The Price of Glory (54 page)

In mid-June the conquest of Verdun might have been attended with infinitely greater calamity, because both the honour and the life-blood of France had by now been totally committed to its defence. There might have been a dramatic collapse of the whole country, possibly preceded by an acceleration of the Mutinies of 1917, but even so this could have been no more than a gamble on the part of the Germans. However, by June German losses had become so heavy that the reserves needed for the final push could not be found anywhere — especially in view of the imminence of the Allied offensive on the Somme. Although, on several occasions the fate of Verdun did appear to balance on the edge of a razor, to us now it is clear that the Crown Prince was right (though tardy) in realising by April that whatever could still be achieved there would never be worth the cost.

German military critics are more or less unanimous in condemning Falkenhayn for his inability to concentrate all at one point (in the Schlieffen-Ludendorff style), for his preference for limited, ‘no risk’ offensives, for being a tacit believer in the Allies’ philosophy of ‘attrition’ (which could only work against the Central Powers), and — last but by no means least — for his boundless indecision once he had taken the plunge at Verdun.

We lost the war against an unlimited superiority, because we never succeeded in concentrating superiority at the decisive point.

So says Ludwig Gehre (
The Distribution of the German Forces during the World War — A Clausewitz Study
). And Hermann Wendt (
Verdun
, 1916):

The soul of the German Commander-in-Chief was not up to the huge task…. Verdun had conquered him, had become his master….

At the end of 1915, when Falkenhayn composed his famous Memorandum, Germany still had a good chance of winning the war; or at least of achieving a good draw via a negotiated peace. It was her last chance. Falkenhayn squandered it at Verdun. The hand he passed on to Hindenburg and Ludendorff was a losing one. He was, in the words of Captain Liddell Hart’s memorable summary:

The ablest and most scientific general — ‘penny-wise, pound foolish’ — who ever ruined his country by refusal to take calculated risks.

Enough has been said of the inability of the French High Command — nagged at by the ghosts of 1870 — to cede one inch of terrain for a tactical advantage; an obsession fatally shared by Hitler in Russia. The case has also been made that it might have been sensible for France to have cut her losses in February 1916, and to have abandoned the sorely neglected fortress, but honour transcended commonsense. More open to argument is the issue of whether Joffre or Pétain was right in the dispute of April onwards; that is, should Verdun — once the principle of its defence
à outrance
had been embraced — or should the planned Somme offensive assume priority? Theoretically, Joffre as C-in-C was entirely justified in not being deflected from his strategy by the German initiative at Verdun, in not allowing the enemy to impose their will upon him. Had this strategy in fact led to a victorious breakthrough on the Somme, History would doubtless have rated Joffre one of her greatest marshals, but his tactics, brutally simple as they were, denied him this title. One of Falkenhayn’s German apologists claims that Verdun was successful in that instead of contributing forty divisions to the Somme as agreed at the Chantilly Conference in 1915, France’s contribution was in fact reduced to fourteen. But there was never a hope of a
percée
on the Somme, with or without Verdun. Joffre’s rigid rationing of replacements to Pétain merely meant, by and large, that more French troops would be available to be killed on the Somme instead of at Verdun; on the other hand, it brought Pétain’s defence perilously close to collapse in June, and by overtaxing the
endurance of the men of the Second Army germinated the seeds of mutiny that were to sprout the following summer.

Neither side ‘won’ at Verdun. It was the indecisive battle in an indecisive war; the unnecessary battle in an unnecessary war; the battle that had no victors in a war that had no victors. As Prince Max of Baden noted in his memoirs,

the campaign of 1916 ended in bitter disillusionment all round. We and our enemies had shed our best blood in streams, and neither we nor they had come one step nearer to victory. The word ‘deadlock’ was on every lip.

By the end of 1916, territorially all the Germans had to show for ten months of battle and their third-of-a-million casualties was the acquisition of a piece of raddled land little larger in area than the combined Royal Parks of London. Falkenhayn could claim with some justification that Verdun led to the breaking of France’s superbly courageous armies. However, the German Army was also never quite the same again after Verdun; as the Crown Prince admitted, ‘The Mill on the Meuse ground to powder the hearts as well as the bodies of the troops’.

For the first time, the Army’s confidence in its leaders was fundamentally shaken, and morale never quite recovered. Both at the front and at home, war weariness manifested itself, and it was symptomatic that Germany’s first peace proposals came soon after the close of the Verdun campaign. By 1917 the Germans had, for the time being, no strength left to take advantage of Falkenhayn’s ‘bleeding-white’ of the French Army.

