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“The World Crisis” (7): The “Soul-Stirring Frenzy” of Verdun
Hillsdale Dialogues: The World Crisis
Continued from The World Crisis (6)
The Hillsdale Dialogues are weekly broadcasts of discussions between Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn and commentator Hugh Hewitt. In 2023-24 they held an extended discussion of Churchill’s The World Crisis, his classic memoir of the First World War. This accompanying essay describes Verdun and the interminable ground war Churchill had sought to avoid. Parenthetic page references are from The World Crisis, Vol. 3, Part 1, 1916-1918 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1927; and the Rosetta e-book edition, 2013. For all World Crisis essays published to date, click here. We cordially recommend the relative audio discussions.
Audio: (World Crisis Dialogue 19): Churchill’s Understanding of Scientific Warfare
Audio: (World Crisis Dialogue 21): Verdun
“To all who endured”
Churchill writes that failures at the Dardanelles and Gallipoli left only deadly trench warfare. If such fighting had proven anything by 1916, it was the advantage of defense. Yet the generals had no plan “except the frontal attacks which all their experience and training had led them to reject. No war is so sanguinary as the war of exhaustion” (20).
By conservative estimates, the nine months of fighting at Verdun piled up 70,000 or more casualties per month. Verdun served as proving ground for the development of new, cruel weapons. Mustard gas, flamethrowers, anti-aircraft and machine guns characterized the unrelenting struggle.
Verdun was a microcosm of the First World War—brutal, entrenched, interminable. It opened the combatants to total war, waged not just against each other but whole populations. Its story occupies early chapters of The World Crisis Volume 3, which Churchill dedicated “to all who endured.”
Strong characters, sinister plans
At the center of the drama were two men. Erich von Falkenhayn, Prussian Minister of War and Imperial German general, selected the fort at Verdun for his offensive. On the defensive side, General Joseph Joffre commanded the French.
Falkenhayn, Churchill wrote, “repeated[ly] state[ed] that the French Army was to be ‘bled white’” (88). A conflict of attrition was his plan. General Joffre’s triumph in the costly Battle of the Marne made him a worthy foe. With these two antagonists, Churchill writes, Verdun “was to become an anvil upon which French military manhood was to be hammered to death by German cannon” (85). Churchill understood this phase of the war as personal and deeply symbolic.
“To break the heart of a nation”
The meaning of this conflict ran deep. Verdun, Churchill explained, “had no exceptional importance either to the French or to the Germans.” The region, near the Luxembourg border, was disarmed; “it contained no substantial magazines [and] it guarded no significant strategic point.” It was 220 kilometers from Paris. Its capture would have been “a military convenience, and in a lesser degree an inconvenience to the French” (84).
But its significance involved something greater than tactical advantage. The Verdun region had been pivotal since the attack of Atilla the Hun in the Fifth Century. Again, in the Ninth Century, it was where Charlemagne’s kingdom divided. Running through it, the River Meuse had defined the eastern boundary of France for generations.
Symbolically Verdun was “the great advanced citadel of France; the principal bastion of her Eastern Frontier.” Falkenhayn knew that “French pride would make it impossible to yield.” (84-85). In fact, he was counting on that.
German strategy was less conquest than brutal attrition: “We are not seeking Verdun,” Falkenhayn said. “Nor are we seeking to blast a hole. Still less do we intend to march through such a hole. Our aim is quite different. We seek to wear down an army, not to make a gap; to break the heart of a nation, not to break a hole in a line” (85).
The Germans knew it would be a long, fierce, and bloody affair, but that with “high-class troops and unprecedented cannon fire,” he felt they could beat the enemy into submission (86).
Verdun’s loss would paralyze the French army and occasion a wave of German victories. Losing such an important area sacred to the nation might even cause France to capitulate.
Infrastructure of protracted conflict
The French were unprepared for the type of battle Falkenhayn sought. As German soldiers began massing, trenches around Verdun remained undug. Garrisons were depleted because the high command believed there were “many parts of the French line more attractive to a hostile attack” (92).
The Germans shattered this belief when at “four o’clock in the morning of February 21 the explosion of a fourteen-inch shell in the Archbishop’s Palace at Verdun gave signal of battle.” The Germans caught the French army flat-footed, and the slaughter began forthwith.
Just three days later, Falkenhayn seemed on the verge of victory. French commanders in the area “telegraphed to Chantilly, advising an immediate withdrawal to the left bank of the Meuse, and the consequent abandonment of the town and fortress of Verdun” (92).
