The Price of Glory (55 page)

I remind you,
monsieur,
that you had a top place on the list of war criminals.
¹
You have had the extraordinary good luck of not having been shot.

Summarily dismissed, the Crown Prince retained the memory of what he conceived as a mortal insult to his dying day. That came six years later, in July 1951, strangely enough only two days before the death in prison of his erstwhile adversary, Marshal Pétain. The remaining years of his life he had shared in penury with his last mistress, a divorced hairdresser, once a Hohenzollern chambermaid.

Of the principal combatants at Verdun, there remains only Pétain, but his long and tragic subsequent career was so intertwined with the more distant effects of Verdun that he requires to be dealt with separately.

* * *

The consequences of the Battle of Verdun did not end with 1918. It is one of the singular ironies of History that although Falkenhayn failed to bring France to her knees, more than any isolated event of the First War, Verdun led to France’s defeat in 1940.

As has already been seen, Verdun contributed to its share of ‘firsts’ significant to the development of warfare. Flame-throwers and Phosgene gas made their debut as assault weapons on a large scale there; for the first time it was shown that an army could be supplied by road transport; above all, Verdun was the forge from which originated the conception of an air
force
in the truest meaning of the word. Tactically, at Verdun the Germans perfected their infantry infiltration techniques, which — on a much larger scale — they employed with devastating effect against Gough’s Fifth Army in March 1918; the French perfected the ‘creeping barrage’, tried a second time with dismal results in 1917. But the full weight of the lessons of Verdun was not felt until after 1918. When the full bill of casualties then became available, military thinkers the world over were united on one point: no future war could ever be fought again like the last
one. They differed only in their approach to deciding how it would be fought. The problem particularly concerned France, who, of all the belligerents, had suffered easily the highest losses in proportion to her total manpower, and the answer of that huge body of
anciens combattants
who had fought before Verdun was unhesitating. Already on August 23rd 1916, G.Q.G. had pointed to it in a remarkable recantation:

One fact dominates the six-month struggle between concrete and cannon; that is the force of resistance offered by a permanent fortification, even the least solid, to the enormous projectiles of modern warfare.

After the war, France remained hypnotised by the way Douaumont and the other forts at Verdun had stood up to the months of hammering. Major Raynal is to be found writing prefaces for military books, pointing to the lunacy of making men fight ‘in the open air’ and recalling how his Leonidean handful inside Fort Vaux had checked the whole German advance.

In an annex to his book,
La Bataille de Verdun,
Pétain remarks pointedly:

If from the beginning we had had confidence in the skill of our military engineers, the struggle before Verdun would have taken a different course. Fort Douaumont, occupied as it ought to have been, would not have been taken… from the first it would have discouraged German ambitions. Fortification, what little there was of it, played a very large rôle in the victory….

It was Pétain who systematised the new thinking. After the war, of the leaders that had emerged Marshals of France, none enjoyed more widespread prestige and affection throughout the Army than he who had entered the war as a superannuated colonel. Old age soon removed Foch from the public arena, leaving a still virile Pétain the principal arbiter of French military thought for the best part of two decades. As Inspector General of the Army, and later Minister of War, he harked back repeatedly to one of his favourite maxims:

One does not fight with men against material; it is with material served by men that one makes war.

Never again, he promised, should such sacrifices be forced upon the youth of France. As early as 1922, he was calling for the creation of a ‘Wall of France’ that would protect her permanently against the restive, traditional enemy. His idea of this ‘Wall’ as it evolved was not of clusters, or even a line, of Douaumonts; for his 400’s had proved that even a Douaumont was mortal. Instead it would consist chiefly of a continuous chain of retractable gun cupolas (similar to those mounted at Douaumont and Moulainville that had proved almost indestructible), linked by subterranean passages burrowed so deep as to be beyond the reach of any projectile. For years Pétain could not persuade the governments of an impoverished France to foot the huge cost of his Great Wall. It was no coincidence that the politician eventually giving his name to it was Maginot, the ex-Sergeant who had been seriously wounded at Verdun and had led the attack on Joffre at the first Secret Session in 1916. Nor was it a coincidence that the Chief of the Army General Staff under whom the Maginot Line materialised was a General Debeney, who had commanded a division through some of the worst fighting at Verdun, on the exposed and completely unfortified Mort Homme. Among existing works to be incorporated in the Maginot Line system were Forts Vaux and Douaumont, both to some extent repaired and augmented with additional flanking turrets. As the threat of a new war approached, one French military writer declared:

The lessons of Verdun have not been lost; for the past fifteen years France has been working on her eastern frontier…. Be confident in this fortification with the most modern techniques.

