The Price of Glory Read online

  The incessant, all-pulverising bombardment — catching the North Africans with none of the cover that had protected Driant’s Chasseurs during the first two days of the battle — had come as the final straw. Nothing like this had ever been experienced. When the German infantry had appeared like a great, grey carpet unrolling over the countryside, a section of Tirailleurs had lost its nerve; then a platoon, a company, and finally a whole battalion wavered and broke. The Germans surged forward with gathering speed. Louvemont, on the vital Pepper Hill and key to the French third position, appeared to be lost. At the right of the front, a similar disaster had overtaken the Zouaves. After the capture of Herbebois and Beaumont, the Branden-burgers of III Corps had thrust through in the direction of Fort Douaumont. To stem the advance, General Chrétien had thrown in his very last reserves, the 3rd Zouaves, with the usual exhortation to resist to the last man. But they had, it seems, dissolved like the early morning mist. In the Ravin de la Vauche, the Germans captured a group of French heavy guns and four batteries of 75s, without encountering any infantry opposition. An escaped gunner officer reported that between the ravine and Souville he had not seen a single French infantryman. What happened to the Zouaves still remains something of a mystery; the French official history is uncommunicative. Becker, the Deputy Chief-of-Staff to Chrétien, may provide a clue in relating that that morning one battalion of Zouaves broke when its commanding officer had fallen. A captain had then taken command and in vain attempted to form a line. His shouts were disregarded; finally, ‘a section of machine guns fired at the backs of the fleeing men, who fell like flies.’1

  Disaster and shame was to some extent redeemed that day by one of those small incidents of self-sacrificing gallantry that periodically illuminate the pages of French military history. At Louvemont, a Tirailleur battalion commander found himself besieged with nothing to defend the village but a defeated, panicky rabble and his Headquarters Company. The burden of its defence fell to a platoon of young ‘trainee corporals’ attached to HQ Company. The platoon was so newly arrived that, in the urgency of the moment, there had been no time to allocate the new corporals to companies. Of 58 of them, only nine survived that day. But Louvemont was saved, for the time being.

  By the night of the 24th, French morale was crumbling seriously. It seemed that almost anything might happen now. The French artillery had become ominously silent, which always had a depressing effect on the infantry. In the retreat from their first positions, the French batteries had had to set up again wherever they could. There was no time to dig emplacements. One by one the German barrage had smothered them in their vulnerable positions. For no very clear reason, the two biggest guns at Verdun, the naval 240s at Cumières and Vaux had been blown up by their jittery crews; as had most of the other long-range naval pieces in the area. Horrible doubts grew in the minds of the infantry; were the guns pulling out on them? Next to the disappearance of the supporting artillery little affects a soldier’s morale in battle more than the sight of hundreds, thousands of untended wounded. Now the misery of the men at the clearing stations (never the strongest point of the French) almost surpassed description. Pierre-Alexis Muenier, an ambulance driver in the first days at Verdun, tells of the wretched men arriving for treatment, their wounds often frozen by the intense cold. Despite the din of the bombardment, those that still could, spoke in low voices for fear of being overheard by the invisible enemy. ‘Joffre who nibbles at them, eh!’ they muttered. Men hideously mutilated by the huge German shells seemed utterly baffled by never once having seen the enemy (though this was a phenomenon that was to become one of the standard characteristics of Verdun). Outside the clearing station at Bras, the seriously wounded lay in their hundreds awaiting evacuation, exposed to the incessant shelling. It was impossible to get more than a fraction out at a time. One ambulance of Muenier’s section took twelve hours to remove only five casualties from the inferno. Everywhere roads had become impassible. Motor ambulances became stuck in shell holes; horses frenzied by the shell-fire overturned their drays, scattering the badly wounded along the road. At the base hospitals in Verdun the situation was little better. The German 380s, firing with ‘diabolical precision’ had cut the main railway between Verdun and the rest of France, and it was taking the all-too-few motor ambulances ten hours to cover twenty miles.

