Authors: Alistair Horne
But, as Hitler began to make it abundantly plain that he would not rest until the
Diktat
of Versailles was overthrown and Germany returned to her former ascendancy, what in fact was the state of the French Army? Was it still the superlative weapon of 1919?
The Influences of Verdun
The training and morale of an army, and even its weapons, are transient factors that can alter the balance between opposing forces within the course of one campaigning season. It is the more immutable matters of doctrine and fundamental strategy that require to be considered here. That a victorious army should, in its subsequent peace-time development, be strongly influenced by the experiences of the past war is a historical platitude and only too natural; but, to quote Frederick the Great, ‘experience is useless unless the right conclusions are drawn from it’. France having borne so much of the brunt of the fighting on the Western Front, the experience there came to weigh with particular gravity upon French military minds. Predominant was that of Verdun 1916, whence arose three separate influences, in many ways self-conflicting, but each vitally affecting the post-war French Army.
The first related to the psychological consequences of Verdun emerging as the symbol and legend of ultimate glory. In most of the great Allied undertakings of the war, the glory had been shared, but Verdun, the longest and most terrible struggle of them all, had belonged solely to France. For ten agonizing months, and at a cost of over 400,000 men, she had measured herself in single combat against the full power of the German
Army and won. As well as epitomizing the very nature of the war itself, Verdun proved to be a kind of watershed in it, ‘the walls upon which broke the supreme hopes of Imperial Germany’, as President Poincaré declared. With every justification, Verdun at once became a legend of national heroism and virility. In the passage of years it grew to be enshrined with the holy qualities of a miracle. It was France’s Battle of Britain, symbolizing just as much, though perhaps imbued with even greater emotive force, and bearing the same kind of latent peril. Just as post-1945 Britons, perplexed by imperial disintegration and adversities of trade, found (and still find) unreasoned comfort in the belief that whatever divinity had presided over Dunkirk and in the London skies would always, in the end, sally forth to save them, so Frenchmen, to their peril, came to regard Verdun as a touchstone of faith in the jungle of the inter-war world. In the Army, as recurrent financial crises rendered the replacement of obsolescent equipment a constant nightmare, it was always agreeable to recall the fundamental superiority which the French warrior race had displayed over the (now disarmed) enemy in 1916. Just as the British Navy ossified after Trafalgar, a kind of conservative complacency was bred in France: ‘What was good enough in 1916 is good enough now.’ To challenge it hardly guaranteed popularity in Army circles.
Yet parallel to the first influence, a second contained the awareness of just how much warfare like Verdun had cost France. More regular officers and men of the French Army had gone through the inferno of Verdun than any other battle, and the frequent post-war commemorations ensured that their minds retained the full horror of those ten months: the ceaseless shelling from an enemy whom, very likely, one never saw, the wounded men agonizing untended, the hideous mutilations, the reliefs and ration parties never arriving, the senseless counter-attacks to recapture at impossible cost a few yards of shell-holes; the thirst, the hunger, the stench, the misery, the fear; above all, always the shells. A young lieutenant killed at Verdun scrawled in his journal: ‘They will not be able to make us do it again another day; that would be to misconstrue the
price of our effort. They will have to resort to those who have not lived these days.’ Privately, the men of France’s post-war Army wondered to themselves if they could do Verdun again, if any other Frenchman, if any other human being could? In the lassitude left by the war, they felt the answer, morally, was
no.
There was indeed no doubt that, numerically, Verdun was the kind of battle that France, with her depleted population, could never, never fight again. But what kind of battle could she fight?
Certainly, whatever those British critics of Churchill might have feared, it seemed increasingly improbable that France could ever herself engage in offensive warfare. Defensively, her interests were protected by the Versailles Treaty – for the time being. But the function of military staffs is to plan for contingency. France
might
, nevertheless, be attacked once again by the traditional enemy; in this event, how could she fight a defensive battle without suffering a Verdun? What new strategy, what new technique could be evolved to avoid it? In their pursuit of an alternative, the footsteps of France’s military thinkers led them back towards Verdun itself. The actual lessons gained there, and the conclusions drawn from them, constitute the third, and most portentous, influence emanating from that hideous battlefield.
