10

“They Shall Not Pass”

NOVEMBER 11, 1918. René Naegelen found himself home on leave at Belfort, happily out of the last-minute fighting still being waged by his division. The mood in town was electric as crowds awaited the ringing of the bells of Saint Christopher’s Church, set for 11 A.M. A brass band ambled past the Naegelen family bakery en route to the town square, its tune discordant, its lines ragged, some musicians clearly tipsy. At the citadel on the edge of town, a squad of soldiers hauled an ancient cannon into position in preparation for a triumphal salute.

Naegelen’s mother asked him to put on his medal. “You should this day,” she said. The Médaille Militaire honored a soldier mentioned six times in dispatches and twice wounded. The mother’s effort to share in Belfort’s festivity was strained. On the wall, in a gilded frame, hung the photograph of a fixedly smiling soldier, Joseph Naegelen, René’s brother. “Joseph had been entrusted with my father’s bakery,” Naegelen recalled. “He was my senior and had two very young children. My parents had four sons and a son-in-law serving in the infantry. I was conscious of their heart-rending sorrow and of their apprehension concerning my brothers and myself.” Of Joseph’s death he had learned, “He lay out there beneath his wooden cross. His comrades dug a bed for him, and to prevent the earth from hurting his eyes, put over his face a battered tin plate.”

Naegelen’s father locked up the bakery, and the family headed toward the square, the young soldier kissed by girls, sobbing old women, even men. Later, he would recall his thoughts at that moment: “I wish you could see what a fool you look. You are walking with such martial strides—chin up, chest thrown out—that your parents can hardly keep up with you. . . . Revel in the fulsome flattery, dear fool! It does not stop war from being a filthy trick.”

FEBRUARY 1916. The men of Naegelen’s battalion arrived at Verdun in February, his own zeal for battle already having been tempered at Champagne. After France had slipped out of the Schlieffen noose in 1914, the kaiser had replaced Helmuth von Moltke as chief of the German general staff that September with his minister of war, General Erich von Falkenhayn. In his youth Falkenhayn had been a slim, severely handsome soldier with the brush-cut hair favored by Junker officers. By the time Wilhelm II sent him back to the field commanding armies, he had grown heavy-featured, thick-waisted, and leaned on a cane, an appearance in keeping with his attraction to ponderous stratagems rather than brilliant thrusts, most notably at Verdun. In choosing the ancient city, its history dating back to Roman times, Falkenhayn sought no vital bridgehead, rail juncture, or commanding heights. He launched his offensive on February 16, 1916, with the simplest intent: to kill Frenchmen by the hundreds of thousands. France, he reasoned, would never dare surrender an old fortress town possessing Verdun’s symbolic potency. The French would hang on and he would grind them down day after day with murderous artillery bombardments, the dead replenished by the living until an entire generation of Frenchmen was annihilated.

The French Army commander, Marshal Joseph Joffre, thought otherwise. He viewed Verdun as a useless bulge in the French front, best given up to achieve shorter lines of communication and supply. The sixty-two-year-old marshal enjoyed a reputation as the leader who had stemmed the German onslaught in 1914. He was held in affection and esteem as “Papa Joffre.” What would have surprised his admiring public was that Joffre had stripped Verdun of its guns. France’s resources were to be reserved for a great offensive later in the year along the Somme River.

By February 21, 1916, Falkenhayn had amassed 1,240 guns, concentrated on an eight-mile arc of the French front. The kaiser’s son and heir, Crown Prince Wilhelm, was given nominal command of the assaults, but Falkenhayn held the reins. That day, as a massive shell exploded in the archbishop’s palace in Verdun, the battle was joined. For nine hours, German guns pounded the French positions, the heaviest bombardment the world had yet known. The French prime minister, Aristide Briand, discovered Joffre’s willingness to abandon Verdun and was horrified. The marshal might be a soldier who understood strategy, but Briand was a politician who understood the power of symbols. The fall of Verdun would spell the fall of the Briand government. Four days later, the prime minister appeared at Joffre’s headquarters at Chantilly and had the sleeping general yanked out of bed. Why was Verdun so poorly defended? Briand demanded to know. Joffre sought to explain that the city had no military significance. The usually even-tempered prime minister exploded. “You may not think losing Verdun a defeat,” he railed, “but everyone else will. If you surrender Verdun, you will be cowards, cowards, and I’ll sack the lot of you!” An abashed Joffre gave in. “We will fight to the end,” he said. General Henri-Phillipe Pétain, the rare French general who believed in defense, was given command of Verdun. Had Falkenhayn been privy to the exchange at Joffre’s headquarters, his joy would have been unbounded. The French were playing into his hand, ready to march into his slaughterhouse.

On February 25, Verdun’s most powerful symbol, the massive Fort Douaumont, fell. Pétain, determined to stem the advance, uttered the line forever joined with his name: “Ils ne passerant pas”— They shall not pass. His pledge would ensure months of just what Falkenhayn had counted on: remorseless attrition.

GENERALS DEALT WITH war at the wholesale level, but troops fought it retail, as René Naegelen again discovered. The fighting ebbed and flowed over the same exhausted ground. The village of Fleury was lost, retaken, and lost again sixteen times in four months. Fort Vaux changed hands thirteen times in one month, with men dying for ground that would not matter a half hour later. Fighting underground was as fierce as that above as both sides honeycombed the surrounding hills with tunnels too low for a grown man to stand in. The foes encountered each other like burrowing animals, clashing with rifles, grenades, even machine guns, their bullets ricocheting off stone walls, tipping end over end, causing horrendous wounds. The miasma of gunpowder fumes and dust in these airless spaces felled men by asphyxiation. The concussive force of grenades rattled men’s brains to the point of madness.

Naegelen thought he had gone insane. He had huddled in a shell hole in front of Fort Vaux with two mates when a shell exploded above them, lifting Naegelen from the ground, then slamming him back to earth. He cautiously moved his arms and legs. “Nothing,” he concluded with relief. “My two friends, however, lying one upon the other, were bleeding.” Both bodies were torn open, and one man “unbuttoned his trousers and died urinating on the gaping wound of his comrade.” Amid the madness, Naegelen recalled thinking, “I was twenty and I had never embraced a woman; I had never felt her warm, naked skin against my eager body; I thought I would die on the very threshold of my wretched life.”

HENRI DESAGNEAUX HAD managed his transfer from transportation to the infantry in time for Verdun. His 106th Regiment was ordered to recapture a trench seized by the enemy the day before near Bras-Ravin. Desagneaux and his men crouched in a shallow trench, waiting for the barrage that would signal their advance. They watched a seemingly endless procession of stretcher bearers pass by, stumbling under the weight of the bodies they bore to a makeshift cemetery, their work attracting swarms of flies.

As night fell, Desagneaux’s unit began its advance. They retook the trench but could not hold it. At daybreak they pulled back and watched an astonishing number of wounded being carried to the rear. Their own artillery barrage had fallen short, dropping shells on their comrades. Desagneaux recorded the scene in his diary: “A machine gunner has been blinded . . . in addition he has lost a leg.” A wounded man pleaded with his lieutenant not to let him die; another begged the officer to shoot him and end his agony. “Our time at Verdun has been awful,” Desagneaux wrote. “Our faces have nothing human about them. For sixteen days we have neither washed nor slept. . . . Our eyes reveal the horror of it all.” His unit had lost more than four hundred men, “and, the positions are the same as before the attack.”