  General Chrétien’s Corps was finished. Not a single company remained in reserve. Although Chrétien had intended before the battle opened always to have in hand the equivalent of a brigade capable of carrying out a strong counter-attack, events had forced him to squander his reserves unit by unit. On the 21st, three out of his fourteen reserve battalions had been doled out to his divisional commanders, Bapst and Boullangé; the next day nine, leaving him with only two in hand. On the 23rd, the 37th Division had arrived, but had been dismembered almost immediately and thrown in piecemeal. Thirty-six hours later it had lost over 4,700 of 12,300 complement; and with the vanishing of the 3rd Zouaves, Chrétien’s last reserves had vanished, too. None of his batteries could mount more than three guns apiece; many were left with only one, scorched black with powder. At 10 p.m. that night, Chrétien was relieved by General Balfourier. But Balfourier was a commander virtually without a command. His Corps, otherwise known as the ‘Iron Corps’ had once been Foch’s, had saved Nancy in 1914, and probably had the finest reputation in the whole army; but it was still en route for Verdun in a desperate forced march. The vanguard of two regiments that had arrived soon after Balfourier had received no food during the past twelve hours, had left most of its machine guns behind and possessed only 120 rounds of ammunition per man. Ambulance driver Muenier described the arrival of these ‘fresh’, elite troops; ‘a mass of men and mules envelops us… Officers and NCOs command with a high voice, brief, clear, as at manoeuvres. Movements are carried out with precision.’ But the only thought of the tired, hungry men was ‘if only they could have a few beds’. Reminiscent of some Verezhagin scene of the Grand Army in Russia, machine-gunners leaned against each other for protection against the bitter cold, 15 degrees below freezing. At once Chrétien wanted to throw these reinforcements into the battle, but their Brigadiers protested that the men were incapable of further effort. Chrétien insisted, remarking that at the Marne the troops had also been exhausted, ‘but they were no longer so when their leaders ordered them to about-turn and march towards the enemy.’ It seemed doubtful, however, whether even this latest sacrifice would gain time enough for the remainder of XX Corps to reach the front before the whole Right Bank position was lost, and with it Verdun. Had the Germans only realised it, as a French historian wrote after the war; ‘… on the dark evening of the 24th of February the way to Verdun was open to the enemy…’

  But if the Germans that night, distracted as they were by certain problems of their own, did not realise just how desperate was the French position, they certainly could not guess that they stood on the threshold of their greatest coup of the campaign. One of the more extraordinary episodes of the war was now about to take place.

  CHAPTER NINE

  FORT DOUAUMONT

  The fortified places are a nuisance to me and they take away my men. I don’t want anything to do with them.—GENERAL DE CASTELNAU, 1913

  The word DOUAUMONT blazes forth like a beacon of German heroism.—FIELD MARSHAL VON HINDENBURG, Out of my Life

  NO unit of the German Army was more strongly imbued with regimental pride than the 24th Brandenburgers of General von Lochow’s III Corps. With intense pride the regiment recalled Blücher’s tribute from the Napoleonic Wars: ‘That regiment has only one fault; it’s too brave.’ From the moment of joining the 24th, young ensigns had that drilled into them, plus a dictum of Frederick the Great which had become a regimental motto: ‘Do more than your duty.’ In 1914, the 24th had romped through Belgium, hit the British Expeditionary Force hard at Mons, then marched on to the Marne. As it goose-stepped through France, swigging ‘liberated’ Champagne and lustily singing ‘Siegreich woll’n wir Frankre
ich schlagen,’ there seemed no limit to the regiment’s successes. Great had been its indignation when the order came to turn about on the Marne. In February 1916, the 24th had just returned from a victorious campaign in the Balkans where it had helped hurl the Serbs out of Serbia. Now, at Verdun, things had not gone brilliantly so far for the regiment. Stubborn French resistance in Herbebois had led to shaming delays, and administered a bloody nose to the 3rd Battalion, which, to a regiment accustomed only to success, seemed to be almost a disgrace; especially when at the other end of the line there were reports of how well the Westphalian reservists, mere farmers in uniform, had done. As the French line bent and cracked before them, the Brandenburgers strained at the leash after fresh laurels with which to redeem the setback. Ahead there now loomed ever closer the greatest laurel of all; Fort Douaumont. Ever since they had been in the line at Verdun they had had an eye on its great tortoise hump. You could not escape from it. Like a small rodent under the unblinking gaze of a hawk, it made you feel quite naked and unprotected. At the same time, it beckoned with an irresistible magnetism.

