The Price of Glory (45 page)

* * *

From a quiet sector on the Woevre, a French Company-Commander, who had fought at Verdun during March and April, watched the events of June, and concluded with extreme gloom that the city was going to fall; worse, ‘the French Army had to admit itself impotent and beaten’. At Army Group HQ in Bar-le-Duc, still further from the battlefield, Pétain had also become infected by the depression reigning in the Second Army. With his remarkable, almost mystic and often over-sensitive intuition, he sensed better than anyone just what the men at Verdun were suffering, and just how potentially explosive morale had become. In material terms, too, the situation seemed to him desperately dangerous. Because of Nivelle’s costly counter-attacks of May and early June, divisions were being used up at a rate of two every three days, instead of one every two days as had been previously allowed for. Even more serious was the state of the all-important artillery. Apart from the steady losses due to enemy counter-battery fire, with the astronomic number of rounds fired guns were wearing out quicker than they could be replaced. Yet the German supply of replacements seemed inexhaustible. In a letter to Joffre of June 11th, Pétain noted that he now had fewer heavy guns than a month ago and that ‘from the point of view of artillery we are fighting in a proportion of one against two’. Moreover, with each step backward the French artillery had become critically short of observation points, one of the principal reasons for the demoralising frequency with which the infantry got shelled by its own guns; with the brief appearance of Boelcke’s ‘Flying Circus’, there was also a serious threat that the Germans might regain supremacy in the air.

In the position to which Joffre had cunningly elevated him, Pétain
found himself caught in a monstrous nutcracker between Nivelle and Joffre, both sublimely self-confident and ignoring or turning a blind eye to the desperate earnestness of the situation at Verdun. On one side, Nivelle was grinding down the backbone of his army with his futile counter-attacks, and all the time crying for more men. On the other side, Joffre, dedicated to the all-out push that was shortly to come on the Somme, for over a month had been stubbornly denying Pétain fresh replacements, and even withdrawing some of his precious heavy guns. Relations between the two had become very strained. Meanwhile, though in the initial stages of the battle he had wanted to abandon the Right Bank and fight behind Verdun, and though even Nivelle was talking of the necessity to evacuate, Pétain, with his sure touch on the pulse of French morale, knew that
now
it would be unthinkable to abandon Verdun. A brave man under torture sometimes reaches a point where, having already endured so much torment, there is no giving in and he must go on to the end, even though he knows that it will bring permanent mutilation, if not death. It would have been possible for France to yield Verdun in February or March, and even perhaps in April or May, but now too much had been committed — too much of her own life-blood — to its defence. The fall of Verdun in June could easily bring about a total collapse of national morale — as Pétain wrote to Joffre, on June 11th:

Verdun is menaced and Verdun must not fall. The capture of this city would constitute for the Germans an inestimable success which would greatly raise their morale and correspondingly lower our own. A tactical success by the English, however great it might be, would not compensate in the eyes of public sentiment for the loss of this city, and at this moment sentiment possesses an importance that it would be inexpedient to disregard.

Utterly frustrated and impotent within the Joffre-Nivelle nutcracker, Pétain was beginning to show the signs of strain. That telltale
tic
was worse than ever, and his intimate entourage noted a marked change in his outlook dating from this period. The fatal pessimism, which a generation and a war later was to be styled defeatism, had set in. After the loss of Côte 304 in early May, Pétain had already written to Joffre expressing his fear that ‘we shall end up by being beaten, if the Allies do not intervene’. A sense of deep
bitterness towards France’s British ally began to permeate Pétain; a bitterness that would henceforth never quite leave him. While France was bleeding to death on the altar of Verdun, the British for four months had stood by doing nothing! It was a cry echoed widely in the French Army (‘
Sales gens, ces Khakis
’, growled Sergeant Boasson), and of course played upon by German propaganda.
¹
Again and again Pétain urged Joffre that Haig be persuaded to advance the date of the Somme.

* * *

In June
Simplizissimus
printed a cartoon of Joffre dangling by the seat of his pants from a tree overhanging a precipice, which tree was about to be chopped down by a German soldier, with the caption: ‘The situation gives no cause for uneasiness.’ But the tree supporting Joffre was now under attack from other sides as well. In Paris the parliamentarians of the Third Republic, so long muted by the almost dictatorial supremacy of Joffre and the G.Q.G., thoroughly shared Pétain’s misgivings about Verdun and were now giving vigorous tongue to their dissatisfaction.

Under a truce — the ‘
Union Sacrée
’— that seemed almost unnatural in France, political peace had endured undisturbed among the various parties since the outbreak of war. On June 16th, 1916, it came virtually to an end when opponents of the Government forced it to hold the first Secret Session of the war. Verdun was the subject, though even this was kept concealed from the French public by ‘Anastasie’, the censor. The debate was opened by ex-Sergeant Maginot, an imposing figure over six feet tall, leaning heavily on a stick as a result of wounds received at Verdun earlier in the war. Maginot knew Verdun and he had known Colonel Driant, whose constituency marched with his. Hesitantly he began, ‘What might seem astonishing is that until now we have all kept quiet.’

Then he warmed to a scathing attack on the French High Command. Its optimism, claiming that twice as many Germans as French were being killed at Verdun, he debunked by quoting German revelations of actual casualties. His conclusion that French losses had
been very little lower than the Germans (in fact they had been substantially higher) caused a sensation in the Chamber. Producing the Galliéni-Joffre correspondence that Driant had inspired in December 1915, Maginot went on to declare with much emphasis that Verdun was  ‘proof of the lack of foresight and the inadequacy of our High Command’.

Another Deputy, Viollette, cited General Gouraud as claiming that on the day of the Nivelle attack on Douaumont, because of the shortage of heavy artillery, there were sixty German batteries that were beyond the French reach on the Right Bank alone.  ‘… above all,’ he added,  ‘the soldier had the feeling that, for eighteen months, he has been thrown at every instant into the furnace, for nil results.’

Both General Roques, Galliéni’s successor as Minister of War, and Briand, the Premier, gave only the feeblest of defences for G.Q.G.’s conduct at Verdun, with Briand stating blandly that Joffre had been taken by surprise in February because the Germans had attacked,  ‘as is not the rule’, without digging any jumping-off trenches. When Roques mentioned that  ‘disciplinary action’ was to be taken against some generals, there was a howl of ‘names, the names! ’ The Chamber was restless and dissatisfied, and for a time it seemed as if the Government might be brought down. But by the close of the Secret Session on June 22nd some deft political manoeuvring had assured its survival. Maginot was persuaded to withdraw his motion of censure, but insisted that it be entered into the archives. In an Order of the Day, a special homage to the C-in-C was deleted in favour of a  ‘collective homage’ to the Army Commanders. The Chamber had hammered home the first nail in  ‘Papa’ Joffre’s coffin.

On June 8th Joffre had left Chantilly to accompany Premier Briand on a visit to London. In his absence, Pétain — thoroughly disturbed as one may imagine, by the fall of Vaux, followed by the new German attacks and the disastrous implications of the breaking of the 291st and 347th Regiments — had made a telephone call to G.Q.G. which, according to Joffre afterwards, ‘produced considerable emotion’. Pétain, he found, ‘had once more scared everybody’, and was threatening the immediate evacuation of the Right Bank before the mass of artillery there should be lost to the Germans. On Joffre’s return, that devastating unshakeable tranquillity speedily allayed all alarm. Pétain was exaggerating, there was really nothing at all to worry about, we are told by Joffre. But, just to confirm his own impeccable judgment:

I thereupon decided to send General de Castelnau to Verdun the next morning so as to obtain his judgment on the situation. De Castelnau returned to GHQ during the night of June 13th/14th, bringing a most favourable impression of the condition of affairs at Verdun….

Writing smugly a long time
ex post facto
, Joffre was not being strictly honest in his
Memoirs
. To begin with, for all Pétain’s prevailing pessimism, it was not true that at this juncture he was seriously contemplating any panic evacuation of the Right Bank; this is abundantly clear from his letter to Joffre of June 11th, already quoted.

