The Price of Glory (25 page)

The ebullient little general now disappears from the picture, his dramatic rôle at Verdun completed.

At midnight Pétain in his first act of command telephoned General Balfourier, the commander of XX Corps:

‘Allo! C’est moi, général Pétain
. I have taken over command. Tell your troops. Hold fast. I have confidence in you.’

Balfourier replied:

‘C’est vous, mon général? C’est bien!
Now everything is going to be all right.’

A similar call was made to General de Bazelaire, now commanding units on the Left Bank. In his memoirs Pétain recorded tersely:

‘La liaison morale, du chef aux exécutants, était assurée.’

By now Colonel de Barescut, his Chief-of-Staff, had arrived, and with a thick charcoal Pétain traced out the front to be held by his command. All that could be done that day had been done. It now remained to find the general somewhere to lay his head for the night. There was barely room for a primitive headquarters in the tiny Mairie at Souilly, let alone anywhere to sleep. Eventually Serrigny found a small house belonging to the local solicitor. Attempts to light a fire in the glacial dining-room had to be abandoned when it smoked out the house. After a meagre supper of beans left over from the orderlies’ meal, Pétain slept, huddled in an armchair. The next morning the inevitable occurred. For an elderly man, even with the robust constitution of Pétain, the long chase through snow and night, the unheated house — added to the exertions of the previous night — proved too much. Pétain awoke with a high fever, and a doctor diagnosed double pneumonia. In the days before M and B, there was no 48-hour wonder cure; the general would be confined to his bed for at least five or six days. The disease might even be fatal. Was there no limit to the disasters besetting France?

The doctor was pledged to secrecy, and an iron curtain of security was rung down on the headquarters lest news of the new commander’s prostration further demoralise the men with their backs to the Meuse. De Barescut and Serrigny were despatched again and again to the front as Pétain’s eyes, and — like Saxe on his litter at Fontenoy — over the next days he directed the battle, shaking with fever, from his sickbed. Somehow the secret was remarkably well kept.

With astonishing rapidity the sick man gathered the threads of the battle into his hands. Order began to replace chaos. He quickly realised that, tactically, the situation at Verdun was not quite as desperate as it had seemed at first sight. Only one bastion of prime importance to the city’s defence had been lost so far: Douaumont. In his opinion, ‘the fact that Verdun still remained in our hands on February 25th constituted a real success’. Balfourier’s ‘Iron’ XX Corps had now reached the front in its entirety; two further corps were on their way, and a third standing by; Haig, with rather ill
grace, had agreed to take over a further sector of the line from the French, so an adequate supply of reinforcements seemed assured. If only Verdun could hold out another two or three days, it would be safe, Pétain thought. But, ‘Our façade, so rudely shaken, could crumble from one moment to another.’ There was no room for any more deadly mistakes. Methodically, Pétain set about ensuring there would be none. De Castelnau, true to form, had dictated the immediate recapture of Fort Douaumont, but after one suicidal failure Pétain immediately rescinded the order. ‘Conserve your strength,’ he told his commanders; ‘the counter-offensive will follow.’ Instead, a
‘position de barrage’
, a well-organised defensive wall was to be erected along the ‘Line of Resistance’ that Pétain had traced out the night he took over command. The backbone of this line would be formed by the neglected and despised forts. Orders were sent out to rearm them, to neutralise the demolition mines, and infantry garrisons were despatched complete with fourteen days’ rations and solemn instructions never to capitulate. (At the same time, though its existence was naturally concealed from the rank-and-file, a ‘Line of Panic’ was also drawn up on the inner circle of forts, Belleville, Souville, Tavannes and Moulainville. If all went awry and there was to be a last ditch fight for the city, this is where it would take place.)

No component of the French forces at Verdun was more conscious of the influence of the new commander than his ancient passion, the artillery. Pétain himself virtually took over control of the artillery, asking his commanders each morning: ‘What have your batteries been doing? Leave the other details till later.’ Again and again he insisted that the artillery ‘give the infantry the impression that it is supporting them and that it is not dominated.’ While the infantry was still too weak to wrest the initiative from the enemy, carefully prepared artillery ‘offensives’ were directed by Pétain, to cause maximum loss to the enemy at minimum cost to himself. For the first time in the battle the French guns ceased their uncoordinated, spasmodic flea-biting and became welded into one concentrated, fearsome weapon. Nothing quite like it had been seen on the Allied side hitherto. The impact on the Germans was immediate; from this moment, said the
Reichs Archives
, ‘began the flanking fire on the ravines and roads north of Douaumont that was to cause us such severe casualties.’

