22 February 1916. Day Two. Captain Emile Driant.

Captain Emile Driant's graduation portrait.Saint-Cyr military academy, 1877

The Bois des Caures provided the French with their first hero-martyr of the battle.

Captain Emile Driant, like many high ranking officers in the French army, had his first military experience in Africa before returning to France in 1888 to marry the daughter of a prominent nationalist, General Boulanger.

As Commander of the 1st Battalion of Chassuers (1899) Driant found his military career stifled by a combination of his strong catholic views and the even more controversial nationalist views of his father-in-law.

Resigning from the army in 1906, Driant became a career politician and as a member of the Chamber of Deputies for Nancy (1910) became a strong advocate of strengthening the defences of France.

Driant was a prolific writer. His journalism on topics of defence quickly developed into a wide range of guerre imaginaire (imaginary war) novels.

'The War of Tomorrow' written under the pseudonym Captain Danrit

Although the majority of Driant's novels concerned the certain victory of France over Germany, his 1902 work, 'The Fatal War' tells the story (1,200 pages) of the total defeat of the British Empire by the French.

These cheap, mass produced novels were very popular in pre-war France and Driant became the most industrious 'future war' novelist of the period,  producing hundreds of stories and longer (very long) novels for a receptive audience.

Driant was recalled to the army shortly after the outbreak of war in 1914.

He was elevated to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel denied to him before the war and given the command of two chassuer battalions (56th, 59th).

His political career continued. He continued to speak in Parliament and was a key figure on the committee commissioned to create what became the 'Croix de Guerre'.

At Verdun

Driant criticised the French high command's neglect of the defences around Verdun. 

His battalions had been sent to establish defences in the Bois des Caures after their participation in the Battle of the Marne  (1914) and had remained their in what many saw as a 'comfortable' posting.

As the German plans for the attack on Verdun moved towards their final stages, Driant became ever more convinced that they would seek a symbolic victory at Verdun and that defeat here for the French would be a national disaster. 

Few people, however, were listening to the author of 'War by Balloon'.

Driant, third from right, in the Bois Des Caures, January 2016

Driant predicted the attack almost to the hour. 

60 minutes before the German bombardment began he had removed his wedding ring and had given it to his soldier-servant, along with letters to his family. When, at his command post 50 minutes later the first shells began to hit the dense woodland, he visited the chaplain and received absolution.

All communications in the Bois des Caures were destroyed in the first hour of the bombardment. Driant found himself depending on runners and messengers as he attempted to make some sense of the carnage around him.

That so many of the 56th and 59th Chasseurs survived the first terrible day was mainly due to Driant's planning. Unlike other sections of the Western Front he had not constructed endless systems of connecting trenches but had concentrated instead on redoubts and strongholds that were well constructed and well dug-in.

One of Driant's fortified positions today.

On day two of the battle German shells crashed down again on the Bois de Cuares in an attempt to wipe out what remained of the French defence. By mid-day the shelling lifted and German troops poured into the shattered woods looking to deliver the final blow.

At around 1pm a foward platoon of German infantry and flamethrowers were 800 meters away from Driant's command post in the centre of the Bois des Caures. 

Driant stepped out into the defensive redoubts and directed the fire of the Chasseurs still around him. Deciding, at some point mid-afternoon, to withdraw to the nearby village of Beaumont, Driant led a small group of Chassuers from shell-hole to shell-hole.

As Driant stopped to give first aid to a wounded Chasseur he was shot through the temple and fell to the ground.

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Driant had commanded 1,200 Chassuers at the start of the previous day, around 500 made it out of the destroyed Boi des Caures and back to French lines at the end of the second.

The bombardment of the woods at Boi des Caures exemplified the struggle at Verdun. This was, above all, a gunner's war.

The Bois Des Caures after one week of bombardment

Driant had been proved correct. His dreadful 'imaginary war' novels may have been produced for a cheap and uninformed readership yet his grasp of the vulnerable situation of Verdun proved to be correct. Driant and his Chasseurs were the first of many at Verdun to pay for the earlier neglect of the French high command.

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The defence of the Bois des Caures elevated Driant to the status of national hero, even German newspapers acclaimed his brilliant defence. When his body was found a German Baroness sent his personal belonging's back to Madame Driant with a letter of sympathy.

Buried by the Germans in 1916, Driant's bdy was exhumed in 1934 and re-buried in the newly growing woods of the Bois des Caures.

Driant's grave in the Bois Des Caures.

This could be a scene from one his 'imagined wars'. A highly romanticised view of Driant's death.