The Price of Glory (42 page)

On June 1st, Raynal had watched helplessly through binoculars as the Germans advanced across the Bois de la Caillette a mile and a half away. If only he had had one 75 in the fort! Nevertheless, two machine guns set up on the superstructure, firing at extreme range, achieved miraculous results. Baffled by the mysterious, invisible weapon that was tearing holes in their ranks, the German Grenadiers kept on coming until Raynal could see a whole trench choked with
grey bodies. Then the attackers disappeared out of sight into the valley.

To the northeast of Vaux, the land falls so rapidly towards the Woevre that the approaches right up to the fort wall lay in dead ground both to its guns and those of Delvert in R.1. Now that the protective flank of La Caillette and Fumin had been lost, it was abundantly clear to Raynal that nothing could stop the Germans reaching Fort Vaux the following morning. The night was spent frantically erecting sandbag barricades, with loopholes for throwing grenades through, at nine breaches in various parts of the fort. Meanwhile the German bombardment rose in a tremendous crescendo; at one period, according to Raynal, shells were falling on the small area of the fort at a rate of 1,500 to 2,000 an hour. Just before dawn on the 2nd the barrage abruptly ceased. The moment had come.

Waiting in trenches less than 150 yards below the lip of the fort were two battalions of the German 50th Division, under the special direction of Major-General Weber Pasha who had recently distinguished himself in organising the defence of the Turkish forts at Gallipoli. In a matter of seconds his men were swarming into the fort moat. At once, they came under heavy machine-gun fire from the two flanking galleries, similar to those that the Brandenburgers had found untenanted in Fort Douaumont, at the north-west and north-east corners. On these the initial fighting was focused. Crouching on the roof of the north-east gallery, German pioneers first tried unsuccessfully to knock it out by lowering bundles of hand-grenades and exploding them outside the loopholes.

The French machine-gunners continued to fire at the Germans attacking the other gallery. Then the pioneers heard below the unmistakable click followed by curses as the machine gun jammed. Quickly they hurled grenades into the gallery, dispatching the gun crew. Out leaped a courageous French officer, Raynal’s second-in-command, Captain Tabourot. For a while, almost single-handed, he kept the attackers away from the entrance to the gallery by hurling hand-grenades, until — his abdomen ripped open by a German grenade — he crawled back into the interior to die. Shortly afterwards, the defenders, thirty-two men and an officer, surrendered the gallery; in it the Germans found two small cannon — minus their breech-blocks.

It was now 5 a.m., and the attackers had already taken one of Vaux’s two main strongpoints. Things did not go quite so easily
with the larger, double gallery at the northwest. Pioneers tried first to ‘smoke out’ its inmates by poking over the fort wall specially elongated tubes fitted to flamethrowers. In the initial surprise, the French machine guns stopped firing, and taking advantage of this Lieutenant Rackow of the 158th Paderborn Regiment managed to slip across the moat with about thirty men. They were the first Germans to reach the superstructure of the fort itself. But almost immediately the French machine guns were back in operation, and for several agonising hours Rackow and his small group sat isolated on the fort. In the terrible din of the Verdun bombardment their comrades only twenty yards away were unable to hear their shouts for support. The German pioneers, with considerable fortitude, now tried lowering sacks full of grenades on a rope outside the gallery, but did themselves more damage. All through the morning the struggle continued, until one after the other the French machine guns were silenced and some fifteen of the gallery’s inhabitants had been wounded. Still it held out. Then at last the Germans on top of the fort discovered the sandbags with which Raynal had plugged a large breach in the corridor leading to the north-west gallery. They removed them, and began hurling grenades into the corridor. Realising what was happening, Raynal ordered the gallery to be abandoned immediately, before its defenders could be taken from the rear.

By about 4 p.m., Raynal had lost both his exterior defences, the superstructure was solidly occupied by the enemy, and the battle was about to move underground. A little like the children and the pirates in ‘Peter Pan’, members of the fort garrison gazed helplessly through the slits of the observation cupolas at the young Germans sprawled out on the ground just above their heads, nonchalantly smoking pipes and occasionally making insulting gestures for their consumption. Meanwhile, during the contest for the galleries, Raynal had hastened to build sandbag barricades inside the corridors leading to them from the central fort.

