As a company commander at Douaumont (during the Battle of Verdun) on 2 March 1916, while leading a charge to try to break out of a position which had become surrounded by the enemy, he received a bayonet wound to the left thigh after being stunned by a shell and was captured after passing out from the effects of poison gas. He was one of the few survivors of his battalion. He was pulled out of an empty shell crater by German soldiers and taken prisoner. The circumstances of his capture would later become a subject of debate as anti-Gaullists rumored that he had actually surrendered, a claim de Gaulle nonchalantly dismissed.