The Price of Glory (30 page)

A mile or two from the front line, troops entered the first communication trenches; though to call them this was generally both an exaggeration and an anachronism. Parapets gradually grew lower and lower until the trench became little deeper than a roadside ditch. Shells now began to fall with increasing regularity among closely packed men. In the darkness (for obvious reasons, approach marches were usually made at night) the columns trampled over the howling wounded that lay underfoot. Suddenly the trench became ‘nothing more than a track hardly traced out amid the shell holes’. In the mud, which the shelling had now turned to a consistency of sticky butter, troops stumbled and fell repeatedly; cursing in low undertones, as if fearful of being overheard by the enemy who relentlessly pursued them with his shells at every step. Sometimes there were duckboards around the lips of the huge shell craters. But more often there were not, and heavily laden men falling into the water-filled holes remained there until they drowned, unable to crawl up the greasy sides. If a comrade paused to lend a hand, it often meant that two would drown instead of one. In the chaos of the battlefield, where all reference points had long since been obliterated, relieving detachments often got lost and wandered hopelessly all night; only to be massacred by an enemy machine-gunner as dawn betrayed them. It was not unusual for reliefs to reach the front with only half the numbers that set out, nor for this nightmare approach march to last ten hours or longer.

One of the first things that struck troops fresh to the Verdun battlefield was the fearful stench of putrefaction; ‘so disgusting that it almost gives a certain charm to the odour of gas shells’. The British never thought their Allies were as tidy about burying their dead as they might be, but under the non-stop shelling at Verdun an attempt at burial not infrequently resulted in two more corpses to dispose of. It was safer to wrap the dead up in a canvas and simply roll them over the parapet into the largest shell-hole in the vicinity. There were few of these in which did not float some ghastly, stinking fragment of humanity. On the Right Bank several gullies were dubbed, with good cause,
‘La Ravine de la Mort’
by the French. Such a one, though most of it in French hands, was enfiladed by a German machine gun at each end, which exacted a steady toll. Day after day the German heavies pounded the corpses in this gully, until they were quartered, and re-quartered; to one eye-witness it seemed as if it were filled with dismembered limbs that no one could or would bury. Even when buried,

shells disinter the bodies, then reinter them, chop them to pieces, play with them as a cat plays with a mouse.

As the weather grew warmer and the numbers of dead multiplied, the horror reached new peaks. The compressed area of the battlefield became an open cemetery in which every square foot contained some decomposed piece of flesh:

You found the dead embedded in the walls of the trenches, heads, legs and half-bodies, just as they had been shovelled out of the way by the picks and shovels of the working party.

Once up in the front line, troops found that life had been reduced, in the words of a Beaux Arts professor serving with the Territorials, ‘to a struggle between the artillerymen and the navvy, between the cannon and the mound of earth’. All day long the enemy guns worked at levelling the holes laboriously scraped out the previous night. At night, no question of sleep for the men worn out by the day’s shelling (it was not unknown for men in the line to go without sleep for eleven days). As soon as darkness fell, an officer would lay out a white tape over the shell ground, and the ‘navvies’ began to dig; feverishly, exposed, hoping not to be picked up by enemy flares and machine guns. By dawn the trench would probably be little more than eighteen inches deep, but it had to be occupied all day, while the enemy gunners resumed their work of levelling. No question of latrines under these conditions; men relieved themselves where they lay, as best they could. Dysentery became regarded as a norm of life at Verdun. Lice, made much of by combatants on other fronts, receive little mention. With luck, by the second morning the trench might have reached a depth of barely three feet.

Over and again eye-witnesses at Verdun testify to the curious sensation of having been in the line twice, three times, without ever having seen an enemy infantryman. On going into the line for the first time, Jubert’s
¹
colonel gave the officers of his regiment instructions that must have been repeated a thousand times at Verdun:

You have a mission of sacrifice; here is a post of honour where they want to attack. Every day you will have casualties, because they will disturb your work. On the day they want to, they will massacre you to the last man, and it is your duty to fall.

