The Price of Glory (29 page)

To another Second Lieutenant of the same regiment, twenty-six-year-old Raymond Jubert (later killed at Verdun), the fighting on the
Mort Homme that day presented a rather more confused picture. The officers of Jubert’s company, then in reserve, were playing cards when word came back that the forward positions had been overrun and had to be instantly retaken. Atop the Mort Homme, all was chaos; under the permanent canopy of smoke, impossible to tell which holes were tenanted by friend or foe. His company decimated by murderous shell-fire even before reaching the objective, Jubert found himself alone, possibly the only surviving officer, and sent off a message to his battalion commander: ‘I do not know where I am, but the position is of the first importance, and I have only ten men to hold it.’ Urgently he requested to be reinforced by at least two companies. Back came a reply typical of that desperate day: ‘There are no reinforcements.’ For another thirty-six hours, under non-stop bombardment, Jubert somehow held his post. On returning, dazed and impressed by the sheer ineffectualness of man amid this inferno of
matériel
, Jubert wrote humbly:

In the middle of combat, one is little more than a wave in the sea… a stroke of the brush lost in the painting.… Courage, in our days, is a currency that is not depreciated, but tarnished by usage.

The official citation, more dramatic, states that under his command the remnants of II Company retook half a mile of what were once trenches, ‘lined up as for a tattoo, singing and laughing, and saved the 151st Regiment’.

Like Jubert, and in contrast to Campana, Captain Augustin Cochin of the 146th Regiment sat on the Mort Homme — from April 9th to April 14th — without once seeing a German infantryman; a not uncommon experience at Verdun. Nevertheless, each day the company under his command suffered an average of 20-30 casualties from the shelling; his Company HQ, a hole in a shattered trench, ‘inundated with the blood of the wounded, who came to take refuge close to me, as if I could do anything, alas…’ Writing to his mother on reaching the Mort Homme during the calm before the storm, he described it as ‘an excellent corner, the best in the sector’. But, on April 14th:

I have returned from the toughest trial that I have ever seen [he had already been wounded, for the third time, near Douaumont on February 25th] — four days and four nights — ninety-six hours — the last two days soaked in icy mud — under terrible bombardment, without any shelter other than the narrowness of the trench, which even seemed to be too wide; not a hole, not a dugout, nothing, nothing. The Boche did not attack, naturally, it would have been too stupid. It was much more convenient to carry out a fine firing exercise on our backs… result: I arrived there with 175 men, I returned with 34, several half mad. And a platoon of little Chasseurs is now in our place. It’s the next course; there will be yet another to serve before long, for the appetite of the ogre is insatiable.… My poor
Biffins
who were half mad; their round eyes, not replying any more when I spoke to them.

On the Somme that July — where he was to meet his death — Cochin noted contemptuously that the artillery bombardments had nothing to compare with Verdun.

Of the April 9th offensive the
Tägliche Rundschau
wrote, in terms that can hardly have been convincing even to its malleable German readers, of

the masterpiece of tactics and strategy of the Great German General Staff, so different to the brutal French attempts at a breakthrough.… Following a pre-conceived plan, we are advancing slowly, methodically, step by step; we are not seeking, as did the French in the Champagne Battle, to achieve the destruction of a single point, we are demolishing their defences piece by piece. Thus we are avoiding excessive losses.…

It would have been interesting to know what the men at the front thought of this account of their endeavours. Certainly General von Gallwitz had no illusions about the brilliance of the ‘pre-conceived plan’. With some force he told von Knobelsdorf, the Crown Prince’s Chief-of-Staff, that it would be pointless pursuing the attacks on the Mort Homme until Côte 304 was finally conquered. With characteristic ingenuity, the Germans set to boring two mile-long tunnels — appropriately called ‘Gallwitz’ and ‘Crown Prince’ — in order to bring troops right up to the northern base of the Mort Homme in safety. Meanwhile, persistent French counter-attacks during April retook the whole crest of the Mort Homme, wiping out virtually all the German gains of April 9th, and the Côte 304 guns continued to reap their heavy toll.