As the
poilus
took up their posts deep in the bowels of the Maginot Line in 1939, the popular cries were ‘
Ils ne passeront pas!’
and ‘
on les aura!’

Thus, in France, since 1870 the wheel of military thinking had turned a fatal full cycle. In 1870 — in simplest terms — she had lost a war through adopting too defensive a posture and relying too much on permanent fortifications; in reaction against this calamitous defeat, she nearly lost the next war by being too aggressive-minded; and what resulted from the subsequent counter-reaction, the Maginot Line mentality, is almost too painful to recall.

* * *

If the effects of Verdun did not confine themselves to the period of the First War, neither were they limited to strictly military and strategic considerations. As France in the inter-war period buried herself beneath the concrete of the new super-Douaumonts of the Maginot Line, so spiritually she sought refuge behind the ‘miracle’ of Verdun. Because of Pétain’s ‘
Noria’
system and the sheer length of the battle, something like seven-tenths of the whole French Army had passed through Verdun. The list of names in Verdun’s Book of Honour is an impressive one; President Lebrun, Major of Artillery; President Coty, Private First Class; President de Gaulle, Captain of Infantry; Marshal Pétain, Marshal de Lattre, Admiral Darlan…. A whole generation of French leaders passes before one’s eyes. Of all the battles of the First War, Verdun was the one in which the most Frenchmen had taken part — as well as being the one that made the most profound and most painful impact. Year after year the veterans, ‘
Ceux de Verdun’,
with their black berets, rosettes and
rubans rouges,
made the pilgrimage in their thousands to the shrines of Verdun; to Vaux and Douaumont and the towering new
Ossuaire
that straddles the Thiaumont Ridge, its revolving beacons restlessly scanning the battlefield by night. On the anniversaries of February 21st or of the recapture of Douaumont, on Jeanne d’Arc Day, Armistice Day or July 14th, the torch-light processions filed up from Verdun to the Meuse Heights to attend sombre and moving commemorations (as often as not addressed to the Glorious Dead in the vocative). Depicting the sacredness of one of these regular pilgrimages, Henri de Montherlant wrote:

Je marchais sur cette terre humaine comme sur le visage même de la patrie.

And Anna de Noailles:

Passant, sois de récits et de geste économe,
Contemple, adore, prie et tais ce que tu sens.

With the passage of the years, the symbol of Verdun attained ever-increasing sanctity and at the same time it grew — more dangerously for France — to be a touchstone of national faith. This ex-Verdun generation of Frenchmen, to whom the political world since 1918 bafflingly seemed to have become more, not less, menacing, gradually
arrived at the mystic belief that, since France had triumphed in this most terrible of all battles, somehow it would always be able to ‘
se débrouiller’.
In that grim duel, France had proved her virility; finally and forever. (The attitude is not without its parallel in today’s Micawberish Briton, who secretly reassures himself that, because of the Battle of Britain in 1940, there is bound to be another miracle somewhere round the corner that will save Britain from economic disaster, without any further undue personal effort on his part.)

Hand in hand with the mystique of the Eternal Glory of Verdun went another influence, less perceptible but infinitely more pernicious.

This war has marked us for generations. It has left its imprint upon our souls [wrote Artillery Lieutenant de Mazenod from Verdun in June 1916]. All those inflamed nights of Verdun we shall rediscover one day in the eyes of our children.