Battalion after battalion decimated solely by the bombardment would be replaced in the line by others, until these too had all effectiveness as a fighting unit crushed out of them by the murderous shelling.
¹
After nights of being drenched by icy rain in a shell-hole under non-stop shelling, a twenty-year-old French corporal wrote:

Oh, the people who were sleeping in a bed and who tomorrow, reading their newspaper, would say joyously — ‘they are still holding!’ Could they imagine what that simple word ‘hold’ meant?

The sensation provoked by being under prolonged bombardment by heavy guns is something essentially personal and subjective; first-hand accounts cover a wide range of experience. To Paul Dubrulle, a thirty-four-year-old French Jesuit serving as an infantry sergeant at Verdun, whose journals are outstanding for their un-embellished realism, it seemed as follows:

When one heard the whistle in the distance, one’s whole body contracted to resist the too excessively potent vibrations of the explosion, and at each repetition it was a new attack, a new fatigue, a new suffering. Under this regime, the most solid nerves cannot resist for long; the moment arrives where the blood mounts to the head; where fever burns the body and where the nerves, exhausted, become incapable of reacting. Perhaps the best comparison is that of seasickness… finally one abandons one’s self to it, one has no longer even the strength to cover oneself with one’s pack as protection against splinters, and one scarcely still has left the strength to pray to God…. To die from a bullet seems to be nothing; parts of our being remain intact; but to be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is a fear that flesh cannot support and which is fundamentally the great suffering of the bombardment….

Dubrulle survived Verdun, but was killed in the Nivelle Offensive of the following year.

More than anything else, it was the apparently infinite duration of the Verdun bombardments that reduced even the strongest nerves. Sergeant-Major César Méléra, a tough adventurer, who had sailed around the world in peacetime and who appeared little affected by the horrors of war, describes his experience of Verdun shell-fire initially with an unemotional economy of words: ‘Filthy night, shells.’ Three days later he was confiding to his diary that the night bombardment made him ‘think of that nightmare room of Edgar Allan Poe, in which the walls closed in one after the other.’ The following day: ‘Oh how I envy those who can charge with a bayonet instead of waiting to be buried by a shell,’ and, finally, the admission:

Verdun is terrible… because man is fighting against material, with the sensation of striking out at empty air….

Méléra survived Verdun and the rest of the war, to be killed a fortnight before the Armistice.

With the steadily increasing power of the French artillery, experiences of the infantryman on both sides became more and more similar. In June a soldier of the German 50th Division before Fort Vaux declared that ‘the torture of having to lie powerless and defenceless in the middle of an artillery battle’ was ‘something for which there is nothing comparable on earth’. Through this common denominator of suffering, a curious mutual compassion began to develop between the opposing infantries, with hatred reserved for the artillery in general. To Captain Cochin on the Mort Homme, it seemed as if the two artilleries were playing some idiotic game with each other, to see which could cause the most damage to the two unhappy lines of infantrymen.

What the PBI felt about their own gunners may be gauged from a French estimate that out of ten shells falling on a Verdun trench, ‘on an average two were provided by the friendly artillery’. Sergeant Elie Tardivel tells how in June seven men from a neighbouring platoon had just been killed by a single French 155 shell:

I met the company commander; I told him I had brought up some grenades and barbed-wire; I asked where I was to put them. He replied: ‘Wherever you wish. For two hours our own guns have been bombarding us, and if it goes on I shall take my company and bombard the gunner with these grenades!’

Emotions between the infantry and gunners resembled those sometimes held towards the heavy-bomber crews of World War II,
¹
whom the ground troops viewed as sumptuously quartered well away from the enemy, making brief sorties to spray their bombs indiscriminately over both lines. A French company commander, Charles Delvert, describes passing two naval batteries en route for Verdun:

Not a single man on foot. Everybody in motors. The officers had a comfortable little car to themselves…. I looked at my poor troopers. They straggled lamentably along the road, bent in two by the weight of their packs, streaming with water, and all this to go and become mashed to pulp in muddy trenches.

