Bertha’. The true ‘Big Berthas’ (named after the Krupp heiress) were short-barrelled mortars with only limited range.

¹
Russia’s contribution to making the ‘Miracle’ possible at all should never be forgotten. Without waiting to complete her own mobilisation, she had attacked unexpectedly in East Prussia, with the result that — at the most critical moment of the campaign in France — Moltke had been forced to transfer two badly needed army corps from the West to the East. As will be seen later, it was not the last time that Russia would come to France’s rescue.

¹
The
Pour le Mérite,
Germany’s highest decoration, was instituted by Frederick the Great, preferring a French title as he despised his mother language.

¹
My italics.

¹
In both the French and German armies units tended to be commanded by lower ranks than in the British forces; thus a Battalion Commander is usually a Major (or
Commandant
), while a Regiment would be commanded by a Colonel, but more often in practice by a Lt.-Colonel.

¹
In 1916 a German Army Corps generally consisted of only two infantry divisions; a division of two brigades; a brigade, two regiments; and a regiment, two or three battalions, each of about 1,000 men. The French establishment was similar, except that there were sometimes three divisions to a corps.

¹
Under Driant’s defensive scheme, there was no continuous line of trenches in the Bois des Caures. On the outskirts of the wood was a chain of small outposts, and behind them the
Grandes Gardes
, each an independent stronghold containing a platoon or more of men. Further back came the support, or ‘S’, line; and at the rear the ‘R’ line of concrete redoubts, in which lay Driant’s own Command Post.

¹
6 a.m. French time = 7 a.m. German time. Henceforth all times given are French.

¹
Later it was estimated that 80,000 heavy shells had fallen in a rectangle 500 by 1,000 yards.

¹
In the French Army, cadets in the last stage of training were sent to command a detachment at the front before actually being awarded their commission.

¹
Through faulty communications and poor artillery liaison disasters such as Samogneux occurred with dismal regularity throughout the First War. One French expert, General Percin (
Le Massacre de Notre Infanterie
) estimates that 75,000 French troops alone were ‘mown down’ by their own artillery in the course of the war.

¹
Demoralisation among the North Africans is largely corroborated by German intelligence reports on the French prisoners taken; ‘The Zouaves and Turkos particularly give one an impression of complete breakdown. The prisoners complain loudly and without moderation of their officers and senior commanders, and spit at the captured officers of other French regiments’ (von Klüfer, p. 73).

¹
Where GQG was lodged.

¹
Éloge
to the
Academic Française
on his election to the seat left vacant by the death of Marshal Pétain.

¹
His son, also General Gouraud, was among the army leaders imprisoned for their part in the 1961 Algerian revolt.

¹
RFV = Région Fortifiée du Verdun.

¹
But at least the Germans learned, which could all too rarely be said of the Allied commanders; much of their success in the 1918 breakthrough was due to Ludendorff’s provision of portable ramps and heavy duck-boards so that the artillery could be rushed forward over the shell ground.

¹
The original:  
‘Nos ennemis, fussent-ils pendus aux nuages, nous les aurons! Et nous les bouterons hors de France.’

¹
See previous chapter.

¹
To us this kind of futile sacrifice symbolises the First War mentality. Yet one must always remember the dilemma facing the French at Verdun, once de Castelnau had picked up the German gauntlet. By 1916 both sides had already experimented successfully with ‘thinning out’ the forward areas to reduce shell-fire casualties. But in the cramped space at Verdun where the loss of a hundred yards might lead to the loss of the city the risk of any such thinning out could not be taken by the French. Similarly the Germans, always attacking, could not avoid a permanent concentration of men in the forward lines.

¹
Though emotions were more violent, with members of the two arms coming to blows when they met on leave.

¹
On the other side, the Germans also suffered (though, because of the greater imaginativeness of the French writers, perhaps not quite to the same extent); typical of German ‘
bourrage de crane
’ were the reports at the beginning of the war that French shells did not explode and their bullets tended to go clean through one without causing excessive damage!

²
Whereas on the home front in 1914-1915 strikes had been negligible, in 1916 there were 314 (most of them in the last quarter of the year), and in 1917, the year of the Army mutinies, 696.

¹
Qualification of an ‘ace’ was five victories, later it was advanced to ten.

