100 Days to Victory: How the Great War Was Fought and Won 1914-1918 by Saul David

Author:Saul David [David, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2013-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

French soldiers at the entrance to Fort Douaumont after it was retaken from the Germans on 24 October.

The meatgrinder that was Verdun had left the French Army close to breaking point, and would cost General Joseph Joffre, the hero of the Marne, his job as Commander-in-Chief. Joffre was blamed for neglecting Verdun’s defences and allowing the initial German breakthrough; for the relative failure of his much heralded Anglo-French offensive on the Somme; and also for refusing to reinforce the hard-pressed Romanian Army in the autumn of 1916, thus contributing to the latter’s rapid defeat by Austro-German and Turkish forces. On 27 December, to sweeten the pill of his sacking, Joffre was made a marshal of France and the government’s ‘technical military adviser’ (a hollow post he soon resigned from).10

His replacement was not Foch or General Noël Edouard de Castelnau (Joffre’s chief of staff), the obvious choices, or even Pétain, the hero of the early Verdun fighting. Instead it was the relatively junior Nivelle who, following the recapture of Fort Douaumont, was seen by most Allied politicians as the ‘saviour’ they had long sought. Tall, charming, cultured and eloquent, Nivelle had an almost hypnotic allure. Even Lloyd George, generally mistrustful of generals, was disarmed by Nivelle’s perfect English (his mother was British) and steely self-confidence. It was, after all, Nivelle and not Pétain who had coined the famous Verdun promise: ‘Ils ne passeront pas!’ (‘They will not pass!’).11 Now as Commander-in-Chief he used a new mantra: ‘Our method has proved itself. Victory is certain, I give you my assurance.’12

But, despite Nivelle’s late victories, no one could claim outright success at Verdun. ‘The campaign of 1916,’ wrote the future Chancellor Prince Max of Baden, ‘ended in bitter disillusionment all round. We and our enemies had shed our best blood in streams, and neither we nor they had come one step nearer to victory. The word “deadlock” was on every lip.’13

The French Army was indeed ‘bled white’ by the fighting, as Falkenhayn had intended; but the German Army had also been badly weakened and was, by 1917, in no fit state to take advantage. Crown Prince Wilhelm, the German commander at Verdun, wrote: ‘The Mill on the Meuse ground to powder the hearts as well as the bodies of the troops.’14

Typical of the carnage was the summit of the Mort Homme, described by a French sergeant in the winter of 1917 as resembling in places ‘a rubbish dump in which there had been accumulated shreds of cloth, smashed weapons, shattered helmets, rotting rations, bleached bones and putrescent flesh’.15

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