Other infantrymen were irked by the impersonal casualness with which the heavy gunners crews emerged from their comfortable shelters to fire at targets they could not see, ‘appearing to be much less concerned than about the soup or the bucket of wine which had just been brought’.

This picture is to some extent endorsed by the artillery themselves. Staff-Sergeant Fonsagrive, serving with a 105 mm. battery wrote in his journal during the peak of the March battle on the Right Bank; ‘the fine weather continues, the days lengthen; it is a pleasure to get up in the morning….’ Watching the planes dog-fighting overhead, there was plenty of leisure time for day-dreaming about wives and families. Later, Fonsagrive notes with some vexation:

One day when, quietly sitting underneath an apple tree, I was writing a letter, a 130 mm. shell landed forty metres behind me, causing me a disagreeable surprise.

Major Henches, another artilleryman (killed on the Somme that autumn) found time to write to his wife during the May fighting at Verdun:

Tell the children we have a poor refugee dog which suffers from a terrible fear and displeases me because he is dirty and snores at night. Two swallows have made their nest near us….

Not all French gunners, however, were as fortunate as Sergeant Fonsagrive. When death came from the long-range German counter-battery
guns, it came with frightening suddenness. A gunner sipping his soup astraddle his cannon, a group of NCOs playing cards would be expunged by an unheralded salvo. In action, the field artillery particularly had even less cover than the infantry; often reduced still further by officers of the old school of that notably proud French arm,
‘La Reine des Batailles’,
who believed (and there were still many like them) that to take cover under fire was almost cowardice. Casualties among some batteries were in fact often at least as high as among the infantry. Captain Humbert, a St. Cyrien of the 97th Infantry Regiment, testifies to the effect of the German artillery’s systematic sweeping of the back areas, knowing that the French field batteries must all be there:

Nobody escapes; if the guns were spared today, they will catch it tomorrow…. Whole batteries lie here demolished….

Lieutenant Gaston Pastre, though also a heavy gunner, provides a very different picture to Fonsagrive. Arriving at Verdun in May, he found the unit he was relieving had lost forty per cent of its effectives; ‘If you stay here a month, which is normal,’ they warned him, ‘you will lose half of yours too.’ The reverse slopes up to Fort St. Michel on the Right Bank, where Pastre’s battery was sited, were crammed with every calibre of gun; it was ‘nothing more than one immense battery, there are perhaps 500 pieces there.’ A wonderful target for German saturation fire — ‘anything that falls between Fort St. Michel and the road is good.’ There were generally only two periods of calm in the day; between 4 and 6 a.m. and between 4 and 7 p.m. when, like subhuman troglodytes, the French gunners emerged from the ground to repair the damage. For the rest of the time, to move from one shelter to another — a distance of about twenty yards — required considerable courage. By night the solitary road from Verdun came under constant fire from the German gunners, certain that French munition columns must be coming up it nose to tail. It presented ‘a spectacle worthy of Hell’, in which men not killed outright were often hurled off their gun carriages by shell blast, to be run over and crushed by their own caissons in the dark.

Next to the incessant bombardment, the stink of putrefaction and the utter desolation of the battlefield, Verdun combatants testify again and again to the terrifying isolation, seldom experienced to the same degree in other sectors. Verdun was the epitome of a ‘soldier’s
battle’. Within an hour or less of the launching of each organised attack or counter-attack, leadership even over the lower echelons ceased to play any significant rôle. Company commanders would lose all but the most spasmodic and tenuous contact with their platoons, often for days at a time. The situation where one French machine-gun section found itself holding a hole in the front two hundred yards wide with its two machine guns for several days in complete detachment from the rest of the army, was by no means unique. To add to this demoralising sense of isolation, the tenacious curtain of smoke from the bombardment meant that the front line frequently could not see the supporting troops behind; nor, worse still, could their rockets of supplication asking for the artillery to bring down a barrage, or cease shelling their own positions, be seen at the rear. Countless were the true heroes of Verdun, fighting small Thermo-pylaes in the shell-holes, who remained unsung and undecorated because no one witnessed their deeds.