In another timeline, when the Prussian grand army invaded France in 1792, the post-revolution Paris Commune and the National Assembly sent large numbers of plenipotentiaries into occupied areas and battle zones on the verge of falling, to rally the citizens of Lorraine and Alsace to fight to the last and swear to defend France.

  Those plenipotentiaries told every commander the same thing: any soldier who surrendered or fled would be treated as a traitor, and his family would be implicated and punished as well. Yet in reality, apart from the Fort of Longwy on the frontier, which successfully held out for three days, the Fort of étain afterward, as well as the Fort of Vaux and Fort Douaumont, about 10 kilometers northeast of Verdun, all surrendered to the German intervention forces with barely a shot fired.

  Now, in André’s era, the northern supreme commander issued a simple, unmistakable order to the commanders of every fortress and strongpoint: hold for seventy-two hours, and even if you surrender afterward, you will not be deemed a traitor. Under this standing rule, those fortress commanders who had previously wavered and privately colluded with the émigré rebel units abruptly changed course and refused the enemy’s demand for immediate surrender. Whether they were surrounded and urged with reason, or pounded by heavy bombardment and threatened without pause, it did not matter. Within those seventy-two hours, French officers and men had to defend the works to the death.

  But the moment the seventy-two-hour limit elapsed, a white flag would go up on the battlements with punctuality so exact that not a single second was delayed. At the same time, the fortress guns would one after another burst their barrels, and could not be repaired. This naturally drove the commanders of the Austro-German coalition into a fury, yet they could do nothing about it.

  Because of General André’s “leniency,” the French garrisons, though in a disadvantaged position, carried out a series of effective resistances in the Lorraine mountains, delaying the coalition’s march by more than half a month. In another timeline, the Prusso-Austrian Coalition took only about one week from crossing the frontier to reaching Verdun.

  Not until the evening of September twelfth did the battered, stumbling German coalition finally reach the right bank of the Meuse. Across the swift river, nearly 100 meters wide, they faced the landmark twin-tower gatehouse of the Verdun fortress, which stood amid encircling mountains. That twin-tower gate belonged to the city walls of Verdun: two massive towers flanked the gateway, and atop them lay an open platform ringed by enclosed gun positions, battlements, and embrasures, fitted with drainage spouts...

  Overall, the Verdun fortress sat in the center of the Meuse valley. Before it lay the broad Meuse as a natural barrier; on its flanks rose the steep valley walls; behind it spread the primeval Argonne forest. It was a position made to be defended. The bridge that connected the far bank to the twin-tower gatehouse had already been demolished by the French garrison, leaving the deck impassable. Even if the commander of Verdun chose to surrender at once, coalition engineers would still need three to four days to restore the broken span.

  On the afternoon before last, when the intervention forces began their siege of Fort Douaumont and Fort Vaux, the Verdun commander, General Beaurepaire, ordered the engineers to pre-place explosives under the arches of four bridges across the Meuse and its tributaries. When the two sister forts lowered their colors in succession, the engineer captain acting on General Beaurepaire’s order lit the fuses. A few minutes later, with several thunderous blasts, and as the smoke slowly cleared, every bridge over the Meuse had been blown apart.

  At that moment, Colonel Davout, concealed on the right bank on the Hubert-Loup heights, let out a long breath and lowered the single-tube spyglass in his hand. Under General Moncey’s orders, Davout and his green-jacket rifle regiment, Second Rifle Regiment, were to ensure that Verdun’s engineers blew all bridges on the Meuse at the very moment Fort Vaux and Fort Douaumont fell. Otherwise, Davout would activate a contingency plan and have an engineer company attached to the rifle regiment carry out a final, controlled demolition.

  Once the Verdun garrison commander, General Beaurepaire, had carried out one of the Northern Command Headquarters’ orders, the rifle regiment tasked with covertly monitoring the area had, for the moment, completed its assignment. As for the seemingly impregnable Verdun fortress and what its final outcome would be, that was no longer something Davout and his men needed to consider. On the battlefield, every soldier had his own mission and duty.

  Under the original plan, once the Prusso-Austrian Coalition reached and occupied Verdun, Davout and the Second Rifle Regiment behind him, 1,800 officers and men in green jackets, blue trousers, and mountain boots with rawhide soles, would disperse into fifteen companies, six more than a standard infantry regiment, and lie concealed in the dense wooded hills along the Verdun–étain line.

  Their task was to seize opportunities to blow bridges and sabotage key routes. Above all, they were to snipe couriers and destroy coalition food and munitions convoys, cutting the Prussian grand army at the front off from every form of rear support, from soldier rations to flour. In addition, Davout had received a secret order to drive off the local civilians along the route by force, because the battles to come would be exceptionally bloody and brutal.

  Of course, it was not yet time to execute the sabotage plan. Everything awaited an order from headquarters, and the signal for that order would be the pole that was to be raised before Davout’s eyes: a simple semaphore mast. The signals were equally simple, and in an emergency even flag signals could be used as a substitute.

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  In the various concealed camps prepared for the Second Rifle Regiment, stores were piled everywhere: ammunition, canned food, medicines and bandages, drying and heating equipment, tools for weapon repair and signaling, and even devices for disinfecting and filtering drinking water. All of this had been arranged long in advance. As early as February, under the pretext of transporting relief grain into the Meuse Department during the food crisis, André had ordered engineer units to build multiple hidden camps here and stock each one with large quantities of war matériel.

