In the eyes of many nobles, the young Comte de Fontenat was a man born stupid. He was fat, a full head taller than most men, broad-shouldered and wide-chested, with two hands that were huge and ruddy. The Comte had a habit of speaking in halting fragments, not from a stammer, but from Fontenat’s timid nature and his lack of social ease.

  In truth, Comte de Fontenat was merely the old man’s illegitimate son. The wealthy Comte de Fontenat the father had countless nephews, yet only one son of his own—and that son was a bastard whom one could not acknowledge in daylight. As a child born out of wedlock, he should never have obtained the title of Comte, nor inherited a manor outside Soissons and an estate of 200,000 livres. However, the August 1789 decree after the Revolution granted illegitimate children the same lawful rights of inheritance in property and status as legitimate ones.

  In his heart, Fontenat was profoundly grateful for the social transformation brought by the Revolution, which allowed a nameless, lonely boy—motherless from childhood, once on the verge of begging in the streets—to possess enviable wealth and a lofty station. Yet by the old Comte’s will, if the young Fontenat wished to hold a noble title in his own right, he still had to serve in the army for no less than two years.

  After muddling through half a year in a crash course at the Paris military academy, Fontenat formally enlisted in March 1790. He was posted to a frontier infantry regiment at Strasbourg and commissioned as a Second Lieutenant of infantry. In June 1791, after the flight of Louis XVI, noble officers fled abroad in droves; Fontenat, who did not know how to refuse an order from above, was swept along with them. After a round of threats and inducements, the young Comte, together with more than ten serving noble officers of his regiment, resigned their commissions, slipped across the Rhine under Austrian escort, and went to Koblenz to serve with the émigré detachment under Comte d’Artois.

  When war broke out in April 1792, Fontenat was promoted to Lieutenant and assigned to supply and baggage duties within the émigré detachment. During that time he met his superior, Colonel Hubert, the deputy director of logistics. Hubert had once been a senior prosecutor in the Reims region; after raising arms against a devil named André and failing, he had been forced into exile. It was said that Hubert also served as the private secretary to Comte de Provence, elder brother of Comte d’Artois, and thus enjoyed considerable favor.

  Before long, the introverted Lieutenant Fontenat came to trust his frank and charitable superior deeply. The Comte also befriended an energetic and cheerful Second Lieutenant named Pierre, who was likewise illegitimate and whose life story strongly resembled Fontenat’s. Before either of them had truly tasted the comforts of noble life, they were already compelled to wage war against their own French homeland for the sake of a noble title they did not even desire—and for the crown of King Louis XVI.

  To be fair, Fontenat did not hate the Revolution very much. Having spent years at the bottom of society, he understood the bitterness of a poor man’s life. He knew why commoners loathed nobles, why they longed for freedom and equality, and why they sought, with near-mad ferocity, to repay the great lords who stood so high above them. If the old Comte had not still remembered the existence of his illegitimate son before his death, Fontenat might well have become a radical Jacobin himself.

  Like other traitors, Lieutenant Fontenat disliked the Prussians intensely. Part of it was personal—the old Comte had lost a leg in the Seven Years’ War. Part of it was what Fontenat saw with his own eyes: Prussian soldiers were coarse, violent, and prone to brutal punishments in camp, while outside camp they harassed civilians. Of course, to speak of such things now was perhaps too late. Colonel Hubert also warned Lieutenant Fontenat and Second Lieutenant Pierre never to let such feelings show, above all not in front of other people.

  And then, not long afterward, an event erupted that would shape Lieutenant Fontenat’s entire life. Several drunken Prussian officers raided the émigré detachment’s supply warehouse; that alone would have been bad enough. But in their drunken frenzy, the Prussians injured Second Lieutenant Pierre’s eye, nearly blinding him. By sheer luck, Fontenat had been sent that day to Vaux to deliver food to French prisoners of war, and thus escaped disaster.

  The next day, the five Prussian officers arrested by the coalition gendarmes spent only one night in the gendarmerie detention room, then swaggered straight into the officers’ mess for lunch, provoking a chorus of jeers from émigré officers. Meanwhile, poor Second Lieutenant Pierre lay in the coalition hospital, fighting to save his damaged eye.

  Even so, the timid Fontenat and the other Royalist officers still did not dare demand justice for their wounded comrade. A Major Moreau from Brittany, however, was the first to step forward without fear. After only a few sharp words with the Prussians, the terse and ruthless major flung a pot of scalding meat broth into a Prussian officer’s face; at the same time, one of Moreau’s companions swung an iron tray into the forehead of a Prussian major, splitting the skin and sending blood streaming down. The act won a roar of approval from every Frenchman present, cooks and servants included.

