Battle Without End

When you walk around the outside of the building you find small windows, and when you look through them what you see are bones. Human bones and skulls. Piles of them. They are the remains of more than 130,000 men who were killed here and whose bodies could not be recovered or identified and so remained in the mud, blown apart again and again by artillery shells, in what was arguably the most awful battle of the First World War.

This, the Douaumont Ossuary, is the perfect memorial to that battle, fought 100 years ago.

The aim of that battle was to win the war, which had already lasted much longer than most people expected. In a little more than a year, far more men had been killed than anyone anticipated, yet neither side was close to victory. The front ran from Switzerland to the North Sea, and there seemed to be no possibility of a breakthrough by either side. There were plans for offensives, but they were likely to accomplish only the pointless taking of a little useless ground and the killing of many more soldiers. Wire, cannons, gas, and machine guns dominated a battlefield that generals had expected to be ruled by the horse. It had become a war of attrition.

So one general gambled that with the right objective and tactics, attrition could be a winning strategy. In a long letter to his leader, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Erich von Falkenhayn, who commanded the German Army, argued, “Within our reach, behind the French sector of the Western Front there are objectives for the retention of which the French General Staff would be compelled to throw in every man they have. If they do so the forces of France will bleed to death.”

Attrition to the limit, then.

The objective Falkenhayn had in mind was the fortified French city of Verdun, which would become a synonym for all the futility and awfulness of war. And the tactics? Nothing especially new. Just much more of the same: artillery, especially, along a very narrow front where the enemy would fight for every bit of ground. One new weapon would appear for the first time—the flamethrower. And it could be said that military aviation came into its own over Verdun.

As any good general should, Erich von Falkenhayn knew his enemy. The French Army, in the years before the war, had adopted a doctrine that stressed the offensive to a point that was virtually mystical. “To excess” was one of the army’s maxims, “and even that may not be far enough.” Defensive measures were regarded as something to be practiced only until a unit could once again go on the attack. There was an echo of Danton in this doctrine. De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.

Audacity had already cost the French Army some 300,000 soldiers and had nearly lost the war. But the generals—most of them—still clung to the doctrine of the offense, which held, as a corollary, that any ground lost must be quickly retaken by counterattack.

Verdun, Falkenhayn knew, was an objective the French would not give up. They would defend its outer line of forts and strongholds to the last man and when ground was lost, it would become the objective of a counterattack.

This was true in spite of the fact that Verdun’s military value in 1916 was, at best, negligible. It had historically been strategic, including during the reign of Louis XIV, when it was fortified by Vauban, the master of military engineering. But this had been a quiet sector, so far, in the war. After the Germans made short work of the fortifications on their way through Belgium, the French high command had stripped the works around Verdun of guns and men and sent them to more active sectors along the line. Fixed fortifications, being defensive in nature, no longer figured in their plans.

However, even with few men and fewer guns, the forts didn’t go anywhere, and they became objectives and symbols to the French, in just the way that Falkenhayn had anticipated. They thus became death traps.

While taking Verdun would not get the German Army much closer to Paris or improve, in any other way, its military situation, in the view of the French, losing the city would be an insuperable defeat the symbolism of which might be fatal. Verdun, the last redoubt to fall to the Prussian invaders in 1870, was a sacred city. In fact, after the long battle, the single road that supplied it with the tons of matériel needed to keep up the fight would become known as the Voie Sacrée.

So in late 1915, when a report detailing the unpreparedness of the Verdun sector of the French line made its way to Paris, behind the backs of General Joseph Joffre and his staff, there was a minor political eruption. Joffre was the supreme commander and something just short of a military dictator. He was also a titan of complacency and a fierce defender of his prerogatives and of his reputation as the savior of France. He had nearly lost the war in the first months of fighting, but the Battle of the Marne in September 1914 had saved his reputation, the army, and, indeed, the nation.

So he took strong exception to the report on Verdun’s defenses and wrote that he would not “be party to soldiers placed under my command bringing before the Government, by channels other than the hierarchic channel, complaints or protests concerning the execution of my orders.”

At this point in the war, Joffre’s resignation would have brought on a major crisis. So although the reports of Verdun’s unpreparedness and vulnerability were accurate, Joffre remained in command, no heads rolled, and the positions around Verdun were improved by the creation of at least one new trench line and the beginning of another. It wasn’t much but it turned out, perhaps, to have been adequate. One hundred years later, one marvels at the bureaucratic warfare and the defense of administrative turf. Tens of thousands dead already. More tens of thousands soon to die. And the generals and the politicians bickered over questions of prerogative and status.

Those who had warned that Verdun was both vulnerable and the objective of a massive German offensive were, of course, correct. Security on the German side of the line was tight but it was impossible to conceal, entirely, preparation for the attack, which entailed the movement of 150,000 men and more than 1,000 artillery pieces, including giant guns that fired shells weighing more than a ton.

The French might have been overwhelmed if the offensive had been launched, as scheduled, on February 11. But fog and snow cut down visibility over the ground where the battle was to be fought. Weather was one of those imponderables of war that Napoleon cited. In this case, it bought the French some time. They continued to strengthen their positions before the human storm they knew was coming.

It began on February 21 with the most massive artillery barrage in the history of warfare. More than two million shells fell on the French along the eight-mile front. Tons of steel and high explosive—and poison gas—came in at a rate of more than 1,000 shells a minute.

The French lines were obliterated, and the units defending them took exceedingly heavy casualties. But French units put up enough resistance to slow the German infantry when it attacked in the afternoon. By the end of the week, the Germans had advanced some three miles. The battle lasted another 10 months, and the same ground would be shelled and fought over again and again.

In the early days, the French were tenacious in defense but disorganized and lacking leadership. It was perhaps inevitable that in a battle that turned so much on matters of symbolism they would leave the largest and most formidable of the forts defending the city, Douaumont, almost undefended.

Though the French high command had declared forts of negligible importance and stripped them of men and guns, Douaumont was an undeniable stronghold, a fact of which the Germans were aware, even if the French were not. Construction on the fort had begun 30 years before the great battle. It had been modernized repeatedly, as recently as 1913. It was a massive structure of concrete and steel, surrounded by moats and belts of barbed wire. Machine guns protected by turrets could bring approaches to the fort under interlocking fields of fire. The men who manned the fort were protected by its thick walls, augmented by layers of sand that absorbed the concussion of exploding shells. Douaumont was the closest thing possible to impregnable, and the German artillery had bruised but not destroyed it in the opening days of the battle. It was a stronghold around which French lines could be stabilized, strengthened, and held.

But it was held by only about 60 men. This was not so much a tactical decision as an administrative oversight—one that lost the fort when, on the fifth day of the battle, a single German soldier encountered no resistance as he approached. Closer and closer he walked, until he was inside the wire and on the edge of the moat. While he was working out what to do next, a shell landed nearby and he was blown into the moat. The handful of men he was leading followed.

Sergeant Kunze then found a way into the fort and eventually ran into some members of its garrison. He took them prisoner and, in time, a few more German infantrymen found their way inside to lend assistance. In a couple of hours, the great fort was taken, by accident and without resistance. This was celebrated in Germany by the ringing of church bells and a day off from school for the children. In France, the public reaction was to continue to downplay the value of the fort. But the military commanders began immediately making plans to retake it, and it became an idée fixe.

That recapture of Douaumont took, in the estimation of one French general, the lives of 100,000 of his country’s soldiers.

That was in the future. On the day Douaumont fell, it seemed the city of Verdun might also be taken. And, as a purely abstract military matter, it might have been better for the French if it had. They could have fallen back—not that far—to defensible high ground. They would not have been defending a salient as they were in front of Verdun, under fire from three sides with their backs to a self-imposed wall.

But Verdun was a sanctified city that could not be permitted to fall, as Falkenhayn had foreseen. With its defenders facing a rout, Joffre sent a new general to take command and save the day.

Philippe Pétain was one of the few relatively successful French commanders in the first months of the war. This was because he had not bought into the attaque à outrance doctrine that had cost the French so dearly and would continue to cost it, until the soldiers finally rebelled and Pétain would again be called upon to save the day. But that was still to come.

On February 25, Pétain’s task was to save Verdun. Joffre called him to his headquarters, gave him his new command, and assured him that things were not really all that bad. Joffre never thought things were that bad and never let news from the front interfere with his meals or a good night’s sleep. Pétain telephoned the commander on the scene and issued the order to “hold fast” until he reached Verdun.

Pétain’s appointment was paradoxical in that he had long been opposed to the mystical belief in offense that infused the French high command. Among other heretical convictions, he held that “audacity is the art of knowing how not to be too audacious.” He was willing to give ground when the situation required, saying that to do so was better than the loss of “several thousands of men.”

In that regard, he was being tasked at Verdun with violating his own convictions. Pétain had gained a reputation among ordinary soldiers as being the rare commander who cared about them and was determined not to waste their lives in heroic, doomed attacks. He had said to the men of a unit that had been through one such attack and suffered heavy casualties, “You went into the assault singing the ‘Marseillaise’; it was magnificent. But next time, you will not need to sing the ‘Marseillaise.’ There will be a sufficient number of guns to ensure your attack’s a success.”

And this was the element in Pétain’s thinking that suited him perfectly as the savior of Verdun. He believed in artillery, not the bayonet.

So along with steadying his new subordinate commanders, he canceled a proposed attack meant to retake Douaumont, and he more or less assumed personal command of the French artillery around Verdun.

While the order to hold at any cost could be seen as playing into Falkenhayn’s hands, it was also true that massive and effective French artillery would make the very small battlefield as deadly for the Germans as it was for the French. In Pétain’s hands, the French artillery did, indeed, become effective, and the battle became one of almost constant shelling. It has been estimated that over the course of the battle, the two armies fired some 40 million artillery shells.

What this did to the ground around Verdun is still evident today. Shell hole overlapped shell hole, and there was no small plot that had not been turned over, perhaps several times. The shelling blew men to pieces and then blew the pieces apart. As the battle went on, the ground became mud mixed with fragments from the corpses of men and horses. In one day, 7,000 horses were killed. A French doctor described the battlefield as a place where “one eats, one drinks beside the dead, one sleeps in the midst of the dying, one laughs, and one sings in the company of corpses.”

As Pétain’s control firmed up, the German Army launched fresh attacks. These gained ground, but slowly, taking, among other objectives, the little town of Douaumont, near the fort. When a commander on the scene ordered a counterattack, on March 4, Pétain countermanded the order. In the official accounts of the battle, this marked the end of its first phase, and the “what ifs?” are seductive.

Falkenhayn had gotten what he wanted, a battle in which the French were willing to sacrifice all. The objective was not to take Verdun, but when Fort Douaumont fell, the opportunity was there. The French were in retreat and near-panic. There was looting in the town of Verdun, where drunken deserters roamed the streets.

But Falkenhayn had not forced the issue, Pétain had taken command, and the battle had gone on. Now it was Falkenhayn who could not give it up. He could not afford to lose, but he could not bring himself to go all in, either.

His subordinates had wanted to attack on both sides of the Meuse River, which bisected the French line of defense. He overruled them, on the principle of conservation of forces. Attacking on both banks would require too many men. But the Germans who were attacking on the eastern side of the river were vulnerable to flanking fire from French artillery on the western bank.

So the front was extended to both banks of the Meuse. The principal objective on the west bank was a hill called, fittingly, Mort-Homme—Dead Man. The Germans finally took the hill, but not until the end of May. The battle grew larger and remained indecisive. An exercise in pure attrition.

And by now, Pétain had been relieved of direct command by Joffre, who desired a more offensive-minded commander and was perturbed by Pétain’s constant requests for more troops. Joffre had other things in mind for whatever troops were available. There was a big offensive in the works, a joint operation with the British on the river Somme. It was to accomplish the long-desired breakthrough. It was scheduled for the first of August.

The general who took over from Pétain was an artillery specialist, Robert Nivelle, as confident as Pétain was skeptical, and as politically polished as any general has ever been. Nivelle’s chief subordinate was General Charles Mangin, who was the purest expression of the offensive spirit. Winston Churchill wrote of Mangin that he was “reckless of all lives and of none more than his own. .  .  . Mangin beaten or triumphant, Mangin the Hero or Mangin the Butcher as he was alternately regarded, became on the anvil of Verdun the fiercest warrior-figure of France.”

As the German advances slowed and finally stalled in the summer, the great Somme offensive was launched a month early, after Joffre’s pleading with his British allies. If the attack did not begin soon, there would be no French army, Joffre insisted with uncharacteristic emotion. It was being blown up and ground into the mud of Verdun.

The British took 60,000 casualties—20,000 dead—on July 1. That was the first day of a battle that was to last until late in the fall. The German Army could not both defend on the Somme and attack at Verdun. So it went over to the defense, and the French, under Nivelle, with Mangin as his instrument, assumed the offensive.

Nivelle had devised a new artillery scheme called a “creeping barrage.” The infantry would advance behind a wall of exploding shells that moved ahead of them at a fixed schedule. Previously, artillery fire had been lifted entirely or moved far ahead of the infantry once the ground assault began. The new scheme worked, and Mangin took ground and won victories until, finally, in December, the ultimate and symbolic objective, Fort Douaumont, was retaken.

After 10 months, the battle ended on more or less the line that had been in place when it began, one million casualties earlier. Of those, perhaps 400,000 were killed.

It was a battle, in the end, with no winners. It was, in a superficial sense, nothing more than another of the many pointless slaughters along the Western front between 1914 and 1918. But it was also one of the most consequential battles in history.

Verdun ruined the French Army and, arguably, France. As the “victor” of Verdun, Nivelle moved up to replace Joffre. He was sublimely confident that he had found a way to break the deadlock on the Western front.

Nivelle proposed a new offensive, this one in an area north of Verdun and south of the Somme. The tactics would be those that had succeeded at Verdun, particularly the creeping barrage, and Mangin would be in command of the leading troops. Nivelle liked to talk, and he had explained his plan for breaking the stalemate and winning the war at dinner parties in Paris and London, where he was warmly received. He had charm and spoke perfect English.

The Germans were thus well aware of his plan and prepared for Mangin’s attack, which came in the spring of 1917 and failed with heavy casualties. Nivelle had promised that if the attack were not immediately successful, it would be halted, and his men would return to their trenches. But after the initial failures—and some 100,000 casualties—he pressed the attack, pushing French troops to the limit and, then, beyond, until at last .  .  . they mutinied.

There had been warning signs at Verdun. Troops there, in the last days of the battle, had taken to bleating like sheep as they marched toward the front line. They had, again and again, been thrown carelessly into attacks that had no chance of success. Now they were refusing to go back into the line and into the attack.

Nivelle was relieved, with Pétain appointed in his place. He was the only general the soldiers trusted with their lives. He was also exhibiting the first symptoms of the defeatism that would eventually consume him like a cancer.

But he was the indispensable man in France’s time of need. He steadied things and gradually brought order and discipline back to an army in which almost half the divisions had shown symptoms of what was euphemistically called “collective indiscipline.” Some 500 men were brought up on charges and sentenced to death, though fewer than 50 were executed. There is still uncertainty about the episode. The French covered it up very effectively, for understandable reasons of security in the beginning and for reasons of pride and shame, one assumes, after that.

The French Army did return to the fight under the command of an increasingly reluctant Pétain, who wanted to wait on the Americans and let them do a share of the fighting. He was the hero of Verdun but the battle seemed to have wounded him in spirit as it had so many of his men.

Still, they loved him. He, of all their commanders, cared about them, making sure they received the minor comforts of regular leave and rations of wine and edible food. And not wasting their lives.

When the Great War ended, France was on the winning side, and Verdun was the battle it chose to remember and exalt. Marshal Pétain was the hero of that battle. The lesson that France chose to learn—and that Pétain preached—was that the nation’s hope lay in defense. The irrational faith in audacious attack was replaced by an equally rigid reliance on fixed fortifications. The example of Fort Douaumont led to the building of the Maginot Line behind which France would be secure when the next war came.

The Germans, of course, took away a different lesson from the stalemate at Verdun and developed armored warfare, panzer attacks, and blitzkrieg.

After the war, the ground where the great battle of Verdun had been fought was rehabilitated to the extent possible. There were unexploded shells everywhere, miles of rusting wire, thousands of bones and fragments of bones.

These were collected and placed in the great ossuary for which Pétain laid the first stone in 1920. In September 1927, he returned to light the “perpetual flame of remembrance.”

On the 50th anniversary of the battle, it was thought his body might be buried there, according to his wishes. Charles de Gaulle, who had served under him and been wounded and captured at Verdun, hoped this could be done. But it was politically impossible, even for someone with de Gaulle’s strength of purpose.

As much as he was the savior of Verdun, Pétain was also the man who had surrendered France to Germany and Hitler. He was the collaborator in chief, and after Germany had been defeated, he was tried for treason and sentenced to death. He was 90 years old. His sentence was commuted to life in prison and he died in 1951. Like so many thousands of his compatriots, he was a casualty of Verdun.

As was France.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.