Verdun 1916 E-Book

Malcolm Brown

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 367

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2003

Beschreibung

1916 was a year of killing. The British remember the Somme, but earlier in the year the heart of the French army was ripped out by the Germans at Verdun. The garrison city in north-eastern France was the focus of a massive German attack; the French fought back ferociously, leading to a battle that would claim hundreds of thousands of lives and permanently scar the French psyche. To this day one can visit the site of ghost villages uninhabited since, but still cherished like shrines. Memories of Verdun would greatly influence military and political thinking for decades to come as both sides came away with memories of bravery, futility and horror. Malcolm Brown has produced a vivid new history of this epic clash; drawing on original illustrations and eye-witness accounts he has captured the spirit of a battle that defines the hell of warfare on the Western Front.

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I first visited Verdun in 1978 in the course of researching and filming for the BBC TV documentaryArmistice and After, in the company of that programme’s outstanding presenter, the historian and biographer, now sadly the late, John Grigg. Some years later I went there again in high-quality company, when researching for the BBC TV seriesSoldiers. In this case my companion and consultant was Richard Holmes, now justly celebrated as the Western Front’s best contemporary interpreter on television. Add Frederick Forsyth to the list, with whom I filmed a memorable sequence in the dripping depths of Fort Douaumont for theSoldiersseries, and the reader will correctly assume that the responsibility for any shortcomings or errors in this book must be mine and mine alone. A fourth presence should be acknowledged, in this case someone I have never met, except through the pages of his masterly account of Verdun,The Price of Glory. I refer of course to Alistair Horne. His book, first published in 1962 and still going strong, is of such a calibre that re-telling the story of Verdun can almost seem the equivalent of re-writing Shakespeare. Yet the attempt must be made, if only because new material continues to emerge even from such a well-known holocaust as Verdun, and because each new generation needs to make its own assessment of the great sagas of the recently departed twentieth century. At a time when Antony Beevor’s account of the epic story of Stalingrad has exposed horrors previously unknown, it is worth claiming that Verdun is now giving off vibrations which can genuinely be described as almost hopeful.Plus ça change, ce n’est pas toujours la même chose. We are so used to cynicism, it is good to be able to record a possible advance.

Such luminaries apart, this book would not have been possible without the help of a circle of talented friends who happily supported me in my attempt to tackle what was by any standards a very challenging subject. I am immensely grateful to all of them. Prominent among them are the three comrades with whom I undertook a vital return visit to Verdun in the summer of 1999: Roderick Suddaby, Keeper of the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum, with whom every conversation was a serious tutorial and quite rightly so; his wife Jenny who took many of the photographs with which this book is illustrated; and Neil Smith, schoolmaster of the highest quality, whose greatest virtue is to ask the vital, challenging question. Next I must list my fellow-translators, who responded benignly, indeed eagerly, to my request to render often very obscure and intensely powerful French or German into fluent and palatable English: Sylvia Newberry, Hilary Hamilton (assisted by Graham Hayter), and, bearing the biggest burden and producing work of consistent vigour and style, my wife Betty, while Kate Tildesley produced some admirable translations from German.

A number of scholarly French colleagues encountered through other areas of work, notably my writings on T.E. Lawrence, expressed great interest when they knew that I was attempting a book on Verdun and offered to send me their comments on how they see Verdun today. To Dr Maurice Larès, Christophe Leclerc, Marie-Laure Blay-Gilbert and Philippe Braquet, therefore, my sincere thanks for caring enough about a British historian’s effort to enrich it with their special insight and wisdom; they have added an important element which would otherwise have been difficult to obtain. Another French friend whose contribution is greatly appreciated is the artist and journalist Mme Françoise Eyraud; she supplied the text of her 1993 interview with the Verdun survivor Pierre Rouquet, quoted in Chapters 12 and 19, and the photograph of him reproduced as illustration 32, showing him as a youthful soldier before his baptism of fire in 1916.

For help in the matter of producing useful, indeed vital, contemporary material I wish to thank Jan Mihell, formerly of the Imperial War Museum, who carried out some highly valuable research into newspaper files, discovering evidence which has greatly added to the book’s scope and range. Former BBC colleague Jane Callander, now an archaeological historian, provided material which led me to give much greater prominence than I had previously intended to that outstanding figure Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: towering twentieth-century intellect and, remarkably, humble stretcher-bearer at Verdun. I defy anyone to read his statement in the aftermath of terrible fighting at Froideterre in August 1916, as quoted here, and not be moved, even awed. What he wrote in 1916 vibrates through all our conflicts today. This is, as it were, a Galileo among so many of lesser quality, and I am proud, and humbled, to be able to offer him as contributor to this retelling of the story of Verdun.

