- Verdun by voluntarily giving up the greater part of the ground
taken. However, in the autumn of 1916, I thought it necessary to postpone that decision: we have sacrificed in this affair a great part of our best troops, and up to that time we allowed our people to hope that the struggle would terminate gloriously for us. Further, if we had withdrawn at that moment, it might have made the too facile impression that all our sacrifices had been in vain. I wished to avoid that strain on the moral of our population, which was already highly tried. In suspending our attacks on
i Verdun we counted on our adversaries themselves adopting, in
. this region, a purely defensive attitude; our hope was not
- realized. At the end of Oct. the French launched a counter-
attack on a large scale on the right bank of the Meuse; it was
boldly carried out and overwhelmed us. We lost Douaumont
i and we had not the troops to retake this monument of German
- heroism."
The conditions under which that action unfolded itself were as follows: In front of Souville and of the line of forts a stout barrier had been formed, which included several well-organized positions; the battle had died down on the right bank, and the French renewed the offensive from the Meuse to the Woevre,
j and regained their superiority over the enemy. On Sept. 13 the
- President of the French Republic came to bring to the martyr
town the cross of the Legion of Honour and the decorations
' which the sovereigns of Allied countries had conferred upon it.
i From the casemates of the citadel, during a ceremony of moving simplicity, he pronounced an eloquent speech which consecrated
i the victory. But he had to keep all his fascination for the word which was at last to be spoken. Events had proved that every
- well-organized attack always commenced with success, and that
it was exceedingly difficult to limit a victorious advance. Now above all was it necessary to throw back the enemy from
I that barrier which had at last been remade. The hour had passed
I for those little attacks which aimed at the recapture of a few
i hundred metres; they had enabled them to get rid of successively the small or large pockets which the German line had dug into the French, but it was only by carrying the whole line forward at one bound that ground could be gained to advantage. An
i operation on a grand scale was called for.
General Nivelle entrusted Gen. Mangin with the study of this task. The latter considered the recapture of Douaumont as a possible consequence of success; this scheme was adopted after discussion, and the fort did not come into it except as one of the objectives of the attack. The same applied to Fort Vaux. The main object thus became the reconstitution in its integrity of the barrier of forts round Verdun.
General Mangin had all the necessary means at his disposal to bring this operation to a successful issue. He had a very powerful mass of artillery 289 field and mountain guns (calibre 65 to 96 mm.) and 314 heavy guns (100 to 400 mm.); 3 divisions in the.
' front line, with 2 Senegalese battalions and i Somali battalion;
1 3 divisions under his immediate orders in the second line; while the adjoining divisions on the front of attack each placed a regiment in the line. The enemy opposed him with 7 divisions but they were very dispersed in depth: 16 battalions were in the first line; 6 in immediate support and in the zone to be taken; 1 1 in near support, which were all to be engaged on the evening of the attack; 25 in reserve, who would later come up to fill in the gaps. The French had located 209 German batteries (about 800 guns) capable of coming into action when the offensive began. After three days of destructive bombardment they feigned a general attack. The ruse was completely successful, and 158 batteries were disclosed; these were under counter- battery fire the next day, the day of the attack, to such effect that only 90 batteries opened fire that day, and then only under unfavourable conditions. The initial artillery superiority of the Germans had then disappeared. This was foreseen in the scheme of attack; the French commander knew that the means at his disposal would be inferior at the beginning to those of the de- fence, but would become superior during the action.
The infantry strengths were almost equal on both sides. The disposal of the German divisions on very narrow fronts, and some-
what hemmed in, lent itself less to manceuvre than did that of the French divisions, whose front was quite double, but above everything else the experience of former actions had shown the efficacy of the methods employed in this zone ; a barrage of field guns falling behind the trenches nailed the defenders to them whilst the heavy artillery and the trench mortars made them indisposed for the fight. At the same time the fire of other heavy guns filled up the openings of the deep shelters, which in times of quiet served as strongholds for the defence; when the assault waves started, preceded by the creeping barrage from 70 to 80 metres in advance, they would not find more than rare local resist- ance, and would advance up to the deep shelters whose occupants would be taken prisoner. General Mangin was able to inform Gen. Joffre and Gen. Nivelle that two hours before the attack 22 German battalions had been almost completely wiped out. As far as the forts were concerned they were laid open; it was impossible to determine their capture with the same degree of certainty as that of the conquest of ground, but the occupation of the superstructure was certain and the capture of the whole appeared to be a matter of two to three days at the most.
If a success of this nature could be foreseen with such certainty, it was not due to an accumulation of material of war, since, at the beginning of the struggle the German artillery was undeni- ably much superior in numbers, in range, in rapidity of fire, and even in calibre (with the exception of a few French guns of 400 and 370 mm., whose fire was solely directed against the forts); nor was it due to the employment of masses of infantry which would overwhelm the enemy by sheer weight of numbers, since the density of the attack was thin so as not to expose more men to loss than those actually required to obtain the desired result. It was due to the use of logical methods, of well thought-out artillery bombardments, which gave them a superiority over the enemy and which compensated in large measure for inferiority in numbers and material; it was due, too, to the dash of the French troops and their confidence in their leaders. It was, however, further due to a perfect understanding in the command. The army commander provided his subordinate, who was in charge of the attack, with all the means at his disposal, and if they were not available he could ask for them from headquarters. Another factor was a thorough knowledge of the particular zone, and the experiences gained in this zone by the same leaders and the same staffs, who had been on the spot during a bitter struggle that had lasted several months. The result was assisted by the mistakes of the enemy, who had practically everywhere only one line of defence, in front of which he had been able to set up only elementary obstacles. These conditions were to be found again on the same field of battle two months later; but they were exceptional and weighed very heavily in favour of the French.
The artillery preparation, which commenced on the 2oth and continued to the 24th with increasing intensity, produced its usual effects. The Germans gave themselves up singly or in little groups; a strayed carrier-pigeon brought in a message of distress from a battalion commander, who said that his troops were not in a state to fight. Finally, at 11.40, the artillery lengthened its fire and the French infantry left their assault trenches. A dense fog hid their advance from the enemy, who did not open fire till 12 minutes after zero time, when the two front waves had crossed his first trenches. The objective was reached in an hour, and it was consolidated very rapidly. In the first instructions the pause was to have been for half-an-hour; the commander of the groups of armies, considering it advisable to consolidate the position, the conquest of which was practically certain, had insisted that it should be much longer, and after discussion had finally fixed the pause for two hours. The bom- bardment, however, had been most thorough; a 42o-mm. shell had brought about an explosion which was followed by a fire; one would have thought that it would have been a great advan- tage to hurry on and to profit by the confusion. Gen. Mangin, too, had fixed the time for consolidation as one hour.
The 38th Div. under Guyot de Salins formed the left wing. His colonial Moroccan regiment penetrated into Douaumont fort, which the Germans had evacuated the day before owing to
