The Price Of Glory: Verdun 1916 (1994) - Plot & Excerpts
I have a Sick Child right now, which means I'm currently running on less than three hours' sleep. This feels to me like total exhaustion. Still, things could be a lot worse. It's been instructive to remind myself that French soldiers in the line at Verdun not uncommonly went eleven days without any rest at all. Although when I cheerfully reminded my wife of this fact at 4 a.m. she didn't seem to find it very reassuring.Eleven days though! Imagine trying to confront an armed Brandenburger with that level of sleep-deprivation. Luckily, such an eventuality rarely came up: one of the most striking things about Verdun was the fact that you were unlikely ever to face up to the enemy, or even see him. All you had to do was wait until your turn in the front-line trenches, and then endure as much shelling as you could before you were eviscerated.This perhaps sounds like some grimly comic exaggeration, but in fact the French commanders were quite explicit about the pointless deaths they expected from their men. General Nivelle's orders were to ‘Ne pas se rendre, ne pas reculer d'un pouce, se faire tuer sur place’, while one colonel told his troops: ‘On the day they want to, they will massacre you to the last man, and it is your duty to fall.’As pep-talks go, that's not exactly the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. In fact it's only a couple of rungs up from ‘Men, why don't all of you fuck off and die.’What was it all about? Well, the Germans guessed rightly that France would never surrender Verdun, which was a key fortress-town near the front lines. They therefore reckoned that by attacking it continually, they would force the French to sacrifice themselves in order to prevent its loss: ‘the forces of France will bleed to death,’ in the words of the famous German memo, ‘whether we reach our goal or not.’This subtle plan had, as Captain E. Blackadder would later put it, just one tiny flaw: it was bollocks. The problem was that the Germans attacking Verdun were compelled to haemorrhage troops almost as fast as the French. So you had both armies hurling great bodies of men at each other, both sides constantly decimated by extremely heavy artillery fire, all over an objective that the Germans never even seriously expected to win.It was very quickly obvious that the whole affair was pointless; but, because of astonishingly limp leadership on both sides, it went on for fully ten months. At the end of which, the front line was in roughly the same place it had been at the beginning and three hundred thousand boys were dead.As Paul Fussell has pointed out elsewhere, to call Verdun a ‘battle’ – as though this relentless endurance of shelling were remotely similar to Blenheim or Waterloo – is to give entirely the wrong impression. Men did not fight men at Verdun, or very rarely; instead, men were pitted against heavy artillery. They heard little but screaming shells and lived – if they were lucky – half-underground in trenches where the water was often waist-high. The ground had been churned up so many times that corpses were (to borrow a cooking term) folded in throughout, and body-parts protruded from the trench walls or confounded your spade when you tried to dig in.The psychological effect of this on the soldiers is…well, it can hardly be imagined. One priest, Sergeant Dubrelle, wrote home with some decidedly un-Catholic feelings:Having despaired of living amid such horror, we begged God not to have us killed – the transition is too atrocious – but just to let us be dead. We had but one desire; the end!Alistair Horne – rising to the peaks of desperate irony that Verdun demands – comments: ‘At least this part of Dubrelle's prayers was answered the following year.’ Horne's tone and command of his material really is excellent throughout; he is very good on the political side, he offers outstanding character sketches of the major players, but he is also determined to make clear the experience of the regular soldiers who, amidst the horror, enacted ‘countless, unrecorded Thermopylaes’.Many of the peripheral details here are fascinating. I knew of course that cavalry was still considered a strong tactic at the start of the war, but I had not previously appreciated how proportionally undeveloped was the use of motor-cars. In 1914, there were only 170 vehicles in the entire French army, and the Senegalese troops brought in to the service depots at first ate the grease.One of the most riveting aspects of learning about the First World War, for me, has been the extent to which it is inseparable from the Second, so that whole period of 1914-1945 can be understood (as one historian said) almost as another Thirty Years War. This element comes across strongly in Horne as well, in unexpectedly tragic ways. It was Verdun that convinced French commanders of the vital necessity of strong forts, leading to their later over-dependence on the Maginot Line; indeed, ‘more than any isolated event of the First War, Verdun led to France's defeat in 1940’. While on the other side of the lines, it created ‘a vacuum of leadership in Germany into which rushed the riff-raff of the Himmlers and Goebbels’.The most prominent symbol of this trajectory is poor Pétain, who emerges here as one of the great tragic figures of the century. Deeply protective of his troops, by far the most humanitarian French general, he would almost certainly have evacuated the whole Verdun salient if he'd been allowed; instead, he was forced to preside over a protracted slaughter. His resulting defeatism and pessimism were the first steps on the road that led inexorably to Vichy France.In terms of raw numbers, there were probably more outrageous encounters; 20,000 British alone were killed on just the first day of the Somme, for instance. But what made Verdun uniquely horrific was how long it went on for. Even academic, judicious Horne finds himself concluding that ‘It is probably no exaggeration to call Verdun the “worst” battle in history’, and a microcosm of the wider conflagration:It was the indecisive battle in an indecisive war; the unnecessary battle in an unnecessary war; the battle that had no victors in a war that had no victors.One feels deeply that what happened from February to December 1916 was a ghastly mistake for the species as a whole. Then again, perhaps the most appalling thing is the possibility that this is not so. ‘War is less costly than servitude,’ writes the French novelist Jean Dutourd, in a comment that Horne quotes twice and that I found utterly chilling: ‘the choice is always between Verdun and Dachau.’ Now there's a choice to keep you up at night.