One most important category requiring very special acknowledgement is that of the copyright holders who have kindly allowed me to use their material, whether previously published or unpublished, to improve both the book’s text and its pictorial content. The latter are acknowledged in the List of Illustrations: the former are acknowledged either explicitly or by implication in the Bibliography. All sources noted are included not merely to convey necessary and, it is hoped, useful information but also as a gesture of gratitude.

Others I am pleased to thank for their much valued help are: Michael Paterson, who provided me with valuable material on Crown Prince Wilhelm and the contemporary postcard-portrait here reproduced as illustration 6; his wife Sarah, of the Imperial War Museum’s Department of Printed Books, who cast a strict, professional eye over my Source notes and Bibliography, making numerous improvements; Julie Robertshaw of the same department, first to read the manuscript from end to end with a view to assessing its clarity and narrative drive; and Roderick Suddaby, already named, whose sharp and scholarly criticisms of the book’s initial draft ensured that the one which went to the printers was markedly superior. I have had much help too from the Museum’s Photograph Archive, especially Hilary Roberts and the staff of the Archive’s reading room, and from Mike Moody and Pauline Allwright of the Department of Art, while Mike Hibberd, formerly of the Department of Exhibits and Firearms, left me much in his debt for his expert advice on artillery matters. As ever I have been able to call on the knowledgeable and good-humoured aid of the Department of Documents, which has now been host to me as a free-lance historian for almost fourteen years. The support of Jane Carmichael, until recently Director, Collections, and of Dr Christopher Dowling, former Keeper of Museum Services, is also warmly acknowledged; thanks to them, both this book and Tempus’s handsome remake of myTommy Goes to Warare published ‘in association with the Imperial War Museum’.

My sincere thanks also to: my son-in-law James Rowles, whose skill in scanning often obscure documents into Word 97 saved hours of tedious typing, and to whose coolness and wise counsel during moments of serious computer malfunction (there were several) I am deeply indebted; my wife Betty for her hours of careful proof-reading; Ian D. Crane for his most valuable index; and Kate Adams and Anne Phipps of Tempus Publishing who between them saw the book through from MS to publication. My gratitude finally to Alan Sutton and Jonathan Reeve of Tempus Publishing for the honour of appearing for the second time in their lists.

I am pleased additionally to record my thanks to Joanna Lincoln for her valued help in creating this new, reformatted edition ofVerdun1916.

Malcolm Brown

May 2003

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowedgements

Preface

Chronology

1 The Name

2 The Background

3 The Plan

4 The Preparations

5 The Battle: First Phase

6 The Seizure of Fort Douaumont

7 The Nights of the Generals

8 The Holding of the Line

9 The Battle: Second Phase

10 The Sacred Way

11 The Helping Hand

12 ‘The Mill on the Meuse’

13 The Heroic Defence of Fort Vaux

14 The Martyr City

15 The Turning-Point

16 The Continuing Battle

17 The Recapture of Fort Douaumont

18 The Closedown

19 The Experience

20 The Legacy

Postscript: Verdun Revisited

Sources

Bibliography

List of Illustrations

By the Same Author

Copyright

PREFACE

Anyone who has been moved by the saga of the Battle of the Somme cannot but be aware of the longer struggle going on throughout almost all of 1916 over 150 miles away to the south-east at Verdun. Yet for the English-speaking reader, especially perhaps the British, Verdun is all too often dismissed as ‘noises off’, as a doppelgänger lookalike which seems to have only a marginal bearing on what they see as largely an Anglo–German ordeal running from July to November in the region of the Somme. But 1916 was dominated by the battle fought in distant Lorraine and it should never be forgotten that a prime reason for the Somme’s controversial continuance from high summer to the edge of winter was that it should relieve pressure on Verdun.

I have been interested in the awesome, multi-faceted drama of 1916 for many years and as someone who has wrestled with the Somme both as documentary film-maker and latterly as historian I welcome the opportunity given me by Tempus to write about its Franco–German parallel. From the moment the idea of a concise but, it was hoped, a pungent and scholarly book on the subject was put on the table I realised that this volume would represent the fulfilment of a distinct, if to that point all but undeclared, ambition. Though somewhat shorter, it will, I hope, take its place alongside my Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme, first published in 1996.

