With Joffre at Verdun: A Story of the Western Front

"Henri!" exclaimed Jules, and at once took command of himself, and pulled his somewhat shaken frame up at attention.

"What's that?" demanded the big German abruptly. "See, Max, he is defying you, this fellow. And you say that he drew you out of the earth and threw you back, almost shaking the teeth out of your head? Unbelievable! Yet, if it is true, why, no Brandenburger will sit still under such an insult."

The jeering laughter of this giant, the covert smiles and the outspoken remarks of other German officers, sent the blood flaring again to Max's cheeks. He scowled, first at one and then at others of his comrades; and, turning once more to the prisoner, and catching at that moment a gleam of defiance from his eyes, struck out again with one hand and almost floored the unfortunate and helpless Jules.

"That to commence with," he told him, "and then to finish the matter. I don't forget, mind you, the blow that you landed on my body in that forest the other night. No, believe me, I, Max, forget nothing of that sort. Then I would have had you shot out of hand, though the occasion was not convenient; but now there is no reason why the execution should not be carried out. You are an escaped prisoner of war; you have assaulted a German officer in the execution of his duty; and here you are, captured, defying the captors of the Fort of Douaumont. March him to the far end of the hall, and call out half a dozen of those guzzling fellows to shoot him."

The armed sentry, who had stood by all this while, taking but little notice of the scene, looking tired and bored and as if he longed to join his comrades, pulled himself together, and, shouldering his rifle, gave a husky order.

"Over there!" he called. "Stand up against the wall! Sergeant Huefer, the officer requires a shooting-party."

The selfsame Sergeant Huefer, at that moment engaged in finishing a hasty meal, looked round and scowled; and then, seeing the snappy little German officer, called Max, looking at him, stood up promptly.

"A shooting-party, sir?" he asked.

"A shooting-party," came the abrupt answer. "Draw them up in front of those two prisoners."

"Two!" exclaimed the big German officer, who with the others was watching the scene.

"Yes, two," snapped Max, swinging round upon him, ready to vent his anger on any one of them.

"But wait! Not two; one only – the escaped prisoner of war, who struck you."

The big German and this snappy little fellow, Max, stared at one another, the former looking urbane and jovial and unconcerned, whilst Max was trembling with rage. He could have kicked this big German who ventured to obstruct him, and who seemed about to thwart his purpose. Yet Max was a careful individual, who had indeed worked his way upwards in the German army, and obtained slow if certain promotion, by constant observation of the regulations. The shooting of captured Frenchmen was one thing – a common enough thing no doubt – but disobedience, defiance of a senior officer, was an altogether different matter, and this big, hulking German happened to be Max's senior by a very slender margin. So slender, indeed, that the position was almost doubtful. Indeed, at that moment neither Max nor this big German could say which of the two was the senior in rank, and entitled to command this party, though it happened that the bigger of the two was not a Brandenburger, but belonging to some other corps, who had by chance fallen in with the party told off to attack the fort of Douaumont, and so found himself amidst its captors. For a moment, then, the two regarded one another, Max flaming with anger, defiant, on the point of abruptly ordering this hulking individual to mind his own business. And then that sense of discretion which had helped him in the past came to his assistance, and he forced a smile – an unwilling smile – while his eyes flashed a vengeful glance at his opponent.

"Then you object?" he asked sharply. "Well, then, let it be one – the prisoner of war. We will shoot him, and get it over quickly. Sergeant, march the firing-party forward, I will give the word to shoot."