  Then, to the 24th’s intense fury, just when the great fort seemed only a couple of day’s fighting away, Corps HQ placed it within the boundary of advance of the neighbouring regiment, the 12th Grenadiers. In their marching orders for February 25th, the Brandenburgers were to halt on an objective about half-a-mile short of the fort, eventually leaving it on their right for their bitter rivals. It was unspeakably unfair.

  From whatever angle you approached Fort Douaumont it stood out imposingly, menacingly. Hardly a square yard of terrain lay in dead ground to its guns. To the tottering French, it gave the comfortable feeling of having a mighty, indestructible buttress at one’s back. It was, as Marshal Pétain later described it, the cornerstone of the whole Verdun defensive system. It was also the strongest fort in the world at that time — on paper: Started in 1885 as part of the ‘de Rivières Line’, Douaumont had been modernised and strengthened in 1887, in 1889, and again as recently as 1913. The huge mass was constructed in the traditional polygon shape favoured by Vauban, and measured some quarter of a mile across. The outer edge of the fort was protected by two fields of barbed wire 30 yards deep. Behind them came a line of stout spiked railings, eight feet high. Below stretched a wide ditch, or dry moat, 24 feet deep, girdling the fort. At the northern corners were sited concrete galleries, facing into the moat, and at the apex was a double gallery, shaped like a flattened letter ‘M’. These three were (supposedly) armed with light cannons or pom-poms, machine guns and searchlights, so that any enemy climbing down into the moat would be caught by a deadly enfilading fire from two corners. Each gallery was connected to the centre of the fort by a long underground passage, enabling it to be reinforced regardless of enemy fire. Next, on the north side, came the gradually sloping glacis, itself swept by the fort’s machine gun turrets — should the flanking galleries somehow have been knocked out. Even if an enemy survived the traversing of the glacis and penetrated to the Rue de Rempart that ran from East to West across the middle of the fort, he could still be taken from the rear by the garrison emerging out of shelters deep below ground.

  At the southern under-belly of the fort, the entrance was protected by an independent blockhouse, also with double flanking galleries. The southwestern approach was masked by a bunker, called a ‘Casemate de Bourges’, out of which fired two 75 mm field guns. Meanwhile, the whole of this side of Douaumont also came under cover of the guns of Fort Vaux and other neighbouring fortifications.

  Inside, the fort was a veritable subterranean city, connected by a labyrinth of corridors that would take a week to explore. There was accommodation for the best part of a battalion of troops, housed in barracks on two floors below ground level. The barrack rooms had rifle embrasures in the thick concrete of the exposed, southern side, so that each could put up a spirited defence as an independent pill-box; if ever the enemy got that far. As a reminder to the garrisons of their duty, there was painted up in large lettering in the central corridor: ‘RATHER BE BURIED UNDER THE RUINS OF THE FORT THAN SURRENDER.’ But the real teeth of the fort lay in the guns mounted in its retracting turrets. There was a heavy, stubby-barrelled 155 that could spew out three rounds a minute; twin short 75s in another turrret mounted in the escarpment to the north; three machine-gun turrets, and four heavily armoured observation domes. For their epoch, the gun turrets were extraordinarily ingenious; their mechanism adopted, with little alteration, for the Maginot Line thirty to forty years later. Forty-eight-ton counterweights raised them a foot or two into the firing position; but the moment the enemy’s heavy shells came unpleasantly close, the whole turret popped down flush with the concrete. Only a direct hit of the heaviest calibre on their carapace of two-and-a-half-foot thick steel could knock them out, and until they were knocked out they could exact a murderous toll on an approaching enemy. Though, under Joffre’s purge of the forts in 1915, the guns in the flanking galleries and the Casemate de Bourges had been removed, these powerful turret guns were still in operation.

