A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (60 page)

By the second week of February everything was in place for an offensive with the potential to change the course of the war. One thing, however, was missing: a clear and shared understanding of how to take full advantage of all the force the Germans had assembled. The worst of the tactical problems began with the strange ambiguities of Falkenhayn’s plan—a plan aimed not at capturing Verdun but at bringing the French army within range of the German artillery and, in the general’s words, bleeding it white. His goal at the start of the campaign was simply to mass his artillery in the hills north of the city, force the French to try to drive those guns away, and blow them to pieces as they did. The core idea was to maximize French casualties while keeping the German infantry out of the fight to the fullest possible extent. In itself this objective was entirely commendable. But it led to Falkenhayn’s decision to limit the first day’s attack to only four and a half miles of front, to wait until the end of the day to send the infantry in, and to advance on the east bank of the Meuse only.

There were many problems with this decision, but the most serious was also the most obvious: it would leave the French artillery on the west bank unthreatened and free to blast away across the river. The crown prince and his chief of staff, Schmidt von Knobelsdorf, battled Falkenhayn on this point, insisting that ample manpower was available for an offensive on both banks and demanding a broadening of the campaign. They were joined by the best-informed of the Fifth Army’s corps commanders, General Hans von Zwehl, who before the war had participated in three war-game simulations of an attack on Verdun. Every one of those exercises had demonstrated that a move on the east bank only would be doomed to failure. The crown prince, Knobelsdorf, and Zwehl even had the implicit support of the famous French general De Rivière, who in the 1880s had directed an expansion of the Verdun defensive system. Upon completing his task, De Rivière had ruefully concluded that Verdun continued to be vulnerable at one point: the
west
bank. Falkenhayn was unpersuaded. He continued to insist that the initial infantry attack be severely limited, that the reserves necessary for exploiting success be kept well to the rear, and that those reserves be not under the crown prince’s control but his own.

Falkenhayn said he simply did not have enough troops to attack on both sides of the river. His subordinates, with three hundred thousand men at their disposal, could not understand what he meant. Falkenhayn explained that troops had to be held back for use in responding to whatever counteroffensives the French or British might launch at other points along the front. His subordinates, rightly convinced that neither the French nor the British were ready to attack in force anywhere, once again were baffled. What they didn’t know, because Falkenhayn didn’t tell them, was that he didn’t really care whether Verdun was captured or not. In all likelihood, he secretly preferred that Verdun
not
be captured—at least not quickly. He appears to have feared that a quick capture of Verdun might cause the French to withdraw and disengage, thereby spoiling his plan. One wonders if it ever occurred to him that, had he seized the city at the start of the campaign, the French would be practically certain to attack him and his massed artillery.
Not
taking Verdun, on the other hand, would leave the French in their defenses and require the Germans—assuming that Falkenhayn wanted the battle to continue—to attack again and again and again. He was relinquishing the opportunity to make one lightning strike and then fight on the defensive.

What Falkenhayn ordered, in the end, was “an offensive in the direction of Verdun.” These were words of art, intended to deceive. The crown prince and Knobelsdorf, understandably, interpreted them as an order to
capture
Verdun. Literally interpreted, however, they merely meant that the German forces were to move in that direction.

All was in readiness for the attack to begin on February 12. The night before, it began to snow, and snow was still falling heavily when morning came. Visibility was zero, which meant the artillery was blind and everything had to be suspended. Conditions remained terrible for a week, but on February 19 the skies finally cleared. The next day was even better—not only sunny but warm, with the mud beginning to dry. By then the element of surprise was lost: the French knew that an attack was imminent, and they had a good idea of where it would come. That night Driant slept as usual in a house some distance from where his battalions were dug in at the Bois des Caures. He rose before dawn on February 21, gave his wedding ring and a letter addressed to his wife to his manservant, and departed for the front. He was already there when the German artillery opened fire. All that day he and his men were under bombardment, their strongpoints blasted apart one by one. Late in the day the survivors, Driant among them, were attacked by German infantry, but the attackers came in less than overwhelming numbers and the poilus held their ground. When night fell, nothing was left of Driant’s battalions but Driant himself, seven lieutenants—every one of whom was wounded—and about a hundred troops still capable of fighting. But they were still in possession of the Bois des Caures.