JACQUES MEYER SURVIVED Verdun. In the summer of 1914, the nineteen-year-old Alsatian had been accepted at the elite École Normale Supérieure in Paris. But eight days after the war began, Meyer and the rest of his class had left school to enlist en masse. In the early days at Verdun, Meyer, now a junior officer, was puzzled one morning to see a great tongue of fire leap from advancing German troops, turning French soldiers into torches. Verdun did not mark the introduction of the flamethrower, only its perfection. Though initially it was terrifying, the French quickly learned to counterattack. A well-aimed grenade could explode the flamethrower’s fuel tanks, causing fire to race up the hose and incinerating the men carrying it. Snipers concentrated fire on these carriers, and when they scored, the flamethrower’s nozzle spun about wildly, scorching friend as readily as foe.

Meyer disdained the myth of what the men called the “blessed wound”—not serious enough to maim for life but bad enough to get a man out of the war. There was “no such thing,” he concluded. If the wounded soldier was borne on a stretcher, “the danger multiplied with the number of men grouped together, making a target for the machine guns or a ‘bundle’ for a shell falling on the heap.” Often, a man with the blessed noncrippling wound would die from loss of blood, gangrene, or exposure before ever reaching an aid station.

THE PROTRACTED FIGHTING at Verdun dulled human feeling. Troops marching to the rear would taunt their replacements moving to the front with “Hey, look, reinforcements for the cemetery.” A nurse moaned to a friend, “This war, it makes brutes of men.” She had tried to wash the hands of a soldier about to be operated on. The man had rebuffed her angrily. “No, my hands are covered with the blood of a Boche colonel,” he told her. “I killed him myself and I refuse to have the blood washed away!”

An American volunteer ambulance driver recalled his conversation with a housewife living near Verdun. She told him about a German widow who had managed to get a letter through to the mayor of her village, begging that her husband’s body be buried where she could find it after the war. “Her thin gray hair hung in wisps over her dirty face, a face lined with a lifetime of toil,” the driver recalled of the Frenchwoman, “and at the moment she told me about the letter, I was startled by her demoniacal expression. Her hands, with long curled nails, seemed like claws. Her face was a symbol of fury.” She had not the slightest desire that the German widow’s request be granted.

THE FIGURE EMERGING most indelibly from the battlescape of Verdun was the poilu, the ordinary French soldier. Literally, the word meant “hairy.” Its origin preceded this war and had been used by Rabelais and Balzac to depict the unsung men in the ranks, whose hairiness was presumedly a mark of manliness. The defining quality of the poilu was uncomplaining fatalism in the jaws of Hell. George Gaudy, an officer with the 57th Infantry Regiment, was moved by his men’s acceptance of their fate even as they sang songs depicting their wretchedness. “What struck you,” he remembered, “was the physical vigor of these poilus, washing up half nude in the snow. Their gaze was calm, the smiles a little mocking.” While the word caught the public’s fancy, “poilu” was rarely heard in the trenches, except by some officers in a cheap bid for camaraderie. The men referred to themselves as les bons hommes, the good guys.

In the beginning, Falkenhayn’s pragmatic, if ruthless, strategy of attrition had made sense. But though he had wisely judged that Verdun should serve only as the anvil for his annihilating hammer of artillery, Crown Prince Wilhelm insisted on victory. And so the fortress that Joffre had judged not worth saving became a prize Germany found worth taking. German troops were herded into the abattoir as numerously as the French. General Pétain countered with “No retreat. Meet death on the field. Let survivors launch counterattacks!” Thus Verdun became one of the most sustained episodes of bloodletting in the annals of warfare. Scarcely an inch went uncontested. By the end of June 1916, the peak of the German onslaught, French dead totaled 160,000, one death every two minutes; German losses amounted to 218,000 men dead, wounded, and missing. In a single day, 7,000 horses were killed. “Verdun was the most senseless episode in a war not distinguished for sense anywhere,” the historian A. J. P. Taylor judged. “Both sides at Verdun fought literally for the sake of fighting. There was no prize to be gained or lost, only men to be killed and glory to be won.”

