The Price of Glory (38 page)

My heart leapt as I saw our youths of twenty going into the furnace of Verdun, reflecting that with the light-heartedness of their age they would pass too rapidly from the enthusiasm of the first engagement to the lassitude provoked by suffering…. Jolted about in their uncomfortable trucks, or bowed by the weight of their fighting equipment, they encouraged one another to feign indifference by their songs or by their badinage…. But how depressing it was when they returned, whether singly as wounded or footsore stragglers, or in the ranks of companies impoverished by their losses! Their expressions, indescribably, seemed frozen by a vision of terror; their gait and their postures betrayed a total dejection; they sagged beneath the weight of horrifying memories; when I spoke to them, they could hardly reply, and even the jocular words of the old soldiers awoke no echo from their troubled minds.

A grim quandary had faced Pétain from the start. There is little doubt that, tactically, in accordance with his ideals of firepower on the defensive and of limiting losses, had it been left to him he would have evacuated the murderous salient on the Right Bank, abandoned Verdun, and ‘bled white’ the Crown Prince’s army as it advanced through a series of carefully prepared lines. Soon after taking up his command he had prepared highly secret plans for just such a withdrawal, and put them under lock and key. After the war, Joffre claimed that on at least two occasions Pétain had to be prevented from evacuating the Right Bank; the claim should perhaps be taken with a judicious amount of salt, but at least it infers that the thought was never far from Pétain’s mind. But, whatever he might have liked to do out of good, tactical commonsense, it was brutally apparent to him that on the first move towards evacuation he would instantly be sacked by Joffre and de Castelnau; almost certainly to be replaced by an
attaque à outrance
general with none of Pétain’s concern about husbanding lives. Thus, to a very real extent, his hands were tied. Nevertheless, in compensation for fighting a battle he disliked, he was at least able to mitigate conditions firstly by placing the strictest permissible limits on French offensive action at Verdun, and partly through getting Joffre to agree to a system of rapid replacements, known as the ‘
Noria
’.

Pétain, from his own combat experience augmented by what he saw daily from the
Mairie
at Souilly, had at once sensed the rapid decline in the fighting value of troops that had been too long in the line at Verdun. Under the
Noria
system, divisions were pulled out after a matter of days, before their numbers were decimated and morale was impaired, and sent to rest far from the front where they could peacefully regain their strength and assimilate replacements. In contrast, the Germans (perhaps banking on the national ability to accept horror more phlegmatically than their opponents) kept units in the line until they were literally ground to powder, constantly topping up levels with replacements fresh from the depots. The weaknesses of this system have already been commented on. By May 1st, forty French divisions had passed through Verdun, to twenty-six German. The discrepancy had two important effects upon the Germans: firstly, it tended to demoralise the men in the field, who asked themselves repeatedly ‘where do the French get all these fresh men from?’; secondly, it deceived the German Intelligence into assuming that French losses were far heavier than they in fact
were — thus further encouraging Knobelsdorf to continue the offensive. (To the French, it also meant that more men of that generation would have the memory of Verdun engraved upon their memory than any other First War battle.)

Back at Chantilly, Joffre was becoming increasingly restive at Pétain’s conduct of the battle. Admittedly the territorial losses had been minute, but since his appointment Pétain seemed to have done nothing but surrender ground, and by the beginning of April he was still refusing to contemplate a major counter-stroke. It was strictly against the book! Moreover — with their miraculous arithmetical process, described by Pierrefeu as simply adding ‘a hundred thousand or thereabouts’ every fortnight — the
Deuxième Bureau
placed German casualties by April 1st at 200,000 to only 65,000 French. (Strangely enough, the magical figure of 200,000 was also the figure selected by Falkenhayn as representing French losses up to that date; as has already been noted, the true totals were in fact 81,607 Germans to 89,000 French.) Deceived by these estimates, Joffre could not believe the enemy would be able to maintain his effort much longer; goaded on by the Young Turks of G.Q.G., Pétain’s tic worsened, but he stood firm. At Chantilly, it was noted that for the first time in his career as Generalissimo, the mighty Joffre found his authority thwarted. Worse still, the needs of Pétain’s
Noria
were draining the reserves that Joffre had been hoarding for the great Anglo-French ‘push’ on the Somme that summer, upon which he had staked his all. In his Memoirs, Joffre claims that if he had yielded to all Pétain’s demands for reinforcements ‘the whole French Army would have been absorbed in this battle…. It would have meant accepting the imposition of the enemy’s will.’ In fact, by ‘accepting’ Falkenhayn’s challenge at Verdun in the first place, the French High Command had obviously done just that; and, with the hand de Castelnau had dealt Pétain in February, it looked to the man on the spot as if the securing of Verdun would indeed require ‘the whole French Army’.