Despite the bleak outlook, General Joffre remained stalwartly committed to the defense. On the same night Joffre was advised to retreat, he doubled down, sending the entire Second French Army to reinforce the position.
Second Army commander General Noël Édouard le vicomte de Curières de Castelnau, arrived at Verdun to “tragic scenes of confusion and disorder which haunt the immediate rear of a defeated battle-front” (94). He leveraged his command and the soldiers’ respect for him to change the tide of battle.
Commanding his troops never to capitulate, Castelnau ordered a redesign of supply lines—the infrastructure of protracted conflict. Resupplied, the French rearmed the forts and fought with renewed vigor. Thanks to Castelnau, “the first German onslaught had been stemmed” (95). Yet, in another sense, the French played into Falkenhayn’s hand: they dug in for the war of attrition he always intended.
“Trial of strength and military honour”
Despite passing up a quick victory, everything Falkenhayn desired seemed to be happening by late February. “Large armies were on both sides grappling with each other round the fortress,” Churchill writes. Reinforcements and munitions “flowed from all France and Germany towards the conflict, and ever-increasing trains of wounded ebbed swiftly from it.” As Falkenhayn had predicted, the battle “had become a trial of strength and military honour between Germany and France” (95).
The Germans kept the upper hand as the conflict grew. Falkenhayn had attacked on 21 February with only three Army Corps, while “three others had stood idle on the two flanks.” But this restraint likely permitted the French to hold out. Things might have gone differently if the Germans had used their full might.
Falkenhayn’s restraint was both curious and critically important. Because he was so set on effectuating a protracted conflict, he gave up on quick victory. He achieved what he wanted, but at a heavy cost for both France and Germany.
The death toll grew quickly and constantly, as both sides flung soldiers into the battle, and dictated the pace of conflict. By the end of April, Churchill continues, the killed or wounded had reached “nearly a quarter of a million French and Germans…though influencing in no decisive way the balance of the World War” (96).
The German High Command was convinced that Falkenhayn’s strategy was correct. The French rallied around their forts, but at the cost of countless lives. With the Germans slowly tightening the noose around Verdun, Falkenhayn’s political clout grew. If the Germans could maintain this martial inertia, his military fame would be assured. Fortunately for the French, they could not.
French resolve, German misinformation
The Germans, Churchill continues, had failed to predict the degree of French resolve. While anticipating an extended conflict, they underestimated just how immense the battle of Verdun would become. Two huge armies, burrowed-in like ticks, “fell together by scores of thousands.” But there were always more replacements in hand (96).
Muddling an understanding of the conflict was the propaganda released by both sides. Since neither was making significant headway, body counts became the metric of success. Each side overestimated its kills and under-reported its casualties. Such propaganda badly misled the German High Command.
Churchill quotes Erich Ludendorff, a rising German general destined to play a great role in the war. Until March 1916, Ludendorff said, “the impression was that Verdun was a German victory” (96-97). So convinced, the High Command pressed the attack.
Outside Germany, Churchill “shared the common impression that the German losses must be heavier than those of the French” (97). Believing victory was certain, the Germans never demanded accurate reports of lost soldiers, artillery and equipment. Actually, France did suffer more casualties, but “the German losses at Verdun greatly exceeded” the supposed numbers (97).
German hopes, Churchill declares, were also dashed by a vigorous defense: “[T]he whole French nation and army hurled itself into the struggle around Verdun” (101). Relentless German attacks did deplete the French garrisons, but they also took a toll on Germany’s war-fighting capabilities. The battle consumed excessive human capital. Though Germany held a powerful position, it was at the expense of the rest of the war. In other words, hoping to capture a rook, they left their queen defenseless.
Support from afar
Nearly 1400 miles away, the Allied Powers were soon capitalizing on Germany’s over-optimistic venture. Russia, badly mauled by German attacks in 1914-15, was rearming with a vengeance. As Churchill notes, this spelled trouble for the Germans in Verdun:
To those who knew that Russia was recovering her strength with every day, with every hour that passed, who knew of the marshalling of her inexhaustible manhood, and the ever-multiplying and broadening streams of munitions of war which were flowing towards her, the German attack on Verdun had come with a sense of indescribable relief.…
The drain of Verdun and the temptations of the Trentino [province in northern Italy] had drawn or diverted from the Eastern Front both reserves and reinforcements, and practically all the heavy artillery (102-04).
Circumstances persuaded the Russians to send a million men “in a general attack” on the Central Powers’ unguarded eastern flank (104). Their counterattack came just in time for the hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen pinned to their crumbling Verdun forts.
