The Price of Glory Page 13

  Into this atmosphere of disorganisation and fatigue, there came, during the afternoon of the 22nd, menacing news from Bapst’s left flank. With the German breakthrough in the Bois de Consenvoye and the capture of Haumont, the anchor position of Brabant on the Meuse was now threatened with encirclement. If the garrison there should be cut off, Bapst knew that he would have no troops to cover the equally important village of Samogneux, farther up the river towards Verdun. Recalling his strict orders of ‘no retreat’, he hastily sent Captain Pujo off to Chrétien’s HQ at Fort Souville, to obtain formal permission for the abandonment of Brabant. Pujo reached Souville by 5.30 and was at once received by the Corps Commander. General Chrétien was a-tough veteran of wars in Indo-China made doubly fierce-looking by a scar that distorted his mouth. Yet beneath this exterior he seems to have been an indecisive man. At first his response to Bapst’s pleas was an immediate and categoric no; it was unthinkable that a French officer could voluntarily yield any ground. It was a matter of honour. Then he began to waver and for two hours kept Pujo waiting for a definite order. Finally, Pujo was sent off with the highly unsatisfactory verdict that General Bapst, being on the spot, should make up his own mind.

  Meanwhile, bad news reaching Bras was hourly being succeeded by still worse news; the enemy were reaching ever closer to the Meuse behind Brabant, and of the units pinned in at Brabant itself a captain and 60 men of the 44th Territorials had hoisted the white flag. From the rest of the front reports were either non-existent, or highly confused; Lt-Col. Bonviolle had reached Samogneux with a handful of survivors from Haumont; Driant in the Bois de Caures was ominously silent. The strain was becoming unbearable. At last, at 12.45 a.m. Pujo returned from Souville. At last, some orders! The Corps Commander had given what seemed to be a carte blanche. Immediately Bapst drafted an order to evacuate Brabant. Shortly afterwards his already uncomfortable HQ was rendered uninhabitable by a large shell which exploded a store of hand grenades. News of his order reached Fort Souville at 3 a.m. Since Pujo had left Chrétien, promises of fresh reinforcements had reached him, and he had begun to change his mind. Brabant now seemed to assume strategic importance. For another three and a half hours he hesitated. Finally the de Grandmaison doctrine triumphed and he sent a peremptory order to Bapst: ‘The Brabant position should not have been evacuated without the permission of the superior command… the General commanding the 72nd Division will take measures to reoccupy Brabant.’

  Half an hour later, he followed it with another order, telling Bapst not to use too many men in the operation. It all revealed how sadly out of touch XXX Corps was with events at the front.

  Under the fortuitous cover of a heavy Meuse mist, Brabant had already been evacuated with light losses. But Bapst, obedient soldier that he was, promptly ordered its retaking; though he must have realised how impossible this was. Word came back to Bapst that there was not a single man available for a counter-attack. The order was counter-manded, and at midday von Zwehl’s men entered Brabant.

  The abandonment of Brabant was hailed by French military writers as the first of the major tactical blunders in the defence of Verdun. Bapst was made a scapegoat, the first of many. Narrowly escaping a Court Martial, he never again held an active command. In fact his decision had clearly been right, the only possible one in the circumstances. A last ditch defence of Brabant could only have resulted in the slaughter of what remained of two French regiments, to be followed almost certainly by an even speedier advance by von Zwehl.

  The orders and counter-orders issued on the morning of the 23rd led to the inevitable disorder. The 72nd Division was nearing the end of its tether. Terrible stories brought back from the front by wounded stragglers began to spread demoralisation among the few reserves that were still uncommitted. Yet still the suicidally heroic penny-packet counter-attacks were being thrown in all along the line, now often reduced to half-platoon level. One of the largest had been that of Major Bertrand’s battalion, which had at last received its orders; which were to attack at dawn the Bois des Caures, now occupied by the best part of the German XVIII Corps. Through surprise at the sheer audacity of such a gesture, Bertrand had achieved some success; at the usual heavy cost. But the neighbouring force that Colonel Vaulet had ordered to join in the dawn attack did not receive its orders until midday; they had been ten hours in transit over a distance of little more than a mile. Though it was now hopelessly late, Vaulet’s orders were still carried out. But hardly had the attack begun to move forward than it ran headlong into a whole German regiment, marching with rifles at the slope, singing lustily. The French were simply swept aside.