Thus began the rift between Joffre and Pétain. Joffre was determined not to abandon the Somme offensive, determined to give it first priority in men and material; but, at the same time, he also wanted Pétain to strike an offensive attitude at Verdun. Pétain, growing ever more aggrieved at G.Q.G.’s lack of sympathy, was convinced that — if Verdun were to be held — the major French effort for 1916 must be devoted to it; eventually moving to the
extreme position that the Somme should be left entirely to the British. He also left Joffre in no doubt that he thought that a break-through would not be achieved on the Somme with the means available. As a general, Pétain certainly had his limitations. He had none of the broad strategic grasp of Foch or de Castelnau; with his gaze concentrated upon his immediate front (as so often happens to field commanders), he lacked the overall vision of the war that was accessible to Joffre. All this is true. But, though Pétain may have seen Verdun as everything, what he saw there in terms of human intangibles the French Army mutinies of spring 1917 proved he saw with far greater clairvoyance than Joffre, Foch or de Castelnau.

Within a matter of weeks of Pétain’s appointment, Joffre was thoroughly regretting it and already contemplating ways of removing him. But Pétain, regarded as the ‘saviour of Verdun’, was already the idol of France, while Joffre’s own popularity — following the stories that had begun to creep out about Verdun’s unpreparedness — was at its lowest ebb since the first disastrous month of the war. Those inveterate intriguers at Chantilly counselled that it would be professional suicide to sack Pétain now. Suddenly, the advent of a new star at Verdun presented Joffre with a ready-made solution.

General Robert Nivelle, 58 at the time of Verdun, came from an old military family and had a mixture of Italian and English blood. Though he afterwards chose to become a gunner, he had passed through the famous cavalry school of Saumur, and still retained all the
panache
of a French cavalryman. At the Marne, Nivelle had been a colonel in command of an artillery regiment. When the French infantry in front of him broke, Nivelle drove his field-guns through the retreating rabble and engaged von Kluck’s troops at close range with such speed and precision that they too broke and ran. In October 1914, Nivelle was promoted brigadier; a divisional commander three months later, and by December 1915 he had been put in command of III Corps. Meteor-like, his orbit was swift and brilliant; also like a meteor, he was to disappear without a trace. In the rapidity of his early promotion he resembled Pétain, but no further. He was an out-and-out Grandmaisonite, and like Foch he believed that victory was purely a matter of moral force. His ambition was as boundless as his self-confidence. When it came to casualty lists among the infantry he commanded, he combined the blind eye of an artilleryman with the unshakeable belief that so long
as the end was success the means mattered not. But, in complete antithesis to both Pétain and Joffre, the supreme attribute of Nivelle — cultured, courteous, suave and eloquent — was his ability to handle the politicians. His allure seems to have been almost hypnotic. Abel Ferry, the youngest and most critical member of the parliamentary Army Commission, gives a typical description of the impact of Nivelle:

Good impression; clear eyes which look you in the face, neat and precise thoughts, no bluff in his speech, good sense dominates everything.

Poincaré was utterly captivated; even Pierrefeu, the cynical chronicler of G.Q.G., fell at first sight, and Lloyd-George, for all his generic, instinctive distrust of generals, was seduced into endorsing the disastrous offensive that bore Nivelle’s name, in 1917. With an English mother, Nivelle’s perfect English may have played its part here, but it was his irradiating self-confidence that really swept people away. His square shoulders gave a potent impression of strength and audacity. His face burned with ruthless determination, and when he expressed an intent his audience was somehow made to feel that it was already
fait accompli.
It was he, not Pétain as is sometimes thought, who gave birth to the immortalised challenge at Verdun:

‘Ils ne passeront pas!’

