Free The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne Page A

favourable solution.’ Such was the confusion Falkenhayn created about his own intentions.
    The second point of discord in the German plan, perhaps its most curious feature of all, was what the shrewdest German critic on Verdun, Hermann Wendt, describes as its ‘two conflicting components’. In his directives to the Fifth Army, Falkenhayn spoke only of ‘an offensive in the Meuse area in the direction of Verdun’. But the Crown Prince in his Army Orders set forth the objective as being ‘to capture the fortress of Verdun by precipitate methods’. When questioned by Herr Wendt years later as to whether Falkenhayn really intended to take Verdun in February 1916, Tappen replied emphatically that ‘the seizure of Verdun was never represented as the real aim of the offensive, but it was the destruction of the French forces that we had to find there. If in the process Verdun fell into our hands, so much the better.’ And this tallied completely with the famous memorandum — while the Fifth Army’s design for a Blitzkrieg victory at Verdun ran quite contrary to any gradual, ‘bleeding-white’ process. Once France had lost Verdun, the carrot to lure the French Army into the abattoir would have been removed; the deadly salient itself where the actual bleeding was to take place would have been excised by the Fifth Army’s advance.
    Neither the Crown Prince nor Knobelsdorf had actually seen the original memorandum, yet, one asks at once, why did Falkenhayn approve the Fifth Army’s plans which differed so much from his own? The answer, it seems, was: MORALE . The cold mind of Falkenhayn apparently calculated that troops would fight better if they went in believing that their objective was to seize France’s strongest fortress, rather than knowing that they were only embarking on another long-drawn-out battle of attrition. (Even von Knobelsdorf later asserted that had he originally known what Falkenhayn’s true intentions were, he would never have supported them.) Meanwhile, to make quite certain the Fifth Army did conform to his will, Falkenhayn, while promising the Crown Prince that adequate reserves would be available, ensured that in fact they remained firmly under his control and not under the Fifth Army’s. Two divisions, allegedly because of accommodation shortage, were kept two days’ march away, and a further two in Belgium; none would be close enough to intervene in the battle at the crucial moment. Thus, as Wendt remarks, the supply of these vital reserves was used by Falkenhayn as a ‘lever’, the manipulation of which, and with what fateful consequences, will shortly be seen.
    Seldom in the history of war can the commander of a great army have been so cynically deceived as was the German Crown Prince by Falkenhayn.

CHAPTER FOUR
    OPERATION GERICHT
The highest form of generalship is to baulk the enemy’s plans; the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces; the next in order is to attack the enemy’s army in the field; the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.… In war, the way to avoid what is strong is to strike at what is weak. — SUN TZU (500 BC), The Art of War
    T HE German national genius for organisation had never shown itself to better advantage. To supplement the roads across the boggy Woevre that the French, in a rare piece of pre-war foresight, had left as poor as possible, the Fifth Army now built ten new railway lines and some two dozen new stations. Seven spur lines were established in the Forest of Spincourt alone, to provision the heavy guns that would be concealed there. Whole train-loads of steamrollers and road-building equipment were shipped in. Day and night the little petrol locomotives chugged forward on the sixty-centimetre railways to the front, pulling long trains loaded with supplies for the pioneers. For one corps alone, the quartermaster’s list included 6,000 wire-cutters, 17,000 spades, 125,000 hand grenades, a million sandbags, 265,000