They Shall Not Pass

The French Army on the Western Front, 1914–1918

Ian Sumner

• Publisher: Pen & Sword
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526721822
• eBook ISBN: 9781781599082
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

"Sumner's brilliant window onto the French army is a book I cannot recommend highly enough . . . Full of detail and mixed with vivid personal accounts."— War History Online
 
This graphic collection of first-hand accounts sheds new light on the experiences of the French army during the Great War. It reveals in authentic detail the perceptions and emotions of soldiers and civilians who were caught up in the most destructive conflict the world had ever seen.
 
Their testimony gives a striking insight into the mentality of the troops and their experience of combat, their emotional ties to their relatives at home, their opinions about their commanders and their fellow soldiers, the appalling conditions and dangers they endured, and their attitude to their German enemy. In their own words, in diaries, letters, reports and memoirs—most of which have never been published in English before—they offer a fascinating inside view of the massive life-and-death struggle that took place on the Western Front.
 
The author's pioneering work will appeal to readers who may know something about the British and German armies on the Western Front, but little about the French army which bore the brunt of the fighting on the allied side. His book represents a milestone in publishing on the Great War.
 
"An interesting, well-written and informative book which goes a long way to explaining why the French army mounted the staunch defense of its homeland that it did."—Burton Mail
 
"The text is skillfully put together and moves seamlessly from one voice to another while illuminating the flow of events that affected Frenchmen and women during the Great War."—Stand To! The Western Front Association

Chapter 1

‘To Berlin!’

1914

Chronology
28 June	Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is assassinated
1 Aug	French order general mobilization
3 Aug	German armies invade Belgium; Germany declares war on France
7–25 Aug	Battles of the Frontiers: two French offensives into Alsace are repulsed
14–25 Aug	Battles of the Frontiers: the French and German armies collide in a series of meeting engagements (the battles of Lorraine, Ardennes and Sambre)
14–25 Aug	Battle of Lorraine: First and Second Armies advance south of Metz; they are halted and then driven back
22–25 Aug	Battle of the Ardennes: Third and Fourth Armies are driven back with very heavy losses
22–23 Aug	Battle of the Sambre: Fifth Army is forced to withdraw from an over-extended position on the French left flank
29 Aug	Battle of Guise: Fifth Army counter-attacks its German pursuers, forcing the enemy to halt
5–10 Sept	First Battle of the Marne: after several days of intense fighting the Germans retreat
10–13 Sept	The Germans withdraw to the Aisne and defy allied attempts to dislodge them
18–24 Sept	Battle of Picardy: Second Army is transferred from Alsace and halts a German advance on the Somme
20–25 Sept	The French drive off a succession of attacks on Verdun; however, the Germans manage to create a salient around Saint-Mihiel
26 Sept	The French repulse a German offensive between the Oise and the Meuse
16 Oct–30 Nov	Battle of the Yser: French and Belgian forces prevent the Germans from capturing the Channel ports
30 Oct–24 Nov	First Battle of Ypres: French and British forces prevent the capture of the town
6–17 Nov	The Germans make further attempts to capture Ypres and Dixmude

‘The Republic is calling us’ – mobilization

Late afternoon, 1 August 1914. In towns and villages across France gendarmes and municipal employees were hard at work. They were busily posting notices on the walls of public buildings – notices which proclaimed general mobilization for the following day. Despite German demands to remain neutral in the event of war with Russia, France was coming to the aid of her ally. Reservists between the ages of 24 and 38 were recalled with immediate effect; the 20-year-olds due to be called up in October would follow later in the month.

This development was not entirely unexpected. The countries of Europe had been preparing for war for the past decade, and speculation had only intensified after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June. On 31 July and 1 August anti-war demonstrations attracted thousands of participants in cities from Denain to Avignon, from Brest to Lyon. But it was also the height of the holiday season and other news demanded its share of the headlines. On 28 July Madame Henriette Caillaux, wife of the minister of finance, had been acquitted of murder after the trial of the summer, her actions judged a crime passionel. Madame Caillaux had shot Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro, after he published a letter damaging to her husband’s reputation. Three days later Jean Jaurès, leader of the French socialists and an ardent pacifist, was assassinated while eating a strawberry tart in a Paris café.

Deep in the countryside, news that the country was mobilizing might come as a complete surprise. As one smallholder in rural Languedoc recalled: ‘We didn’t take any newspapers [and] we seldom left the village, plus it all happened very suddenly.’ Rural schools too did little to introduce their pupils to the wider world. One future infantryman (96th Infantry) remembered his teacher’s comment on the assassination in Sarajevo: ‘This could be an excuse for war’. But he was the exception; few of his comrades knew anything about the crisis brewing in 1914. And these southerners were not untypical. A survey conducted in 1906 had previously revealed just how little serving soldiers knew of recent French history; indeed, many were unaware that Alsace and Lorraine had been lost to Germany in the war of 1870–71.

Serving soldiers had received their marching orders on 28 July. Two days later Bandsman Meyer (74th Infantry) was with his unit in Rouen, where ‘many of the men were drunk’. Trooper Henry Videau (5th Cuirassiers) was in barracks in Tours, with just enough time to dash off a letter to his parents. ‘Don’t be too down-hearted …,’ he told them:

We’re mobilizing, those on leave have been recalled, and so has the class of 1910. They’ve mobilized the whole of the east, so it’s no joke. We must hope it’ll go no further than that but I’m not confident. We’re all confined to barracks and the trucks are waiting at the station to take us away. … Don’t worry though. If war does break out, better for us if it happens now than in four or five years’ time. Right now I’m the only one with the colours [and] Raoul [his brother] won’t be called up. I’m writing in haste since time is short.