As soon as both galleries had been occupied, Lieutenant Rackow, who had now assumed control of all operations on the fort, ordered a party under Lieutenant Ruberg of the Pioneers to break into the fort proper along the north-east corridor. Obediently Ruberg and a handful of men set off down a dark narrow passage, similar to the one that had confronted Sergeant Kunze in Douaumont three months earlier. A long flight of steps led down under the moat and then up again, and soon Ruberg came to a steel door barring his path. Behind it he could hear French voices whispering. Swiftly he prepared a charge out of hand-grenades (because of General von Deimling’s acceleration of the attack on Vaux the Pioneers had had no time in which to prepare proper demolition charges), pulled the pin out of the last grenade and ran.

Behind the steel door was Raynal himself, inspecting a hastily erected barricade which was not entirely to his liking. From the noises made by Ruberg, he realised what was afoot and quickly ordered his men back. Just in time; for the barricade ‘disintegrated in a powerful explosion.’ On the other side of the door, the five-and-a-half-second grenade fuse had not given Ruberg time to get clear, and he was hurled backwards by the explosion, lacerated with splinters. The force of the blast and the wounding of their chief caused the Germans to hestitate before re-entering the deadly tunnel just long enough for Raynal to rebuild his barricade and site a machine gun behind it. For the time being the French remained masters of the corridor.

That night Raynal, with all his telephone lines to the rear already severed, sent off the first of his four pigeons bearing a report of the situation.

Early on the 3rd of June, German assault troops worked their way round to the south of the fort. Vaux was now completely cut off, even from R.1 which still maintained a tenuous link with the rest of the Second Army. The siege was on, and a curious stalemate was established with a German commander, Rackow, on top of the fort, and a French commander, Raynal, underground. All through the day the main battle continued ferociously in the two corridors leading to the heart of the fort. In each the French had built sandbag barricades several feet thick, defended by one brave grenadier. The German pioneers had meanwhile brought up more powerful explosives, so that it was only a matter of time before the French grenadier was knocked out, and his rampart demolished. But beyond was yet another barricade, from behind which a machine gun spewed death on the attackers at point-blank range, while the French were preparing yet a further series of obstacles to its rear. Yard by yard the Germans advanced, but at heavy cost.

Of all the horrors in the fighting at Verdun, it is difficult to imagine any much more appalling than the struggle that took place day after day in the underground corridors of Fort Vaux. Here the battle went on in pitch darkness, relieved only by the flash of exploding
grenades, in a shaft for the most part no more than three feet wide and five feet high, in which no grown man could stand upright. Machine-gun bullets ricochetting from wall to wall inflicted wounds as terrible as any dum-dum, and in the confined space the concussion of the grenades was almost unendurable. Repeatedly men of both sides felt themselves asphyxiating in the air polluted by TNT fumes and cement dust stirred up by the explosions. Added to it was the ever-worsening stink of the dead, rapidly decomposing in the June heat, for whom there was no means of burial inside the fort.

The two attacking German battalions had already suffered grave losses. Before being silenced, Vaux’s gallery machine guns had cut swathes in the attackers, and by the evening of June 2nd the battalion of the 53rd Regiment had only one officer left unwounded. Meanwhile, Rackow and his men on the roof of the fort were being exposed to an ever-increasing intensity of French gun-fire, to which the deadly 155 in nearby Fort Moulainville now added its voice. On the night of June 3rd both battallions had to be withdrawn exhausted. But for Raynal and his six hundred there was no relief.

Out at R.1 Delvert had meanwhile successfully repulsed two more German attacks, and spent the rest of the day under heavy bombardment. He noted in his diary that he had not slept for seventy-two hours. At 10 o’clock that night, Captain Delvert was overjoyed by the arrival of a subaltern, bringing a company of reinforcements. But the company numbered only eighteen men. An hour later, another subaltern appeared, claiming to have brought up a company.

‘How many men have you?’ asked Delvert.

‘One hundred and seventy.’

Delvert counted them. There were twenty-five.