Background

OLD WOUNDS UNHEALED

JULIUS CAESAR WOULD NOT BE SURPRISED TO LEARN
that a great battle took place at Verdun two millennia after his conquest of Gaul. The place was well known to the Romans, who recognized its inherent military importance. They named it, in fact—called it Verodunum, “strong fort.” As the name suggests, the Romans made it a military center as their empire grew. It was a base from which they could move against still-unconquered tribes, and a refuge to which they could withdraw when barbarian hordes came plundering.

Verdun had almost certainly been a stronghold long before Roman times. Its importance grew out of its position on the River Meuse, which snakes northward from headwaters in the French Alps into Belgium and Holland on its way to the North Sea. Any geographer could have predicted that a town would emerge where Verdun did in fact appear: it was the only point on a long stretch of the Meuse where even Bronze Age travelers could cross the river with comparative ease. From earliest times it was a gateway connecting the Rhineland with central France and the two little river islands where Paris would be born. Any mass of warriors on the rampage in western Europe was likely to find itself drawn to Verdun.

Thus Verdun’s whole history has been written in blood. Even Attila the Hun sacked and burned the place. When the quarreling grandsons of Charlemagne met in 843 to divide the Frankish empire, they did so at Verdun. Their agreement, the Treaty of Verdun, created three new realms. In the west was the Kingdom of the West Franks, which would evolve over the centuries into France. The Kingdom of the East Franks became Germany (and gradually broke into hundreds of fragments). Between the two was a long and vulnerable strip-kingdom, called Lotharingia (the root of the name Lorraine) for the unfortunate grandson, Lothair, who received it as his share. It ran from what is now Holland south through the old kingdom of Alsatia (thus Alsace) all the way to Rome. It became a battleground between its neighbors and soon disappeared from history.

It is not much of an exaggeration, in light of this history, to say that not only France and Germany but also their twelve hundred years of struggle over the territories between the Meuse and the Rhine all were born at Verdun.

For a while Verdun belonged to the western kingdom. In 923, at a time when France was feeble and the Holy Roman Empire strong, the Germans took it. Verdun and the territories around it, Alsace and Lorraine included, remained German for more than six hundred years, which might have been expected to settle the question of its cultural identity. But by the sixteenth century the balance of power had shifted. France was centralizing under the king at Paris and growing stronger, while the Holy Roman Empire was almost too fractured to defend itself. Verdun was plucked away by Henry II of France. In the seventeenth century Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIV, seized Alsace and Lorraine as well, shifting the border between France and Germany eastward to the Rhine.

Louis XIV, the Sun King, had in his service possibly the greatest military engineer in history, Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban. When Vauban installed a great chain of frontier fortresses west of the Rhine, he made Verdun its northern anchor. He transformed it from a fort into a network of forts spread across the rugged, wooded hills at the center of which the town sits like a plum in the bottom of a bowl. Until advances in artillery and siege warfare overtook Vauban’s work, Verdun remained impregnable.

Every war drew armies to Verdun. It withstood a siege during the Thirty Years War and fell to the Prussians in 1792, when the monarchies of eastern Europe were making war on Revolutionary France. The French soon got it back, but the idea of retaking and keeping Alsace and Lorraine became a key element in the German nationalism that Napoleon’s wars had ignited.

Verdun held out longer than all of France’s other eastern fortresses in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The Germans returned it to France as part of the settlement of that war, but they kept Alsace and a substantial part of Lorraine—five thousand square miles in all. Now the recovery of the two provinces became a French dream, their loss a wound so painful as to destroy any possibility of reconciliation with Germany. In Paris’s Place de la Concorde, a statue representing Strasbourg, principal city of the lost territories, was permanently draped in black.