  Such were the fate of these impromptu, uncoordinated, suicidal ripostes. But, once again, their ferocity had the effect of persuading the Germans to greater prudence. Though the German assault had been resumed with full force along the whole of XXX Corps’ front, preceded by the usual annihilating bombardment, the third day of the battle was still to bring no breakthrough, no rout of the vastly outnumbered French defenders. On the right, 51 Division, though it had borne less of the weight of the German onslaught than the 72nd, was nonetheless fighting with equal heroism. It still clung tenaciously to Herbebois, the only portion of the first line remaining in French hands. Here the German flamethrowers had begun to lose some of their initial terror, French sharpshooters having discovered how easy it was to pick off the heavily laden German pioneers before they came within range. The huge Austrian 305 mm. mortars were now brought to bear on the wood. Finally, at 4.30 p.m. divisional HQ gave the order to withdraw from Herbebois; but an hour and a half later Sergeant-Major Quintin was still holding out with the remnants of his platoon, until surrounded and captured.

  At the village of Beaumont, situated on a strategic rise, and to which Driant had tried to withdraw the previous day, elements of several French regiments fought to the end against repeated attacks. So costly were these to the Germans that the official, history compares Beaumont to St. Privat, one of the bloodiest actions in the Franco-Prussian war. As the Hessians of XVIII Corps closed in on the village they were scythed down by suicide machine guns firing out of concealed cellar apertures, that were only silenced when the houses had been brought down on top of them. To the French defenders it seemed as if the dense German formations were coming in with such rapidity that they were being physically swept forward into the French machine guns, by succeeding waves pressing from behind. Casualties among them were enormous. When Beaumont finally succumbed to this impetus on the 24th, a German lieutenant had to intervene to save the life of the captured French commander from his men, enraged by the casualties they had suffered. In the adjacent Bois de Wavrille, heavy losses had also been inflicted on the Hessians by the combined shelling of Chrétien’s heavy guns now concentrated on the wood, and by their own barrage falling too short. Something akin to panic broke out, during which two regiments, the 115th and the 117th, became badly entangled with each other. When at last they were sorted out, it was too late to renew the attack that day. For the first time, expressions like ‘desperate situation’ and ‘day of horror’ make their appearance in the official German account.

  The spirited and prolonged defence of Herbebois and Beaumont provided the 72nd Division an invaluable anchor, which enabled them to hold the line Beaumont-Samogneux during most of the 23rd. This resistance resulted in yet another check to the German advance, and this time it was von Zwehl’s Corps that was held up. To his considerable surprise, von Zwehl found himself confronted by a defence line lying between the known first and second French positions that was recorded on none of the carefully prepared German maps. Consequently it had received relatively little attention during the preliminary bombardment. The obstacle was in fact the hastily dug ‘Intermediary Line’ ordered by General de Castelnau on his January visit; not the last contribution he would make towards the defence of Verdun. The few hours’ delay in the ever-accelerating German advance now afforded an invaluable respite, during which Chrétien was able to push up units of a new divisi
on, the 37th African Division, behind the tottering 72nd.

  But what remained of 72 Division was deteriorating rapidly. More and more runners were failing to reach their destinations, and when they did they brought such desperate messages as the following:

  Lieutenant commanding 3rd Battalion of the 60th to 143 Brigade. The C.O. and all company commanders have been killed. My battalion is reduced to approximately 180 men. I have neither ammunition nor food. What am I to do?

