Road to Verdun World War I's Most Momentous Battle and the Folly of Nationalism

1 The Bois des Caures To foresee "the war of tomorrow" was not difficult: it was bound to come. To predict this attack on Verdun . . . was more daring. We're about to have it. Lieutenant Colonel Emile Driant, letter to a friend, 20 February 1916 Surprise and speed, assets that military commanders have always been schooled to prize above virtually all others, were rarely at their disposal in the First World War. The Germans still hoped to enjoy them at Verdun, but first they had to put their faith in the lessons of mass warfare as they had learned them since 1914. Elaborate preparation, it seemed, was the key to victory. Falkenhayn might have hesitated to provide resources on a scale that met the large promises of his memo to the Kaiser or the specific needs that the Crown Prince discerned, yet what he authorized in the compromises hammered out immediately after Christmas 1915 was still a massive concentration of force. Indeed, it was the most massive yet gathered in a war that had already proved a deadlock of concentrated force. The salient where this force gathered in the New Year described a 60-kilometer curve around Verdun. Prominent hills marked the tips of either wing: Cote 304, in French hands, and the Butte de Montfaucon, in German hands, on the left bank of the river, and Les Eparges, which the Germans had vainly tried to take early in 1915, on the right bank. Louis Madelina native of Lorraine and scholar of Napoleonic history as well as one of several staff officers who set out to chronicle Verduncompared the landscape to an intermittently rocky coastline facing the sea. This, indeed, is exactly what it had been at some remote point in geological history. The effect is most clearly marked in the eastern and southern sectors, from the village of Ornes down to Les Eparges, where the Hauts de Meuse overlook the Woevre. Here the French and Germans confronted each other on the plain, but the bulk of the French defense lay in the commanding hills behind them. For their part, the German positions still enjoyed the advantages for which the attackers of a salient naturally look. All were well served by supply-lines for bringing in extra troops and equipment, and many lay in deep forest offering cover to new deployments. "Build no more fortresses, build railways": the elder Moltke's dictum had been a guiding principle of the German army since the days of the Franco-Prussian War. That war had given the Germans control of the long-distance lines leading to Metz, a major railway center, and their advances in 1914 had given them command of those serving Charleville-Mezieres, Longwy and Briey. All came within 100 kilometers of Verdun. In the New Year of 1916 the Germans set about extending them down to the towns, villages and woodland fringing the salient. Here they added a further network of narrow-gauge tracks penetrating the forests; at some points these came within half a kilometer of the front lines. With the belief in railways went a belief in artillery, particularly the heavy artillery unmuzzled in the advance through Belgium which had begun the war. The most notorious of the German siege weapons was the Krupp 420mm howitzer, the Dicke Berta (or Big Bertha) that had flattened the forts of Liege.* Over seven meters long, it was transported to * Nonmilitary readers may appreciate being reminded that artillery weapons are formally designated by the caliber of the shells they fire: thus the Big Bertha fired a shell with a diameter of 420mm, or about 161/2 inches, and a 77 fired a shell with a diameter of 77mm, or about 3 inches. the battlefield in sections and took almost a day to assemble for firing; its shells were nearly as tall as a man and many times as heavy. Almost as powerful were the Krupp 380mm naval gunthe Germans, likeOusby, Ian is the author of 'Road to Verdun World War I's Most Momentous Battle and the Folly of Nationalism' with ISBN 9780385503938 and ISBN 0385503938.