  The whole fort lay under a protective slab of reinforced concrete nearly eight feet thick, which in turn was covered with several feet of earth. Unlike the great forts of Belgium that had caved in beneath the blows of the German 420s, the concrete roof of Douaumont had been constructed like a sandwich, with a four-foot filling of sand in between the layers of concrete. The sand acted as a cushion, with remarkable effectiveness. Exactly a year before the Verdun offensive began, in February 1915, the Crown Prince had brought up a battery of 420s to try their hand at Douaumont. Sixty-two shots in all were fired, and German artillery officers noted with satisfaction ‘a column of smoke and dust like a great tree growing from the glacis of Douaumont’. The fort guns remained silent, so the Germans assumed that Krupp’s ‘Big Bertha’ had once again done its stuff. In fact, though the reverberations and concussion within the fort had been extremely unpleasant, the bombardment achieved little other than knocking away half the inscription, DOUAUMONT, over the main gate. (Why the fort’s 155 never returned the fire was quite simple; its maximum range was just over 6,000 yards, which would not have carried as far as the French front lines.) In the bombardments of February 1916, again the German 420s had caused negligible damage. Thus, it seemed — contrary to the pessimism of Joffre and G.Q.G. — that Douaumont was virtually impregnable.

  By February 25th, 1916, the attacking Germans had reason to assume that Fort Douaumont had been badly knocked about, but was still likely to prove a stubborn and prickly obstacle. Never could they have guessed that it was both undamaged and — through an almost unbelievable series of French errors — to all intents and purposes undefended!

  ***

  The 24th Brandenburg Regiment’s orders for February 25th were to capture Hassoule Wood, then halt on a line about 750 yards to the northeast of Douaumont. The usual annihilating bombardment had started at 9 a.m. and was to lift to the fort itself, when the attack would begin. The line-up was as follows: 2nd Battalion on the right, 3rd on the left, with the 1st in reserve. On the right flank the 12th Grenadiers (in whose line of march the fort now lay, but who were also to halt short of it), and on the left the 20th Regiment, were to advance simultaneously. But in one of those last minute upsets that occurred so frequently in the First War when runners and word-of-mouth took the place of ‘Walkie-Talkie’, neither regiment received its orders in time. So at zero hour as the barrage lifted, the 24th found itself advancing unsupported. Rather typically, it paid no attention and thrust forward with its usual impetuousness. As luck would have it, instead of finding itself in a nasty trap, the 24th burst into a vacuum left by the Zouaves that had melted away the previous day. The few remaining French in the Brandenburger’s path scattered rapidly, in some disarray. Two hundred prisoners were taken, and then followed a wild pursuit after a fleeing enemy. Within less than 25 minutes, advanced detachments from the 2nd Battalion of the 24th had reached the objective, having progressed over three-quarters of a mile. It was
just about a record for that war.

  On the extreme left of the 2nd Battalion was a section of Pioneers, commanded by a Sergeant Kunze. Kunze at 24 was a regular soldier of Thuringian peasant stock; from his photograph one gets the impression of heavy hands and limited intelligence; from his subsequent action, one gets an impression of complete fearlessness, but perhaps of that variety of boldness that often reflects lack of imagination. Men like Kunze were the backbone of any German Army; they would go forwards in execution of what they held to be their orders, unquestioningly and unthinkingly, until at last a bullet dropped them. In the usual practice of the German Army, Kunze’s section had been detailed to accompany the first wave of storm troops, to clear any wire or other obstacle that might hold them up. Aided by the land contours, it was on the objective well to the fore. Kunze himself had already had an eventful afternoon. In a captured machine-gun post he had stopped and given first-aid to a wounded French NCO, but the ungrateful gunner had somehow regained his weapon and reopened fire. Kunze hastily returned and dispatched the man with little compunction. At another enemy position, a few minutes later, Kunze saw a Frenchman raise his rifle, but he shot first. When at last he reached the objective his blood was thoroughly up; after the day’s brief action he was, in that favourite but quite untranslateable German Army expression, unternehmungslustig. As he paused to recover his breath, he saw the great dome of Douaumont looming ahead, incredibly close to him, terrifying but at the same time irresistibly enticing. French machine guns were chattering away busily to the right, but the Fort seemed silent. Kunze now reconsidered the orders he had received that morning; to eliminate all obstacles in front of the advancing infantry. And here, just in front of him, was the biggest obstacle of all! Ignoring in the excitement of the moment the other order — not to go beyond the prescribed objective — and with little thought as to what he would do when (or if) he got there, he set off in the direction of the Fort. His section followed obediently. Ten men against the world’s most powerful fortress! It seemed an act of the most grotesque lunacy.