The Price of Glory (13 page)

… men squashed, cut in two, or divided from top to bottom, blown into showers by an ordinary shell, bellies turned inside out and scattered anyhow, skulls forced bodily into the chest as if by a blow with a club…

It was only astonishing how much of such mutilation flesh could surfer and still survive; Duhamel, a war doctor whose writings later brought him election to the Academy, tells of the riddled but living bodies, brought to his clearing station — ‘they reminded us of disabled ships letting in water at every seam.’ And then there was gas, many of whose victims (those that survived) were reminded of its choking, searing horror on damp winter days every year till they died; an experience mercifully altogether unknown to World War II combatants.

To cope with these mutilations on so massive a scale, medical services were singularly ill-equipped. In this respect — as in many others already mentioned — France in 1914 was notably, and notoriously, behind both Britain and Germany. She remained so throughout the war. Her Medical Service had been prepared in 1914
for a short sharp war, and was hopelessly caught out. Its doctors, inculcated in the de Grandmaison notions of war
en rase campagne
and clean bullet wounds, also reckoned on an ‘aseptic’ war. Their miscalculation possibly cost France an army corps of men; for, with wounds impregnated by dirt and debris from the explosion of shells, hideous ‘gas gangrene’ became the single largest mortality factor among the wounded. Almost unheard of in World War II, once it set in it was only curable by prompt and skilful surgery; both usually lacking in the First War.

If a badly injured man survived the brutal jolting in the two-man handcarts used by the French to collect the wounded, the crude attention of over-worked medicos in the clearing stations, and the long bumping about in the ambulances with their solid tyres and unyielding springs, even then his prospects were poor. At the beginning of the war Clemenceau’s
L’Homme Libre
had violently denounced the insanitary railway cattle-trucks used to transport the wounded back to base hospital, in which many that had endured so far now contracted fatal tetanus. Though the paper was promptly suppressed by the censors, conditions improved only a little as the war went on. Even at the base hospitals the mortality rate was high. The surgery itself was often as crude as the steel that made it necessary. Over-worked surgeons operating under impossible conditions instantly divided the wounded into three categories; those who would die anyway, and were therefore not worth operating on: those who would probably survive, but would be of no further use to the war effort; and those who could eventually be returned to duty. On this third category, the doctors lavished most of their attention; this was known as the ‘conservation of effectives’. The second category was just patched up as well as time would allow. The results were often horrifying; describing them, Duhamel says in one terrible sentence — ‘
Il y avait Sandrap, qui faisait ses besoins par un trou dans le côté….’

When the final reckoning on war casualties came to be made, it was hardly surprising that of the three Western Powers France led with easily the highest ratio of deaths to wounded; on top of a total of 895,000 killed in action, another 420,000 had died of their wounds or of sickness…

* * *

To a sociologist studying human behaviour during the First War one of the most astonishing revelations must be the extent to which the fighting men of all nations adjusted themselves to, and then accepted over so long a duration the mutilations, the indignities, the repeated displays of incompetence by the leaders, and the plain bestiality of life in the trenches. When, in the course of the ensuing battle, one reads of episodes where courage failed, and when one attempts to visualise just what the maintenance of courage might have involved at Verdun, one can only be amazed that these ‘failures’ did not happen more often, did not become the norm of of human behaviour. Could we of the mid-20th Century, one asks oneself, stand one quarter of what the men of the First War had to put up with? Their stoical capacity to endure could undoubtedly be partly explained by the strong leavening of tough, hardy peasants in their ranks (and especially in France, where the strange solitude and emptiness of French villages today still testifies to their terrible losses). But all the men of 1914 had been conditioned under Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes’, established by the long years of Victorian solidity and its continental equivalents. They had been brought up to
accept.
Steady convictions and the unquestioning ‘theirs not to reason why’ that imparted total confidence in the wisdom of superior powers were their inheritance; ‘sureties’ that were to be erased forever by the First War.

By 1916 ‘acceptance’ was really the operative word. Those who in 1914 had groused about conditions had by now either vanished or submitted. For every individual who tortured himself trying to think out a reason for life under these conditions, there were ten who dumbly, helplessly and unreflectingly accepted it as it was. In this mute acceptance of conditions there was a certain cynicism about the soldier of 1916, but it was a tough kind of cynicism. He no longer considered himself fighting for such noble symbols as Alsace, Belgium, the
Vaterland
or rule of the seas. He fought simply out of a helpless sense of habit, to keep going, to keep alive. Eighteen months in the trenches had taken the edge off the fine ideologies of 1914. Nevertheless, it seemed as if the man at the front could continue to accept almost indefinitely. Physically and morally, both the French and the Germans had become toughened to the act of acceptance; as it were, inocculated against the afflictions of war. Cases of pneumonia in the snow-bound trenches were almost unheard
of, as were disciplinary lapses requiring a court martial. The troops that faced each other at Verdun represented the peak that the war was to produce. Like steel that has been tempered for just the right length of time, they were hard and tensile, but not yet brittle; no longer the green enthusiasts of 1914, nor yet the battle-weary veterans of 1917-18. Verdun was to be the watershed; beyond it neither army would be quite the same again.

