Fort Vaux

“ The beauty of Verdun is more grim and austere. It is a struggle of patience and sacrifice, one in which the watchword is “Hold and keep.” The question here is not merely one of barring the road to a foe who may pierce our line, but also of pinning him down to the spot while the Allies draw up and carry out their plan of a general offensive. That is why the resistance of Fort Vaux serves a higher purpose than the defence of a mere scrap of territory. It is bound up with a victory, it forms part of a victory, if victory be measured by the thwarting of the enemy’s will and design. ”

“ The Germans are at Douaumont.
Vaux no longer dreams of talking lightly about the misfortunes of an old comrade. For years they had mounted guard together before Verdun. They lived the same life, a life that was rather sad and lonely. They saw each other at a distance, they signalled to each other. One relied on the other in battle as on a trench-mate. If one is dying, the other is in danger. And from the observing-station which is still intact the fort inspects the slopes of Hardaumont and La Caillette, the treacherous ravines and the bare plain of the Woevre. ”

“ It is there, towards the village, over against those hillsides, over against Damloup, that the enemy’s onslaught was shattered. And the fort, on its plateau, with its superstructure half crushed, with breaches in its double wall, seems like the formidable hulk of an ironclad which still floats upon the waters, not yet abandoned by its crew. ”

“ The stretcher-bearers took advantage of the destruction of the enemy machine-guns installed on the fort, and were thus able to carry corpses away in the western ditch and to cleanse the infirmary of all its filth. From the ensuing night onwards this task was beyond their powers. The dead had to remain with the living. An unspeakable horror stalked through these dim vaults, where, in a thick, pestilent atmosphere, a sleepless, nerve-racked, thirst-maddened garrison, crowded into a narrow space, refused to abandon the struggle. ”

“ The day of the 10th will be still more of an ordeal. The Germans have to justify the lying communiqué which told the world of the capture of Fort Vaux. Throughout the night of March 9–10 and the day of the 10th, the artillery, in clearing the way, overwhelms the fort with projectiles of every calibre, and tries to isolate it by a curtain fire which makes a special mark of the lower end of La Horgne on the Damloup side, the ravine of Les Fontaines in Vaux-Chapître Wood, and the advanced works of Souville. ”

“ Like the signals, it flashes to the end of the country, to the end of the world. In sober truth, the whole earth awaits with intense eagerness the upshot of the drama of Vaux. And it is the miracle of the defence, and that alone, that has aroused this great thrill of admiration and anxiety.
Yet the fort is not forsaken. The whole army is concerned with working its salvation. Without delay, a new offensive is planned. A regiment of Zouaves and a regiment of colonial infantry, formed into a composite brigade, are brought up into the neighbourhood. ”

“ Will this wreck of a fort have any heart left after the three days it has just lived through? Not for a single moment has the storm ceased to shake the plateau. To the left, it wreaks its fury upon the entrenchment R1, which has the audacity to resist; to the right, upon the Damloup battery, which holds the promontory and sweeps La Horgne bottom and the outlet from the village, and upon the immediate approaches, which are defended to the west by La Courtine and to the right by the Belfort and Montbéliard trenches. ”

“ Thursday, May 18.—My trench by the side of the railway commands the ravine of Vaux, which is riddled like a sieve with shell-craters full of water.
“That ruin in front, some sixty or eighty yards from the village, is the ‘western house of Vaux’ mentioned in the communiqués.
“The village is now nothing more than a mass of crumbling walls, which our 155 mm. guns are constantly battering.
“In front of headquarters is Fort Vaux. To the north and east it is surrounded by the Boche trenches.
“The dreariness of the landscape is beyond description. ”

“ It awakens the plains of the Woevre, lighting up the rivulets and pools. Here is Vaux village on the right, and Damloup village on the left. Farther on, that large cluster of ruined houses must be Étain. In the rising sun they form a white lace*-work of stone, recalling the cities of the East. And yonder are the frowning hillsides of Hardaumont. Douaumont towers above, Douaumont still swathed in darkness, like an evil spirit.
More efficiently than the enemy, the sunshine climbs the slopes of the fort. It is light and airy, like a bearer of good tidings. ”

“ The fort retires within itself to face all the suffering piled on suffering: the barrages, the bombs, the flames and the gas and the suffocation, the horror of unspeakable sights and smells, and, above all, thirst, the thirst that makes men howl like wolves, and lacerates their tongues and their lips. ”

“ The enemy is now held, and will have to submit to our laws and accept our manœuvres.
On March 10 the enemy climbs the northern slopes of Fort Vaux. He is now only two or three hundred yards off the counterscarp. To cross those two or three hundred yards will take him three months. Three months of superhuman exertions, of ceaseless attacks, of an inconceivable outlay of munitions and incredible losses among her young men, the flower of the nation. ”

“ What ground have the French for complaint? We have given them back a fort by a counter-attack. We credit them with a counter-attack which they26 have never made. We ascribe to them a success which they have not obtained. The world will admire us. The world will say: ‘There is true Teutonic frankness. The Germans had taken Fort Vaux. It was a splendid gain. Next day they lost it. Well, they don’t hesitate to proclaim the fact. We can certainly rely on the German communiqués. They confess the truth when things go against them. ”

“ Some hours later, during the night, Cadet Buffet, two N.C.O.’s, and three men of the 7th Company of the 142nd leave the fort in their turn. The problem is less baffling for those going out than for those coming in. The former merely have to elude the Boche machine-guns, whereas the latter have to elude ours as well. The fort, in order not to be invested, must keep the southern ditch and the approaches. Every shadow that draws near is suspect. The difficult thing is to convince the sentries that one is a friend. ”