Though, in the last desperate days of February, it may hardly have seemed the most dramatic, undoubtedly the gravest problem
confronting Pétain was one of communications. Only the most precarious of lifelines now connected Verdun with the rest of France. Before 1916, G.Q.G. had stolidly resisted the Army Commission’s recommendations to establish new railway lines to Verdun. Now the main line up the Meuse was severed by the enemy astride it at St. Mihiel. The second, to Paris via Ste. Ménéhould, was under steady bombardment by the Crown Prince’s naval guns. Already its dislocation had forced the Verdun artillery to cut its ammunition expenditure sharply. There remained only a narrow gauge track, reminiscent of an Emmett railway and called the
Meusien,
that was designed to supply the wants of a peacetime garrison, and the second-class road that ran alongside it for some fifty miles from Bar-le-Duc. This road represented the sole act of prescience displayed by the French High Command at Verdun prior to the German attack. In 1915 it had been widened to seven yards, just large enough for an up- and down-column of trucks. But for this Verdun would have been doomed to die of slow strangulation. As it was, to Pétain, mindful of the chaos he had witnessed on the icy road the day of his arrival, there was room for every possible doubt. Soon the Verdun army would total half a million men and 170,000 animals; Pétain’s ravenous guns would be demanding twice and treble their previous flow of shells. Could this huge array be supplied without straining to breaking-point the thin lifeline? Certainly no army of this size had ever been maintained by road before.

Pétain’s organising genius was ably supplemented by the engineer responsible for transportation to Verdun: Major Richard. Together they laid down strict rules to keep the vital traffic moving. The road was divided up into six cantonments, each with its own crews of pioneers and vast workshops to service the primitive vehicles. It was to be reserved exclusively for motor transport, all marching columns to keep to the field on either side; any truck breaking down was at once to be heaved into the ditch. There could be no hold-ups. At the same time ten battalions of Territorials were set to work building a new broad-gauge railway to Revigny. But were there enough motor vehicles in the French Army to sustain the flow? The new invention had been badly neglected in the French Army before the war, like most others. In 1914 there were only 170 vehicles in the whole army, and throughout the war the officer in charge of the French Service Corps never held a higher rank than lieutenant-colonel. Fortunately the brilliant improvisation of the Marne aroused G.Q.G. to the possibilities of motor transport. At the time of the German attack, the combined resources of the RFV
¹
and the neighbouring Third Army could raise 700 trucks, representing a daily capacity of 1,250 tons. But it was estimated that the forces at Verdun would require at least 2,000 tons a day, plus another 100 for every additional division brought up. Major Richard and his men scoured France for transport. Once again the miracle of the taxis of the Marne was repeated; this time in Paris the price of vegetables doubled as one by one the civilian
camions
disappeared off the streets. Even by the time Pétain took over, Richard had somehow assembled 3,500 assorted vehicles. It was an astonishing feat for a mere major. But still there was a chronic shortage of trained crews. After fifty, sometimes seventy-five hours without a break, drivers began to collapse at their wheels, and another precious vehicle would be written off. Senegalese brought into the service depots at first ate the grease supplied to lubricate the strange monsters. Lack of skill combined with the sheer unreliability of the primitive mechanisms kept Richard’s workshops constanly overflowing.

The antics of the vehicles with their solid, treadless tyres on the icy roads reminded an American observer of the irregular march of young elephants: ‘Many of them slid over the edge, turning upside down, and others caught fire.’ But still the traffic kept flowing. Seen from a distance at night, the dimly lit vehicles resembled ‘the folds of some gigantic and luminous serpent which never stopped and never ended’. On either side of the road their headlamps lit up the bowed backs of the endless columns of marching men. It seemed as if all the vitality of France were flowing up this narrow artery. Then, on February 28th, disaster struck. There was a drastic thaw, and in a matter of hours the unmetalled road turned to liquid mud. At places it was sinking up to eighteen inches. The young elephants threatened to flounder to a halt, and with them the flow of life-blood to Verdun. Delegated complete powers by Pétain, Richard in desperation summoned up all available Territorials. Almost shoulder to shoulder they were lined along the road, hurling gravel non-stop under the wheels of the passing trucks. An anxious Pétain telephoned Richard:

‘Will the road hold?’

‘The road will hold.’

‘Good. Otherwise I was going to give the order to evacuate the Right Bank.’

The road held. During the critical week beginning February 28th, over 25,000 tons of supplies and 190,000 men were brought in over it to Verdun. At its peak, in June, when 12,000 vehicles were employed, one passed along it every fourteen seconds, and it was estimated that the mileage accrued each week along its short fifty miles added up to twenty-five times the earth’s circumference. To ensure that the crisis of February could never be repeated, Pétain employed the equivalent of more than a whole division of men permanently mending the road. All the colourful components of France’s Colonial Empire were to be found at work keeping the Verdun lifeline open; powerful Senegalese, with their chants of
‘cassa-le-caillou’,
wielded picks next to industrious little Annamites, clad in yellow uniforms. During the ten months the siege was to last, Richard’s road gangs were said to have shovelled nearly three-quarters of a million tons of metal on to the road. Aptly compared by one historian to General Grant’s Chattanooga railway of 1863, it established military history. With something like two-thirds of the whole French Army to pass along it bound for the dreadful Calvary of Verdun, the title Maurice Barrès coined for it was hardly a profanity: the
Voie Sacrée
.

* * *

At the front the news ‘Pétain is in control’ had an instant and magical effect. ‘France has her eyes on you,’ he had told them in his first Order of the Day, and the troops had their eyes on Pétain; even though for the best part of a week they were not actually to see the new commander in person. What the appearance of de Castelnau had done to raise morale at the various HQs, the mere name of Pétain did among the ordinary soldiers. The sagging line stiffened, and finally froze. The 27th of February, the
Reichs Archives
recorded as being ‘the first day of the Battle for Verdun that, despite the heroic fighting of the troops and despite great and bloody sacrifices, brought German arms no success anywhere.’ The elite XX Corps was now fully entrenched on the Right Bank, and, as already noted, other big reinforcements were on their way to Verdun. Even the gaping hole left by de Bonneval’s precipitate retreat on Belleville Ridge had been plugged before the over-cautious Germans could exploit it — although it had been left open for twelve hours. A hastily assembled group of the famous 75s had been pushed forward on to Froiadeterre,
and its lethal barrage had given one of the fresh divisions of XX Corps just enough time to move up through the ebbing debris of de Bonneval’s 37th African Division and establish a firm line from Bras to Haudromont.

It was around Douaumont Village that the main fury of the fighting raged. For the best part of a week it continued. Three times the Germans attacked in vain. Under cover of the machine-gun turrets in the fort (operated by von Brandis) the 24th Brandenburgers were thrown into the fray again, still flushed with their triumph. But this time they suffered their heaviest casualties since the battle began. A new regiment of Saxons made its appearance, only to be massacred by its own heavy guns. On the 27th, a Jäger battalion lost 413 killed. Several times the village actually changed hands. The 420s were then deployed to flail its ruins with their one-ton projectiles. A French lieutenant holding a bunker in the village noted that under the bombardment ‘this vast block, 30 metres square, oscillated, at times actually rising up, like a ship’. Yet still the suicide machine-gun nests stayed behind in the pulverised debris and mowed down the German assault waves. The grey carpet that lined the slopes leading up to Douaumont grew thicker. The French 95th Regiment which had held the village on the disastrous day of February 25th was withdrawn, decimated, from the battle. Other regiments followed. At last, by a strange quirk of irony, Pétain’s own, the 33rd, took its turn at Douaumont. On the way to the line, an officer of the 33rd wrote to his parents with premonition, ‘Is this farewell?’ For many it was. Within three days word came back to Pétain that one whole battalion of his old regiment had been virtually wiped out, and one of its companies reduced to nineteen men. On the list of officer casualties appeared the name of a young company commander who Pétain recalled had been particularly eager to join his regiment, and had seemed to have quite a promising future. Now, badly wounded, he had been taken prisoner. His name was Captain Charles de Gaulle.