  At 10 a.m. on the 23rd, impatient at being cut off from all effective control of his brigade, Colonel Vaulet, decided to move closer to the front. Vaulet was typical of the toughness of the French Army of 1914. Aged 57, he had risen from the ranks, and as a lieutenant colonel in 1914 he had been seriously wounded in the abdomen during the ‘Battle of the Frontiers’. Captured by the Germans, he escaped a fortnight later, his wound still open. He took refuge in a French gaol, where he was equipped with civilian clothes and the false papers of a vagrant about to be released. He was again caught by the Germans, tried as a spy, but acquitted and sent to a POW camp in Germany. Four months later, in very ill-health and suffering from his wound, Vaulet was repatriated via Switzerland as unfit for military service. In March 1915 he was back in the army. Since the battle began on February 21, the tough old colonel — who had been Driant’s immediate superior — had played perhaps the most distinguished rôle among the French Brigade Commanders. With his litany of ‘counter-attack; again counter-attack; always counter-attack’, he had been the very embodiment of 72 Division’s will to resist. Now, as he left his shelter to move up towards the cracking front, he was seen to disappear in a burst of flame.

  One by one the leaders were falling. Vaulet, Driant and Renouard were dead; Bertrand and several other battalion commanders were wounded. Worse still, whole units were beginning to vanish. A sinister indication of the state of morale was an order received by Lieut.-Colonel Bernard at Samogneux, telling him to keep in reserve a machine gun detachment: ‘to enforce obedience upon those who might forget their duty.’ But the nightmare was nearly over, it seemed. The Algerians and Moroccans, tough Zouaves and Tirailleurs, of 37 Division were close at hand. Shortly before midnight General Chrétien ordered Bapst to pull out and reconstitute the remnants of his division on the two ridges called Talou and ‘Pepper Hill’.

  There remained one ordeal still ahead of the division; Samogneux. The orders for Samogneux were the usual, simple – ‘tenir coûte que coûte.’ In the village, where fires were raging and the bombardment was constantly growing in intensity, was the equivalent of a battalion under command of Lieut.-Colonel Bernard. Hemmed in on two sides by von Zwehl’s advancing troops, on the third side its back was to the Meuse. A battalion commanded by Major Duffet had been sent up to reinforce Bernard, but half a mile from Samogneux it had come under observation from German guns on the far side of the river. A terrible wall of shellfire interposed itself between Bernard and the relieving column, which, with heavy losses, was stopped in its tracks. Meanwhile, panic-stricken soldiers, their officers long since killed, were straggling out of Samogneux, spreading stories — in their own defence — that the village had fallen, that they were its garrison’s sole survivors. The rumours reached Bapst’s HQ, and a message was immediately dispatched to Bernard demanding confirmation. Back came a piqued response from Bernard, flaying the ‘cowards and panic-mongers’. The situation, he said,

  is not brilliant; nevertheless I am holding at Samogneux… all the horses have been killed, bicycles smashed, runners wounded or scattered along all the routes. I shall be doing the impossible if I keep you informed of events.

  Then silence. Rumours of collapse continued to flow out of Samogneux. At 10 o’clock that evening, Chrétien’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Major Becker, was passed by a courier on horseback at a full gallop, shouting ‘the Boche is at Samogneux.’ ‘I wanted to stop him and ask him from whom had he received this information, and what was his mission,’ recounted Becker. ‘But despite my injunction, he merely galloped off, and I fired two shots from my revolver after him without result.’

  Now a disastrous thing happened. Bapst had become convinced that Samogneux had indeed fallen, and issued the routine order for its recapture. At the same time back in Verdun, General Herr ordered the powerful French artillery now assembling on the Left Bank of the Meuse behind Fort Vacherauville to bring down all its weight on the conquered position. At 0.15 hours that night, just as Bernard was sending off a report that he was still holding, the first 155 salvos hit the French positions. The fire was unusually accurate. Within a matter of seconds the machine guns guarding the left flank had been wiped out. Frenziedly the defenders fired off green ‘Cease Fire’ rockets. But in vain. For two hours the French barrage did its terrible work. It killed the attacking German commander, but it also broke the back of the French defenders. The waiting Germans were quick to take advantage of the situation, and by 3 a.m. all was over at Samogneux. Out of one cave, collapsed under the bombardment, passing Germans heard a pathetic plea of: ‘Pour mes enfants, sauvez-moi!’ They stopped to try to dig the man out, unsuccessfully; then were ordered forward to continue the attack. Bernard, captured, was ushered into the august presence of the Kaiser, who — feeling that Verdun was about to topple and wishing to be in at the kill — had moved close to the front to watch the action through a well-protected periscope. ‘You will never enter Verdun,’ the French colonel assured him defiantly.1