Still shaken, his head swimming yet after that struggle on the stairway, his bloodshot eyes fixed upon the figures of Jules, of the officers, and of Sergeant Huefer and the party of men he was now parading, Henri never felt more helpless in all his life before. He felt pinned to the spot, incapable of action; and, indeed, common sense – what little of it he still possessed after the blow which had rendered him unconscious – told him that action of any sort was useless. Yet, could he see a friend, an old chum, a comrade as dear to him as any brother, shot down in cold blood in front of these leering men? Could he watch him put up as a target, to be butchered by these unfeeling Germans? No. The thought that Jules's fate hung heavily in the balance, that some desperate action on his part might bring him assistance, spurred Henri to movement, and, rising to his knees, he groped his way towards the entrance to the hall wherein the firing-party were then assembling. As he crawled across the bodies then littering the gallery along which the tiny railway ran, and crossed the foot of the stairway, his hand lit upon a rifle, which he seized instantly and raised to his shoulder. Then he dropped it again, for the movement was too much for him, and, stumbling forward, fell on his face, his head swimming once more, his brain in a whirl, and his pulses beating in his ears till he was deafened. It was just at the moment when Sergeant Huefer, undisturbed by the task allotted to him, in fact, eager to finish off the prisoner and get back to his meal, gave a short, sharp order and set his firing-squad in motion, that Henri's outstretched fingers came into contact with another object – a round, cylindrical object attached to a short stick, a hand-grenade, one of those bombs which had helped to blow in the barricade which he and his gallant poilus had erected at the top of the stairway.

With an effort he pulled himself together, and, gripping the stick, felt for the safety-pin, removal of which would allow explosion of the grenade once it came into contact with any body. Then, rising to his knees, and unsteadily to his feet, he stretched out his left hand to the wall, while with his right he swung the hand-grenade backwards and forwards. By then the firing-party had been halted in front of Jules, who, head in air and arms folded, stood against the far wall.

"Load!" he heard the command ring out and echo down the gallery. "Present!"

Up went the rifles to the shoulders.

Henri gave a sharp jerk to the handle of the grenade as he loosened his hold of it, and sent it flying forward into the hall, where it landed a moment later – landed, indeed, within a foot of the fire which the men had built in the centre of this big place, and about which they had been seated. There followed a blinding flash, a thundering detonation, and then shouts and shrieks and groans, and clouds of dust and falling debris. An instant later, Henri had fallen backward into the gallery, and lay, much as he had lain before, among the bodies of those who had taken part in the fight on the stairway.

CHAPTER XVII

Charge of the Gallant Bretons

Let us for the moment leave Henri and Jules in the centre of the ruins of Fort Douaumont, and return for a few brief seconds to that gallant yet dangerously small force of Frenchmen, who, until this moment, had been fighting to check the advance of the Germans about the town of Verdun.

Five days of the most terrific fighting had passed. Five days of incessant bombardment from massed German guns, which had literally blown the defenders out of their trenches. And during those few days, when the French lines to the north of the salient and to the east of the River Meuse were driven in till they rested near Vacherauville, on the Meuse, and ran from thence to Thiaumont and Douaumont Fort and Vaux, and so back to the Meuse again, French efforts had not been confined alone to local fighting.

On the very first day, indeed, what had been strongly suspected before became abundantly apparent, and it was clear that a German attack of unprecedented force and violence on the salient of Verdun was to be expected. The weight of artillery alone which for all those hours had been pouring a torrent of shells on the heights of the Meuse was sufficient to indicate the nature of the German preparations. A thousand guns, directing their missiles on one sector of the long line of trenches wriggling across the north-eastern provinces of France, was no unusual feature of this extraordinary and gigantic warfare, but here there were not one thousand guns alone but many more, many hundreds more, probably even in excess of two thousand; while, moreover, the troops of the Kaiser, debouching from the woods, marching up those ravines giving access to the plateau of Douaumont, and massing behind evergreen firs farther away, as discerned by the air-pilots of our ally, disclosed the fact that those massed guns were to be supported by an equally enormous concentration of troops – a concentration which could have been effected only for one purpose. In short, and in fact, it was clear that this was to be no ordinary attack on the salient of Verdun, but a gigantic offensive – one which would demand a numerous defending force and guns in proportion.

But the movement of troops from one area of the field to another is a comparatively slow process at the best of times, for it must be remembered that, behind the fighting-lines of such an army as opposed the Germans, rails are always more or less congested, while an enormous mass of vehicles ply the roads, bringing up ammunition and food, and hundreds of other articles necessary for the fighters. Time, then, was required in which to gather French forces, and time in which to rush them over the rails, and by motor-transport along the roads, to the neighbourhood of Verdun, and then to push them up to the fighting-line.

