Verdun to the Vosges: Impressions of the War on the Fortress Frontier of France

by Gerald Campbell

From half-past four in the afternoon to half-past seven there was another storm of shells, and then again a lull, and more stock-taking. Even though the vaulted shelters in the fort are immensely solid, the casualties were surprisingly light. Only eight more men had been wounded, so that the total number of deaths caused by four hundred shells was only one. There had been many hair-breadth escapes, but though the defences were crumbling to pieces before their eyes—when they could see for the blinding clouds of black smoke which hung about for two or three minutes after each explosion—so far they were not hopelessly broken in. In the bombardment of modern forts that is the principal factor—since on their standing depends the lives of the gunners—that and the resisting powers of the gun embrasures and cupolas, which cannot, however, last for ever. Their destruction is only a matter of time.

With that prospect in front of them, and also the practical certainty of a night attack, perhaps by infantry as well, the garrison were quite remarkably calm and resolute. Some of them even managed to snatch an hour or two of sleep, and all were thirsty enough to drink, though only one or two were able to eat anything.

During the night a brisk fusillade every twenty minutes or half-hour up to three o’clock was all that they had to put up with, except for several false alarms raised by the sentries of imaginary enemies trying to cross the barbed-wire protections, which kept everybody’s nerves on edge. The besiegers had evidently concluded that the fort was not yet sufficiently broken up to make an infantry attack feasible. So at about five, just after the fort of Les Paroches had rung up to say that they could do nothing to help them, as their guns could not reach the German positions, the 150’s began again, and one of the first shots hit an ammunition store and exploded about twenty 90-millimetre shrapnel shells. Then came another message (they must have found the telephone rather a comfort in their isolated position), this time from Commercy, to say that the 2nd Cavalry Division from Toul was well on the way to relieve them, and had reached Buxerulles on the Commercy-Fresne road, north-east of St. Mihiel, hardly more than twelve miles off. But it was not till well on in the night, nearly twenty-four hours later, that the Toul division at last arrived, and before that time the garrison had gone through a still more severe bombardment.

The day began with a white flag incident, or rather with the appearance of two German cavalrymen accompanied by a bugler, and carrying a large flag of truce. The commandant went forward to speak to them—they had stopped thirty yards the other side of the wire entanglements—and three times they summoned him to surrender the fort. To the first summons he answered simply, “Never”; to the second, “France has given me charge of the fort and I will blow it up sooner than surrender it”; and to the last, “F.... moi le camp, je vous ai assez vus ... A bientôt, à Metz!” So that was the end of them and their mission.

Up to now the guns bombarding them, as far as the garrison could make out, consisted of a battery of 150’s at the edge of the wood of Lamorville, about five miles to the east of the fort, and a field battery of 77’s, posted between one and two miles away on the reverse side of Hill 259, called La Gouffière. There were also some infantry engaged in digging trenches on the Signal of Troyon, close by, where the commandant had shot his partridges on the 7th. (On the 8th, in one of the lulls in the bombardment, he had two shots himself with 90 shrapnel at the men on his partridge ground, and rather spoilt their excavating work, but then the 150’s began again.) On the second day, after the white flag and its bearers had taken their departure, the bombardment began again, with greatly increased severity, as the enemy had now brought up some 280’s and 305’s, but in spite of the extraordinary havoc which they produced the plucky garrison still continued to serve their guns as best they could without any thought of surrender. When night fell there was another alarm of an infantry attack. This time there was no doubt about it. They could make out a black mass of men advancing towards the south cupola of the fort, and some of them were already busy cutting the barbed wire in front of it. The commandant, whose diary of the siege I have followed in this account, got his men together, ordered most of them under cover, and then opened fire on the swarm of assailants with machine-guns. That was too much for the Germans, and they broke and fled, leaving the ground strewn with their dead and wounded. Still later in the night he was knocked over and wounded in several places by fragments of a 305 shell which fell only a yard behind him. But as soon as his wounds were dressed he was up again, commanding and encouraging his men, and still the fort held out through the dark night, continually lit by the explosion of the bursting shells. And then, at last, the division from Toul arrived (I presume that the cavalry had had to wait at Buxerulles for the slower troops who were following them), the enemy were forced to abandon the bombardment not a moment too soon, and the commandant was carried off to hospital at Verdun (where he received the Croix de Guerre), but not before he had left fluttering on the crumbling parapet the flag of France. On the next day, and the next, and the next, further fierce onslaughts on the fort by large numbers of Germans were driven back with great slaughter by the garrison, strongly reinforced by the cavalry division and a Toul battery of 75’s, and the attack on Troyon was finally abandoned on the 13th. The German losses in front of the fort, as the result of the five days’ fighting and a second unsuccessful attack which they made on it a week later, were between seven and ten thousand men.

This splendid defence of Troyon was typical of what happened in several of the Meuse forts when the enemy, on September 20th, resumed their efforts, but with many more troops, to force their way across the Hauts de Meuse to the river. Having reoccupied Thiaucourt, on the Rupt de Mad, eight miles north-west of Pont-à-Mousson, they took up a position well to the west of it, with a long front extending north and south in front of St. Mihiel, through Heudicourt (eight miles north-east of the town) along the Hauts de Meuse. The gap in the line of the German front between the Fifth and Sixth Armies was now at last permanently filled up, for the first time during the war.

From this forward position they began a systematic bombardment of Troyon, les Paroches, the Camp des Romains, Liouville, and the other river forts. Their base position behind this line reached from Thiaucourt to Fresnes, on the edge of the Hauts de Meuse, seventeen miles across the plain in the direction of Verdun, and ten miles short of it. This position it is worth while to notice with some care, because it forms the base of the triangle of which St. Mihiel (of which we shall hear something) forms the apex. Its strength lay in the fact that it had Metz, with its big supplies of stores and men, less than twenty miles behind it, with direct railway communication; its weakness in its exposure to flank attacks, on its right to the north by the garrison army of Verdun, on its left by that of Toul and the left wing of de Castelnau’s army. The driving force of the Metz supplies of men and ammunition from the rear was strong enough to enable the centre of the German line to push forward like the point of a wedge to St. Mihiel in the west. But the lateral pressure of the two French forces on their right and left flanks was also strong and compelled them, as the point of the wedge advanced, to extend their forces on each side of it, facing outwards in two almost opposite directions. And that was how the original St. Mihiel triangle came to be formed, with a seventeen-mile base from Thiaucourt to Fresnes, and two equal sides, each fourteen miles long, from Fresnes to St. Mihiel on the north-west, and from St. Mihiel to Thiaucourt on the south-east. Nearly parallel to this lower side of the triangle, and five or six miles to the south of it, most of the road from Commercy to Pont-à-Mousson, a distance of twenty-five miles, was in the hands of the French. Their only railway ran along the valley of the Meuse, from Commercy past St. Mihiel to Troyon, and as a rule they were not able to use it except at night.

The Germans were better off. They commanded, to begin with, a line from Metz along the Moselle to Arnaville, from which it turned westwards along the Rupt de Mad to Thiaucourt. Half-way between these two places it was joined by another line running due south from Briey, and as their position was consolidated at least one other light railway was constructed in the direction of St. Mihiel. There was also another railway (a section of the Verdun-Commercy line) which runs south from Fresnes along the east edge of the Hauts de Meuse to Heudicourt, half-way between St. Mihiel and Thiaucourt, part of which was available for German traffic, besides a fairly large supply of level roads all through the district, and of these various facilities for transport they made excellent use.

In the plain of the Woevre behind the Fresnes-Heudicourt line everything worked with the precision of a huge machine. During and after the bombardment of the river forts the scene was more like the surroundings of an immense centre of industrial activity than the ordinary conception of a battlefield. From their emplacements between the infantry lines German and Austrian field-guns and siege artillery pounded away incessantly at the forts with 8¼-inch, 12-inch, and even 16½-inch shells. Observation balloons and occasional aeroplanes swayed and hovered over the lines, and ragged fan-shaped columns of brown or white smoke shot up into the air here and there as the charges of high explosives and shrapnel from French or German guns fell and burst. But apart from these inevitable and unconcealable signs of battle—noise and pillars of smoke by day, noise and flashes of flame by night—all the machinery of the fighting was hidden underground, and as far as eye could see the plain looked unpeopled and deserted. Only in the rear the supply trains constantly rolling up from the German base and the methodical work of the men loading and firing the guns and recording the effect of the shots, like shifts of artisans labouring round the furnaces of a gigantic mill, spoke of life and energy. But in appearance it was always the creative energy of a busy manufacturing district rather than the destructive energy of war.

Inside the forts, the direct object for the time being of all this system and activity, there were no illusions of this kind, nothing but grim reality and red ruin. Troyon was hotly bombarded for the second time till it had only four guns left capable of firing a shot, and still the plucky garrison refused either to retire or surrender. The storm of high explosives had only done part of its work. It had reduced Troyon and Les Paroches and Liouville and some of the other forts to a shapeless melancholy desolation of crumbling mounds and yawning pits, littered with tons of rusty steel and shattered blocks of scattered masonry and concrete, till they looked like discarded gravel-pits half buried under scrap-heaps of iron waste. But, though their existence as forts was at an end, the remains of them, with one exception, were still in the hands of the French, protected no longer by their bastions and the guns in their dismantled cupolas, but by the rifles of the men in the trenches, the real flesh and blood rampart of the Republic.