Most of the siege warfare of 1914–18 had surged back and forth over an amorphous line of trenches. What was peculiar about Verdun was the presence of concentric clusters of powerful underground forts. Although, for various reasons, France had grossly neglected these at the beginning of the battle, its subsequent course seemed to indicate that Verdun owed its survival to them. The mightiest of these forts, Douaumont, had actually been captured early on in an extraordinary, bloodless
coup
by a small group of Germans; its loss was later estimated to have cost the French the equivalent of 100,000 men. Its neighbour, Fort Vaux, with a garrison of only 250 men, heroically stood up to a whole Germany army corps and delayed the advance on Verdun one vital week. Others, like Souville, proved invaluable by furnishing shellproof shelters from which infantry could sally forth to repulse the attacking
Germans, while supporting them with fire from artillery mounted beneath almost indestructible carapaces of thick steel. Only the very heaviest enemy shells could penetrate them. When a French Army Commission led by Marshal Joffre visited Verdun in 1922, it was astonished at the way in which the forts had absorbed the pounding of the German ‘Big Berthas’, an impression reinforced by the nigh-impenetrable strength which their scrutiny of Germany’s deep-dug ‘Hindenburg Line’ revealed. If only the French High Command could have utilized those forts properly in 1916, think how many valuable
poilu
lives might have been saved, all the while assuring the integrity of Verdun! Let these lessons not be ignored, the Commission warned itself.
The Maginot Line
There was an additional factor. From the days of the barbarians onwards, France had constantly lain open to invasion through her vulnerable eastern frontier. With the new rapidity of movement afforded by railways, it had twice been proved, in 1870 as in 1914, that a battle lost in the east could bring the Germans to the very doors of Paris itself within a matter of weeks. In Lorraine and the Nord, France’s most vital industrial centres lay particularly exposed to German aggression, and deprivation of these had so nearly brought defeat in the Great War. Among a nation where the peasant voice still predominated, the soil of France – every square yard of it – assumed sacred qualities; it was the unyielding defence of this which had persuaded the French High Command to adopt such rigid and costly tactics at Verdun. After the stabilization of the fronts in 1914, the French infantry had paid out a steady and prodigious rent in blood just to hold on to that continuous line of ill-protected trenches, stretching from Switzerland to the North Sea. But at least they had held, and by doing so had ensured the inviolability of France’s sacred soil. Supposing now, the Army Commission of 1922 asked itself, France should prepare to defend herself behind not shallow, hastily dug trenches, but a continuous and permanent line of forts even deeper and more
sophisticated than those of Verdun? In the event of another German war, would not such a line surely save both lives and the ravaging of French territory? Might not its mere existence pose a formidable deterrent to any aggressive-minded German ruler in the future?
For seven years the Battle of Verdun was re-fought in the higher councils of French military thought, as argument swayed back and forth over the blueprints for France’s new fortress line. On one premise the majority were agreed from the start: the line must represent a ‘continuous front’. Above all this was the view of Pétain, appointed Inspector-General of the Army after the war, and, as age removed Joffre and Foch from the scene, for many successive years her most influential soldier. He was also the man who had been more closely concerned in the immortal defence of Verdun than any other. But although Pétain, in the years following his trial and disgrace, has come to be regarded in France as a scapegoat for all that was faulty about inter-war military thinking, it is entirely unjust to suggest that he single-handedly laced his Army into a kind of intellectual straitjacket. The French Army donned it all too willingly. For during the past war its officer corps had had no contact with the great fluid movements of the campaign in the East in which so many Germans had taken part nor had they even any direct knowledge of the highly mobile campaigns fought by Allenby and the British in Palestine. ‘We had been haunted,’ wrote a distinguished subsequent Army leader, General Beaufre,
3
‘by the tenacity of the German machine-guns, and the impossibility in which we found ourselves of breaking the enemy front.’ From the lessons of their four years of static warfare, which even the introduction of tanks did disappointingly little to alter, had emerged the doctrine of the ‘continuous front’, to be espoused by the great mass of French military thought, with its experience of no other form of strategy. This, thought the École Militaire all through the
1920s, must prove to be the shape of future warfare; moreover, as shown above, it was a shape peculiarly expedient for the defence of the soil of France. But expediency usually turns out to be a poor strategic guide.