A deliberate hallmark of my books on the First World War has been their concentration on the experience of the individual and this one is no exception. In great conflicts which can look from a distance like armies of ants fighting in a huge ant-hill such a focus is surely both legitimate and necessary in that otherwise it is all too easy to see monumental events of this kind merely in terms of the amount of ground gained or lost, the number of guns captured or, on the human level, in terms of the statistics of the wounded, the prisoners and the dead. Never was there such an ant-hill as Verdun and with the added hazard of the language barrier (though it is good to be able to state that there are a handful of notable contributors to this book whose natural tongue was English) it can seem all but impossible to turn the telescope onto the actual people involved. Every attempt has been made to breach this barrier and I am most grateful to those translators past and present, known and unknown, who have assisted me in the vital task of bringing a significant number of those people into focus. Their efforts (my debt to those known to me is already acknowledged here) combined with the remarkable candour with which participants on both sides recorded their experiences will, I hope, help to make this book as fascinating and moving to read as I have found it to research and write.

One question that might arise from that statement is worth anticipating here. How was it that in the midst of all the anxiety, stress and suffering of Verdun, men still found the time, and more importantly the will, to write long and detailed letters, or personal diaries, in which they often gave extremely frank accounts of their experiences? And did such outpourings represent an exception or a rule? A recent German historian of Verdun, German Werth, believes it to be the former; indeed, in his view, letter writing was extremely rare and such letters as came out from Verdun were terse, perfunctory and gave only the minimum of information. The battle was too overwhelming; more, its effect would continue long after it was over:

Most of the soldiers who returned from the front were silenced by the ‘hell of the matériel battle’. Few kept diaries; as a rule only reminiscences of events were produced. In positions close to the line, in areas that were not altogether peaceful, there was practically no opportunity to exchange shovel or rifle for a pencil. Letters home restricted themselves to the barest essentials, were primarily a sign that the soldier was still alive, the pages of diaries recorded only the coarsest of impressions. They could not provide a perspective on the ‘sense’ of the action that was left to the memoirs of the generals and commanders, who, for their part, knew little of the lives of the ordinary men in the trenches.

Fortunately the exceptions, determined to communicate or record what they were going through and, in the case of letters, eager to hold contact with the world beyond the battlefield, have left some remarkable evidence. Additionally, particularly on the French side, there was much collecting of first-hand accounts in the interwar period and there has been more research of a similar kind since, with an inevitable surge in respect of recent First World war anniversaries. In fact, from one source or another, the material relating to Verdun is verging on the encyclopaedic. One massive repository of personal material is the volume Verdun1916 edited by Jacques Péricard, originally published in a huge volume in 1933 and now happily available in a convenient softback, while another, Verdun by Jacques-Henri Lefebvre, published in 1960, gives away the reason for its scholarly weight by its subtitile: ‘la plus grande bataille de l’Histoire’: ‘the greatest battle in History’. More recently, the best-selling Paroles de Poilus, published in 1998 by Librio in association with Radio France, has brought to light another crop of high-quality letters from both sides of the battle-lines. I am most grateful for the opportunity of including material from these sources, and from numerous others, some of them published while the battle was in progress or within a very short time of its conclusion.

The title Paroles de Poilus raises another subject: that of the name poilu. Strictly it means ‘hairy one’, or ‘bearded one’; the French infantryman was traditionally bearded which was why tradition was offended when men had to shave off their beards to wear gas masks. Much as British soldiers were not enthusiastic about being called ‘Tommy’, French soldiers did not like being called ‘poilus’; to them it savoured too much of journalistic slang. They generally referred to each other as ‘les bonhommes’, of which probably the best British equivalent is ‘the lads’.

CHRONOLOGY

1916

21 February

Start of German attack on the right bank of the River Meuse

22 February

Death of Lieutenant-Colonel Driant

25 February

Seizure of Fort Douaumont*

26 February

General Philippe Pétain takes command at Verdun

6 March

German attack on the left bank of the Meuse

5–10 April

General German assault on both banks

10 April

Pétain’s message: ‘Courage: on les aura!’

1 May

General Robert Nivelle takes over as Verdun commander; Pétain becomes Commander, Army Group Centre

22 May

Failed attempt to retake Fort Douaumont

7 June

Fall of Fort Vaux

23 June

German attack on Fleury and Fort Souville; Nivelle’s message ‘You will not let them pass!’

1 July

Opening of the Battle of the Somme

12 July

Germans briefly reach Fort Souville: furthest point of German advance

24 October

Recapture of Fort Douaumont

2 November

Reoccupation of Fort Vaux

18 November

End of the Battle of the Somme

15–18 December

Final French right bank attack at Verdun

1917

April

Nivelle offensive, Chemin des Dames

August

Second Battle of Verdun: recapture of Mort-Homme, Côte 304, Avocourt

1918

November

American troops reclaim remainder of Verdun battlefield

Note

*Strictly Fort Douaumont should be referred to as Fort de Douaumont. This book follows normal English practice from1916onwards by deleting the ‘de’; hence Fort Douaumont, Fort Vaux, Fort Souville etc.

1

THE NAME

Certain places are fated to be permanently marked by what happened in them or in their vicinity at one particular moment of history. The name is enough: mention it and the connotations gather around, the reputation clicks instantly into place. The twentieth century was rich in such names and in its own particular category Verdun stands high. The battle to defend that garrison town in north-eastern France from 21 February to 18 December 1916 has become a symbol almost without parallel of the awfulness of modern industrialised conflict. Perhaps only Stalingrad, famous for the six-month-long siege-battle in Soviet Russia which became the turning point of the Second World War, can invite serious comparison. So much was implicitly acknowledged by the man who more than anyone caused the Stalingrad débâcle, Adolf Hitler, when in November 1942 he assured his Nazi Old Guard in a speech at Munich that it would never become ‘a second Verdun’. It did, with himself and his country as the losers.

Verdun had its Russian connotations even while the battle was being fought. The German Supreme Commander on the Russian Front (himself to be closely associated with Hitler’s rise to power) was General Paul von Hindenburg. He would later write:

‘Verdun!’ The name was continually on our lips in the East from the beginning… As time went on… doubts gradually began to prevail, though they were but seldom expressed. They could be summarised shortly in the following question: Why should we persevere with an offensive which exacted such frightful sacrifices and, as was already obvious, had no prospects of success?

The Russians – allies of France and Britain at this time, their withdrawal from the war under Lenin still almost two years away – looked on the French response to the German attack on Verdun with something approaching awe. M. Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador at the court of the Tsar, had been aware that for some time the Russian people had tended to sneer at the French contribution to the war. Now he sensed a different mood. ‘The Battle of Verdun,’ he noted in his diary as early as 28 February, ‘has changed all that. The heroism of our army, the skill and coolness of our High Command, our enormous resources in matériel and the splendid attitude of our public opinion are admired by everyone.’

Britain also watched with admiration, if with frustration in military circles because 1916 was meant to be the year of a great Anglo–French offensive, not a German one. The intended attack went ahead, if with reduced French participation. It became known as the Battle of the Somme, itself a kind of Verdun replica, not dissimilar in level of sacrifice if fortunately shorter in duration.

For the French, Verdun would become a lasting symbol. When Henry Bordeaux, who doubled as soldier and patriotic writer, produced the first of his two books about the battle, The Last Days of Fort Vaux – published in 1917 – he began his Preface with the paragraph:

VERDUN – those two syllables that have already become historic ring out today like the brazen tones of a trumpet. In France, no one can hear them without a thrill of pride. In England, in America, if any speaker utters them, the whole audience rises as one man.

If one were to nominate a British parallel, it would not be associated with the Somme, but with that other sector of the former Western Front where the British have long had a special link, Flanders, where between 1914 and 1918 there took place no fewer than four Battles of Ypres. The city of Ypres, determinedly defended with the kind of ‘they shall not pass’ mentality which pertained at Verdun, is the only possible British equivalent. In August 1915, a young British private, Rifleman P.H. Jones of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles, wrote in his diary:

One feels that this City of the Dead is infinitely greater, infinitely more sublime in the hour of its ruin than it could ever have been in the past. It seems to be a symbol, not only of the mad destruction against which we are fighting but also of the ideals for which we struggle. We hold this place for moral effect only (our troops would be better off behind the Canal) for an ideal, in short. We have paid a heavy price for our ideal, two great battles and Heaven knows how many more to come. There is nothing sordid in this place, in holding it men have died for a dream, sacrificed themselves for a heap of ruins.

The French would have recognised such sentiments for they reflect what they themselves felt instinctively in relation to Verdun. There was, however, a major difference. The British were fighting abroad. The French, like the Belgians, were fighting on their own ground, their patrie. More, substantial areas of that patrie were under occupation. As far back as the first weeks of the war a British cavalry officer, Captain E.W.S. Balfour, Adjutant of the 5th Dragoon Guards, had sensed the fury his allies felt at the loss of so much territory to the enemy. In a letter to his family he wrote:

To the French it is their own home and it makes them mad. We somehow fight on with no increased animosity. If we were ordered to retire again tomorrow, I don’t believe we should lose morale. The French really are giving everything and it makes one wonder if people in England realise what the advance of an invading army over a country means.