Two of the infantrymen who were later killed saw it more precisely, and prophetically. In a letter to his wife of June 13, 1916, Sergeant Marc Boasson admitted having had

the most horrible thought… Germany and France will emerge from the struggle exhausted for a long time. And France for longer than Germany, her low birth rate insufficient during these last years will strike its blow amid the consequences of the war.

A month later he writes in a rage:

This is not heroism. It is ignominy. What kind of a nation will they make of us tomorrow, these exhausted creatures, emptied of blood, emptied of thought, crushed by superhuman fatigue?

Like an answering voice Jubert declared as he left for his second spell on the Mort Homme, ‘… they will have to resort to those who have not lived out these days….’

As the veterans of Verdun stood to attention outside the
Ossuaire
during those torchlight commemorations, and the emotive speeches brought the tears welling up, as well as the glory and the superhuman heroism, they remembered the horrors of the ceaseless shelling, the wounded men agonising untended, the hideous mutilations, the runners not returning, the reliefs and ration parties not arriving,
the thirst, the hunger, the stench, the misery, the fear; above all, always the shells. Privately to themselves they wondered if they could do it again, if any other Frenchman could? The answer they felt was NO. No human being could do Verdun again. Then in paralysing pessimism they watched across the Rhine, at the books once entitled ‘The Tragedy of Verdun’ now becoming replaced by themes of ‘The Heroic Struggle’ or ‘Song of Heroism’; at Germany’s resurgent numbers threatening to swamp France’s own enfeebled birth-rate; at the memories and lessons of Verdun swept aside by the hurricane of the Nazi determination for
revanche.
During the inauguration of the
Ossuaire
in 1927, Pétain remarked that

the constant vision of death had penetrated him [the French soldier] with a resignation which bordered on fatalism.

It was a condition with which the whole generation that had fought at Verdun remained infected. Resignedly it sat down behind the new Douaumonts Maginot and Pétain had built for it as Czecho-Slovakia was sold down the river. Morally it had been bled white. In his book, ‘The Taxis of the Marne’ that so savagely castigates the ‘Men of Fifty’ of 1940 — that is, the Verdun generation — Jean Dutourd (who was then twenty) declares brutally that France was betrayed

not by the Fifth Column. She was betrayed by you, men of fifty. She was betrayed by what should have been her vital forces.

But was it their fault that they had lost their vitality?

The German soldier of the First War — the
Reichs Archives
admit — was more deeply affected by Verdun than by any other campaign of the war. Each post-war year the German survivors also trekked to Verdun by the hundred, trying to find the positions where they had fought so long and so desperately, or merely visiting the innumerable cemeteries with their well-tended black crosses; and one of the favourite games to a generation of German children was playing at the capture of Fort Douaumont. One might in truth add that the blood-letting, just as it had devitalised France’s ‘Men of Fifty’, had contributed to a vacuum of leadership in Germany into which rushed the riff-raff of the Himmlers and Goebbels, but somehow Verdun itself never left quite so potent a lingering effect in Germany. It was
perhaps because, inhuman as conditions at Verdun had been for the Germans, they had nearly always been one degree worse for the French; or because, relative to the number of combatants, only a quarter as many Germans as French had fought there — thus the impact of the battle was spread somewhat thinner over the post-war generation as a whole.

Most significant of all was the immense influence Verdun had upon the thinking of the
Wehrmacht
leaders, a quite remarkable number of whom were actually involved in the battle as junior officers. Von Manstein was a staff officer to General von Gallwitz during most of the campaign on the Left Bank; Paulus fought as an infantry officer through the worst fighting round Fleury from June to August. Guderian was Assistant Intelligence Officer at Fifth Army HQ throughout the offensive phase at Verdun; von Brauchitsch, Hitler’s Army C-in-C, took part in the see-saw battles of August to September on the Right Bank, and witnessed the recapture of Fort Douaumont; Keitel, the
Wehrmacht
Chief-of-Staff from 1938 until the end of the Third Reich, was a captain on the staff of X Reserve Corps (Right Bank) in the summer of 1916. (Though they never fought in the actual battle, Rommel took part briefly in the Crown Prince’s first attempts to seize Verdun in late 1914, and von Kluge was badly wounded on this front later in the war.)
¹