  When more Prussian officers crowded in, more and more French officers gathered of their own accord, standing tall and shouting support for the brave Major Moreau. In that moment, Fontenat’s head went hot. He found himself beside the Breton major, and the honest, quiet man seized an empty bottle and smashed it with savage force across an attacker’s skull. The Prussian brute had been boasting only minutes earlier that he had “dealt with” several Frenchmen in the supply warehouse the day before and thrown them into the street.

  Before long, news of the all-out brawl in the officers’ mess spread into the coalition camp. Under the shadow of the Doulon village massacre, French-born soldiers loathed all German troops; with officers now inciting them, the spark in the mess set the entire coalition alight, igniting a new round of mass fighting between two peoples who hated each other.

  When all three gendarmerie squadrons of the fortress finally arrived to suppress the riot, the enforcers stared at one another in helpless confusion. Two hundred gendarmes could not possibly control the grand spectacle of nearly 3,000 men beating each other senseless. The gendarmes tried to seek instructions from the fortress commander, only to discover that Colonel Manstein had vanished inexplicably from the coalition headquarters. When the matter was pushed to the highest-ranking French officer in Verdun, Colonel Hubert, the logistics officer merely shrugged and acted as though nothing could be done.

  Back at the scene, some impatient gendarmes waved bayonets and pistols, trying to frighten soldiers back into their barracks, only to be beaten to the ground by Prussians and Royalist French fighting side by side. In every age and every country, gendarmes are the most disliked group in any army—without exception. The coalition troops had long resented their lofty airs; men who had once suffered punishment at their hands resented them even more.

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  Someone clever proposed a simple plan: first, join with the Frenchmen—or the Germans—and beat the living daylights out of those two hundred detested gendarmes; the quarrel between Prussia and France could be settled afterward.

  No one knew how long it lasted. At last, when the exhausted coalition soldiers lay on the ground groaning, hundreds of French troops in blue uniforms surrounded the entire camp. Prussians and émigré soldiers alike were spent and unarmed; they dared not resist a force with loaded muskets. They could only submit.

  “Colonel—will I be shot as a traitor to France?” When Lieutenant Fontenat learned that the Breton “big brother” who had fought beside him was in fact Colonel Moreau, the supreme French commander leading the assault on Verdun, the young Comte asked in terrified disbelief.

  Moreau, now in a French field officer’s uniform, patted him on the shoulder and smiled warmly. “Of course not. Comte, we are comrades who fought shoulder to shoulder. We just beat the damned Prussians together, forced them to surrender, and recovered Verdun. And one more thing: you are not to call me Colonel anymore. You will keep calling me Brother Moreau, or I will be very displeased.”

  Fontenat’s face lit up at once. Still unsatisfied, he pointed toward the bewildered, leaderless émigré soldiers and asked, “What about them? They won’t be sent to a prison camp, will they?”

  At that moment, Colonel Hubert also came forward. Standing on the shoulders of two grenadiers, he addressed the crowd in a loud voice:

  “The great Commander André has signed a decree: he pardons all crimes committed in the past by the warriors who have risen up on the battlefield, and he sincerely welcomes every Frenchman to rejoin the French army—to fight for our French homeland, and to fight for personal honor.”

  An hour earlier André had still been the devil the émigré detachment hated. Now the traitors who believed themselves redeemed cheered until the sky rang. Every Frenchman knew that once André gave his word, he would keep it. Even if he could not fulfill it at once, he would repay it afterward with still greater compensation.

  One more thing made Fontenat happy: a French medical officer used a remarkably effective solution to control the inflammation and suppuration in Pierre’s wound, and in the end saved the Second Lieutenant’s eye.

  …

  While Colonel Moreau and Colonel Hubert worked in tandem to retake Verdun with almost no bloodshed, Colonel Davout also led half his rifled-musket regiment, with strong engineer support, to strike precisely at the relief forces coming from Vaux and Douaumont, roughly ten kilometers northeast of Verdun.

  When the tricolor once more flew above the walls of the fortress-city, the commanders at Vaux and Douaumont—still under coalition control—were thrown into panic. The 5,000-man force they had dispatched jointly to recover Verdun had been subjected to sustained attacks by large numbers of French riflemen on the march. Reports said it had lost nearly half its strength and was now unable to advance or withdraw, forced to huddle in place behind the shelter of the twenty guns it had brought.