It was because of such attitudes that when the Germans attacked Verdun in 1916 it was defended in so furious a manner. The French had yielded enough heartland already; to lose more would inflict yet more humiliation. In Balfour’s phraseology, it made them mad and forced them to give everything rather than concede.

The result was what rapidly became known as the ‘Hell of Verdun’. Significantly the most famous painting of the battle, by Georges Leroux, is called ‘L’Enfer’: ‘Hell’. With its depiction of smoke, fire, mud, shattered trees, and pygmy figures in gas-masks attempting to crawl out of a flooded trench it is almost like a science-fiction version of a Gustave Doré illustration to Dante or a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Small wonder that Verdun’s reputation once fixed became so enduring.

There was further fighting there in the following year, if smaller in scale; even the thought of it could act as a reminder of what had happened in the preceding one. In the late summer of 1917 a sixteen-year-old American, Julian Green (born in Paris, with French as his chief language, and a future novelist of distinction), then working as a volunteer ambulance-driver, found himself in the wooded hill country of the Argonne, not many miles from Verdun. Soon after his arrival a fellow member of his unit called him out on to the terrace of the building they were using as a headquarters and invited him to listen, to a low, distant, incessant rumbling. His first thought was that he was hearing a storm. ‘No’ said his colleague. ‘If it were thunder the noise would stop occasionally. This noise is constant. It’s Verdun.’ Green would write of his reaction:

I shuddered at the mention of this sinister yet fascinating name. There, I knew I really would have been frightened. There, my intestines would certainly have turned to liquid like those of King David in the Psalms. Verdun was a hell, and the noise I heard in the distance was the ghastly rattle of death, the vast black hole where the armies of two nations were being swallowed up. I could not utter a word…

How Verdun came to be attacked and how it was defended, and how, against the odds, it has now become a remarkable symbol of international reconciliation is the subject of this book, published at the onset of a century in which it is hoped that such massive human tragedies as those that took place at Verdun, the Somme, Ypres and Stalingrad will join the list of what the poet William Wordsworth called ‘old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago’.

2

THE BACKGROUND

Verdun is a town – now more frequently referred to as a city – of the Département of Meuse, itself part of the ancient province of Lorraine. The annual Michelin guide notes its distance from other notable centres: Paris 262 kilometres, Metz 66, Châlons-sur-Marne 87, Nancy 110, Reims 119. In terms of its situation in 1916 it might have added: approximate distance from German front line, 18 kilometres.

Verdun is surrounded by a circle of hills, the Meuse Heights, with beyond them to the east the marshy Woevre Plain; Metz lies at its extreme edge. Not far to the north is the uphill country of the Ardennes (through which Hitler, to the amazement of his enemies, sent his invasion forces in 1940), while to the west are the forests of the Argonne. Further west lie the plains, and the vineyards, of Champagne. The reason for the town’s existence is that it stands at the point where the main route from Metz to Paris crosses the river Meuse.

The Meuse has none of the obvious glamour of the Loire or the Seine, but its course is nevertheless a fascinating one, and one with much history. Flowing 885 kilometres from its source in the département of Haute-Marne, it passes Domrémy-la-Pucelle, famous as the birthplace of Joan of Arc, on its northward progress to Verdun. Moving on from Verdun it next claims Sedan, scene of an ignominious French surrender in 1870, before entering Belgium, where its name changes to the Flemish version, Maas. Then, in the course of a long eastward parabola towards the North Sea, it passes the Belgian towns of Namur and Liège and the Dutch town of Maastricht before linking up with the Waal, part of the supreme river of the German cultural imagination, the Rhine. Even then it manages to reach the sea in several outlets and under several aliases. Among the rivers feeding into it is the Sambre; devotees of Britain’s war poets will recall that the best of them, Wilfred Owen, lost his life in November 1918 on the banks of the nearby Sambre-Oise Canal. Much of the course of the Meuse was fought over in numerous actions in both the twentieth-century’s world wars.

A river’s banks are labelled in relation to its progress to the sea. Thus when in the context of the Verdun battle the Meuse’s right bank is mentioned, the reference is to the eastward side (at this point it flows, if with several severe loops, almost due north); its left bank, therefore, is that to the west.

