Pain and indignation
February 29th to March 6th 1916
VERDUN WAS A world without boundaries.
The name of Marechal Philippe Petain was to become, in later decades, execrated. In its wake, his talents and courage at Verdun have often been airbrushed out of history. The challenges he faced in beating down the German steamroller were immense, and so too were his achievements.
His first success was to revitalise the supply lines to the beleaguered town. The Germans had cut off the main railway link and the inadequate Meusien line remaining was used to transport food. Everything else upon which the town depended arrived along la Voie Sacree — a dirt road, twenty feet wide, which led from the provincial capital of Bar-Le-Duc, 45 miles away.
Petain divided it into six sections, with repair shops and refuelling stations, local commanders and military police (the latter to direct the traffic). He called in the Service Automobile de l’Armee Francaise to organise the largest use of motorised vehicles in the war so far and, thanks to their efforts, French trucks carried 190,000 men, 22,500 tons of munitions and 2,500 tons of other materiel up la Voie Sacree in the first two weeks of battle.
Such was the infrastructure of siege warfare in the early twentieth century. The unhappy commander also found himself pressed into service while coming down with double pneumonia.
In the circumstances, the warning that it could be fatal seemed ironic, and the injunction to rest superfluous. He dosed himself with medicines and, wrapped in blankets, directed operations from his headquarters in the town hall at Souilly.
He immediately ordered the reinforcements of all the remaining forts, increased the number of guns on the heights west of Verdun and telephoned all the local commanders, saying, ‘Keep up your courage. I know I can depend on you.’ It was backs to the wall.
Most French commanders favoured major infantry attacks. By their side, Petain — who believed battle would be won by superior firepower — seemed heterodox.
His claim that, ‘Cannon conquers, infantry occupies’ was made more sustainable thanks to the outstanding 75mm French guns which were now massed to fire down on advancing Germans. The fighting which ensued was predictably horrific.
As French surgeon George Duhamel reported, ‘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.’
Jesuit priest Paul Dubrulle, serving as a sergeant in the 8th Regiment, was so traumatised by one shelling (which left a headless and limbless body impaled on a tree) that he ‘implored God to put an end to these indignities. Never have I prayed with so much heart.’
Periodically, fresh troops arrived in Verdun to relieve those returning from battle. Their first sight of the veterans was often disconcerting: ‘The men in their greatcoats were ashen-faced, staring like those who have come back from the brink. One of those ghosts stood up on his seat, mouth pinched, eyes glittering in their sockets, and waved a bony arm towards the horizon. You knew this silent gesture signified unspeakable horror. From time to time a soldier stood up, muddy, haggard, terrifying, and shouted at us ‘Don’t go there, it’s dangerous!’ We were on the road to Verdun and our imaginations were working overtime.’
Nurses had no need of imagination. They knew. Elsie Knocker, now the Baroness de T’Serclaes, and Mairi Chisholm worked on in Pervyse, catering for the Belgian soldiers marooned behind the flooded areas which were keeping the Germans at bay. Mairi had just turned twenty on 26 February and was depressed by news of casualties: It will be very terrible this year. So many good lives still being lost and absolutely nothing to be gained by it all. It makes one very sad to realise how unnecessary it all is…one wonders how it will all end.
It was a very good question — that sense of growing futility was one destined to become more ubiquitous and shrill in the months ahead. Meantime, the two women laboured to get the publicity which would help to fund their work and had letters published in the Irish Times appealing for funds. Their costs included £8 a month in petrol (around £500 now), repairs of vehicles £10, coal and potatoes £4; meat for the soups they made for the soldiers £2, and eggs, bread, butter and laundry another £6 a month. On 2 March, they were told that King Albert would be inspecting the trenches at Pervyse and would visit them, which he duly did. In an age mesmerised by royalty, that was the kind of publicity which was a fund-raiser in its own right.
As the savagery in Verdun gathered momentum, war everywhere felt increasingly total. Inhibitions concerning the targeting of civilians seemed to belong apparently to another era. Hull was attacked by two Zeppelins, L-11 and L-14, in the early hours of March 5. For its citizens, the two hours during which the raid lasted were terrifying: many fled to the outskirts but, for those who remained, there was a voyeuristic fascination which not even terror could wholly eclipse. One diarist recorded: From ground level, observers could see the trapdoor of the Zeppelin open and shut, through which the commander released his bomb-load by electrical control. Eighteen people died in the raid, two from shock, and fifty-two were injured.
