"The enemy seems to have maintained a bombardment all round General Herr's lines on February 21, 1916, but this general battering was done with a thousand pieces of field artillery. The grand masses of heavy howitzers were used in a different way. At a quarter past seven in the morning they concentrated on the small sector of advanced intrenchments near Brabant and the Meuse; twelve-inch shells fell with terrible precision every few yards, according to the statements made by the French troops. I afterwards saw a big German shell, from at least six miles distant from my place of observation, hit quite a small target. So I can well believe that, in the first bombardment of French positions, which had been photographed from the air and minutely measured and registered by the enemy gunners in the trial firing, the great, destructive shots went home with extraordinary effect. The trenches were not bombarded—they were obliterated. In each small sector of the six-mile northward bulge of the Verdun salient the work of destruction was done with surprising quickness.
"After the line from Brabant to Haumont was smashed, the main fire power was directed against the other end of the bow at Herbebois, Ornes, and Maucourt. Then when both ends of the bow were severely hammered, the central point of the Verdun salient, Caures Woods, was smothered in shells of all sizes, poured in from east, north and west. In this manner almost the whole enormous force of heavy artillery was centered upon mile after mile of the French front. When the great guns lifted over the lines of craters, the lighter field artillery placed row after row in front of the wreckage, maintained an unending fire curtain over the communicating saps and support intrenchments.
"Then came the second surprising feature in the new German system of attack. No waves of storming infantry swept into the battered works. Only strong patrols at first came cautiously forward, to discover if it were safe for the main body of troops to advance and reorganize the French line so as to allow the artillery to move onward. There was thus a large element of truth in the marvelous tales afterwards told by German prisoners. Their commanders thought it would be possible to do all the fighting with long-range artillery, leaving the infantry to act as squatters to the great guns and occupy and rebuild line after line of the French defenses without any serious hand-to-hand struggles. All they had to do was to protect the gunners from surprise attack, while the guns made an easy path for them.
"But, ingenious as was this scheme for saving the man-power of Germany by an unparalleled expenditure of shell, it required for full success the co-operation of the French troops. But the French did not co-operate. Their High Command had continually improved their system of trench defense in accordance with the experiences of their own hurricane bombardments in Champagne and the Carency sector. General Castelnau, the acting Commander-in-Chief on the French front, was indeed the inventor of hurricane fire tactics, which he had used for the first time in February, 1915, in Champagne. When General Joffre took over the conduct of all French operations, leaving to General Castelnau the immediate control of the front in France, the victor of the battle of Nancy weakened his advance lines and then his support lines, until his troops actually engaged in fighting were very little more than a thin covering body, such as is thrown out towards the frontier while the main forces connect well behind.
"We shall see the strategical effect of this extraordinary measure in the second phase of the Verdun battle, but its tactical effect was to leave remarkably few French troops exposed to the appalling tempest of German and Austrian shells. The fire-trench was almost empty, and in many cases the real defenders of the French line were men with machine guns, hidden in dug-outs at some distance from the photographed positions at which the German gunners aimed. The batteries of light guns, which the French handled with the flexibility and continuity of fire of Maxims, were also concealed in widely scattered positions. The main damage caused by the first intense bombardment was the destruction of all the telephone wires along the French front. In one hour the German guns plowed up every yard of ground behind the observing posts and behind the fire trench. Communications could only be slowly re-established by messengers, so that many parties of men had to fight on their own initiative, with little or no combination of effort with their comrades.
"Yet, desperate as were their circumstances, they broke down the German plan for capturing trenches without an infantry attack. They caught the patrols and annihilated them, and then swept back the disillusioned and reluctant main bodies of German troops. First, the bombing parties were felled, then the sappers as they came forward to repair the line for their infantry, and at last the infantry itself in wave after wave of field-gray. The small French garrison of every center of resistance fought with cool, deadly courage, and often to the death.
"Artillery fire was practically useless against them, for though their tunnel shelters were sometimes blown in by the twelve-inch shells, which they regarded as their special terror by reason of their penetrative power and wide blast, even the Germans had not sufficient shells to search out all their underground chambers, every one of which have two or three exits.
"The new organization of the French Machine-gun Corps was a fine factor in the eventual success. One gun fired ten thousand rounds daily for a week, most of the positions selected being spots from which each German infantry advance would be enfiladed and shattered. Then the French 75's which had been masked during the overwhelming fire of the enemy howitzers, came unexpectedly into action when the German infantry attacks increased in strength. Near Haumont, for example, eight successive furious assaults were repulsed by three batteries of 75's. One battery was then spotted by the Austrian twelve-inch guns, but it remained in action until all its ammunition was exhausted. The gunners then blew up their guns and retired, with the loss of only one man.
"Von Falkenhayn had increased the Crown Prince's army from the fourteen divisions—that battled at Douaumont Fort—to twenty-five divisions. In April he added five more divisions to the forces around Verdun by weakening the effectives in other sectors and drawing more troops from the Russian front. It was rumored that von Hindenburg was growing restive and complaining that the wastage at Verdun would tell against the success of the campaign on the Riga-Dvinsk front, which was to open when the Baltic ice melted.
"Great as was the wastage of life, it was in no way immediately decisive. But when the expenditure of shells almost outran the highest speed of production of the German munition factories, and the wear on the guns was more than Krupp and Skoda could make good, there was danger to the enemy in beginning another great offensive likely to overtax his shellmakers and gunmakers."