Verdun has long been a bone of contention. In that huge area of northern France, Belgium and constantly changing border country which none other than General Charles de Gaulle (himself a combatant there in 1916) was to call a ‘fatal avenue’, Verdun was a place that was frequently in the wars.

There was a Gallic settlement here and then a Roman: Virodunum Castrum, hence, by the easiest of mutations, Verdun. Attila the Hun attacked it in 450, leaving it ‘like a field ravaged by wild beasts’. In 843 a treaty signed here annexed Verdun to the ancient kingdom of Lorraine. From 870 for a time it became part of France, but in 923 it was incorporated into the then German Empire. Moving on several centuries, we find Verdun seized in 1552 by Henri II, King of France. Over time it would acquire the distinction of being subjected to at least ten sieges.

One of the most famous was that of 1792, during the wars that broke out subsequent to the French Revolution. The siege produced one of those ringing exhortations at which the French have always been adept, when Danton, then supreme revolutionary leader, urged the town’s populace to hold out against the investing Prussians with the message: ‘il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace’: ‘we need audacity, more audacity, always audacity’. It was not enough, for the town capitulated, but it started a trend. There would be more such slogans when Verdun was under siege once again in 1916.

Verdun came well out of the disastrous Franco–Prussian War of 1870–71. At a time of deep national disgrace, it refused to open its gates to the victorious armies of Kaiser Wilhelm I, spiritedly repelling an attack in August 1870 and only conceding in November, when its garrison was allowed to surrender with the honours of war. Paris had been under siege for months before Verdun gave in. In the harsh political settlement that followed, while Alsace and most of Lorraine were annexed to Germany, Verdun was excepted. It thus became in effect a frontier town, with the new border barely a day’s march away. As a result it could easily have been an early victim in 1914, when the impetuous French advance into Alsace-Lorraine was brushed aside by the superbly trained forces of Kaiser Wilhelm II. But the troops of the Crown Prince Wilhelm’s Fifth Army were held up before it by fierce resistance and so when the lines congealed and trench warfare began, it remained in French hands, if with the Germans ominously close.

Verdun had another distinction. It was a town exceptionally well-defended in the style associated with one of the great masters of seventeenth century warfare, Marshal Sebastian de Vauban.

Vauban (1633–1707) is a key figure in the history of modern Europe but one whose name is relatively unknown, largely because his speciality, fortifications, makes for less exciting reading than that other matter which dominates the writing of history, fighting. Everybody knows who lost and won the siege of Troy, but who were the superb military architects who made that city so impregnable that it could only be seized after ten years through the basically unsporting ruse of the wooden horse? Vauban’s stock in trade was the creation of a Trojan-style security: in effect, walls to forestall wars.

His principal role was that of specialist military adviser to one of the most bellicose leaders of the last millennium, King Louis XIV of France. Famous now most of all for his splendid palace, Versailles, and secondarily for his mistresses, the so-called ‘Sun King’ was in his lifetime seen above all as a human Mars, a bringer of war. This he himself acknowledged when on his deathbed in 1715 he confessed to his young successor, Louis XV, that he had ‘loved war too much’.

Under Louis XIV’s almost quixotic lust for glory was a need for security. What drove him to almost constant warfare was the fear that the alternative might lead to defeat and therefore disgrace. In such circumstances Vauban might easily have been a compliant toady, but on the contrary he presented him with what has been described as ‘a method of waging war elegantly and with a minimum of bloodshed’. Vauban proposed, in effect, a frontier of interconnected and brilliantly designed strongholds which an enemy would find virtually impossible to penetrate. Thus was begun a philosophy of defence which links Vauban directly across the centuries with that supreme icon of the 1930s (alas, also to be dubbed a supreme white elephant), the Maginot Line.

Vauban’s creations can be seen far and wide today: at Mont-Louis in the Pyrenees, at St Malo in Brittany, where the Fort National offers a Vauban ‘first’ to visitors from Britain, in the great Citadels of Lille and Arras, and at numerous other places along the northern and eastern frontier such as Montmédy, whose ‘majestic citadel’ (as described by the historian Richard Holmes in his tour de force celebration of this crucial zone of Europe, rightly called Fatal Avenue), ‘scrapes the skyline long before the town itself is visible’. There is even one of his creations, more a forward bastion than part of any obvious plan of defence, at Neuf-Brisach on the left bank of the Rhine. Verdun was of course bound to be included high in his list, as is evident from the town’s massive Citadel, which bears the master’s unmistakable hallmark.