The turn of the tide
The Russian onslaught meant the eventual end of conflict at Verdun. Now it was the Central Powers who “were entirely unprepared for the weight, vigour and enormous extent of the assault” on their eastern front (104). Russia’s rearmed forces inflicted massive losses of troops and territory.
At this pivotal shift in the battle, “[n]o one was more surprised than Falkenhayn.” The Russian front, he wrote, “had remained absolutely inactive…. There was no reason whatever to doubt that the front was equal to any attack on it by the forces opposing it at the moment” (105). He and his colleagues were baffled that circumstances in the East could so completely reverse themselves without ever raising alarm bells for them or their Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian allies.
Falkenhayn acknowledged the German hubris. They were now faced, he wrote, with a fundamental change: “A wholesale failure of this kind had certainly not entered into the calculations of the Chief of the General Staff (himself). He had considered it impossible” (106). Unfortunately the impossible was now barreling through the East, its target Berlin.
Russia saves the day
The Eastern Front, Churchill’s final volume of The World Crisis (1931), was dedicated “To our faithful allies and comrades in the Russian Imperial Armies.” Knowing now of how Russia would desert the Allies after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, we tend to ignore how valuably they contributed earlier.
The Russian surge inflicted staggering losses on the Central Powers. A week into their offensive, Churchill records, “the Austrians had lost 100,000 prisoners, and before the end of the month their losses in killed, wounded, dispersed and prisoners amounted to nearly three-quarters of a million men” (106).
Such catastrophic damage confronted the Germans with a dilemma. Was the Battle of Verdun really worth sacrificing most of Germany’s war machine in a symbolic fight over forts that had “no exceptional importance”? (84).
Faced by these two terrible options, the Germans chose to abandon the Verdun campaign to defend their strategic interests in the East. Verdun had become “in Ludendorff ‘s words, ‘an open wasting sore’” (107). Its heavy losses bogged down the German legions and crippled their morale.
Falkenhayn always believed that Germany could have prevailed, and may have been right. But as the tides of war shifted across Europe, his attachment to Verdun became a liability, a blot upon Germany’s record of military triumphs. Falkenhayn’s brainchild to dominate French thus became the seed of his own undoing. The last German forces retreated or were taken prisoner in December 1916. Four months earlier, Falkenhayn, replaced as chief of staff by Paul von Hindenburg, was sent to command a German offensive against Romania—a rather easier target.
Verdun aftermath
The tale of Verdun is simultaneously simple yet profoundly nuanced. The simple arc of the story tells of an overambitious German tactician whose victory was stolen by an unexpected renewal of conflict in the East. The nuances, however, are indispensable for understanding why over 300,000 young men died in the mud around a series of obsolete forts.
France sent seventy-five divisions to its eastern border, sacred land since the days of Attila. Fifty German divisions fought and died for Falkenhayn’s goal of inflicting maximum pain and destruction. In the end, casualties on both sides were 715,000 to 800,000, about 53% of them French.
The lessons of Verdun are manifold. Germany in its pride and optimism abandoned an early victory and propagandized death tolls, but ended in an ignominious retreat. Likewise, Verdun shows the importance of unified military strategy: it was Russian rearmament and renewal of its offensive that saved the French from being overrun.
What Churchill learned
For Churchill, Verdun was a lesson on what to avoid in a European ground war. The horrors of protracted trench warfare and the attrition that accompanied it destroyed morale on both sides. Verdun taught the virtues of decisive action, something Churchill would draw upon twenty-five years later.
By many accounts Verdun was the climax of the First World War. Worse was to come, at places like the Somme and Passchendaele, but Verdun prefigured the horrors ahead. It demonstrated the awful reach of modern warfare, engaging whole populations as much as opposing armies. It was the proving ground for terrible new technologies like machine guns, poison gas and flamethrowers. All these were features of a conflict Churchill had predicted and tried vainly to prevent in 1914.
Yet, for all its novelty and newness, Verdun also displayed the primordial basis of warfare: a symbolic struggle for what it means to be a nation, the importance of preserving a country’s hallowed land. Put simply, Verdun exemplifies the total war mentality. It forces those who study it to analyze what is worth fighting for—and just how far a people will go to defend hearth and home.
The author
Mr. Sturdy is a George Washington Fellow at Hillsdale College and a member of the Class of 2024. He is studying for a B.A. in Politics and French with a Minor in Music, and is co-president of the Pi Delta Phi French honor society.