The Price of Glory (17 page)

A half company of Chasseurs, two-and-a-half battalions of the 165th Regiment, a battalion and a half of the 351st, with two-and-a-half companies of the 44th Territorials, this was all that remained.

The French gunners had suffered little less than the infantry. Theirs had been a thoroughly frustrating day. Telephone communications had long been severed, and in the smoke of the German bombardment few of the infantry’s supplicating rockets had been seen; fewer still of the runners had come through. Observation planes and balloons had been swept from the sky by the German fighters. Firing blind, batteries had for the most part contented themselves by shelling old and identified targets, little aiding the hard-pressed infantry. Meanwhile their guns were being demolished one by one by the German 150s. German observers noted a steady
diminuendo
in the French fire. Batteries lucky enough to have horses still alive were beginning to pull back their pieces; but many had to be abandoned to the advancing enemy. Typical of the devotion with which gunners defended their immobilised pieces was the episode of a young naval officer in Herbebois. Ensign Pieri had been detached to command a long-barrelled 160 mm. gun, which in a battle of David and Goliath, had been taking on at ten miles’ range one of the huge 380s shelling Verdun. On the 21st, a salvo of four enormous shells had virtually uprooted Pieri’s gun from its rock emplacement, but he had got it back into service, and had operated it until the German infantry approached. Forced to evacuate, they blew up their ammunition and then took up a position in a nearby trench. Unfortunately the 1874 model rifles the Navy provided (for ceremonial occasions) fired black powder cartridges which gave away their location, and forced them to withdraw once again. Somehow in the confusion of battle, Pieri was at one point able to regain the gun itself. Twice he tried to blow it up, but his fuses were damp. Incredibly enough, with the Germans already occupying one corner of the emplacement and busily setting up a machine gun there, he then managed to remove the breech block, which survivors of his crew broke up with a pick in a neighbouring trench.

On the night of the 22nd, severe frost once again brought only an interlude of misery to the exhausted attackers and defenders alike; it was worse still for the many wounded lying untended between the lines.

CHAPTER EIGHT

BREAK THROUGH

The Will to Conquer sweeps all before it.

MARSHAL FOCH

B
EHIND
the French lines, confusion and alarm were steadily mounting at the various HQs. Since his ride had been interrupted by the German shelling early on the 21st, General Bapst had had a particularly trying time. Though still a vigorous, composed personality, Bapst was over 60; an advanced age for a divisional commander. Most of his service life had been passed in the peaceful confines of artillery depots, and his HQ in the little school-house at Bras had been organised very much on peacetime lines. For the General and all his staff, only one shelter, four yards square, had been dug. But at least he was well organised there. Then at lunchtime on the 21st, orders had come from XXX Corps that he was to move up to Vacherauville. Hastily packing up his staff, he waited till cover of night to move. At the new HQ, Bapst installed himself as best he could amid scenes of excitement and confusion. There was no room to hang operational maps; the only light came from the flickering candles, frequently blown out by German shells. After complaining to General Chrétien of the difficulties of exercising command under these conditions, Bapst was granted permission to move back again to Bras. At 10 a.m. on the 22nd he set forth along a road heavily shelled and crowded with troop movements. Meanwhile, once again, 72 Division had been virtually without command during several vital hours. In some disarray he reached Bras, only to find the little school had now become a refuge for a motley of all arms, cooks, clerks and wounded. These were duly chased out, not without awkwardness, but by now the strain had begun to tell on Bapst.

Into this atmosphere of disorganisation and fatigue, there came, during the afternoon of the 22nd, menacing news from Bapst’s left flank. With the German breakthrough in the Bois de Consenvoye and the capture of Haumont, the anchor position of Brabant on the Meuse was now threatened with encirclement. If the garrison
there should be cut off, Bapst knew that he would have no troops to cover the equally important village of Samogneux, farther up the river towards Verdun. Recalling his strict orders of ‘no retreat’, he hastily sent Captain Pujo off to Chrétien’s HQ at Fort Souville, to obtain formal permission for the abandonment of Brabant. Pujo reached Souville by 5.30 and was at once received by the Corps Commander. General Chrétien was a-tough veteran of wars in Indo-China made doubly fierce-looking by a scar that distorted his mouth. Yet beneath this exterior he seems to have been an indecisive man. At first his response to Bapst’s pleas was an immediate and categoric
no
; it was unthinkable that a French officer could voluntarily yield any ground. It was a matter of honour. Then he began to waver and for two hours kept Pujo waiting for a definite order. Finally, Pujo was sent off with the highly unsatisfactory verdict that General Bapst, being on the spot, should make up his own mind.