  Worse still, Vaux itself—four kilometers to the southeast, Douaumont’s sister fortress—had fallen in silence. From the testimony of routed soldiers, the Bavarian commander learned that French agents had exploited Vaux’s weakened garrison and incited a large-scale revolt by 1,200 émigré troops.

  With rebels inside and French troops outside acting together, the French swiftly seized the entire fortress of Vaux, then released and armed 2,000 French prisoners held there. As for the 1,600 German soldiers inside Vaux, they offered only fifteen minutes of effective resistance. Once the French commander called out a guarantee of humane treatment for prisoners, the Germans raised their hands and surrendered.

  In other words, when the French next turned on Douaumont, they would do so with more than 3,000 additional fighting men. Douaumont now had only 800 Bavarian soldiers left—plus more than 3,000 burdensome mouths to feed. Those were coalition sick and wounded, suffering chiefly from dysentery. The doctors had argued that Douaumont’s closed environment could isolate disease, while its clean mountain springs and pleasant surroundings would aid recovery.

  If this were merely a matter of holding walls, the commander believed he could endure until Duc de Brunswick came back, or else hold out until supplies ran dry and then surrender. In an emergency, even those thousands of sick men could be dragged out to resist for a time.

  But the first to refuse were the Bavarian gunners. They would not risk their lives on the batteries, because French snipers using Minie bullets could hide in the woods four or five hundred meters away and pick off gunners on Douaumont’s gun platforms with precision. At first, the fortress gunners dared to reply with cannon fire, but after forty minutes there were no living gunners left on the batteries. Most were dead; the rest had crawled into cover.

  Once the fortress lost its artillery, its defensive power would collapse. If the French launched an assault then, holding the walls would be difficult. Even if they somehow survived the first attack, the Bavarian commander and his officers could not be confident of surviving the next. And there was another fear: if they fought too fiercely and enraged the attackers, a furious French commander might decide the Bavarians belonged to the same category as Hessian mercenaries—and then matters would turn dangerous in the extreme.

  After a brief discussion, a white flag rose above Douaumont. The Bavarians formally surrendered.

  When the twin disasters of Vaux and Douaumont reached the 3,000 German troops pinned at the two bridgeheads, their morale collapsed at once. Soon the German commander sent envoys under a white flag to negotiate with Colonel Davout.

  After receiving assurances that the French commander would guarantee the soldiers’ lives and respect officers’ status and noble honor, the German generals ordered their gunners to spike every gun with hammers and nails, soak all powder, then command their men to fix down their bayonets and lower their musket muzzles. Formed up in ranks, they marched forward and laid down their arms.

  In the fighting around Vaux, Douaumont, and the two bridges, the 2,000 men of the Second Rifled-Musket Regiment under Colonel Davout—working with engineers and agents of the Military Intelligence Office—not only recovered Vaux and Douaumont, secured Verdun, turned part of the émigré detachment, and freed 2,000 French prisoners of war, but also destroyed or captured 13,000 Prussian and German troops, including more than 3,000 sick men, and seized dozens of guns.

  If one also counted Colonel Moreau’s bloodless capture of Verdun, the turning of 1,500 émigré troops, and the capture of a similar number of Prussian soldiers, then across the entire sequence of Verdun actions, in only two days the French army freed 2,000 French prisoners, turned 3,700 émigré rebels, and destroyed or captured as many as 15,000 Prussian and German troops.

  The seizure of Verdun, Vaux, and Douaumont meant that the French army had cut straight through the line of communications of the 45,000-man coalition main force led by Duc de Brunswick. The coalition army was the now isolated and helpless, trapped in a tightening encirclement by French forces roughly three times its size. Thus the Commander André and his staff achieved the second step of their grand strategic design: cutting and besieging. The first step had been to lure the enemy deep.

  Without exaggeration, the Verdun campaign changed the situation that had persisted since the August war: the French army, repeatedly beaten back, had been forced to endure blows without the ability to strike back. The victory at Verdun also sounded the trumpet for a strategic counteroffensive by the three armies under the Northern Command Headquarters.

  At the same time the Verdun fighting began, along the Verdun–étain–Longwy route and the étain–Metz–Longwy route, the 1,200 men of the Third Rifled-Musket Regiment—formed only a little over two months earlier—were split by Lieutenant Colonel Friant into twelve assault companies. With engineer demolition teams supporting them, sometimes operating alone and sometimes cooperating in pairs, they raided coalition supply columns and depots, blew every bridge they could reach, ambushed and delayed reinforcement troops, kidnapped and assassinated émigré officers, and threw the entire occupied zone and the enemy’s supply lines into chaos.

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