With the immediate crisis controlled, Pétain focused his attention on the precarious supply situation at Verdun. Before the war there had been two major rail lines into Verdun, but the German advance of 1914 had cut one, while the other ran precariously close to German lines and was easily interdicted by their fire. This left the nearest usable railhead at Bar-le-Duc, some 45 miles south of Verdun. It was tenuously connected to the fortress city by a 20-foot-wide dirt road and the Meusien, a small, barely operational railway.

Pétain used the Meusien to transport food, but the line was otherwise insufficient. He ordered construction of a proper rail line to Verdun but knew this would take months. Until then his reinforcements, replacements and ammunition would have to be transported by truck from the railhead at Bar-le-Duc to Verdun. So Pétain brought in the Service automobile de l’armée française for what would become the largest use of motorized vehicles in warfare up to that point. He divided the road from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun into six sections, each with repair shops, refueling stations, its own commanding officer and a contingent of military police to direct traffic. Administering the supply convoys were the Service automobile and the specially created traffic commission of Bar-le-Duc, together comprising 9,000 officers and men with 3,900 vehicles. This force was responsible for moving reinforcements, replacements, ammunition and supplies for an entire army, as well as evacuating wounded from the battlefield to hospitals at the rear. The road was christened la Voie Sacrée (“the Sacred Way”), and along it the lifeblood of France poured into the furnace of Verdun.

In the midst of Pétain’s work to organize his supply lines, the frigid temperatures that had dominated the first days of battle unexpectedly rose. The moderate weather transformed la Voie Sacrée into an impassable morass, and French supply columns slithered to a halt in the mud. Pétain met this challenge by conscripting the local populace into labor battalions. He established a number of rock quarries and set up relay teams of civilian workers to move the gravel produced there to the road. Labor battalions of colonial troops from Africa and Asia worked feverishly to shovel the gravel into the mud and firm up the road. These extraordinary efforts solidified the road, and trucks once more began rolling toward Verdun.

The motorized convoys moved men and materiel to the battle zone around the clock. The performance of the Service automobile in the critical opening stages of the Battle of Verdun was stupendous, especially considering the terrible weather and primitive vehicles. In the first two weeks of the battle, French trucks carried 190,000 men, 22,500 tons of munitions and 2,500 tons of various other materiel up la Voie Sacrée to Verdun.

With his logistical lifeline in place, Pétain’s next priority was to establish French fire supremacy. He reorganized the guns at his disposal and sent urgent requests for additional batteries and ammunition. Pétain later recalled: “I unremittingly urged the activity of the artillery. When the liaison officers of the various army corps, meeting at Souilly for their daily report, began to explain to me in detail the course of fighting on their several fronts, I never failed to interrupt them with the question: ‘What have your batteries been doing? We will discuss other points later.’” Pétain issued a directive that artillery fire should be concentrated and ordered observers to report each barrage to him in detail, down to the type of projectile fired by each gun. With these reports he coordinated the fire of every battery in the Second Army.

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