AMONG MORE THAN a quarter of a million Germans lost at Verdun, one name did not appear. Lothar Lanz of Pioneer Battalion 30 had found the wild swings from savage killing followed by a live-and-let-live tolerance morally disturbing. Early in the struggle, he had taken part in shooting Frenchmen trying to rescue their wounded from no-man’s-land under a Red Cross flag. Yet at Verdun he experienced numerous tacit cease-fires. At one point his battalion occupied a trench alongside the road from Damvillers to Verdun. The French were dug in three hundred yards opposite. At night, both sides sent patrols ahead to man sentry posts. Wary at first, the “hereditary enemies,” as Lanz called them, soon began mingling, “and on the following morning our relieved sentries related to us with pleasure how liberally the Frenchmen had shared everything with them.” Both sides drew water from the same well at a farm. The French “used to wait till we trotted off with our cooking pots filled and then they would come up and provide themselves with water.” Occasionally, both sides arrived at the well at the same time. “Thus it happened,” Lanz observed, “that three of us were at the well without any arms when a score of Frenchmen arrived with cooking pots. The Frenchmen were seven times as numerous as ourselves, the thought never struck us that they might fall upon us.” Then, overnight, he would again find himself steeped in savagery. “The spade I found to be a handy weapon,” he remembered. “I hit one opponent between head and shoulder. The sharp spade half went through his body; I heard the cracking of the bones that were struck.” During another assault, Lanz and his comrades leaped into a trench, flinging grenades at the French defenders. Of eight poilus, five were killed outright. Three others began clambering out of the trench. Lanz seized one. “In a trice I was on him. I knocked out some of his teeth. Then he surrendered and raised his hands. . . . He pointed to his wedding ring. He handed me his bottle, inviting me to drink. I told him, ‘You’ve been lucky. A few missing teeth don’t matter. For you the slaughtering is finished. Come along.’ ” As Lanz marched his prisoner to the rear, his strongest emotion was envy.

Lanz and his company were pulled from the line for a rest at Montmédy. The proletarian was disgusted by the number of rear-echelon officers who “loitered about in their faultless uniforms or rode along whip in hand. . . . Many accosted us and asked us rudely why we did not salute them.” The harassment, particularly by haughty youths with a touch of gold on the shoulder, made Lanz and his comrades long for the trenches: “After a few hours we got sick of life twenty miles behind the Verdun front.”

Lanz managed to get a furlough. At the end of it, instead of returning to his unit, he went to a friend’s home and donned civilian clothes. He removed all identification from his uniform, wrapped it around his rifle, along with his canteen and mess kit, and threw the lot into a river during the night. He followed a zigzag course, taking trains that eventually brought him to Düsseldorf. He was by now several days absent without leave, a deserter subject to the death penalty. He made his way on foot to a woods over the German-Dutch border and slipped across. Lanz eventually arrived in Rotterdam, where “I soon obtained a well-paid position and became a man again who could live and not merely exist.” He was one among some twenty thousand German deserters who took refuge in the hospitable Netherlands.

But Rotterdam was still not far enough away. Lanz began scheming to get himself aboard a ship that would take him where he most wanted to be: America.

THE APPALLING WAR in the mud was paralleled briefly by a splendid spectacle on the pristine seas. On May 31, 1916, the British and German fleets squared off near Jutland in the North Sea— twenty-eight British dreadnoughts and nine battle cruisers versus sixteen German dreadnoughts and five battle cruisers. When fog and darkness stilled their guns, the British had lost fourteen ships of all classes and the Germans eleven. The only major naval engagement of the war had ended essentially in a tie of no tactical consequence. But Jutland represented a strategic British victory since the German High Seas Fleet thereafter holed up in port, never again to emerge during the war. Jutland would also have another unintended consequence: with her capital ships essentially out of the fight, Germany turned to submarine warfare, including attacks on neutral vessels, which would eventually contribute to drawing the United States into the war against her.