One American war correspondent later assessed Verdun to be the Gettysburg of the First War, the recapture of Fort Douaumont its Pickett’s Charge; and writing of the Nivelle Offensive of 1917, Waterloo was the analogy that sprang to his mind: ‘the political Waterloo of Europe’.

Verdun was as much a historic turning-point for the other Allies as it was for France. One of its direct results was that from July 1, 1916 — that grim landmark in British history — the main burden of the Western Front devolved upon Britain. Verdun’s rôle in bringing the United States a stage closer to belligerency has already been noted, and it is reasonable to add that after the Nivelle Offensive and the French Mutinies, the war could no longer have been won
without
American troops. Indirectly, it was Verdun that made America’s participation in the war essential and inevitable, with all its enormous implications for the future of Europe and the world.

* * *

Of the principal actors in the Verdun tragedy, some disappeared speedily into oblivion; others lived to play another part in European History.

The fall of Nivelle had been attended by a shaming scene at G.Q.G. when, refusing to resign, he had been literally propelled out of office, bitterly blaming Mangin for the failure on the Chemin des Dames. Afterwards he was given a command in North Africa and never again permitted to come near the Western Front. When the war ended, he made a limited return to grace; was nominated a member of the Supreme War Council in 1920, and sent to represent France in the U.S.A. at the tercentenary of the arrival of the
Mayflower
later that year. He died in 1924, still in his mid-sixties, leaving no memoirs and having made no attempt to justify the calamitous offensive that bears his name and will probably be discussed as long as the war itself.

Of the Nivelle triumvirate, the shadowy
éminence grise,
d‘Alenson, whom one must deem responsible for much of Nivelle’s rashness, both at Verdun and subsequendy, died of consumption almost immediately after the Chemin des Dames. Mangin, brought before a Court of Inquiry, was absolved from all blame but nevertheless — once again — removed from his command. True to form, he begged the Minister of War to be allowed to re-engage as a simple soldier. The boon was refused and for several months he fretted, unemployed, and pettily forbidden to reside within thirty miles of Paris. Then Clemenceau and Foch came to power, and the order went out: ‘To Mangin a corps.’ After six months of probation, Mangin
redemptus
was once more at the head of an Army; just in time for the great crisis of 1918. Churchill describes him superbly as

like a hungry leopard on a branch [who] sees Incomparable Opportunity approaching and about to pass below.

Opportunity arrived when Foch selected Mangin to launch the first of the victorious counter-strokes against Ludendorff’s spent offensive, and the Leopard, leaping out of his lair in the Forest of
Villers-Cotterets did not fail this time. A few months later Mangin rode magnificently into Metz, distributing copies of Verlaine’s
Lamentation
to his troops. When peace came, he was put in charge of the French occupation of the Rhineland. Here he was seized with the inspiration to become a new ‘Germanicus’, the re-constructor of Germany. He became closely involved with the Rhineland separatist movement, but before his scheme could bear fruit, he died — aged only fifty-eight — in 1925. For many years rumours persisted that like Germanicus, he had been poisoned; possibly by German nationalists.

Following his downfall, Joffre’s obscurity became almost complete. They gave him a small office in the
École de Guerre,
where he was attended by his faithful ‘
Sacré Thouzelier’
and a minute staff. Haig, in his diary, describes paying a visit to this office in October 1918:

No one hears a word of poor old Joffre now; he has quite disappeared. We found an A.D.C. in the office but were told that the Marshal does not come back after his déjeuner. I fancy the old man has this fine office, but nothing to do. Clean blotting paper and a few maps were waiting ready for use.

When the great victory cavalcade passed through the Arc de Triomphe, there were those in the crowd who wondered who was the portly peasant figure jouncing about on the reluctant chestnut, to the left of the immortal Foch. For another twelve years, Joffre pottered about in his office in the
École de Guerre,
preparing his voluminous memoirs, but otherwise showing no flicker of interest in the other postmortems on the war in which, over so many crucial months, he had been the supreme power in France. In 1931 he died, having outlived Foch and most of the other French warlords; except de Castelnau, and of course, Pétain.