Those gallant fellows who had faced the first rush of the Germans, who had stood under a tornado of shells, and who had held on to their positions so desperately, were fighting all the while, not so much to hold the particular positions in which they were, as to gain time, to resist as long as possible, to thwart the enemy in his intentions, to delay his advance, and to keep him away from the main line of defence till such time as reinforcements could reach them. Very gallantly had the thin line of heroes carried out their purpose, holding on, often enough, till they were killed to the last man. They had made the Kaiser's troops pay dearly for every inch of ground; and, whereas the German High Command had confidently expected to reach Verdun within a day or two, five days had passed, and yet, in spite of overwhelming gun-fire and masses of troops, the French had only just retired to their main defensive position.

Douaumont stood on that line. Douaumont, which the Kaiser had told his people was the corner-stone of the salient which he hoped to capture; and Douaumont, as we know, had fallen already to the Brandenburgers. Yet behind Douaumont, behind the Côte du Poivre and the Côte de Talou, there existed yet miles of upland plateau before the city of Verdun could be reached – miles which the Germans must cross before they could hope to complete its capture.

We have seen how, attempting to follow up their drive to the north, the French guns on Mort Homme and Hill 304 had outflanked the Germans, and had driven them from the Côte de Talou and the Côte du Poivre. We have followed their movements later, when, abandoning the drive in a southerly direction over the slopes of the Côte du Poivre, the German war lords caused their armies to swerve to the east to face the fort of Douaumont and to march towards it. Let us anticipate their movements by a little, and say that, having captured the fort – a mere empty and cracked vessel – they found themselves still faced by the French, who had retired only a short distance beyond it; and who, reinforced that very night by the 20th Corps – as dashing a corps as ever existed – counter-attacked with furious energy, and advanced their lines till they surrounded the captured fort on three sides, and held, indeed, a portion of the interior. There, in that position, they dug themselves in firmly, and though the Germans continued to attack that portion of the line with a fury never before exceeded, and with utter disregard of the losses they suffered, not for weeks did they so much as dent it. Like the Côte de Talou, and the approaches from the north, Douaumont and the neighbouring trenches defied them; and, tiring, as it were, of the venture in that direction, yet determined as ever to capture Verdun and the salient, they once more changed their line of attack. Crossing the Meuse, they flung their details against the Mort Homme and Hill 304, hoping to capture those positions and sweep away the guns which enfiladed the Côte du Poivre. The removal of these would allow them to continue that advance from the north which threatened to shorten the base of the salient and to capture its defenders.

If we were to venture to describe every attack made by the Germans, every gallant defence of the French poilus, and the course in detail of the terrific conflict which raged – and, indeed, still rages as we write – round the salient of Verdun, we should require a multiplicity of chapters. For, indeed, foiled at the outset by the failure of their giant attack to do more than drive the French on to their main positions, in spite of the huge advantage of a surprise effected on the 21st February, and forced, as it were, by public opinion – the opinion of Germans at home, of their Austrian allies, and of every neutral country in the world – the Kaiser's war lords kept desperately at the task of subduing the salient. Not one, but dozens of assaults were made either upon the Mort Homme and Hill 304 positions, or upon the plateau of Douaumont, extending at times to the farm of Thiaumont, and later, after weeks and weeks of conflict, to the fort of Vaux and the trenches south of it. The most gigantic attack on any one position that has ever been recorded in the history of the world was accompanied by other facts hitherto never seen in warfare.

The hosts of German troops concentrated on the face of the salient approached at times three-quarters of a million, and needed constant replenishment; for French 75's, machine-gun and rifle-fire bit deep into the ranks, and soldiers – hundreds of them, nay, thousands – fell, till the slopes leading to Mort Homme and to the gentle wooded heights of the Meuse became a mere shambles. Four months of fighting, indeed, found General Joffre and his brave troops still holding the line, still selling inches of the hills when the pressure became too great or the enemy gun-fire too fierce to be withstood – selling those inches at a price which can only be termed grisly and exorbitant – and now and again counter-attacking, when pressure from the enemy had forced them to yield ground of vital value.

Yes, after four months of terrific fighting, Verdun, that sleepy old town down by the River Meuse, and the lines of trenches surrounding it which formed that historic salient of which we have written, were still in the hands of the French, still denied the Germans; while the losses inflicted upon the latter, the increasing pressure of the British, now in crowded ranks along the Western Front – so crowded, indeed, that already a fourth army had taken over lines from the French, thus yielding reserves for further fighting at Verdun – that increasing pressure and a sudden brilliantly successful offensive on the part of the Russians in Galicia were putting the Kaiser and his war lords in a sad predicament. They, too, needed reserves: reserves to feed those horrible gaps at Verdun; reserves to march against the British Front; reserves to rail to Russia, there, if it were possible, to stem the tide of Muscovite troops pouring through the broken Austrian lines on their way to Vienna and Berlin.

Let us leave the combatants there to return to Jules and Henri. Pandemonium reigned in that huge battered hall of the fort of Douaumont when the bomb which Henry had thrown had done its work in the midst of the Germans. The fire hitherto burning so cheerfully in the centre of the darkened hall was scattered in every quarter, leaving glowing embers in odd corners and crannies. Had there been more light upon the surroundings, many of the men, seated but a moment or so before, would have been seen stretched on the ground, killed by the explosion. That big officer, who, still chuckling, had looked on at the preparations for Jules's execution, might have been seen leaning against the outer wall of the fort, his tunic torn and burned, a red pool collecting on the flags beside him, his jaw dropped, his eyes wide open, insensible and dying. And of Max, that little snappy officer, not a sign would have been found. For, like every surviving man who had stood in the hall, he had bolted. A hand gripped Jules suddenly, as he lay gasping against the wall.

"Who's that?" he demanded breathlessly. "Hands off, or I'll choke you," and, shaken though he was by the explosion, he prepared to throw himself upon the individual who had accosted him.

"Jules, is that you, Jules?" came a feeble voice, and almost at the same moment a heavy form flopped down beside him and straightway rolled across him.

It was Henri, as unconscious at that instant as was the big German, chuckling but a minute earlier.

"Henri!" Jules shouted; "Henri, what's happened? Are you killed like the rest of them?"

Evidently the gallant Henri was nothing of the sort, for, opening his eyes and staring out into the darkness, he growled a denial.

"Dead? Not much! but soon shall be if we stay here long enough for those fellows to bring lights," he grumbled. "If they bring lights they'll get us, and then – "

"You needn't mention the rest of the details. Pull yourself together!" Jules told him. "Here, wait a moment!"

Freeing himself from the dead weight of his chum, he dashed across the hall, feeling giddy and shaken by the explosion, and, scrambling on hands and knees amongst the bodies lying around the spot where the fire had been burning, he soon secured a water-bottle, and, hastening back, first dashed some of the contents into Henri's face, and then lifted the metal cup to his lips and let him drain it.

"Wanted that – eh?" he asked, having himself gulped down a draught. "Let's have another. Now, here we are! My word, what a bust-up! How did it happen? I saw you over there, just outside the hall, and wondered whether you'd do anything. You did – eh? Was that your bomb? Tell me about it."

Henri scoffed at him – scoffed angrily.

"Let's take a seat in the very centre, search for food, and sit down to a leisurely dinner," he said, his voice choked with satire. "Better still, let's ring a bell, if there's one, and ask that Max individual to come in and join us; he'd enjoy it, wouldn't he?"

"The demon! He'd have shot me in another minute. But still, here we are!"

"And the sooner we get out of it the better. That water's made me feel far better, and I can stand now, I believe. Yes, giddy a bit, but I can still stick to my pins, and that's something. What do we do – eh? Here, pull off the uniforms of a couple of these fellows, they'll not miss them, and let's change clothes as quickly as we can. Don't forget, too, that once we've changed we are Germans – Brandenburgers, 6th Brigade fellows, who've attacked the fort and helped to capture it. No more French after we've got into our disguises."

The suggestion came glibly enough, and sounded extremely simple; yet when the two – shaken after that terrific fight on the stairway, and once again by the explosion which Henri had manoeuvred – came to attempt the task they found it almost beyond them, for your German, as a general rule, is of no mean stature. Even in days when rations may be reduced owing to the British blockade, which holds up supplies destined for the German Empire, German recruits are still plump and fat, and Brandenburgers not less so than their fellows. Thus the task of turning dead men over and filching their garments, hard enough in any case, was made more difficult in the darkness, particularly so for young fellows such as Jules and Henri, who were not stoutly built like the Germans.

"Slip on any sort of an old coat and helmet at first," Henri advised, "then if that Max comes back we can push our way in amongst the bodies of the fallen, and he'll be none the wiser. Later, when we have the opportunity, we can make a more leisurely search, and perhaps we shall be lucky in finding garments that fit us."

It was a fortunate thing, indeed, that they decided on such a plan. For as they went about the hall, stooping over the bodies of the fallen, endeavouring to select and discover clothes likely to suit their own stature, a loud order was heard from behind the battered end of the hall, and presently some twenty men inarched in, the short and snappy officer leading them.

"Pull out the fellows who are still alive, or not too seriously injured," he commanded. "Leave the dead till later on. Now hurry!"

Parties of stretcher-bearers followed the soldiers, and, starting at once, began to bend over the fallen forms lying about the hall, turning men over, dragging the dead aside, and lifting those who were wounded out of the mass. Coming to a distant corner, not so far indeed from the exit leading to the stairway which Jules and Henri had defended, a party of bearers discovered a pack of Germans lying in all directions, their limbs stretched in the most fantastic postures, some on their sides, their heads resting on an arm as if they were sleeping; others on their faces, their arms doubled up beneath them; and others, again, on their backs, stiff and stark already.

"Dead!" said the commander of the party, a junior non-commissioned officer. "On one side with him!"

"Dead!" repeated one of the bearers, leaning over another figure. "Here, he's not a big man, I can manage him single-handed."

"As dead as any," cried a third, and seemed quite jovial about it. "Here we are! He's no weight at all – quite a puny fellow for a Brandenburger."

They dragged perhaps half a dozen bodies away from the corner to the far wall, and laid them in a row beside others already collected; then, gathering up the wounded and carrying them outside, they returned again, completing their task after some few minutes.

"Light up!" Max, that short and snappy German officer, commanded. "Get a fire going, and let us resume the meal. One moment though! Have any of you seen a sign of those Frenchmen – the two whom we were about to shoot?"

"One there, sir," came the answer, while a bearer holding a torch lit up that part of the hall by the wall against which Jules and his fellow-prisoner had been stationed. "He's dead – a piece of masonry, dislodged by the explosion, fell on him."

Max seized the torch from the man, and, striding forward, bent over the figure of the poilu, and, turning the body with his foot – for this German was an individual possessed of little feeling, indeed a heartless wretch, a callous fellow – he placed the torch nearer, and stared at the face of the Frenchman.

"Burr! Not my man! And no one has seen the other?"

"No one!"

"Then we will wait till morning and search the place. Now, let the men turn to at their meal. Sergeant, wake me in an hour's time, when I will go round and inspect the sentries."

Gradually the fire in the centre of the hall died down, while men nodded as they sat on blocks of fallen masonry, or on forms which had been dragged into the hall. Darkness slowly penetrated to every corner of the place and almost hid the Germans. Then a figure stirred, one of the dead sat up slowly and nudged another of the dead beside him. One of the nodding figures seated upon a form on the far side of the fire yawned, stretching his arms widely, kicked the ashes from the dying embers with a heavy boot, and looked about him. Then his hair rose on his head, while his eyes protruded in the most horrible manner. Perspiration dropped from his forehead, his hands shook, and his limbs trembled, as he gaped at those two dead figures sitting up and regarding him closely.

"Dead men sit up and look at me! Dead men!" he spluttered, and slowly rose to his feet.

There was a frozen look on the wretch's face now, and he kept his eyes on those two figures as if he had no power to turn them away, as if, like a serpent, they fascinated him. Then of a sudden he gave vent to a loud scream and dashed from the hall, upsetting his comrades as he did so.