But Nivelle was in reality a triumvirate. His left hand was his Chief-of-Staff, a sombre and sinister character called Major d’Alenson. Immensely tall and bony, with a cavernous face and arresting eyes:

Always badly dressed, with untidy hair and beard, he walked about the corridors with his hand in the belt of his breeches, seeing no one, lost in thought with the air of a melancholy Quixote… [says Pierrefeu].

One of the most brilliant officers that ever passed through Staff College, d’Alenson was Nivelle’s
éminence grise.
He was also dying of consumption, but only he knew it. Feverish, enflamed, sometimes apparently verging on insanity, he believed it was his mission to save France before he died. ‘Victory must be won before I die,’ he
remarked later, ‘and I have but a short time to live’. To one under sentence of death himself, the lives of others cannot have assumed undue importance. On and on he drove the hardly unwilling Nivelle into the attack. It was he, more than anyone, who was to fire his commander’s imagination with the fatal 1917 offensive on the Chemin des Dames which broke the French Army. A few weeks later he was dead.

Nivelle’s right hand, his chief executive, his hatchet-man, was the toughest general in the whole French Army; Charles Mangin, sometimes known to his troops as ‘the butcher’ or ‘eater of men’. At the time of his entry into this account, Mangin was commanding the 5th Division in Nivelle’s III Corps, aged 49. Born in the ‘Lost Territories’, Mangin was the French colonial soldier
par excellence.
Two-thirds of his peacetime career had been spent in the colonies; much of the time engaged in ‘pacification’, during which he had been wounded three times. In 1898, as a lieutenant he had led the advanced guard of Marchand’s remarkable expedition across Africa to Fashoda, which had so nearly brought France to blows with Britain. When he returned to France to lead a brigade to war, he still slept whenever possible in a desert tent — regardless of the obvious dangers. He was a staunch admirer of the qualities of African troops; though this admiration often inflicted terrible massacres upon the wretched colonials thrown into his offensives.

Mangin was a killer, and he looked the part. His face was burnt and eroded by the Sahara; his square jaw seemed permanently set, like a terrier with its teeth clamped into a rat that it was vigorously worrying to death. His mouth was wide, thin-lipped and cruel; his jet-black hair stood up fiercely
en brosse.
He walked with a quick, nervous gait, and had a Napoleonic habit of standing with his hands behind his back, his head thrust forward. An American correspondent (who whole-heartedly approved of Mangin) remarked that ‘his whole appearance gave the impression of an eagle searching for prey’. Seeing him again at the Victory Parade, the same correspondent noted that as Mangin approached the Arc de Triomphe, characteristically ‘his sword rises and sweeps back in the most splendid salute ever seen’. The only unexpected thing about this savage-looking soldier was his surprisingly high-pitched voice and great charm.

Whatever else might be said about Mangin, he was one of the technically most competent generals in the French Army. Precise
to a fault, nobody was better at co-ordinating an attack and at getting his troops over the top at zero hour. Every bit as self-confident as Nivelle, he assured his men that he possessed ‘
Baraka
’ (an Arab expression for heaven-endowed good fortune). They believed it, and sacrificed themselves again and again for him — even after 1917. Teddy Roosevelt, too, was apparently swept away by Mangin’s infectious vigour (perhaps the excitement at meeting so kindred a spirit proved too much for him) in the spring of 1914, and cancelled his visit to Berlin, deciding to stake his money on France — so the story goes. Mangin’s motto was: ‘concentrate all at one point; but then, right to the limit!’ The trouble was he knew no limit. Fear and death meant nothing to him. A real front-line general, more than once he had been wounded during the war while taking grotesque risks. After his disgrace in 1917 there was no doubting his sincerity when he expressed the wish to re-engage as a simple soldier; nor is there any doubt that, had he been allowed to do so, he would have given his life as carelessly as he had required the men under his command to give up theirs. Winston Churchill sums him up brilliantly: