The Price of Glory (51 page)

in four hours,
Mon Général
, I shall give you twenty-two battalions.

Mangin’s confidence this time was widely shared in the army. General de Salins told his men dramatically:

The hour has arrived… your victory is certain; chastisement is close for the horrid Boche.

And an officer of one of the other divisions in the first wave, noting the comforting masses of artillery and supplies, remarked bitterly:

If only we had been thus provided at the beginning of the war, we should not now be fighting in France.

It was a very different picture in the Crown Prince’s camp. The elation of an army on the offensive had given way to the uncertainty of an army that has lost the initiative and knows it is about to be attacked. Aware that the new High Command was only awaiting a psychologically propitious moment before it abandoned the present forward positions at Verdun, senior officers transmitted their uneasiness to the troops. The men themselves were exhausted, many either having spent a grisly summer on the Somme, or just too long at Verdun — like the units of von Zwehl’s VII Reserve Corps that had been there without relief since February. Germany’s inferiority in manpower had never been more grimly apparent, and exhaustion was revealing itself in
matériel
too. Worn-out guns were dropping their projectiles short with a disconcerting frequency that had hither-to been largely a French preserve. Meanwhile, the misery of the men holding the exposed forward trenches grew from day to day. For weeks the French had kept up a steady bombardment — what Mangin called ‘not burying the hatchet’ — effectively preventing any improvement in the defences or the erection of wire. Then rain drilling into the pulverised earth had frozen in the bitter Verdun autumn weather, thawed again, and refrozen, causing the wholesale collapse of trenches quite as efficiently as Mangin’s guns. Day after day the constant rain, freezing at night, was profoundly demoralising. A steady stream hobbled to the rear on frost-bitten feet, augmented by men who had eaten putrid horse flesh in the desperate hope of being hospitalised; anything to get away from Verdun. By September, desertions had reached such unprecedented numbers that General von Lochow issued a special decree, ordering that cowardice be shown no mercy. Fifth Army officers could not remember when, since the war began,
esprit de corps
had fallen to such depths.

Inside Fort Douaumont discipline since the May catastrophe had been tightened up, stricter anti-fire precautions taken, and additional exits dug, but otherwise life had gone on much as usual throughout the summer. The fort was constantly jammed with coming and going troops (it being noticed that, very humanly, units tended to be quicker entering than leaving the blessed sanctuary of ‘Old Uncle Douaumont’, as it was affectionately called). None of this had been much interfered with yet by the non-stop French bombardment. The months’ long pounding, however, had surreptitiously achieved one thing; inch by inch the protective layer of earth covering the fort (in some places, once nearly eighteen feet deep) had been eroded away. Unknown to its tenants, mighty Douaumont was now like Samson with his hair partially shorn.

On October 19th, the French preliminary bombardment blasted forth. A whole row of ‘
Saucisses
’ seemed to be peering down on the fort, while observation planes swarmed overhead. On the 21st, the artillery observation turret was shattered by a heavy shell, its officer crushed under tons of concrete, without however the vitals of
the fort being penetrated. Douaumont still smiled, confident and aloof; this was all old hat. The 22nd also passed reasonably quietly. Then, shortly before midday on the 23rd the whole structure was shaken by an abnormally powerful concussion. Lights were extinguished and in the dark each man of the garrison experienced a moment of unparalleled private terror; was there about to be a repetition of May 8th? Some minutes elapsed before it was discovered that a huge shell had evidently burst inside the fort’s sick bay on the upper floor. The whole casemate had been reduced to a shambles, and fire still raged inside. Some fifty medical personnel and wounded had been killed. Ten minutes later, many in the fort heard the sickening shriek of another enormous projectile on its way down, followed by a crashing thud close at hand. A fraction of a second later the time fuse exploded, and once again the fort rocked. This time the barrack-room of Casemate 8 had been wiped out. It was clear that the French were using something heavier than they had ever possessed before. At horribly predictable intervals of ten to fifteen minutes the 400 mm. shells came down. Their accuracy was remarkable; few missed the fort, several penetrated what remained of the earth, and the eight-foot thick concrete carapace, before exploding within the fort’s vitals. The bakery was smashed; two successive hits destroyed Casemates 11 and 17, and either the fourth or fifth shot brought down the roof over the main corridor on the upper floor, completely blocking it.