For twelve days after the April 9th attack, it rained solidly, suspending all operations. The misery of the troops of both sides, clinging to their wretched holes in the corpse-reeking mud, multiplied. The
Reichs Archives
recorded:

Water in the trenches came above the knees. The men had not a dry thread on their bodies; there was not a dugout that could provide dry accommodation. The numbers of sick rose alarmingly.…

But at least the enforced postponement saved the Germans from setting off yet another attack at half-cock. To Gallwitz, the gunnery expert, the new attempt on Côte 304 would be a pure artillery exercise; it would literally blast the French off the hill; moreover, it would succeed. Never before — not even on February 21st — would such a concentration of firepower have been seen.

On May 3rd, a day of oppressive heat, over 500 heavy German cannon opened fire along a front of little over a mile. For two days and a night the bombardment continued, until French aviators reported the columns of smoke rising to an altitude of two-and-a-half-thousand feet. To the men on the ground it seemed ‘as if to finish things off the Germans had decided to point one cannon at each one of us.’ Casualties among the French, badly deficient of deep shelters after the weeks of heavy shelling, were appalling. One French officer describes how he was buried three times that day in his trench, and dug out each time by his men. Others were less fortunate. Of one battalion, only three men were said to have survived; many of the remainder were simply buried alive by the shells. One by one the French machine guns were destroyed. For over two days no food or supplies could be got through to the defenders, nor any wounded evacuated. Reinforcements fortunate enough to arrive got lost in the chaos atop the ridge, wandering all night to find their new positions. One company commander who survived the attack recalled that ‘nobody knew exactly the location of the mixed-up regiments… it was impossible to move. Orders had pushed up men on top of men and set up a living wall against the monstrous German avalanche.’ Finally, under the obscurity of dust and smoke the Germans managed to get a foothold on the summit, but it took three more days of bitter close combat before the vital Côte 304 was finally theirs.

One of the first demands of the conquering Germans was for a double ration of tobacco — to mask the intolerable odour of corpses. When the balance sheet was finally totted up after the war, it was estimated that 10,000 Frenchmen alone had laid down their lives on this one small corner of France.

The capture of Côte 304 represented the first breach in the ‘Line of Resistance’ that Pétain had prescribed on taking up his command, and with it the stage was set for the final German attack on the Mort Homme, with the elder Falkenhayn once again in command. This time he could afford to make no mistake; his former pupil, the Crown Prince, was there at his elbow, watching every move. Never since 1914, said the Crown Prince in glee,

have I been able to see a fight so clearly.… The intense barrage fire of our artillery sweeping the whole slope of the hill was at once a magnificent and awe-inspiring sight; the Mort Homme flamed like a volcano, and the air and the earth alike trembled at the shock of thousands of bursting shells. As zero hour was reached, and punctually to the very minute our barrage lifted, through my glasses I could clearly observe our skirmishers leave their trenches and move steadily forward; here and there I could even distinguish the smoke puffs of bursting bombs. Close behind followed reserves, carrying-parties and entrenching companies. How were things going? Then from the French trenches were to be seen streaming back to our lines, first a few prisoners here and there, then more and more, and at last whole columns of them; I breathed freely once more! There followed a perceptible pause. My Chief-of-Staff, who had been following the progress of the attack from a more distant position in Consenvoye Wood on the eastern bank, telephoned to me that the attack had failed and that everywhere our men could be seen falling back. I was able to correct him; what he had seen were the crowds of prisoners!

By the end of May, the Germans had taken the whole of the Mort Homme, as well as to its east the important village of Cumières. At one time the tide, before it was checked, had reached the railway station at Chattancourt and was lapping around the very foot of the Bois Bourrus ridge. It was the end of the German offensive on the Left Bank. The Crown Prince had achieved what he set out to do in March; though his small auxiliary clearing action had taken him nearly three months and cost at least as many lives as the whole of the rest of the fighting to date. Worse still, by the end of May there were indications that for the first time German losses might be exceeding those of the French; within a week one completely new brigade had been as good as wiped out. But the margin of retreat for the French had become very narrow indeed, and now the full weight of the Germans in the West could be thrown against Pétain’s men on the Right Bank of the Meuse.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

WIDENING HORIZONS

A Dieu! que la guerre est jolie
Avec ses chants ses longs loisirs.