The latest, westward shift of the border had left the French with no major defenses between Verdun and Germany. Verdun became, therefore, part of France’s first line of defense. In the final years of the nineteenth century, it and a line of fortress cities to its south (Toul, Épinal, and Belfort) were further expanded and strengthened. Observing this work, Alfred von Schlieffen concluded that the only feasible way to take the offensive against France was to go through Belgium.

Just a few years before the Great War, the largest of the Verdun strongpoints, Forts Douaumont and Vaux, were covered with protective shells that not even the biggest guns could destroy. By the outbreak of the war, the word Verdun signified a ten-mile-wide military region bisected by the Meuse and including a dozen major fortresses, eight smaller strongpoints, and forty additional redoubts that, though smaller still, also bristled with guns.

Verdun proved crucial to France’s survival in the opening weeks of the war. It remained the anchor that Vauban had intended it to be, allowing the French armies to maintain an unbroken line as they fell back toward the Marne. Almost but never quite cut off, by October 1914 it was the hard nucleus of a salient protruding into the German line. Early in 1915, the Germans tried to pinch it off but failed. Thereafter that sector of the front became quiet, and Joffre began stripping Verdun of its firepower. Ultimately 80 percent of its artillery was sent off for use in offensives elsewhere. Its manpower was reduced to levels that every commander on the scene found to be cause for alarm.

Alsace and Lorraine by this time had been invaded by the French and retaken by the Germans, but their status remained unsettled. The population of the two provinces was largely German-speaking and German in culture—even today their architecture and place names are more German than French. But loyalties were mixed. The region had been French at the time of the Revolution and had remained French long enough to become republican in its sympathies and unaffected by the rise of nationalist sentiment inside Germany proper. After the Franco-Prussian War it had been put directly under the governance of Berlin, rather than being given the kind of semiautonomy enjoyed by other German states. Its people had little liking for the Prussians, who moved in like an occupying force. On the other hand, most of the Alsace-Lorrainers were Catholic, and the militant anticlericalism of the French government in the decade before the war (a prejudice so potent that it put even senior French army officers under a cloud of suspicion) made many of them wary of Paris.

The behavior of the Prussians seemed almost calculated to push Alsace and Lorraine into the arms of France. In 1913 a young Prussian lieutenant insulted the people of the town of Zabern and injured a protesting civilian with his sword, but Berlin took no disciplinary action and offered no apology. Anti-Berlin feeling became inflamed, and the overreaction of the authorities quickly made things worse. In August 1914, when mobilization was not greeted with universal enthusiasm, the German military authorities felt confirmed in their disdain.

Mobilization went smoothly enough, though in all of Alsace and Lorraine only eight thousand men volunteered and a fourth of the sixteen thousand conscripted men living abroad reported for duty as ordered. Many of those who did report were deemed to be of questionable loyalty, and when it became clear that disproportionate numbers of them were being sent to the Eastern Front, they naturally grew resentful. More than seventeen thousand Alsace-Lorrainers, meanwhile, were slipping across the border to volunteer in France.

Ultimately, three hundred and eighty thousand men from Alsace and Lorraine served in the German army during the war. Their desertion rate was eighty out of every ten thousand, compared with one in ten thousand for other German troops. The high command responded with increased distrust and even harsher treatment both of the provinces themselves and of the soldiers who had come from them, and the sense of alienation deepened. It widened beyond possibility of repair when the government’s postwar plans for the provinces became public knowledge. Rather than being granted autonomy as one of the German states, they were to be punished: Alsace was to be given to Bavaria, Lorraine to Prussia.

Thus did Germany, through its own actions, lose Alsace and Lorraine long before France took them back.

Chapter 20