As each hit carried with it fresh disaster, the fort Commandant, Major Rosendahl, was having difficulty quelling panic. With little option, he ordered the immediate evacuation of the upper works. Nevertheless, cowering on the cellar floor where Gardien Chenot and his Territorials had been captured in February, the fort garrison was still not out of danger. Through the huge hole in the roof that had been ripped above the main corridor, Hit No. 6 fell and burrowed its way right through into the principal Pioneer Depot at the bottom of the fort, which was filled with small arms ammunition and rockets. A powerful explosion followed, asphyxiating fumes crept through the fort, and once again it seemed that the May holocaust would be repeated; for near the Pioneer Depot was a magazine full of unexpended French shells for the heavy turrets. It was the end, thought Major Rosendahl; such a risk could not be taken again. Though every exit had been effectively blanketed by French gas shells, he issued the order to abandon the fort. Only a small suicide squad stayed behind to try to extinguish the fires in the Pioneer Depot. At nightfall the French railway guns ceased their murderous work, but still the fires raged. It seemed hopeless; all the fort’s water had been exhausted, and the firefighters were reduced to using the bottled mineral water stocked for the wounded. Thus during the night of the 23rd the last of Douaumont’s garrison withdrew.

At least, not quite the last. There remained two solitary soldiers manning the gallery in the far northwest corner of the fort. They had not been unduly disturbed by the 400s striking elsewhere in the huge fort; they had not seen the garrison pulling out, they had received no orders to abandon their post, and — like good German soldiers — they stayed at it, alone and forgotten, for another two days. Meanwhile, at about 7 a.m. the following morning, a Captain Prollius with a small group of signallers and runners from a nearby artillery unit, wandered into the fort, and discovered (no doubt to his considerable surprise) that it was empty. Quickly he reconnoitred it to find a reason why. The fires in the Pioneer Depot were still burning, but no longer out of control and the danger of the magazines blowing up seemed to have passed. The fort was cut in two on the upper floor by the blocked corridor, but it could still be traversed via the cellar. To Prollius it appeared both feasible and — with the French attack clearly imminent — highly desirable that Fort Douaumont should still be defended; provided he could gather together enough men. All he had available were some twenty odd. Urgently he sent a runner to the rear.

Out in the open the German infantry in their shallow, partially inundated trenches had suffered as never before from the French ‘softening up’. Some were luckier than others — like a wily battalion of Mecklenburgers, who, noticing that the French opposite them had pulled back from their first line of trenches just before the bombardment began (no doubt to keep out of the way of the inevitable ‘shorts’!), promptly hopped in and thus escaped the worst of the shelling. For three days the dreadful bombardment continued without pause until unit after unit reported back that its capacity to resist had been reduced to virtually nil. Then, on the afternoon of the 22nd the French guns fell silent and the Germans heard the sound of cheers from the enemy assault trenches. At last the attack was about to begin! It was almost a relief. Swiftly the front line observers sent word back to their guns to begin the counter-barrage. Down came a curtain of shells on where the French assault waves
should now be advancing. But they weren’t! Not one man had actually left the enemy trenches.

It was all an ingenious trap laid by Nivelle. The German field guns that had hitherto been lying silent waiting, like the kettledrums in an orchestra, for this one moment, profitlessly betrayed their positions and now drew a smothering fire from the French 155s. For yet another day and a half the counter-battery work continued, by which time only ninety German batteries out of some 158 were still in action, and many of the remainder had been savagely mauled. When the French ‘softening-up’ really came to an end, nearly a quarter of a million rounds had been fired. What little remained of the defending infantry’s backbone began to crumble.