  With the final tragedy of Samogneux, the 72nd Division now passes from the Verdun scene. In the words of Grasset, it no longer existed. After four days of fighting, the division had lost 192 officers and 9,636 men; its brother-in-arms, the 51st, 140 officers and 6,256 men; for both divisions a combined total of 16,224 out of an establishment of 26,523. With Driant and Vaulet dead, Bernard, Robin, Stephane and Quintin in captivity, and Bapst in disgrace, a new personae dramatis enters the Verdun stage – they in their turn to disappear too and be replaced with depressing speed — and even the scenery begins to shift with a rapidity seldom experienced on the Western Front.

  In the German camp, exultation was growing. Some ten thousand French prisoners, 65 guns and 75 machine guns had been taken; moreover the initial victories had, said the Reichs Archives — resorting to a rare piece of Teutonic nonsense — afforded ‘renewed proof of the ascendancy of German manliness’.

  * * *

  February 24th, 1916, was the day the dam burst. Once the Germans had broken through the ‘de Castelnau Line’ between Beaumont and Samogneux, the whole of the French second position, inadequately prepared and pounded for four days by the most brutal bombardment, fell in a matter of three hours. During that disastrous day alone, enemy gains equalled those of the first three days put together. By the evening, for the first time since the Marne, the war had once again become one of movement. No trenches, no more barbed wire, no deadly machine-gun emplacements. The ‘rase campagne’ fighting that Foch, Joffre and Haig had so ardently sought for in their attempts at a percée during the past eighteen months of sterility seemed at last to have arrived. Only its manner of coming was not quite what the Allied Commanders desired.

  To plug the holes rent in the 51st and 72nd, a new division, the 37th African, had been flung in by Chrétien piecemeal — like clay shovelled into the cracks of a dyke. Haig, on first receiving an account of the Verdun fighting of the 24th, recorded in his diary in that superior tone he generally adopted when writing about his Allies; ‘I gather that this Division had run away much in the same way as the “Tirailleurs Marocains” used to do on my right on the Aisne.’ Alas, Haig’s entry was only a mild exaggeration. The 37th African Division was reputedly one of the crack units of the French Army; its Zouave regiments were comprised largely of tough colons, seasoned in the incessant ‘pacification’ campaigns of North Africa, its Tirailleurs ferocious tribesmen from Morocco and Algeria, fathers of today’s Fellagha. These French Colonial troops had established a terrifying reputation (they were averse to taking prisoners) with the enemy
, and Germans moving into a new sector always enquired nervously ‘Are there any Africans opposite?’ Brilliant, brave to the point of fanaticism on the attack, the North Africans — in common with soldiers of most fiery southern races – were, however, strongly subject to temperament and less consistent fighters than the more dogged northerners. When it reached the Verdun battle area on the 23rd, muffled to the ears like medieval Saracens, everything had been against the proud North African division. Split up into packets, it found itself under the command of strange officers — and the regular French Army tended to regard the Colonial troops all too frequently as mere cannon fodder. At the front, the men of the 37th learned they were expected to hold a line devoid of any prepared positions. All shelters, either against the weather or the bombardment, had been razed by the German shelling. The bitter cold gnawed into the bones of the wretched, unacclimatised North Africans, and a night of exposure had reduced their morale to a low ebb. Meanwhile, through their lines had flowed the steady, demoralising debris of defeat; the aimlessly wandering wounded and shell-shocked, with their staring eyes; the shattered remnants of regiments with appalling tales of horror, pouring back in their search for safety, propelled by an impetus that nothing short of a bullet could check.