In one of the cruel ironies of war, the two airships had intended to attack Rosyth but were blown off course by strong winds and snowstorms — all week in Britain the weather had been particularly bad, with heavy snow causing transport problems throughout the country. L-11 dropped a bomb aimed at the Royal Station Hotel, the headquarters of Humber Defence which fell instead on a house in Collier Street, killing the wife of a docker and four of their children, including a two-year-old. The solitary anti-aircraft gun managed a single shot, and the paucity of city defences would lead to a huge outcry.
By contrast, the war at sea during the week saw a rare excursion into relative chivalry and restraint. The minesweeper, HMS Primula, fell victim to the submarine U-35 in the Eastern Mediterranean on 1 March, with the loss of three lives — a modest total, explained by the scrupulous adherence to the rules of engagement of its commander, Lothar von Arnauld de la Periere, who always allowed crews of enemy merchant ships to board lifeboats before sinking their vessels. He would become the most successful U-boat commander of the war. For the Entente, however, the good news ended there. The Royal Navy had tried to intercept a German raider which broke into the North Sea the previous day and, in the ensuing struggle, both SMS Greif and HMS Alcantara of the Northern Patrol, enforcing the blockade of Germany, were sunk. German losses were 187 dead and 125 captured, and those of the British 72.
While small beer by comparison, the Germans had been vastly irritated the previous week when Portugal seized 36 German ships, interned since the beginning of the war on the river Tagus at the request of the British. She now added to the insult by overriding German protests and seizing another vessel, a passenger and freight carrier Admiral at Lourenco Marques, explaining, not very diplomatically, that she needed them for transport.
The Germans were greatly bucked, however, by the triumphant return this week of their hugely successful merchant raider SS Moewe. Like the British ‘Q’ ships, Moewe had been disguised to look innocuous and to sport a neutral flag until it closed in upon an intended victim at which point the German flag was hoisted and guns revealed. Since December 1915, its exploits had become famous throughout Germany. It had sunk thirteen ships, including HMS Edward VII near Scapa Flow, and taken two others to harbour as booty, including the British passenger liner, Appam, now in America, laid mines and confounded Allied shipping as her routes crossed as far as the Brazilian coast. She was now given a great welcome home at Wilhelmshaven, escorted by lines of battleships to the cheers of all their crews. Her commander, the superbly named Graf Nikolaus zu Dohna-Schlodien, was congratulated by Admiral Reinhard Scheer, Commander of the High Seas Fleet, who came aboard to salute him and the crew.
The moment offered some respite from the widespread frustration felt at the mystifying inaction of the German High Seas Fleet which had spent most of the war so far confined to harbour. High expectations had been moulded by the bombast and rhetoric of the Kaiser whose naval fixation had, in pre-war days, led to one third of the military budget being spent on battleships. In retrospect it is easy to see that, thanks to the activities of their U-boats, the Germans were already taking more than enough risks to alienate world opinion. It was also about to get a whole lot worse. Germany formally announced to the USA on 29 February that her unlimited submarine campaign would start, as planned, at midnight.
On 3 March, the U.S Senate tabled a resolution warning Americans against sailing in belligerent ships. The vote passed with 68 votes to 14. Regrettably, this was not a moment which the novelist Henry James had lived to see. The old man had died, aged 72, at his home in Chelsea on 28 February, having become a British citizen the previous July, partly to show his displeasure at America’s reluctance to get involved. Having written pamphlets praising the Allies, visited Belgian refugees and wounded British soldiers, he had also become President of the American Volunteer Ambulance Motor Corps. In an effort to publicise its work and appeal for funds James had, remarkably, given an interview to the New York Times in April 1915, praising ‘the noble work of relief which a group of young Americans, mostly graduates of Harvard, Yale and Princeton, are carrying on in their stretch of the fighting line in Northern France.’
James had lived long enough to learn he had been awarded the Order of Merit in the 1916 New Year’s Honours. Well before then, he had also made his feelings clear about German intentions: ‘How can one help seeing that such aggression, if hideously successful in Europe, would, with as little loss of time as possible, proceed to apply itself to the American side of the world, and how can one, therefore, not feel that the Allies are fighting to the death for the soul and the purpose and the future that are in us, for the defense of every ideal that has most guided our growth and that most assures our unity?’ As regards the British, James felt it a privilege ‘to share the inspiration and see further revealed the character of this decent and dauntless people.’ His passionate support of the war had done much to cement his reputation as an anglophile and thus to serve as an eloquent source of rebuke to the neutrality of the United States. After his funeral at Chelsea Old Church on 3 March, and cremation in Golders Green, his sister-in-law, Alice, smuggled his ashes to the States — perhaps determined to reclaim him as an American.
