nations. In this case, it undoubtedly saved Verdun, and possibly France herself.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE WAITING MACHINE
But the god of the weather suddenly took it into his head to derange all our plans. —CROWN PRINCE WILLIAM, My War Experiences
La guerre, mon vieux, tu sais bien ce que c’était.
Mais quand nous serons morts, qui done l’aura jamais su?
JACQUES MEYER
D URING the night of February 11th to 12th, French troops of the forward line at Verdun were ordered to stand-to in the first serious alert to be proclaimed. This was no false alarm. From his headquarters at Stenay-sur-Meuse the Crown Prince had issued on the 11th, for publication on the morrow, a proclamation which began: ‘After a long period of stubborn defence, the orders of His Majesty, our Emperor and King, call us to the attack!’ But as the morning of the 12th dawned, weary French outposts gazed out on an opaque white landscape. It was snowing hard, and through the thick mist and blizzard one could barely perceive the enemy front-lines. Over the whole front an uncanny silence prevailed; no suspicious noises, no unusual movements. Grumbling a little at their lost night’s sleep, the French troops resumed their normal positions. Their officers sighed with relief. On the other side of the lines, several hundred pairs of German eyes peering through artillery range-finders noted mat ‘less than a thousand metres away everything disappears into a blue-grey nothing.’ Farther back, generals anxiously studied the barometer; finally, at Stenay, the Crown Prince decided that both his proclamation and the offensive would have to be postponed twenty-four hours. If the all-important guns could not see, the battle could not proceed.
All the waiting German storm-troops heard of the postponement was when orders decreeing ‘interior duties’ were pinned up in the Stollen. On the day of the 13th, a second alert turned out the French, but once again they were stood-down on the morrow as the snow continued and the weather grew even colder. The notice of the previous day reappeared in the German Stollen, which the wags reinterpreted down the line as ‘in case of bad weather the battle willtake place indoors.’ Day after day the same entries were noted down in unit diaries: ‘snow again… snow thaws, but fog… rain and gales… still rain and gales. Another day’s respite… rain and gales. Not a sound of a cannon… wind and snow squalls… misty and cold.’ In its devotion to la Patrie , the perverse climate of Verdun could scarcely have shown more zeal.
By 1916 the infantryman had become, in the words of one of the great French war novelists, simply a ‘waiting machine’. To this latest, most unnerving waiting game, daily extended, the opposing forces settled down in their different ways. A few keen young French officers tried to get their men to work on the dilapidated defences, but in the hard ground little could be achieved but the further exhaustion of already fed-up troops. For the most part the poilus , huddled in their oversize greatcoats, resorted to the time-honoured techniques for mitigating trench boredom. Some continued months’-old work on delicately engraved bangles; bracelets for a wife made from the copper driving band of a shell; a ring for a fiancée from the aluminium of its fuse-cap, perhaps inset with the button off a German tunic; or a pen-cap for a child, made out of a spent rifle cartridge. Despite the crippling weight of his other kit, on his way to the front the poilu craftsman somehow always found room for his metal vice; his trinkets were capable of indefinite elaboration, often terminated only by a sniper’s bullet. Some gambled away their paltry sous of pay in endless games of piquet. In the Bois des Caures, a lieutenant of the Chasseurs toyed exultantly with a new trench mortar he had invented. Others stepped up the tempo of rat-hunting, simply as a means of keeping warm. Anything to silence the deadly question of
CHAPTER FIVE
THE WAITING MACHINE
But the god of the weather suddenly took it into his head to derange all our plans. —CROWN PRINCE WILLIAM, My War Experiences
La guerre, mon vieux, tu sais bien ce que c’était.
Mais quand nous serons morts, qui done l’aura jamais su?
JACQUES MEYER
D URING the night of February 11th to 12th, French troops of the forward line at Verdun were ordered to stand-to in the first serious alert to be proclaimed. This was no false alarm. From his headquarters at Stenay-sur-Meuse the Crown Prince had issued on the 11th, for publication on the morrow, a proclamation which began: ‘After a long period of stubborn defence, the orders of His Majesty, our Emperor and King, call us to the attack!’ But as the morning of the 12th dawned, weary French outposts gazed out on an opaque white landscape. It was snowing hard, and through the thick mist and blizzard one could barely perceive the enemy front-lines. Over the whole front an uncanny silence prevailed; no suspicious noises, no unusual movements. Grumbling a little at their lost night’s sleep, the French troops resumed their normal positions. Their officers sighed with relief. On the other side of the lines, several hundred pairs of German eyes peering through artillery range-finders noted mat ‘less than a thousand metres away everything disappears into a blue-grey nothing.’ Farther back, generals anxiously studied the barometer; finally, at Stenay, the Crown Prince decided that both his proclamation and the offensive would have to be postponed twenty-four hours. If the all-important guns could not see, the battle could not proceed.
All the waiting German storm-troops heard of the postponement was when orders decreeing ‘interior duties’ were pinned up in the Stollen. On the day of the 13th, a second alert turned out the French, but once again they were stood-down on the morrow as the snow continued and the weather grew even colder. The notice of the previous day reappeared in the German Stollen, which the wags reinterpreted down the line as ‘in case of bad weather the battle willtake place indoors.’ Day after day the same entries were noted down in unit diaries: ‘snow again… snow thaws, but fog… rain and gales… still rain and gales. Another day’s respite… rain and gales. Not a sound of a cannon… wind and snow squalls… misty and cold.’ In its devotion to la Patrie , the perverse climate of Verdun could scarcely have shown more zeal.
By 1916 the infantryman had become, in the words of one of the great French war novelists, simply a ‘waiting machine’. To this latest, most unnerving waiting game, daily extended, the opposing forces settled down in their different ways. A few keen young French officers tried to get their men to work on the dilapidated defences, but in the hard ground little could be achieved but the further exhaustion of already fed-up troops. For the most part the poilus , huddled in their oversize greatcoats, resorted to the time-honoured techniques for mitigating trench boredom. Some continued months’-old work on delicately engraved bangles; bracelets for a wife made from the copper driving band of a shell; a ring for a fiancée from the aluminium of its fuse-cap, perhaps inset with the button off a German tunic; or a pen-cap for a child, made out of a spent rifle cartridge. Despite the crippling weight of his other kit, on his way to the front the poilu craftsman somehow always found room for his metal vice; his trinkets were capable of indefinite elaboration, often terminated only by a sniper’s bullet. Some gambled away their paltry sous of pay in endless games of piquet. In the Bois des Caures, a lieutenant of the Chasseurs toyed exultantly with a new trench mortar he had invented. Others stepped up the tempo of rat-hunting, simply as a means of keeping warm. Anything to silence the deadly question of
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