On 4 January 1930, a vast majority in both chambers of the National Assembly voted for a law accepting the Army’s long-debated plans for a Great Wall on the eastern frontier. André Maginot, who had become one of the Third Republic’s most honourable politicians, happened to be Minister of War at the time; thus it was his name that the fortress line would bear henceforth. For the first phase of its construction, the Assembly voted the immense sum of 3,000 million francs,
4
to be spread over four years. Work on the Maginot Line began at once; as Maginot himself stressed, it
had
to be completed by 1935, the date appointed by the Versailles Treaty for France finally to withdraw her troops from the Rhineland. It was to run from Basle, on the borders of Switzerland, to Longwy, close to where the Belgian, Luxembourg and French frontiers meet; why it was not intended to continue to Dunkirk, thus covering Belgium, will be seen later. The strength and depth of line varied, but for 87 miles it consisted of ‘fortified regions’, guarding two major invasion avenues. One covered a potential assault aimed at Metz and Nancy, while the other faced north to guard the plains of Lower Alsace. Facing directly east, a series of lesser fortifications backed up the wide river barrier of the Rhine. Just behind the frontier, the defences of the two fortified regions began with a series of anti-tank obstacles and barbed wire, backed up by reinforced barracks, known as
maisons fortes
(‘strong houses’) and pill-boxes, the object of these advance posts being to provide warning of an attack and delay it. At their rear came a deep anti-tank ditch and then the subterranean casemates, and forts which comprised the backbone of the Line. Protected by up to ten feet of concrete, each casemate contained rapid-firing anti-tank guns and machine-guns firing out of underground slits with a 50-degree arc, as well as grenade-throwers to dislodge any enemy infantry approaching by means of dead ground. Their twenty-five-man garrison
lived and slept on a floor still deeper under the earth. Superbly blended into their environment, about all that an enemy could see of these concrete casemates were two small nipples formed by the observation cupolas surmounting them.
The real pride of the Maginot Line, however, lay in its forts, which backed up the casemates at an interval of every three to five miles. Ever since Vauban, French engineers have been without rivals in the art of fortification, and the Verdun forts had been masterpieces of their time, but these new concrete and steel monsters were veritable wonders of the modern world. When troops passed through their cavernous gates placed discreetly at the base of some hill, they entered into a Wellsian civilization in which they could live, sleep, eat, work and exercise for many weeks without ever seeing the surface of the earth – not unlike nuclear submariners of today embarking on a voyage under the Pole. Electric trains whisked them from their underground barracks and canteens to their gun turrets; vast power stations, equally underground, provided them with heat and light; powerful compressor plants supplied them with air, and ensured that the forts were proof against poison gas; immense subterranean food stores, reservoirs and fuel tanks would enable them to remain cut off from the rest of the French Army for up to three months. There were three different types of forts, the biggest of which – Category 1 – housed a garrison of up to 1,200 officers and men, and contained between fifteen and eighteen concrete ‘blocks’, each bristling with guns mounted in disappearing turrets and of calibres that ranged from 37 mm. to 135 mm. Each fort was divided in two, connected by deep subterranean galleries lying beyond the penetration of any bomb or shell, and varying between 400 yards and 1½ miles in length. Thus even if one half of the fort should be knocked out, the other half could continue to fight, and each half was so located that it could bring down supporting fire on its twin, its neighbouring forts or casemates.