The experience of 1870, however, had left the French with the feeling that Vauban’s legacy along their eastern frontier was not enough. Thus an expert in fortification of a similar school, General Seré de Rivières, was entrusted with the construction of a whole new defence system which effectively created a series of ‘entrenched camps’. Each consisted of a town and an outlying ring of forts. Belfort, Toul, Épinal and Verdun made up, as it were, the front line, while Langres, Dijon and Besançon lay in reserve. Between Épinal and Toul a gap was deliberately left, in the hope that in the case of another invasion it might act as a kind of mouse-trap, to lure an unwary enemy to come in and be destroyed. There was a similar, much less developed system along the Belgian border, though there was less urgency over this sector, as it was not perceived as a main point of danger. In the region of Verdun, the scheme was at its most sophisticated. Thus when the Germans began to plan their assault there in 1916 they found their maps marked with no fewer than twenty major and forty minor obstacles in the way of their possible lines of attack.

The battleground of Verdun, as shown in the1919Michelin Guide adapted to show the limit of the German advance and the front line at the end of the battle.

Many of these would survive the coming battle intact, and some remain more or less in their original condition to this day, if, as in the case of Fort de Génicourt south of Verdun, so transformed by decades of abandonment to nature as to seem like a castle out of a story by the Brothers Grimm. Others, such as Fort Douaumont and Fort Vaux, on the Meuse Heights to the north-east of the town, would be changed over the months of fighting into monstrous hulks, themselves in their own way to become icons of French mythology almost as potent as Verdun itself.

Ironically, at the moment when it might have seemed that de Rivières’ forts were about to come into their own, they suddenly fell out of fashion. But perhaps this is scarcely surprising in a story with as many twists as that of Verdun.

3

THE PLAN

Verdun lay so deep in French-held territory that it can seem somewhat incredible that the deviser of the strategy that subjected it to ten months of terror in 1916 had as his prime aim the defeat of Great Britain: or more precisely, of England. Conditioned by long years of imperial rivalry, Germany’s Chief of the General Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, saw France, above all, as ‘England’s best sword’. If only that sword could be knocked out of her hand, England would herself surely concede and admit defeat. The destruction of France’s will to resist, by whatever means, was seen as the vital step to that end. Ironically, indeed inevitably, ‘England’ was to be merely a fascinated spectator of the resultant encounter, while the huge casualty lists to which it gave rise were primarily French, though there were also massive losses on the German side.

Falkenhayn’s attitude towards England was not, however, unique to him. German public opinion was far more anti-English than anti-French. France was the old enemy, beaten in previous wars. England was the heart of the Empire which should have been friendly – were not the two countries linked through their royal families? – but seemed determined, casually, almost arrogantly, to bar Germany from her place in the sun.

To produce the result required Falkenhayn proposed that Germany should attack France at a point where the wound would be so hurtful that she would defend to the last, no matter what the scale of sacrifice. As he himself would put it (in a document attributed to December 1915 which would become known as the ‘Christmas Memorandum’):

Within our reach behind the French sector of the Western Front there are objectives for the retention of which the French General Staff would be compelled to throw in every man they have. If they do so the forces of France will bleed to death – as there can be no question of a voluntary withdrawal – whether we reach our goal or not. If they do not do so, and we reach our objectives, the moral effect on France will be enormous. For an operation limited to a narrow front, Germany will not be compelled to spend herself as completely.

Falkenhayn went for the option of an inland battle in his struggle against England because he saw no alternative. Flanders, the obvious area of attack, would probably only produce a military log-jam, as indeed would be the case in 1917. A naval battle was far too risky; when one was attempted later in 1916, at Jutland, the Germans were fortunate to get away with a kind of score-draw. Unrestricted submarine warfare was a possible option – indeed, having been called off after the sinking of the Lusitania and other such ships the previous year, it would be restarted in February 1916 as a second string to the initiative against Verdun. But it would obviously be slow to take effect. If, however, France could be so destabilised that she was forced to sue for peace, England would surely conclude that she too must withdraw from the war. On first consideration this might seem a bizarre gamble, but the German attacks of 1918 were launched on a very similar premise. They were meant to break the Anglo–French forces apart, force the French to give up and send the British back across the Channel, before the arrival of the Americans. Falkenhayn’s policy was basically an earlier variation on the same theme.

The German supremo had two names in his shortlist of places appropriate for attack: Belfort and Verdun. But Belfort, at the eastern end of the front close to the Swiss border, offered restricted scope for manoeuvre; furthermore, any advantage gained there would be too peripheral. Verdun, by contrast, had much to recommend it, not least because, he argued, its closeness to German railway communications offered a point of attack for the French whereby they could make the whole German front in France and Belgium untenable.