James’s anglophilia might have been an excuse for preening among some civilians. For British soldiers in the greatest danger it would have seemed only an irrelevance. Those besieged at Kut-al-Amara were now seriously worried. Having seen the water level rise dramatically in the river Tigris, three feet higher in two days, they were desperate for rescue or, at least, for news. As Edward Mousley recorded:
A large sweepstake on the date of the relief has been started for all European troops. Relief is defined as the time when our first boat passes the Fort. The contingency of our having ultimately to surrender is not included. …Reuters tell us of a big German shove at Verdun. What an awful slaughter yard that will be!
Of little consolation to them, perhaps, but the same week proved distinctly successful for Allied forces in other parts of Africa. On 29 February, the siege of the Cameroons was raised, with most remaining Germans spirited across the border to Spanish Guinea (and some of the grander ones to Madrid). The unconventional but highly successful General Lukin, having inflicted a thorough drubbing upon Senussi tribesmen at Agagia the previous week, now went and occupied Sidi Barrani on the coast.
Among those in high politics, the appetite for intrigue seemed immune to events elsewhere. Asquith’s government found itself increasingly imperilled by its critics, whose indignation was stoked by its failure to bring about any decisive victory in the war, by the continuing reverberations of old scandals (especially the munitions crisis and Gallipoli) and by the perception that the Prime Minister himself was a spent force.
Since January 1916, a secretive group — dubbed the ‘Monday Night Cabal’ — met weekly to plot his overthrow. Led by the PM’s erstwhile friend, Alfred Milner, it attracted support from Geoffrey Robinson, (editor of The Times), Waldorf Astor (editor of the Observer), and the passionate Unionist, Sir Edward Carson, who had resigned his post as Attorney General in October 1915, becoming a focus for disaffection with the government. The unscrupulous General Sir Henry Wilson, Director of Military Operations at the War Office was also involved, as was Asquith’s ambitious and far from disinterested Minister for Munitions, David Lloyd George.
A recent catalyst for intrigue lay in the fallout following conscription. On March 2, the Military Service Act enacting conscription came into effect. Although opposition groups such as the No Conscription Fellowship would never achieve much traction, there were well-founded fears at the time that it might.
Many women in particular were appalled — some at the prospect of losing menfolk and others that women’s wages would be slashed in consequence. The Woman’s Dreadnought (mouthpiece of the East London Federation of the Suffragettes) urged its readers, ‘Women, protest with all your strength and energy against Conscription…Compulsion is dangerous to the working people and wrong in principle, and no compromise can make it either wise or just…once the wedge is in, it will be easier to drive it further into the heart of British liberties, than for the people to wrench it out.’
Asquith’s heart had never been in conscription and he was wearied by the endless in-fighting its passage had provoked. His consolations this week were exclusively domestic.
With one son, Raymond, on active service in France and another, Beb, still recovering from shell-shock, it was a source of huge delight for him to welcome home his son, Oc, who had served with distinction in Gallipoli.
Oc arrived on 4 March and was reunited with his ecstatic stepmother, Margot, in Walmer Castle. She wrote in her diary: “Oc is so wonderful — the greatest and best friend I have in the world, so much the best regulated of Henry’s children and with far the finest character … I can’t imagine a greater joy than for me to have his protecting love just now.”
One cannot begrudge the joy of families reunited with those who had fought bravely. Oc Asquith’s excellences included a stern probity which had led him to refuse leave, along with brother officers, until it was granted to his men on the same terms as the battalion’s officers.
Yet one of the recurring dissonances of this time is the very different fates of officers and Other Ranks. This was a pregnant issue especially in the case of the many thousands of soldiers now prisoners of war.
Theoretically, they enjoyed the protection accorded by the 1907 Hague Convention which stipulated that signatory countries should send relief to POWs in the form of food parcels and clothing. In practice, however, its benefits were experienced unevenly. Germany and Britain organised such relief well; Austro-Hungarians and Russians enjoyed far less consistent provisioning.
And, for all PoWs, there was a brusque apartheid based on rank and, in effect, upon class. Ordinary soldiers were entitled to five square metres of space, one blanket, a sack filled with straw or wood shavings and could be given manual labour to do without pay. Officers had three times as much space, a mattress and a pillow, were exempt from manual labour, had an orderly to look after them and were paid a monthly salary.
A Russian soldier from Moscow, Alexei Zyikov, captured in Russian Poland in 1915, languished in Marienburg POW camp in north-eastern Germany. As usually the case with Russian prisoners, no food parcels reached him and his diary chronicled his sufferings. He noted:
Our people resent the fact that the French, Belgians and English live so well and are not forced to work. They don’t go about hungry like we do. They boast to us that their governments send them bread and parcels from home. But we, Russians, get nothing: our punishment for fighting badly. Or, perhaps, Mother Russia has forgotten about us.
This howl of pain and indignation embodied much that was prophetic.