On the morning of the 24th a thick autumnal mist hung over the Meuse hills. It seemed as if Douaumont, sensing that its second hour of destiny was at hand, sought to avoid the issue by concealing itself in obscurity — as indeed it had done on February 25th. The German defenders enjoyed one last fleeting moment of relief; nobody could attack in this visibility. Then suddenly through the fog they heard the high-pitched French bugles, sounding the well-known call to charge:

Il y a de la goutte à boire là haut…

In fact, with all their training on the simulated battlefield, the weather could not have been more propitious for the French. What were left of the German field guns did not open fire for twelve minutes after the French had left their trenches; by this time they were already in the defenders’ first line. The summer-long disputed bastions of Fleury and the
Ouvrage de Thiaumont
fell within minutes, and General de Salins’ division surged on down into the Ravin de la Dame (the scene of the
‘Tranchée des Baїonnettes’
in June) where they captured a Battalion Commander and his staff. The battlefield became carpeted with packs and haversacks as the French troops, exhilarated by the sense of pursuit, shed their heavy burdens So rapid was the advance that one senior German officer was taken in his underpants. Bunkers were by-passed and left for the second waves to mop up; in one a French sergeant counted 200 prisoners. The Germans seemed to be surrendering with a readiness never encountered before. A French listening post overheard one detachment report back:

I have only one man left, all the others have run away.

Some of the Germans told their captors they had had no food for six days, and everywhere the French were impressed by the destruction their guns had executed.

For the French, the most important single factor in the attack that day was a battalion of the
Régiment d’Infanterie Coloniale du Maroc
— the distinguished regiment that alone in the French Army wore no number on its lapels, only an anchor, and that had suffered so badly in the final effort to relieve Vaux. Now it was the sole unit equipped for the kind of close-in fighting that might be expected once Douaumont was reached. Yet for one dreadful moment it seemed to have got lost in the fog. Its commander, Major Nicolai, a tall, imposing figure with fierce
gauloises
moustaches who reminded his men of a Nineteenth-Century cavalryman, had just arrived from Indo-China, and this was his first battle on the Western Front. Compass in hand, he had led his battalion forward into the obscurity at the prescribed 100 yards every four minutes. Soon landmarks were recognised indicating that the battalion was erring well to the left of its objective. Either the compass or the commander was at fault. An agonising interlude; which way was Douaumont? Abruptly, as if by a miracle, the fog opened like a curtain, and there — just ahead and to the right — lay the great dome of the fort lit up in a patch of sunshine. It was an inspiring, yet rather terrifying sight. Before his men could be deterred by the menacing mass they had come to take, Nicolai ordered the battalion forward onto the fort. There was only light opposition. In a matter of minutes, the stout Battalion Adjutant, Captain Dorey, was the first officer to clamber up on to the Fort glacis, puffing and panting with the exertion. Quickly sappers and skirmishers were dispatched into the openings of the fort. Here and there resistance held up the attackers for an hour or two. But none of Captain Prollius’ urgent pleas for support had been answered, and soon the French flame-throwers and grenades, striking from every quarter, had put paid to his handful of men. Early that evening Sapper Dumont, a ‘fly’ little Parisian soldier and
maître-ouvrier
in civil life, together with one other private, stumbled upon Prollius’ command post in the cellar of Douaumont. Prollius, four officers and twenty-four men — constituting all that remained of the fort’s garrison — surrendered to Dumont. Once again Douaumont was French. That it should have been both captured and recaptured virtually empty was, as a French commander remarked,

a singular fate for a fort which during eight months had been the key to a field of battle watered with the blood of hundreds of thousands of men.…

At his battle command post in Fort Souville, Mangin had experienced the most anxious day of his career. After the last of the
horizon-bleu
waves had been swallowed up by the fog, hours passed before any news came back. About midday the steady straggle of prisoners began, and from Souville could be seen above the mist an immense cloud of dust and smoke as the creeping barrage advanced; but no sign of the infantry behind it. Even the brigadiers had lost all touch with their subordinate formations. Exhausted, breathless runners arrived from time to time, but the picture they provided was a disjointed, and often confused one. Despite its complete superiority over Verdun, the French Airforce could offer little assistance. Courageous pilots flew their
cages à poules
at dangerously low levels in an attempt to pierce the obscurity. Some twenty planes were lost that day; many through crashing in the fog, or brought down by splinters from the ground barrage itself. Briefly Douaumont’s crest was glimpsed like a reef emerging from a sea of fog, then it disappeared again.