Meanwhile, bad news reaching Bras was hourly being succeeded by still worse news; the enemy were reaching ever closer to the Meuse behind Brabant, and of the units pinned in at Brabant itself a captain and 60 men of the 44th Territorials had hoisted the white flag. From the rest of the front reports were either non-existent, or highly confused; Lt-Col. Bonviolle had reached Samogneux with a handful of survivors from Haumont; Driant in the Bois de Caures was ominously silent. The strain was becoming unbearable. At last, at 12.45 a.m. Pujo returned from Souville. At last, some orders! The Corps Commander had given what seemed to be a
carte blanche
. Immediately Bapst drafted an order to evacuate Brabant. Shortly afterwards his already uncomfortable HQ was rendered uninhabitable by a large shell which exploded a store of hand grenades. News of his order reached Fort Souville at 3 a.m. Since Pujo had left Chrétien, promises of fresh reinforcements had reached him, and he had begun to change his mind. Brabant now seemed to assume strategic importance. For another three and a half hours he hesitated. Finally the de Grandmaison doctrine triumphed and he sent a peremptory order to Bapst: ‘The Brabant position should not have been evacuated without the permission of the superior command… the General commanding the 72nd Division will take measures to reoccupy Brabant.’

Half an hour later, he followed it with another order, telling Bapst not to use too many men in the operation. It all revealed how sadly out of touch XXX Corps was with events at the front.

Under the fortuitous cover of a heavy Meuse mist, Brabant had already been evacuated with light losses. But Bapst, obedient soldier that he was, promptly ordered its retaking; though he must have realised how impossible this was. Word came back to Bapst that there was not a single man available for a counter-attack. The order was counter-manded, and at midday von Zwehl’s men entered Brabant.

The abandonment of Brabant was hailed by French military writers as the first of the major tactical blunders in the defence of Verdun. Bapst was made a scapegoat, the first of many. Narrowly escaping a Court Martial, he never again held an active command. In fact his decision had clearly been right, the only possible one in the circumstances. A last ditch defence of Brabant could only have resulted in the slaughter of what remained of two French regiments, to be followed almost certainly by an even speedier advance by von Zwehl.

The orders and counter-orders issued on the morning of the 23rd led to the inevitable disorder. The 72nd Division was nearing the end of its tether. Terrible stories brought back from the front by wounded stragglers began to spread demoralisation among the few reserves that were still uncommitted. Yet still the suicidally heroic penny-packet counter-attacks were being thrown in all along the line, now often reduced to half-platoon level. One of the largest had been that of Major Bertrand’s battalion, which had at last received its orders; which were to attack at dawn the Bois des Caures, now occupied by the best part of the German XVIII Corps. Through surprise at the sheer audacity of such a gesture, Bertrand had achieved some success; at the usual heavy cost. But the neighbouring force that Colonel Vaulet had ordered to join in the dawn attack did not receive its orders until midday; they had been ten hours in transit over a distance of little more than a mile. Though it was now hopelessly late, Vaulet’s orders were still carried out. But hardly had the attack begun to move forward than it ran headlong into a whole German regiment, marching with rifles at the slope, singing lustily. The French were simply swept aside.