This was my first WWI battle-level book and it was very informative. Sad, too, because Verdun is among the worst battles in history. (Horne makes the case that it is the worst battle in history, even worse than Stalingrad, and he might be right.)Faced with stalemate on the Western Front, Falkenhayn, German chief of staff, came up with a plan to bleed the French army white. He would attack a target they had to defend, like the forts in front of Verdun, and then let attrition take its toll. There was fighting around Verdun before the battle started, and there was fighting after, but the main campaign started with the German attack in February of 1916. Of course, for the German front-line soldiers, the goal was to take Verdun—not just to attack it and force the French to defend it—so the early months of the battle consisted of German breakthroughs that never got as far as they could have, because Falkenhayn wouldn’t provide enough troops to exploit front-line successes. The lack of honest communication on strategy between Falkenhayn and his generals cost the German Army dearly. And naturally the French defended their territory tenaciously, through new weapons like phosgene gas and flame-throwers, through mud and shells and more shells, usually while hungry and thirsty and surrounded by corpses.What Falkenhayn didn’t realize was that attrition would hit both armies. By the year’s end, the French and German armies were exhausted. The German army would not recover during WWI, and it’s easy to argue that the French army never recovered at all. Yet the longer the battle went on, the more important victory became for each side, and so the battle continued.It’s easy to picture WWI as a horrible series of men in trenches, suffering huge casualties to take only a few yards of territory, commanded by officers that kept repeating the same mistakes over and over. That’s true for Verdun, in part, but that might be an oversimplification. German storm troops had good success with their new techniques early in the battle. Indeed, the French learned from them and French troops, mimicking their enemy, had some early success in the Somme. Toward the end of Verdun, Nivelle perfected the rolling barrage technique with artillery, and the French were able to recapture most of their lost territory at what, compared with the rest of the battle, seemed like lightening speed. Naturally the Germans quickly adapted, so the rolling barrage technique didn’t work the next year and stalemate returned to the trenches.Horne concentrated on the leadership at Verdun, but included information on the grunts involved in some of the heavy fighting, especially that surrounding the forts. After reading this book, I find myself reluctantly respecting Petain. Most of my knowledge about Petain prior to reading this involved his WWII actions, but during WWI he was the right man at the right place, a rare general who saw men as men. Most other WWI-era generals seemed to see men in the same way they saw bullets and shells—go ahead and use them up; they’re expendable; we’ll find more somewhere. Horne quotes another writer who says War is less costly than servitude . . . the choice is always between Verdun and Dachau. But in 1940, Petain didn’t know about Dachau, he only knew Verdun, and I can understand his desire not to repeat it. (He was also very old and may have been slightly manipulated during WWII. And he was handed a mess he didn’t make and I don’t think anyone could have fixed it at that point. My prior contempt for Petain has been transferred to Laval. Who knew this book would turn me into a Petain apologist?)Horne’s writing is good, though it was written for an audience that reads far more French than I do, and he rarely provides translations. He sums the battle up with these words: Neither side ‛won’ at Verdun. It was the indecisive battle in an indecisive war; the unnecessary battle in an unnecessary war; the battle that had no victors in a war that had no victors.
What do You think about The Price Of Glory: Verdun 1916 (1994)?
Despite the age of this book it still remains a classic of WW1. Horne's ability to describe a character in single a paragraph is exceptional among historians. Admittedly it does get a bit repetitive towards the end as the carnage continues and continues (but so did the real battle!) The last view pages nearly brings the reader to tears as he discusses the fate of so many survivors of Verdun and of the battlefield it's self. Some may disagree with Horne's conclusion that the Battle permanently scarred French morale and doomed them to defeat in WW2. Just wish Pres. Bush and his advisers had listened more to Mr Horne's about fighting an insurgent war.