  ...

  At ten o’clock on the morning of September fifteenth, General Beaurepaire, as commander of the Verdun garrison, returned to his headquarters after inspecting the defenses once again. Across the Meuse, the roar and blasts of dozens of guns had nothing to do with him. He shut himself inside his second-floor office, handled administrative matters, and issued orders.

  Before long, General Beaurepaire looked up. Through the window, he saw a large garden outside. A solid shot had flown in and happened to smash the oak sapling he had planted with his own hands, shaking the whole room. The windowpanes and the porcelain on the display shelves had already been reduced to broken trash days earlier.

  “If it were not for this war, everything in Verdun would be so calm and peaceful,” the garrison commander sighed. He fell silent for a long while, then shook himself and began pacing beside the map table, thinking to himself: “Thank God I evacuated all civilians one week early. Aside from the 1,000-man garrison, only those Royalist Party bastards remain, determined to force me into surrender.”

  With that thought, the fortress commander bent down, found a low stool, and sat. In fact, André had instructed General Beaurepaire that after blowing all bridges over the Meuse, he could withdraw west with his troops, cross the Argonne forest, and in the Sainte-Menehould area place himself under the command of the Army of the Meuse, under General Moncey.

  But Beaurepaire refused the Northern Command Headquarters’s order. He hoped to win at Verdun a “great” victory that would make the world sit up and take notice. Yet when the Commander-in-Chief André issued a second order to pull back, 2,500 garrison troops and 4,000 civilians chose to follow the gendarmerie detachment that brought the order and retreat west into the Marne.

  Even so, Beaurepaire and his remaining 1,000 garrison troops held Verdun for three days. Although the brave coalition engineers, heedless of the fortress guns, worked day and night to repair the bridge deck, after several days they had managed only a passage barely wide enough for two infantrymen abreast. Because assault formations could not deploy on a narrow, damaged bridge, every attack on the twin towers ended in failure.

  Moreover, around Verdun, every boat on the Meuse had been scuttled and sunk, or burned to ash. To force a crossing of the broad Meuse during high water would have been a commander’s folly, a straight gift of lives. Yet intelligence indicated that the coalition was building rafts at a shallower stretch downstream. Plainly, the Duc de Brunswick and his tens of thousands of German troops no longer wished to wait for the garrison commander’s surrender.

  At the start of the fighting, Beaurepaire told himself he could force the intervention army to back off and return to Paris as a hero, perhaps as a national representative for the Meuse Department, or as a commander of an Alps or Italy army group. As for the three corps under the Northern Command Headquarters, he never dared dream of touching them. André’s domineering style made every general tremble before him, to say nothing of Beaurepaire, who had already disobeyed the young commander’s orders twice.

  When the gunfire slackened, the commander rose and went to the window again. A courier ran toward him and delivered an urgent dispatch. It read: Lieutenant Colonel Pipon has defected; the northern wall has been opened by royalists; Verdun is about to fall into coalition hands.

  Beaurepaire’s vision swam. He nearly collapsed. He was not surprised by Verdun’s fall. If others had defected, he could at least have understood it. But Lieutenant Colonel Pipon was his wife’s younger brother.

  Although Commander-in-Chief André, with an exceptionally hard line, repeatedly vetoed the Paris Commune’s calls to execute commanders who suffered defeat, the Northern Command Headquarters could not protect the relatives of officers who sold out their country. Pipon’s defection in substance placed several families in extreme danger.

  With that, Beaurepaire immediately signed his final order and had the courier transmit it to all officers: destroy all guns, firearms, and ammunition on the spot and throw them into the Meuse. Twenty minutes later, the Verdun garrison opened its gates. Under their officers’ guidance, they formed up and surrendered to the coalition.

  After the courier left, Beaurepaire remained alone in the office for a time. He wrote his wife, Marie, a last farewell letter.

  “My dearest Marie:

  My beloved wife, my confidante, my love!

  Farewell. Take good care of yourself, and of our three children.

  You must tell everyone that Charles Beaurepaire fell in battle, fighting for the fatherland of France!

  Ever thinking of you,

  Charles.”

  When he finished, the garrison commander was suddenly weary, almost drained. He went into the dressing room and changed into a brand-new general’s uniform, cap, and boots. The best tailor in Verdun had made them at General Beaurepaire’s request two weeks earlier. He had intended to wear them on the day of victory. He had not expected that day to be today.

  Twenty minutes later, once the coalition learned of the fortress’s surrender, the bombardment stopped. Before long, a Prussian infantry regiment ordered to take over the twin towers crossed the barely repaired bridge over the Meuse with great caution, successfully occupied the fortress, and shut the captured French soldiers inside the twin towers to await the arrival of coalition gendarmes.

  Just as Prussian officers and men began cheering yet another victory beneath the double-headed eagle banner flying over the walls, a tragic scene unfolded in Verdun’s central square.

  General Charles Beaurepaire, in a general officer’s uniform, mounted on a warhorse, drew his sabre and shouted as he charged straight at more than 1,000 Prussians who were deploying at the gate. Coalition officers shouted desperately, trying to make the maddened French general abandon this foolish act of suicide, but he did not slow for an instant.

  The Prussian infantrymen instinctively raised their rifles, took aim, and the entire line fired as one...