Such were the fate of these impromptu, uncoordinated, suicidal ripostes. But, once again, their ferocity had the effect of persuading the Germans to greater prudence. Though the German assault had been resumed with full force along the whole of XXX Corps’ front, preceded by the usual annihilating bombardment, the third day of
the battle was still to bring no breakthrough, no rout of the vastly outnumbered French defenders. On the right, 51 Division, though it had borne less of the weight of the German onslaught than the 72nd, was nonetheless fighting with equal heroism. It still clung tenaciously to Herbebois, the only portion of the first line remaining in French hands. Here the German flamethrowers had begun to lose some of their initial terror, French sharpshooters having discovered how easy it was to pick off the heavily laden German pioneers before they came within range. The huge Austrian 305 mm. mortars were now brought to bear on the wood. Finally, at 4.30 p.m. divisional HQ gave the order to withdraw from Herbebois; but an hour and a half later Sergeant-Major Quintin was still holding out with the remnants of his platoon, until surrounded and captured.

At the village of Beaumont, situated on a strategic rise, and to which Driant had tried to withdraw the previous day, elements of several French regiments fought to the end against repeated attacks. So costly were these to the Germans that the official, history compares Beaumont to St. Privat, one of the bloodiest actions in the Franco-Prussian war. As the Hessians of XVIII Corps closed in on the village they were scythed down by suicide machine guns firing out of concealed cellar apertures, that were only silenced when the houses had been brought down on top of them. To the French defenders it seemed as if the dense German formations were coming in with such rapidity that they were being physically swept forward into the French machine guns, by succeeding waves pressing from behind. Casualties among them were enormous. When Beaumont finally succumbed to this impetus on the 24th, a German lieutenant had to intervene to save the life of the captured French commander from his men, enraged by the casualties they had suffered. In the adjacent Bois de Wavrille, heavy losses had also been inflicted on the Hessians by the combined shelling of Chrétien’s heavy guns now concentrated on the wood, and by their own barrage falling too short. Something akin to panic broke out, during which two regiments, the 115th and the 117th, became badly entangled with each other. When at last they were sorted out, it was too late to renew the attack that day. For the first time, expressions like ‘desperate situation’ and ‘day of horror’ make their appearance in the official German account.

The spirited and prolonged defence of Herbebois and Beaumont provided the 72nd Division an invaluable anchor, which enabled them to hold the line Beaumont-Samogneux during most of the 23rd.
This resistance resulted in yet another check to the German advance, and this time it was von Zwehl’s Corps that was held up. To his considerable surprise, von Zwehl found himself confronted by a defence line lying between the known first and second French positions that was recorded on none of the carefully prepared German maps. Consequently it had received relatively little attention during the preliminary bombardment. The obstacle was in fact the hastily dug ‘Intermediary Line’ ordered by General de Castelnau on his January visit; not the last contribution he would make towards the defence of Verdun. The few hours’ delay in the ever-accelerating German advance now afforded an invaluable respite, during which Chrétien was able to push up units of a new division, the 37th African Division, behind the tottering 72nd.

But what remained of 72 Division was deteriorating rapidly. More and more runners were failing to reach their destinations, and when they did they brought such desperate messages as the following:

Lieutenant commanding 3rd Battalion of the 60th to 143 Brigade. The C.O. and all company commanders have been killed. My battalion is reduced to approximately 180 men. I have neither ammunition nor food. What am I to do?

At 10 a.m. on the 23rd, impatient at being cut off from all effective control of his brigade, Colonel Vaulet, decided to move closer to the front. Vaulet was typical of the toughness of the French Army of 1914. Aged 57, he had risen from the ranks, and as a lieutenant colonel in 1914 he had been seriously wounded in the abdomen during the ‘Battle of the Frontiers’. Captured by the Germans, he escaped a fortnight later, his wound still open. He took refuge in a French gaol, where he was equipped with civilian clothes and the false papers of a vagrant about to be released. He was again caught by the Germans, tried as a spy, but acquitted and sent to a POW camp in Germany. Four months later, in very ill-health and suffering from his wound, Vaulet was repatriated via Switzerland as unfit for military service. In March 1915 he was back in the army. Since the battle began on February 21, the tough old colonel — who had been Driant’s immediate superior — had played perhaps the most distinguished rôle among the French Brigade Commanders. With his litany of ‘counter-attack; again counter-attack; always counter-attack’, he had been the very embodiment of 72 Division’s will to
resist. Now, as he left his shelter to move up towards the cracking front, he was seen to disappear in a burst of flame.