¹
That Falkenhayn was equally prey to excessive optimism is revealed by the fact that he considered the French had already lost 200,000 men by the beginning of April; and even up to the publishing of his memoirs in 1919, he still deluded himself that, during the March fighting ‘for two Germans put out of action, five Frenchmen had to shed their blood ‘, a ratio that the previously cited casualty returns show to have been complete delusion.

¹
Bethmann Hollweg had from the beginning been the focus of opposition to Falkenhayn within the German ruling clique. It was he who had forced Falkenhayn to surrender, in 1915, his post as Minister of War.

¹
See illustrations.

¹
During the last fortnight in May, French casualties were in fact considerably higher than for any other period since the initial German onslaught, and 9 out of 17 divisions in the line had to be relieved.

¹
‘R’ stands for
‘Retranchement’.

¹
In fact, as a later inquiry showed, despite warnings as early as March about the inadequacy of Vaux’s water supply, nothing had been done, and the cisterns appear to have been half-empty when Raynal assumed command. It was a piece of negligence on a par with the failure to garrison Fort Douaumont.

¹
Neither Pétain nor his men could of course appreciate the fantastic difficulties that had faced unmilitary Britain in building up a twentieth-century war machine from virtually nothing. With an effort unparalleled in her history, she had already increased her original six B.E.F. divisions (which had been virtually annihilated during the Mons retreat in 1914) to fifty-two; but none of this was visible to the sore-tried men at Verdun.

¹
Although the merits of Conrad’s proposal are of little concern to this story, at least one outstanding German military critic, General von Hoffmann, felt that Conrad was right, and that a Caporetto-style defeat in 1916, instead of 1917, might easily have brought Italy to collapse and struck a serious prestige blow at the Allies, while freeing troops for other fronts.

¹
By comparison, the whole Battle of Alamein in twelve days cost only 13,500 British casualties, dead, wounded and missing, and — according to Second World War standards — it was not a ‘cheap’ battle.

¹
French gas fatalities on the 11th are said to have totalled little more than half-a-dozen.

¹
Alas, Nicolai, who also took part in this attack, now promoted Lieutenant-Colonel and decorated with the
Légion d’Honncur
for the capture of Douaumont, was killed by a German sniper.

¹
It is again worth recalling that at Alamein Montgomery lost 13,500 men.

¹
A generation later, amid the catastrophe of 1940, Gamelin (who in 1916 was Joffre’s Chief of Operations) was to share with Joffre the experience of being sacked from the Supreme Command.

¹
Typical of the chaos, in one hospital there were reported to be only four thermometers for 3,500 beds.

¹
So much so, that its demoralisation had been reported by the GQG Liaison Officer at Second Army HQ. (See
page 270
.)

²
The first units to threaten to march on Paris apparently came from III Corps; the unit Nivelle had commanded on his arrival at Verdun in April 1916, and some of the worst disorders took place in Mangin’s old division, the 5th. III Corps, unlike most of the other units principally involved in the mutinies, had not in fact been in the line for several weeks, and the insurrection began while the Corps was at rest camp.

¹
Figures of ‘missing’ on both sides also included those taken prisoner.

¹
They were almost the sole exceptions.

¹
Champions of Falkenhayn see proof in his Rumanian Campaign that, under any but the impossible stalemate conditions of the Western Front, he was indeed a great commander. They ignore however that the actual strategy in Rumania was devised by Hindenburg-Ludendorff, not Falkenhayn, and that, for veteran German troops, rounding up the Rumanians (never the world’s most intrepid warriors) was not far removed from Kitchener’s annihilation of the Khalifa’s Fuzzy-Wuzzies at Omdurman.

¹
In 1918.

¹
Hitler, the corporal-turned-strategist, fought on the Somme but not at Verdun; nevertheless, he seems to have had some fixation about the Battle. At least one of his generals (Blumentritt) was convinced that he wanted to emulate Falkenhayn at Stalingrad, and draw the Russian armies into a ‘bleeding-white’ battle there—with results even more disastrous than those which overtook Falkenhayn.

¹
As a major, Pétain had been rejected by the father of the woman he wanted to marry on the grounds that he seemed to lack prospects of advancement. She married another, was widowed by the war, and eventually married Pétain—now a Marshal of France—in 1920.

¹
Subsequently abbreviated RA (13), etc.

Table of Contents

Preface

1   La Débâcle

2   Joffre of the Marne

3   Falkenhayn