Moreover, he had not exaggerated the threat to Verdun, which had evidently worried even the shrewd and perceptive de Castelnau sufficiently for him to ring up both Haig and Foch and beg urgently that the Somme offensive be put forward. That Joffre too may have been rather more ruffled at the time than he would like posterity to believe is suggested by the imploring tone of his Order of the Day of June 12th:

Soldiers of Verdun!… I make one more appeal to your courage, your ardour, your spirit of sacrifice, your love of country….

The period June 8th-12th was indeed, potentially the most dangerous for the French since February 25th; by the 12th, Nivelle had at hand no more than one fresh brigade in reserve, and there was no indication that the German push had yet exhausted itself. Had the Germans thrust on then, they could almost certainly have broken through to Verdun. As it was, they were within an inch of success. But, by the time de Castelnau reached Verdun to find everything so ‘favourable’, the German offensive had quite unaccountably petered out on the very brink of ultimate success. And, much as Joffre might like to claim credit for his prescience, the reason for this petering out had nothing to do with him, or any other French leader. Verdun’s salvation this time owed itself to an event occurring far away, at the other extremity of the European battlefield; an event for which — indirectly — it was Erich von Falkenhayn the French had to thank.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE SECRET ENEMIES

Achilles:
Patroclus, I’ll speak with nobody.

SHAKESPEARE,
Troilus and Cressida

S
OME
of the errors inherent in Falkenhayn’s ‘bleeding-white’ experiment that had cost the Crown Prince’s Army victory in February have already been enumerated; the failure to attack on both banks of the Meuse simultaneously, the holding back of reserves at the crucial moment. Then had followed his endless wavering which surrounded every subsequent attempt to continue the offensive. Indecisiveness was a fatal flaw of Falkenhayn’s character; so too was his arrogance and his passion for secrecy, the results of which were now — in a dramatically unexpected fashion — to rob Germany of her last chance of a victory in the West in 1916.

During his planning of ‘Operation
Gericht
’ at the beginning of the year, Falkenhayn had committed the exceptional error of not informing his opposite number and ally, Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Austrian Commander-in-Chief, of his intent to attack Verdun. One can find many contributory causes for the Central Powers’ failure to win the First World War, but it would be hard to select any single factor more influential than the extraordinary lack of co-ordination and co-operation between Germany and Austria. There was never a ‘Supremo’, no Joint Council of War, and only the barest minimum of liaison between the two senior partners. To a generation with memories of the Eisenhower stewardship in World War II, this seems incomprehensible, and even by First War standards it compares unfavourably with what degree of co-operation the bickering Allies achieved under Joffre, and later — at the eleventh hour — under Foch, as Supreme Allied Generalissimo. In practice, this meant among other things that the Central Powers were rarely able to make full use of their one supreme strategic advantage over the Allies — their interior lines of communication.

It was the disastrous personal relations of Falkenhayn and Conrad that they were largely to blame. General von Kuhl describes the two
together at one of their rare meetings; the former tall, stiffly erect, sartorially immaculate, every inch a Junker; Conrad,

small and elegant, almost girlish in figure. His clever face, with its white Imperial, was agitated by a nervous twitch of the mouth and eyelids. His uniform was clothing, not adornment; seldom was there an order on his jacket; indeed on ceremonial occasions he often forgot such decorations. So they stood together, the two men whose decisions set thousands in motion. The first was more of a soldier; the second the more deeply instructed soldier. Over one there remained something of the bloom of his days as a lieutenant; over the other the irritable air created by mental toil.

Theirs was the fundamental incompatibility of the Northern and the Southern German. Conrad was typical of the Austrian aristocracy of the period. He had been fourteen at the time of the Battle of Sadowa in 1866; memory of that catastrophic defeat, and the degrading subordination of the ancient Hapsburg Empire to the upstart Prussians that followed, rankled as ceaselessly as did 1870 to the generation of Foch and de Castelnau. And the arrogant Falkenhayn, in his whole bearing and manner, was a constant reminder of that humiliation. It was typical of the man that Falkenhayn should once have been heard through closed doors, pounding the table and shouting at the Archduke Karl, the Hapsburg heir: