The Price of Glory (49 page)

In the ears of Ritter von Epp’s men, the peculiar sound of the gas bombardment was sweet music; indeed, ‘never before had the artillery been so blessed and idolised by the infantry’.

Still sweeter was the silence that spread, as before, among the French guns. But as the German storm-troopers advanced out into the dawn from the shell-holes, a barrage of 75s swept down all along the line, incomparably more devastating than anything experienced on June 23rd. The attackers looked at each other in dismay as great
gaps were torn in their formations. In a matter of minutes the 2nd Battalion of the 140th Regiment lost nearly all its officers; the C.O. of the 1st Batallion of the 3rd Jägers — which had already suffered so heavily in June and was now scheduled to lead the frontal assault on Souville — simply reported back that he could not take the responsibility for continuing, and was ordering his men to dig in. It was illustrative of how the Germans’ cutting edge had been blunted over the months at Verdun.

What had gone wrong? There was a simple answer. Since the 23rd the French gunners had been equipped with new and more effective gas masks,
¹
of a design actually approved long before the first appearance of Phosgene. With admirable cunning and control they had held their fire until the enemy insouciantly revealed himself.

Nevertheless, there were still the usual, unaccountable disasters and more of the disturbing
défaillances
on the French side early that day. Striking hard southwest from Damloup ‘High Battery’, German Jäger troops well supported with flame-throwers took the French 217th Regiment apparently by surprise. One whole battalion was encircled and rounded up, some thirty-three of its officers and 1,300 men slaughtered or captured. Its Commanding Officer, Lieut.-Col. Leyrand had a remarkable escape; captured in his command post he was en route for Fort Vaux when his two-man escort was killed by a salvo of French shells. Unwounded himself, he made his way back to his command post, where he found Germans in control and was captured anew. That evening it was retaken by a French counter-attack; Leyrand, still unwounded, was liberated. Meanwhile, the rout of his regiment had brought the Germans on the left flank of their attack to within a few yards of the eastern end of the Tavannes Tunnel, the vital nerve centre whose western end emerged in the valley of the Meuse, close to Verdun. A flood of wounded, retching gas cases and panic-stricken stragglers streamed towards the refuge of the tunnel, while French sappers prepared to blow it up if the German advance continued.

Something similar had happened at the other end of the line, at Fleury, where the Leib Regiment — despite its fatigue and depression — had seized a bunker containing the HQ of the French 255th Brigade. The commander was killed in the course of the struggle. Members of another French unit nearby observed one platoon firing
hard at the backs of its fellows who had thrown away their weapons and were making for the German lines. Obviously all was not well with the French defence that day. To make matters worse, two battalions Mangin sent to plug the hole left by the collapse of the 255th Brigade took the wrong direction, and they too fall victim to the oncoming Germans. Once again the Bavarian Alpine Corps had punched a dangerous hole in the French lines; but this time only some 400 yards deep.

That night, 2,400 French prisoners were counted; again a large bag considering the scale of the attack. On the 12th the battle continued afresh, but the efforts of the Germans, exhausted and with no fresh reserves to throw in, rapidly began to ebb. Still, for a few hours, confusion existed on either side as to exactly where the front line lay. Suddenly during that morning, an excited German staff officer ran to General von Dellmensingen and reported that an unidentified group of men were waving a German flag from the top of Fort Souville. The General reached for his glasses. It was true! There were Germans on the fort. Quickly he ordered the artillery to lay a protective barrage to the south of Souville. It was clear that there were no longer any French troops between the Germans and the fort. But equally there was not one single regiment available to exploit this superb opportunity.

The Germans on the glacis of the fort, about thirty of them, were in fact only leaderless fragments of the 140th Regiment, forced by the French artillery barrages to move forwards, rather than backwards with the rest of their regiment. The senior of the group was an unknown young Ensign; desperately he signalled with his flag for his comrades to join him on the fort. For a while they were left undisturbed by the French. Beyond, little more than two miles away, they could see the twin towers of Verdun cathedral and the Meuse gleaming through the summer haze as it meandered in and out of the city. The Promised Land! The spires of Moscow as seen in the grey distance of autumn 1941 cannot have seemed more enthralling — nor more unobtainable — to German soldiers. Out of all the Crown Prince’s legions, this was a sight that would be bestowed on these thirty alone. And it was not to last long. In Fort Souville itself the garrison had been largely knocked out, but taking shelter there were the remnants of a French regiment, some sixty men under Lieutenant Dupuy. Hearing that there were Germans on the glacis, Dupuy promptly led out his men to drive them off, in what (not knowing
that this was only an isolated group) might well have been a heroically suicidal attack.

After a sharp exchange, Souville was once more undisputedly French; some ten of the Germans whose eyes had beheld the sacred city were taken prisoner, the rest killed or dispersed. In deepest frustration and despair, General von Dellmensingen saw the last flicker of German hopes at Verdun dwindle and expire.

* * *

The German tide receded with incomparable swiftness from its highwater mark that day. By July 14th — Bastille Day — Mangin’s counter-attacks had pushed the attackers practically back to their starting-off positions of July 10th. The bid to take Verdun was finally at an end. Between February 21st and July 15th, the French had lost over 275,000 men (according to their official war history) and 6,563 officers. Of these somewhere between 65,000 and 70,000 had been killed; 64,000 men and 1,400 officers had been captured (according to the Crown Prince). Over 120,000 of the French casualties had been suffered in the last two months alone. On the German side, Falkenhayn’s ‘limited offensive’ had already cost close on a quarter of a million men; equivalent to about twice the total complement of the nine divisions he had been willing to allocate for the battle in February. The German artillery had fired off approximately 22,000,000 rounds; the French perhaps 15,000,000. Out of their total of ninety-six divisions on the Western front, the French had sent seventy to Verdun; the Germans forty-six-and-a-half.

It was perhaps symptomatic of the whole tragedy of Verdun that this last attack need never have taken place. The Crown Prince tells us that on July 11th Falkenhayn had once more changed his mind and ordered that he should ‘henceforward adopt a defensive attitude’. But it was far too late to pass on the message to the divisional staffs. The futile slaughter proceeded. And even after the German offensive was called off after July 14th, still the tragedy could not be halted; all through July, August and part of September the hideous struggle at Verdun continued, little abated. Again it seemed as if humans had lost their power to stop the battle they had started, which went on and on, sustained by its own momentum. The French, who could never be entirely sure that July 11th did represent the Germans’ last effort against Verdun and who had been pushed back so dangerously close to the city that one more breach, one more mistake, could still
bring about its fall, had to fight desperately to regain breathing room. The Germans were confronted by a terrible dilemma; once their forward impetus ceased and they were forced over to the defensive, tactically they should have abandoned most of the terrain they had conquered at such hideous cost. It was largely indefensible. The Crown Prince recognised this, but even he admitted that it was impossible, because, psychologically, it ‘would have had an immeasurably disastrous effect’.

Such were the symbolic proportions that names of meaningless ruins like Thiaumont and Fleury — not just
Verdun
now — had assumed in German minds. So all through the summer the dingdong battle ensued; with the French bitterly attacking, attacking, attacking; and the Germans contesting every inch of ground, occasionally themselves attacking to regain a lost fragment. Typical of this new, transitional phase of the battle was the prolonged struggle for PC 119 on Thiaumont Ridge; built as a command post for perhaps a dozen men, its recapture by the French required a whole battalion. Again and again Fleury and the Ouvrage de Thiaumont changed hands; until, by the end of the summer, all that remained of Fleury (once a village of 500 people) was a white smear visible only from the air — the sole recognisable object found on its site a silver chalice from the church.

There were alarms on both sides. On August 4th, Private Meyer was detailed off to sing at a concert organised for the music-loving Crown Prince. But the sudden threat of a French breakthrough at Thiaumont dispatched Private Meyer’s unit to plug the hole; the concert was cancelled, and the budding tenor captured by the French. On July 19th, Lloyd George told Repington of
The Times
that he was still seriously worried that Verdun might fall and the Germans ‘would then shift around 2,000 guns on to our front and hammer in’. At the beginning of September, President Poincaré was to bestow the
Légion d’Honneur
upon a triumphant Verdun, but a sharper German reaction than usual re-awoke French fears to such an extent that it was felt prudent to postpone the ceremony until the new crisis had passed.

With the fighting raging back and forth over the same narrow, corpse-saturated battlefield in the blazing summer heat, the screw of horror tightened (if such a thing were possible) yet another turn. A French officer, Major Roman, describes the scene at the entrance to his dugout in July:

On my arrival, the corpse of an infantryman in a blue cap partially emerges from this compound of earth, stones and unidentifiable debris. But a few hours later, it is no longer the same; he has disappeared and has been replaced by a
Tirailleur
in khaki. And successively there appear other corpses in other uniforms. The shell that buries one disinters another. One gets acclimatised, however, to this spectacle; one can bear the horrible odour of this charnel-house in which one lives, but one’s
joie de vivre
, after the war, will be eternally poisoned by it.

Despite their continued subjection to these vile conditions, French morale at Verdun rose perceptibly during August. Everywhere — on the Somme, in Russia, in Italy, in the Near East — the Allies were attacking, and — best of all — Verdun was no longer seriously threatened. Correspondingly, German morale sagged. In August, owing to the brutally exposed ground it was bidden to defend, Fifth Army casualties for the first time exceeded those of the French.

* * *

Behind the scenes, it was in August that there occurred the ultimate clash between the Crown Prince, Knobelsdorf and Falkenhayn. Heartily relieved when Falkenhayn at last terminated the Verdun offensive, the Crown Prince was horrified to discover, after July 11th, that his Chief-of-Staff even now still cherished ambitions of taking Verdun, and was only awaiting a suitable moment to reapply pressure on Falkenhayn. The French, argued Knobelsdorf, were certain to have sent forces off to the Somme; and, pointing to the tactical difficulties that the coming of winter was bound to exacerbate, was it not better to go forward rather than back? On August 15th, Falkenhayn — following a conference with Knobelsdorf at which the Crown Prince was not present — sent a typically indeterminate memo to the Fifth Army, stating that although the offensive had ended an aggressive posture must be maintained, both for home and enemy consumption. Falkenhayn then requested an appreciation of future prospects. From this letter, the Crown Prince at once deduced that Falkenhayn had

reverted to the idea which I believed he had abandoned — of keeping open the bleeding wound in the side of the French Army.

Worse, he suspected — not without reason — that Falkenhayn and Knobelsdorf were planning a new attack behind his back.

There followed a discussion at Fifth Army HQ, attended by the two commanders on either side of the Meuse; von François (Left Bank) and von Lochow (Right Bank). Von François thought it essential to resume the offensive, principally because to abandon it now would be ‘an admission of weakness’. Von Lochow, however, had by now come round to the viewpoint that had cost his predecessor, von Mudra, his command in April. He knew the conditions on the Right Bank better than anyone, having been there since February when he commanded III Corps, and felt that even the capture of Fort Souville would only be a repetition of Vaux, leading to still more hard fighting and heavy casualties. Backing the Crown Prince, he recommended that efforts be devoted to consolidating the existing positions.

The division of opinion at Fifth Army HQ was reported to Falkenhayn, and back came another letter; this time characteristic of the C-in-C’s hopeless indecisiveness. The future conduct of the battle Falkenhayn had started was now ‘left to the Army Group Command to decide’. Commented the Crown Prince:

Despite the cryptic nature of this document, I was secretly glad to be freed from a weight of responsibility which had become intolerable, and once more to be my own master. I knew well enough the course I was bound to choose.

The course he had chosen at last was to beseech his father in the most urgent terms to replace Knobelsdorf. Disillusioned with the failure of the Verdun operation and with the state of the war in general, for once the All-Highest listened to his son. On August 23rd Knobelsdorf was sent off to command an Army Corps in Russia. His place was taken by General von Luttwitz, who, the Crown Prince says, ‘entered into my ideas rapidly and without reservations’.