“ Further letters would give us no more information as to the state of the German soldier before Fort Vaux. We could find enough and to spare of complaints about economic difficulties. That the German soldier who is fighting at Verdun should know so much of the material insecurity of those whom he has left behind him is a righteous punishment for the terrible scourge let loose by a whole nation drunk with the sense of power—the nation which sneered when Paris starved in 1870 and which has set out to organize a war of frightfulness. The fires of its hell burn hotter and hotter. ”

“ But lying requires a continuity of effort of which the most cunning impostors are rarely capable. It is only the man who tells the truth that never burns his fingers. Three months later—measure those three months later: exactly eighty-eight days, in other words the whole interval between the announcement of March 9 and the real fall of the fort, June 7 in the early morning, eighty-eight days of heat and cold, of weariness, of thirst and lack of sleep, of bombardments and assaults—three months later Fort Vaux is really taken. The German High Command knows what the cost is. ”

“ The struggle at the barricades began again, with grenades and flame-jets. Water was now distributed only drop by drop. The wounded implored their comrades to put them out of their misery. Quicklime had to be thrown upon the dead, who could not be carried away. The hardships were more severe than ever, but a gleam of hope had appeared. The fort was no longer isolated: the two signallers who went off the previous evening had succeeded in their task. When the fort spoke, it was heard, and the reply came: “Courage! we shall soon attack.” The defenders are not forgotten. ”

“ Then it runs back, crossing the ravine by the dyke, passes in front of the entrenchments R3, R2, and R1, envelops the fort at a distance of barely 200 yards from the counterscarp, sweeps down into La Horgne bottom, is thrust out into a point at Damloup village, and bends back into La Gayette bottom in front of La Laufée.
The Hardaumont salient and Damloup village run out from the line like spires, and their defence is a hazardous business. The entrenchments have been broken up. What sort of a barrier can the fort still provide? ”

“ Next day the fort’s appeal is heard.
179
III
THE SORTIE On June 4 the water ration was half a pint. Half a pint for men who have fought and are fighting in the haze of bombs, of flame-throwers, of asphyxiating gases! Half a pint for fever patients, tossing uneasily at the overcrowded dressing-station, amid the dead and the dying! Piteous wails and entreaties are heard on all sides. Silence, however, is instantly restored when Major Raynal puts in an appearance. Half a pint, and no more. Who was it that asked for a larger ration? Why, as things are, half a pint is a great deal! ”

“ At the redoubt R1, where the ground slopes down from the plateau on which Fort Vaux stands, Captain Delvert is in the front row of the stalls to watch the performance going on before him on the other side of the ravine. He sees the German infantrymen come out like ants from an123 anthill that some foot has kicked. Here they are making their way down towards our trench in the salient. They leap into it. The white smoke that emerges shows that a hand-grenade duel is in progress. ”

“ He lays siege to the fort from three sides—he is around it, above it, and inside it. Yet the fort doggedly refuses to give in. Cut off from the outer world for a whole day, it has no sense of being forsaken. Outside there, it feels certain, they are working on its behalf. Inside it sets up more and more barricades. Step by step it defends the stairways, and foot by foot the corridors. It faces heavy artillery, machine-guns, grenades, liquid fire, smoke-bombs, thirst, poisoning, intoxication, stench, putrefaction. ”

“ And now the news grows more abundant, with more men coming and going: reliefs, wounded, stragglers, fatigue parties meet on the hillsides, under the never-ending shower of shells which is aimed particularly at the fort and its immediate approaches. One needs a sober head to extract a certain measure19 of truth from these alarming and often contradictory reports. They have been seen at Dieppe, they have been seen quite near Damloup. In the end, they are seen everywhere. The fort, which cheerfully digests its daily ration of projectiles, listens philosophically to these unsettling rumours. ”

“ The fort, on its tableland, plays the part of those mountain refuges where lost caravans come to find shelter from the storm. It is a haven of safety; he who succeeds in crossing the danger-zone can breathe freely under the arched vaults.
Little by little the march past becomes more orderly, and organization is introduced into the mob. The right is reserved for those coming in, the left for those going out. ”

“ These are the men who broke the back of the German assaults on the village and fort of Vaux on March 8, 9, and 10. They can scarcely remember that they forced the enemy to retreat; they are too much occupied with forgetting their miseries—the cold, the snow, the lack of sleep, the long hours they spent crouching down in rifle-pits, their lost comrades, the continual presence of death during the bombardment which shatters men’s nerves and stuns their brains. ”

“ This defence gave the world an opportunity of gauging the stamina of the French soldier and his powers of resistance. Yet it must not lead us to forget that a little later our troops re-entered the fort as victors.
M. Henry Bordeaux, the novelist of Les Roquevillard and Les Yeux qui s’ouvrent, was peculiarly entitled to write The Last Days of Fort Vaux. He followed the Battle of Verdun as a captain on the Staff, and was mentioned in dispatches in the following terms: “An officer who under all circumstances has displayed the highest military qualities. ”

“ On June 5 and 6, the position of the French garrison grew steadily worse; the number of dead and211 especially of wounded increased with rapid strides; at last there were no more than a hundred pints of water left, even for the wounded. Those who had not been wounded had not a drop, and had eaten scarcely anything since the 4th. Yet the French continued to fire from the direction of the gorge, through the embrasures in the barracks and those in the ditch, at every target that offered itself. In this way the German garrison of Fort Vaux suffered losses. ”

“ Yet the enemy does not leave off attacking, and he floods his objective with an endless deluge of projectiles. On the 4th, at two o’clock in the morning, an attack upon the fort is started from the north-east and the south-west. It begins by making progress, then it is checked by the machine-guns. At daybreak an aeroplane flies above the fort and comes down so low that it casts a shadow over all this chaos. Will the daring bird let itself be wounded, like the last pigeon? ”