De Castelnau, denied his Marshal’s baton — it was always said — because of Clemenceau’s rabid anti-clericalism, retired and entered the Chamber of Deputies. Like Nivelle, he left no writings on the war,
¹
a notable loss to historians, though he lived to be ninety-seven, and to see a France ruled in adversity by his nominee of February 1916.

Of the lesser figures at Verdun, many like Colonels Driant and
Nicolai, Captain Cochin, Lieutenants Jubert and Joubaire, Sergeant-Major Méléra, and Sergeants Dubrulle and Boasson, either died there or on another battlefield. Among those that survived, Major Raynal, the Hero of Vaux, eventually went into politics on returning from prisoner-of-war camp and became a pacifist. His fellow POW, Captain de Gaulle, spent the years of internment developing his ideas on warfare and the French Army of the future. Officer-Cadet Buffet, who made the miraculous double journey in and out of Fort Vaux, still teaches at a school in Perpignan.

On the German side,
Oberleutnant
Brandis, after facing Nivelle on the Chemin-des-Dames, grew to be the idol of a whole generation of German school-children to whom he gave his sparkling lectures on the Conquerors of Douaumont. Colonel (later Major-General) Franz Ritter von Epp, commander of the Bavarian Leib in the two final assaults on Verdun, became one of the first to raise a
Freikorps
in post-war Germany, financed Hitler in his early Munich days, and was later appointed chief of the Nazi Party’s Department for Colonial Policy.

Of Schmidt von Knobelsdorf, sent off to command a Corps on the Eastern Front in 1916, little was ever heard again. As far as is known, he made no attempt to answer the many vociferous German critics who after the war accused him of being chiefly responsible for the disaster at Verdun.

When Falkenhayn relinquished the Supreme Command after the Battle of Verdun, General von Zwehl noted that his hair had turned completely white. Then there followed a brief moment of triumph. Declining the Kaiser’s consolation prize for a fallen favourite, the Ambassadorship in Constantinople, Falkenhayn was given command of the Ninth Army, which he led in a brilliantly conceived lightning campaign against Rumania.
¹
With the collapse of Rumania, he was sent to reorganise the crumbling Turkish Army in Palestine, arriving just in time to see Allenby capture Jerusalem. He ended the war covering the Bolsheviks in an unimportant Polish garrison post. After the war, life for Falkenhayn consisted of giving a series of
lectures on the Rumanian Campaign at Berlin University, and compiling his memoirs — all in that extraordinary cold and remote third person singular. Although — uncommunicative to the end — he never gave any clue as to his real feelings, and until his death he still affected to believe that German losses at Verdun had been ‘not much more than a third of those of the enemy’, he appeared to be weighed down by his reflections on the battle. Rapidly his health began to deteriorate, starting with a breathing difficulty which doctors found hard to diagnose. To a former A.D.C. he wrote in 1921:

My complaint is an inflammation of the kidneys with horrible consequences, which I have been suffering from since the New Year… the real cause of it is doubtless psychological, not physical….

To a relative he confided about this time that, five years after Verdun, he still found it impossible to sleep at night. In April 1922, he died in a
Schloss
near Potsdam.

The Crown Prince too seems to have been pursued all his life (he long outlived Falkenhayn) by the ghosts of Verdun. In exile in Holland he sensed that even the Dutch thought of him as ‘that
Boche
— the murderer of Verdun!’ For five dreary years he lived in an abandoned parsonage on the polder of Wieringen, his leptic figure made to look even more bizarre by breeches, Dutch clogs and an oversize cloth cap. Begging his cousin, King George V, for a mitigation of his circumstances, he pointed out pathetically, that there was not even a bathroom in his place of exile. Then, in 1923, friends, hoping for a Hohenzollern reinstatement, spirited him back into Germany. The reinstatement never came. Instead, the Crown Prince flirted impetuously with the Nazis; then seems, with that highly-developed insight of his, to have foreseen where they would lead Germany, and swiftly recanted. Throughout the Nazi era and the Second World War, he lived in retirement in Germany. In May 1945 he was arrested at Lindau by the French First Army; its commander, a General de Lattre de Tassigny, the same who as a young Company-Commander had fought at Verdun through some of the worst days of June 1916. The Crown Prince asked for an interview with de Lattre, requesting that — as he had taken no part in the recent hostilities — he be allowed to go home. De Lattre, with fresh
memories of all that France had suffered at German hands, and no doubt also recalling the days when he had faced the Crown Prince on the Meuse heights, was icy: