he Great War centenaries roll on,
rather like a creeping barrage. In
Britain in 2015 the main target was
Gallipoli; in 2016 it will be the Somme.
The opening day of that battle, 1 July 1916,
was the worst disaster in the history of the
British Army. Nearly 20,000 men were
killed.
But in 2016 the French will commemorate
a different battle, hardly known in Britain.
Verdun was a 10-month slugging match
lasting from February to December 1916. It
became the battle of the war for France:
fought on home soil for a city fabled in
French history. Serving there at one time or
another were 75 per cent of the French army
on the western front in 1916. “J’ai fait
Verdun” (I did Verdun), poilus (the slang
name for French infantrymen) would say
laconically. Nothing had to be added.
For the French, La Grande Guerre had
a simple moral clarity. The German army
invaded France in August 1914. Although
Paris was saved, 10 départements in
north-east France remained under German
occupation – their people and resources
ruthlessly exploited by les Boches. For most
French people, 1914–18 remains essentially
a war that was about national liberation.
After the western front congealed into
trenches at the end of 1914, both sides
looked for ways to resume open warfare –
the kind of fighting for which generals of
that era had been trained. In 1915 the
French mounted major offensives in Artois
and Champagne, supported by the British
at Loos in Belgium. Their losses were huge
and the territorial gains negligible.
In 1916, conscious that America might
soon be drawn into the war in support of the
British and French, it was the Germans who
tried to loosen the log jam in the west, and
one German in particular: General Erich von
Falkenhayn, chief of the General Staff. His
stereotypically ruthless ‘Prussian’ image –
close-cropped, hard-eyed – masked a fatally
indecisive character. Verdun started as
Falkenhayn’s brainchild, but it developed
a satanic life of its own.
Falkenhayn’s intentions remain
opaque. After the war he claimed that
he wrote a memo for the kaiser at
Christmas 1915 setting out a deliberate
plan to bleed to death (verbluten) the
French army by targeting Verdun- a fortress city on the river
Meuse in a quiet part of the
western front south-east
of the Somme. Here the
French line formed a salient, hernia-like in
shape, which stuck out into German-
controlled territory. Along the wooded
heights to the north on both banks of the
river the French had built a web of forts and
defences to protect the city itself, but these
had been stripped of men and supplies by the
French supreme commander, General Josef
Joffre, to reinforce active parts of the front. So
the vulnerability of Verdun, and its proximity
to German railheads, made the city a
plausible military target.
On paper the plan looks clear and
simple. But many historians, unable
to find any trace of the so-called
Christmas memorandum, have
concluded that it was a retrospec-
tive concoction by Falkenhayn to
pretend, once the battle got
bogged down, that his intention had
always been to fight a grim war ofattrition (Ermattungskrieg).
In fact, Falkenhayn never seems to have
expected to take Verdun itself, whatever his
troops were told for morale reasons. Nor
did he provide the resources necessary for a
decisive breakthrough, attacking initially
only the forts on the right (east) bank.
Arguably he intended Verdun as a large but
controlled offensive to drain the enemy at
relatively small cost to his own forces, with
the twin aims of forcing the French to
transfer troops to Verdun and the British to
mount a diversionary attack further north.
This might loosen up the main part of the
front, allowing the Germans to take the
offensive with devastating effect.‘Bite-and-hold’ offensive
Ironically, one part of Falkenhayn’s scenario
did come true: the British-French offensive
on the Somme, brought forward in its
start-date, was intended to ease the pressure
on France at Verdun. Although Field-
Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the supreme
British commander, toyed with hopes of a“Soldiers deserted, and civilians fled
in a flood of cars, carts and
prams that foreshadowed the hell of 1940”
T
The architect of Germany’s attack on
Verdun was Erich von Falkenhayn,
who claimed that he planned to bleed
the French army to death GETTY IMAGES/MARY EVANSHISTORY