3.2.4. DID MEMORY OF FEUDAL VALOR ADD TO THE CARNAGE OF WORLD WAR 1?

THE IDEAL WAS TRANSMITTED, ITS BRAKES WERE NOT

The cult of frontal mass attacks — "l'offensive à l'outrance" —  

dominated French strategy until October 1917, though barbed wire and machine guns made significant success impossible. 

 A tattered poster found at a flea market. The battle of Verdun (February-December 1916) was the longest and one of the most murderous of World War I.

Many French army officers were nobles. "My friends, let us arm our comrades with the muskets of the enemy!" was the kind of story with which they grew up.

The Splendors of Glory

The baron of Mortemart* Boisse, Captain of the 2nd Infanterie*  

*Descendant of a 12th-century lord. 

 

Brandishing the flag recalled the Crusades and like the accoutrements of knights, uniforms were decorative and mortal:  

Crusaders Conquering the City of Zadra in 1202 by Andrea Vincinto, toward 1600 / zoom

Magazine cover, April 1915 (found in a flea market; no further reference)

• No helmets: many head wounds.

• Red trousers, ideal targets. The uniform was adopted in 1830, when shots that covered only 200 meters made concealment pointless. But when a change to grey-green was proposed in 1912, the Minister of War bellowed, "the red trousers are France!"

-- The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, 1979

In August 1915 the color did change — to light blue.

One fourth of young French noblemen were killed in World War I.

*    *

Does feudal admiration for reckless courage explain four years of hopeless attacks by the European armies, and their initial rejection of tanks? 

Americans, who had no nobles or memories of a feudal past, changed strategy after a single blood bath (the battle of Belleau Wood, in July 1918).

The least sensible uniforms and most lyrical declarations were French. The emphasis on élan, the push to win, and cran, bravery, were rational as a reply to Germany's greater population and more advanced industry. 

-- Tuchman, p. 48.

But its extreme irrationality harks back to the ancestral mentality. The small farms that underlie France's relatively slow industrialisation explain its persistence.

 

The offensives stop 

only when mutinies affect half 

the French army.

Paths of Glory, 1957

Three films deal with shootings "as examples:" Paths of Glory by Stanley Kubrick (1957, forbidden in France until 1975) ; Pantalon (1997;  French video);  Les Fusillés by Yves Boissent (2015).

 

End of this chapter.

*       *      * 

Next chapter,
IV.

Africa: Choosing a backwater