The Price of Glory (18 page)

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.

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…’