GUILLAUMEAPOLLINAIRE,
L’Adieu du Cavalier

… The best thing of all has been the chance of taking part in this war…. Every day one goes on learning, every day one’s horizon widens.—from
German Students’ War Letters
(ed. Philip Witkop)

A
LTHOUGH
from March to the end of May, the main German effort took place on the Left Bank of the Meuse, this did not mean that the Right Bank had become a ‘quiet sector’. Far from it! Frequent vicious little attacks undertaken by both sides to make a minor tactical gain here and there regularly supplemented the long casualty lists caused by the relentless pounding of the rival artilleries. Within the first month of the battle the effect of this non-stop bombardment, by so mighty an assemblage of cannon, their fire concentrated within an area little larger than Richmond Park, had already established an environment common to both sides of the Meuse that characterised the whole battle of Verdun. The horrors of trench warfare and of the slaughter without limits of the First War are by now so familiar to the modern reader that further recounting merely benumbs the mind. The Battle of Verdun, however, through its very intensity — and, later, its length — added a new dimension of horror. Even this would not in itself warrant lengthy description were it not for the fact that Verdun’s peculiarly sinister environment came to leave an imprint on men’s memories that stood apart from other battles of the First War; and predominantly so in France where the nightmares it inspired lingered perniciously long years after the Armistice.

To a French aviator, flying sublimely over it all, the Verdun front after a rainfall resembled disgustingly the ‘humid skin of a monstrous toad’. Another flyer, James McConnell, (an American, later killed with the Lafayette Squadron) noted after passing over ‘red-roofed Verdun’ — which had ‘spots in it where no red shows and you know what has happened there’ — that abruptly

there is only that sinister brown belt, a strip of murdered nature. It seems to belong to another world. Every sign of humanity has been swept away. The woods and roads have vanished like chalk wiped from a blackboard; of the villages nothing remains but grey smears…. During heavy bombardments and attacks I have seen shells falling like rain. Countless towers of smoke remind one of Gustave Doré’s picture of the fiery tombs of the archheretics in Dante’s ‘Hell’…. Now and then monster projectiles hurtling through the air close by leave one’s plane rocking violently in their wake. Aeroplanes have been cut in two by them.

With the noise of the battle drowned out by his aircraft’s motor, ‘it is a weird combination of stillness and havoc…’.

The first sounds heard by ground troops approaching Verdun reminded them of ‘a gigantic forge that ceased neither day nor night’. At once they noted, and were acutely depressed by, the sombre monotones of the battle area. To some it was ‘yellow and flayed, without a patch of green’; to others a compound of brown, grey and black, where the only forms were shell holes. On the few stumps that remained of Verdun’s noble forests on the Right Bank, the bark either hung down in strips, or else had long since been consumed by half-starved pack-horses. As spring came, with the supreme optimism of Nature, the shattered trees pushed out a new leaf here and there, but soon these too dropped sick and wilting in the poisonous atmosphere. At night, the Verdun sky resembled a ‘stupendous
Aurora Borealis
’, but by day the only splashes of colour that one French soldier-artist could find were the rose tints displayed by the frightful wounds of the horses lying scattered about the approach routes, lips pulled back over jaws in the hideousness of death. Heightening this achromatic gloom was the pall of smoke over Verdun most of the time, which turned the light filtering through it to an ashy grey. A French general, several times in the line at Verdun, recalled to the author that while marching through the devastated zone his soldiers never sang; ‘and you know French soldiers sing a lot’. When they came out of it they often grew crazily rapturous simply at returning to ‘a world of colour, meadows and flowers and woods… where rain on the roofs sounds like a harmonic music’.