* * *

After over a week of waiting and alerts, nerves at Verdun were showing perceptible signs of strain. The volatile French had come to regard the enemy’s exasperating passivity as all part of a diabolical campaign to wear down the strength of the defenders. On February 17th, there had been a mild morale-booster in the shape of news of a great Russian triumph against the Turks. But Erzerum was far away, and the French had long ago begun to take announcements of ‘decisive victories’ with the correct amount of salt. Still the bad weather continued. Then, on the 19th, the sun appeared and the mud slowly started to dry out. Joffre made a last visit to Verdun and congratulated Herr on his preparations. That night frost set in. The 20th was a radiant, almost spring-like day. Everyone knew it must be coming soon. At
Grand Quartier Général,
Colonel Renouard, Chief of the
Troisième Bureau,
was heard to remark gleefully: ‘What a hornet’s nest they will fall upon!’  In the Bois des Caures, more realistically, Driant wrote in a last letter to his wife: ‘The hour is near… I feel very calm… In our wood the front trenches will be taken in the first minutes…. My poor battalions, spared until now!’ And to a friend: ‘As for me, I have always had such good fortune that it will not abandon me, and I hope to be writing to you when we have crossed the worst passage.’ To encourage the nervous troops, at 1600 hours that afternoon, the French artillery opened up for the first time, with an hour’s bombardment. General Herr issued his final orders to his troops, incorporating the formula that was almost standard among French First War Commanders: ‘Resist whatever the cost; let yourselves be cut to pieces on the spot rather than fall back.’

Night fell. At Revigny, thirty miles behind Verdun, the vigilant crew of a 75 fired at, and brought down in flames a Zeppelin setting out to raid communications; an unprecedented feat. Meanwhile between the lines a superbly clear, cold moonlight had lit up the tranquil landscape. In the Bois des Caures the Chasseurs stood watch with an affected casualness, hands in pockets, gazing at the mysterious dark shapes of the woods to their front and wondering what would emerge from them on the morrow. Behind them in the shadows there was an occasional cracking of twigs and the murmuring of muffled voices as ration parties brought up the last supplies; otherwise silence. Far off the sleepless Chasseurs could hear the steady rumble of the German trains moving ammunition in the Forest of Spincourt. Closer, over a No-Man’s-Land made beautiful by the flattering moonlight that erased the blemishes of war, there came a sound of German soldiers singing.

CHAPTER SIX

THE FIRST DAY

Il n’y a que la première gorgée qui coûte.

PAUL CLAUDEL,
Ballade

When I knew it [war] I passionately loved it.… I shall not cease to love it, for all the splendour in which it has clad the most humble.—CAPTAIN LA TOUR DU PIN,
Le Creuset

D
EEP
in a wood near Loison one of Herr Krupp’s naval guns raised its immense barrel slowly through the camouflage netting. For the tenth time the sleepy crews went through their drill. They were getting fed up with being tumbled out night after night in the bitter pre-dawn cold — and all to no purpose. But today it seemed to be the real thing. Once again the battery commander lovingly checked the fuse on the shell that stood nearly as high as himself. There was a ring on the field telephone. The long-awaited order had arrived. The monster projectile was hoisted up and rammed into the breech. The crews turned their backs to the muzzle, raised their hands to their ears, and braced themselves as the officer shouted
‘FEUER!’

Nearly twenty miles away the shell exploded with an earth-shaking roar in the courtyard of the Bishop’s Palace in Verdun, knocking a corner off the cathedral. After all the repeated gun drill of the past days, it was not a good shot; instead of hitting one of the vital Meuse bridges it merely provided Allied propaganda with yet another example of German ‘frightfulness’. Somewhere in the vast labyrinth of Vauban’s Citadel where once British POWs had been lodged during the Napoleonic Wars, a bugler sounded a warning to take cover. The shells began to fall at a steady tempo. Another 380 millimetre gun firing on Verdun station was rather more successful than its sister piece; after a few shots the rails of the marshalling yard were standing in the air like twisted fragments of wire. Operation ‘Execution Place’ had begun.

In the Bois des Caures, most of Colonel Driant’s Chasseurs slept on oblivious of what was going on behind them. Some three hours later, Corporal Stephane — known as ‘
Gran’ père
’ because of his
46 years — was gently awakening, to the homely sound of a coffee-grinder nearby. With it came the voices of two men arguing in the grumbly, good-natured way of soldiers in the early morning. From ‘
Gran’ père
’ Stephane’s dugout the day looked much like any other; if anything it promised to be better than the filthy weather one had had during the past few weeks. With all this talk about a German attack, a fine clear day like this might seem a bit ominous; yesterday evening, for the first time in a long while, there had been the unusual, and rather menacing spectacle of a German plane flying between the lines. But there had been these rumours almost non-stop since Christmas, and nothing had yet happened. One could almost believe it was all invented by the staff back in Verdun, just to get a little more work out of the poor sods of
biffins.
Lying between sleep and waking — a pleasurable state, were it not for the numbing cold — Corporal Stephane’s  thoughts were all of the immediate problems of getting up and the more distant prospects of a leave that was due shortly.

Suddenly, the whole world seemed to disintegrate around him. With the conditioned alacrity of old soldiers, the two men with the coffee-grinder disappeared below ground, cursing in unprintable French “why couldn’t the….. wait till I had finished my coffee!’ The air in the Bois des Caures seemed solid with whirling material. To Corporal Stephane, it was as if it were swept by ‘a storm, a hurricane, a tempest growing ever stronger, where it was raining nothing but paving stones.’ Upon the terrible din of the explosions were superimposed the splintering crashes of rending wood as the great 210 millimetre shells lopped off branches, or uprooted the trees themselves. Barely had the tree trunks fallen than they were spewed up into the air again by fresh eruptions. From his own position, still relatively immune to the shelling, Stephane watched its methodical progress with a certain macabre fascination. It was like a garden hose, he thought. First it swept
Grande Garde
1,
¹
up at the front of the wood, then it ascended the ravine to
Grande Gardes
2, 3 and 4, across to the concrete redoubt of R2 and the cross-roads, and back again to
Grande Garde
1, repeating itself every quarter of an hour.