—Bob Daugherty
If you want to understand World War I, this book about the battle of Verdun is a must-read.A history professor once told me that World War I, the French Revolution, and the U.S. Constitution had inspired more history than any other events or episodes. World War I exhausted Europe; at the outset, its armies, navies and colonies held dominion over much of the globe, but at the end it was a pauper continent, with both victors and vanquished shattered by deaths and debts, reparations and revolutions. And Verdun marked a pivotal moment in this transformation, for here the generals revealed that they had too few ideas about how to win--but too many men still to feed into the meatgrinder.Because of battles like Verdun, many associate World War I with images and episodes straight from "All Quiet on the Western Front" or "Paths of Glory"--futile attacks and counterattacks, weary and shell-shocked men running across pulverized land only to be killed or maimed by mass-produced bullets and explosives, victims of Europe's collective skill at the industries of war. In this meta-narrative, the perpetrators of this mass slaughter remain hidden, distant, aloof, living in idyllic chateaux miles away from the mud and the blood, their actions either inscrutable or idiotic.Horne pulls back the curtain to reveal the character and personality of those generals, showing their unique strengths and weaknesses and how those character traits played themselves out in one of the greatest battles in human history. By writing so well about the decision-makers, he makes the churned earth and spilled blood more tragic--and more understandable. Verdun, a battle Horne describes "the battlefield with the highest density of dead per square yard that has probably ever been known" was by all accounts a supreme test of wills for both France and Germany. In Horne's hands, though, it becomes something more tangible and real, a clash not just of armies, but of people.In addition to the excellent human descriptions, though, Horne writes wonderfully and vividly about the scenes of the battle. Some authors and books wring the life out of historical events, turning them into stale words on dead paper. But Horne brings this monstrous battle to life, vividly describing the claustrophobic underground tunnels of shell-battered Fort Douamont and the clutching terror of phosgene gas. Horne takes a catastrophic battle of mind-boggling proportions and makes it all too real.
—G.d. Brennan
Some selfish but ultimately healthy mechanism insulates us—most of us, most of the time—from life's horrors. Without a mental carapace to protect us from the sheer awfulness of things, we’d be reduced to masses of quivering, suicidal jelly before we even got out of bed. Take this humdrum little factoid: a quarter of a million men died in the Battle of Verdun. A quarter of a million. The mind refuses to assimilate such a statistic. Sure, you can understand it, but its full significance doesn’t register; it couldn’t possibly, because if you ever managed to grasp the immensity of suffering concealed behind that cold, round figure, you’d go insane. Something very, very bad happened at Verdun in 1916. Not just bad in the trite war-is-hell kind of way, but cosmically, apocalyptically bad. Those who experienced the battle groped instinctively for religious or mythological analogues: ‘Moloch’, they called it, or ‘Minotaur’, or simply ‘the monster’. All these nicknames attest to a feeling shared by nearly everyone who was there: a sense that the war had finally exceeded the reach of human control or comprehension. As the editor of the German Reichsarchiven put it:...Verdun transformed men’s souls. Whoever floundered through this morass full of the shrieking and the dying, whoever shivered in those nights, had passed the last frontier of life, and henceforth bore deep within him the leaden memory of a place that lies between Life and Death, or perhaps beyond either... But ordinary soldiers could be no less eloquent. A French sergeant—who had once been filled with ‘the patriotism of the warrior’—wrote to his wife:I have changed terribly. I did not want to tell you anything of the horrible lassitude which the war has engendered in me, but you force me to it. I feel myself crushed…I am a flattened man. Or there’s the Jesuit priest who had enlisted in the ranks and who found himself expressing, in the words of the author, ‘singularly un-Catholic sentiments’: Having despaired of living amid such horror, we begged God not to have us killed—the transition is too atrocious—but just to let us be dead. We had but one desire: the end.Military history per se doesn’t really interest me: I couldn’t care less how many meters XX Corps advanced or how the 9th Hussars effected a sweeping pincer movement. And in the vast, chaotic abattoir that Verdun became—troops being marched up to the line would sarcastically bleat like sheep—such tactical details are even less relevant than usual. Alistair Horne knows this, and though he’s very good at the ‘big picture’ stuff, his true forte is the telling close-up, where he zooms in on a solitary individual to show you the grime on his face, to let you hear his cynical jokes and—all too often—witness his final moments.The Price of Glory contains dozens of these inset portraits, many of which read like novels compressed into a single paragraph. They give an overwhelming impression of the variety, intensity and plain oddness of all those vanished lives. Here’s Horne describing Jean Navarre, a French fighter ace:The son of a wealthy paper manufacturer and something of a playboy, Navarre loathed killing and claimed he flew only because he had to. He took poorly even to relaxed airforce discipline; he was incapable of keeping a log-book, and was at one time placed under arrest for disobedience. The men in the trenches adored him because when there was no enemy in the air he would ‘distract’ them by hurling his red plane…into terrifying—and strictly forbidden—aerobatics over the front line. In all he fought 257 combats at Verdun, most of them against heavy odds, and shot down eleven planes. Wounded, he displayed violent bad temper in hospital; shook Paris by his wild debauches on convalescent leave; and finally ended the war in a mental home, suffering from chronic depression into which he had sunk after the death of his brother. In 1919, while preparing a stunt to fly under the Arc de Triomphe, he was killed in collision with telephone wires under circumstances that suggested suicide.Isn’t that amazing? You couldn’t invent such a fascinating character if you tried. I don’t think they even make people like that anymore.Well, I feel I’m on the verge of one of my tiresome anti-fiction rants here, so I’ll calmly remove my hands from the keyboard. But let me say that if you have any desire to understand the series of collective psychotic episodes known as twentieth-century history, you could do worse than to start at Verdun. It’s pretty much the primal scene. No wonder the last hundred years have been totally FUBAR.
—Buck