Back at Sector Headquarters, General Lebrun had received Raynal’s pigeon message, and — under heavy pressure from Nivelle — prescribed an immediate counter-attack to regain the fort. Almost hysterically, Lebrun told the wretched general commanding the 124th Division that he was, if necessary, to lead the attack in person. At dawn on the 4th, the French went in in six dense waves, actually reaching the western extremity of the fort. But fresh replacements of Düsseldorf Fusiliers were already in position, and they drove off the attackers at bayonet point.

For Raynal, June 4th was to be the grimmest day so far. It nearly proved fatal. The previous night German Pioneers had managed, with a great effort, to bring up six flame-throwers on to the fort
superstructure (four having been destroyed by artillery fire en route). They would smoke Vaux’s heroic garrison out like rats. At a given moment, the Germans attacking below ground were withdrawn, and the nozzles of the infernal devices were inserted into apertures and breaches in the fort exterior. (Fortunately for the garrison a detachment of Germans trying to seal hermetically the fort by filling in one of the larger breaches was dispersed by the vigilant crew of the Moulainville 155.) The first warning Raynal had was a cry of ‘Gas!’ from all parts of the fort. Almost immediately an asphyxiating black smoke poured into the central gallery. Down the north-west corridor fled its defenders, faces blackened and burnt, their barricades abandoned. Flickers of flame began to appear in the main body of the fort, and for a moment mass panic threatened. Then the flame-throwers ceased. Reacting quickly, and with almost superhuman courage, Lieutenant Girard darted back into the smoke-filled north-west corridor. He reached the abandoned machine gun there a second before the Germans. Wounded several times in the ensuing action, he held on until the situation was re-established; then fell unconscious from the toxic effects of the smoke. Meanwhile, Raynal had ordered the opening of all possible vents to clear the smoke, and to minimise the recurrence of such an attack.

A similar German attempt to rush the defenders in the north-east corridor had also failed, while an attack on the bunker at the south-west corner of the fort had ended in a minor French triumph. All the German Pioneers had been killed, and their flame-throwers captured. With this acquisition the garrison were able to keep the southern moat of the fort clear of the enemy. The net result of the new German effort had been dreadful burns for some fifteen members of the French garrison and the capture of twenty-five yards of the north-west corridor, with one of Raynal’s three observation cupolas.

Shortly before midday Raynal dispatched his last pigeon with the message:

We are still holding. But… relief is imperative. Communicate with us by Morse-blinker from Souville, which does not reply to our calls. This is my last pigeon.

Badly gassed in the recent attack, the wretched bird fluttered around half-heartedly, returning to settle on the loophole of Raynal’s
Command Post. After several more failures, it was finally coaxed into the air. It reached Verdun, was delivered of its message, then — like Pheidippides at Marathon — fell dead. (The only one of its species to be ‘decorated’ with the
Légion d’Honneur,
the noble emissary was stuffed and sits to this day in a Paris Museum.)

Reaction to the message brought by Raynal’s last pigeon was speedy. Fort Souville, which suspected that Vaux had already succumbed and its signals were a German trick, now blinked out an encouraging message to Raynal, and the mounting of yet another relief attack was prepared.

Grave as had been the events of the morning, something far more menacing transpired in the fort that afternoon. Says Raynal:

A sergeant of the fort Quartermaster’s Staff came to me, requesting a word in private, and said in a choking voice: ‘
Mon Commandant,
there is practically no water left in the cistern.’

I leaped up, I shook the sergeant, I made him repeat his words;

‘But this is treachery!’

‘
Non, mon Commandant,
we have distributed only the quantities you indicated, but the gauge was inaccurate.’

The agony began. I gave the order to preserve what little remained and to make no distribution today.
¹

The three-hundred odd supernumerary troops inside the fort had now become useless mouths that could endanger the whole garrison. Somehow, Raynal realised, it was imperative to evacuate them. But Vaux was encircled by the enemy. A desperate risk had to be taken. Summoning Officer Cadet Buffet, a nineteen-year-old brought up in an orphanage, he ordered him to scout a way out from the fort late that night. The bulk of the escaping troops would then follow in small, well-spaced packets.