Verdun had a number of other advantages from the German viewpoint. The fighting of earlier months had left it in a salient, overlooked, in the style associated in British minds with Ypres, on three sides and therefore ripe to be pinched out. Additionally, its links to the rest of France were minimal. The main railway line between Verdun and Paris’s Gare de L’Est via Ste Menéhoulde ran so close to the enemy’s lines as to be at the mercy of his guns. There remained one narrow-gauge railway and one road, linking Verdun with the departmental capital, Bar-le-Duc, almost sixty kilometres away. On the German side, by contrast, fourteen railheads were available through which the men and the matériel required might be brought to the points of attack.

A valuable aid to the understanding of the concept of the Verdun battle is the 1919 Michelin Guide, entitled Verdun and the Battle for its Possession. Produced, like all the others in this emotive series, ‘in memory of the Michelin employees and workmen who died gloriously for their country’, it is a volume of commemoration, a guidebook, and a thumbnail history. The following is its graphic caption to a double-page map (reproduced here) entitled ‘Plan of the German offensive of February, 1916’:

‘Concentrate an all-powerful artillery, cut with gun-fire the only main railway connecting Verdun with France, crush the French defences, isolating their occupants with heavy artillery barrages, then rush the town with huge masses of men, irrespective of losses, crushing the last vestiges of resistance’ – such was the ‘kolossal’ [sic] plan which the Germans set out to execute on February21st,1916.

This, in a nutshell, was the essence of the German intention, though it is significant that it takes for granted that the Germans wished actually to take Verdun whereas in fact there was, and there still remains, considerable ambiguity as to precisely what it was that lay at the heart of Falkenhayn’s strategy.

The key question to be asked is: what would best serve Falkenhayn’s purpose? The seizure of Verdun would be a great coup, but would that lead to the destruction of the French army? Would it not be better to turn the Verdun sector into a kind of open wound, which the French would keep pouring men and resources into to staunch? In other words, would it not be more productive to make attrition the purpose of the offensive, rather than victory?

That, however, was not how an offensive could be sold to the soldiers to be involved. There was nothing ‘dulce et decorum’ in dying for so arid and ruthless a policy.

Thus it was necessary that Crown Prince Wilhelm’s Fifth Army, which was to carry out the attack, should believe that Verdun itself was the target. In his Army Orders the Prince defined his aim as ‘to capture the fortress of Verdun by precipitate methods’. Confirmation that his troops assumed that such was the basic intention occurs in the memoirs of a French commander whose reputation was soon to be made in the forthcoming struggle, the future Marshal Pétain. He wrote of the pre-battle period: ‘[N]umerous letters found on prisoners mentioned an early action to be led by the Crown Prince, also a military review scheduled to be held toward the end of February on Verdun’s parade-ground, and even predictions of the ensuing peace’. With such prospects in view, the Germans would contemplate the ordeal facing them in a better frame of mind than would have been the case had they known they were to take part in a kind of timeless killing-match.

A caveat must be entered, however, before the story continues. Recent research has questioned the whole basis of the Falkenhayn view of the Verdun battle. The text of his so-called ‘Christmas Memorandum’ only occurs in his book General Headquarters1914–1916and its Critical Decisions, written in 1919. The German Official History quotes it, but obviously uses the autobiography as the source, since it states that no copy was found in the official archives. It has therefore been suggested that the Memorandum too was written in 1919, to justify in retrospect why Verdun was never captured, the argument being: ‘it never fell; I never meant it to fall’. Some students have therefore taken the view that the standard explanation view of the origin of the battle is no longer valid. By contrast, a recent highly respected scholar in this field, Holger H. Herwig, accepts that the document might have been written later but nevertheless believes it still reflected Falkenhayn’s overall intention in 1916. The situation remains suspicious but not proven; indeed it could be argued against a revisionist interpretation that Falkenhayn was doing little for his own reputation in the wake of Germany’s defeat in aligning himself with a deliberate policy of attrition for attrition’s sake, just at the time – 1919 – when at last the belligerent nations were able to look back on the war and count its terrible cost.

But another question has been raised: why was Falkenhayn so sure that an attack on Verdun would persuade France to pour out her life-blood to hold the breach? Looking back on Verdun 1916, do we not invest it retrospectively with the status it would shortly acquire? Was Falkenhayn in fact so surprised at the amazing French response and tenacious resistance that he had to invent his ‘bleed France white’ philosophy to explain it?