Joseph Lintanf (19th Infantry) was home on leave in the Breton village of Plestin-les-Grèves (Côtes d’Armor), celebrating his sister’s wedding. The mayor gave Joseph and his cousin Théophile permission to stay the night before they reported back for duty. Ernest Etienne (3rd Zouaves) was still in bed when he received his recall: ‘On the morning of 31 July I was still fast asleep when my sister suddenly appeared in my room … the gendarmes had just [called to] ask me to return to my regiment as soon as possible.’

In Mirepoix (Ariège), close to the Pyrenees, the town-crier toured the streets with news of the mobilization order. Lost property was his normal stock-in-trade and his voice rapidly failed. ‘Nobody could hear him,’ reported Marie-Louise Escholier. ‘A crowd gathered round his silver-braided kepi and [started to] heckle: “Hey, we’re not lip-readers! What a carry on!” … At every street corner, the same hostile ring formed around him. He was as miserable as a bullock dogged by a cloud of angry flies.’ In the countryside church bells or local officials broadcast the news. The bells were normally used to warn of hailstorms or fires. When people in the Limousin heard them ring, they looked up, puzzled, into a clear blue sky; elsewhere the fire brigade turned out, searching in vain for flames and smoke.

In the tiny Alpine village of Granon (Hautes-Alpes) the harvest was in full swing:

When we heard the bells ringing, we wondered what was happening … It was the garde-champêtre who brought us the news. ‘We’re at war, we’re at war!’ he told anyone he bumped into … ‘But who are we fighting?’ ‘Why, the Germans of course!’ Once the mobilization orders and itineraries arrived, the reality of the situation began to hit home. Every able-bodied man received his papers; parting, that’s what the war meant to start with. It turned the village completely upside down. Some people made a joke of it all. You’ll get a summer holiday out of it. We’ve never had one before; make the most of it. But others were worriers, always looking on the black side. The war seemed like the end of the world for them and they wanted no part in it. Some lads went and hid in the forest. [But] in the end everyone went. In just one week the village had changed completely. There were no men left between the ages of twenty and thirty.

Conscripts had made up the bulk of the French army since 1798, with every 20-year-old male liable to spend three years with the colours. ‘Young people didn’t balk at military service,’ recalled one stretcher-bearer from the class of 1915. ‘It seemed normal to wear uniform for as long as was needed to guarantee peace.’ Each January the commune posted a list of those deemed eligible for service, and these men then went before a board to assess their suitability. Every man was measured and weighed by a medical officer, and some were rejected immediately on medical grounds – for example, lack of stature or congenital infirmity. Serving prisoners were not excused; on completing their sentence they were sent off to the Infanterie Légère d’Afrique to man remote desert garrisons. Nor were there exemptions for conscientious objectors. It was also possible to volunteer in advance of the call-up – for three, four or five years, or for the duration. Just over 26,000 men did so in the first flush of enthusiasm in 1914. But by the following year that number had plunged to under 11,000.

In a tradition which dated back to the earliest days of conscription, towns and villages gave a big send-off to those selected for service each year, dressing them in distinctive costumes with ribbons and flowers, and giving them a special flag to carry. During wartime this custom became rather more muted, but it never disappeared entirely. As late as March 1918 Captain J.C. Dunn, a medical officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, noted: ‘Going on leave, I saw in Steenwerck the latest class of French conscripts leaving home for their depots. Dressed in their Sunday best, beflowered, beribboned, beflagged, befuddled, they were calling at every friend’s house and being given liquor. Poor boys.’

After three years with the ‘active’ army, conscripts then spent eleven years in the reserves, a further seven in the territorials, and a final seven in the territorial reserves – a total of twenty-eight years in all. On mobilization in 1914 each infantry regiment and each chasseur battalion raised a reserve unit. These units were initially intended to man garrisons and lines of communication. But in the event they had to take their place in the line alongside serving soldiers: ‘There is no such thing as reserves,’ said Commander-in-Chief Joseph Joffre in 1915.

Some contingents of reservists set off for the front amid celebrations; others departed amid sadness and tears. On 2 August the men of the Pyrenean town of Bagnères-de-Bigorre marched to the station, led by a band and applauded by their fellow townspeople. But later that morning another contingent arrived in the town from the nearby village of Gerde. They too made their way to the station, but behind came their wives, mothers and sisters, weeping. In distant Lorraine the town of Nomény, close to the German frontier, witnessed similar scenes: ‘A noisy troop paraded in front of the Prévot works at half-past seven in the morning, singing the Marseillaise: it was the men from the villages … [of] Raucourt, Abaucourt and Mailly, off to join their units. The Nomény men soon followed: women wept, children clung to their fathers, but the men kept their farewells short and their tears unshed.’

The territorials were intended only for very local, static defence. Some regiments did see action during the conflict, in emergencies such as the Race to the Sea in September 1914, but for the most part those not guarding lines of communication were used as works battalions – making and maintaining trench systems, roads and railway lines – or to guard prisoners of war.

The peacetime army contained 817,000 men, a figure increased on mobilization to 2,944,000. Altogether almost eight million men were called to the colours during the war.

Those who were small and light might qualify to join a cavalry regiment; those with any technical expertise – of railways, public works, shipyards or telecommunications – the artillery, engineers or air service. But most men went into the infantry; normally around two-thirds of all recruits, but rather more in 1915 in response to the losses sustained in the first months of the war. Around three out of every four infantrymen were peasant farmers and agricultural workers; the remainder were factory workers, small craftsmen, shop assistants, teachers or clerks. The engineers and the aviation service continued to demand appropriate qualifications, but the huge expansion of the wartime artillery quickly opened up that arm of service to a wider range of recruits. An artillery posting – indeed any posting away from the front line – was highly prized. Louis Lamothe (339th Infantry) was certainly envious of two acquaintances who went straight into the artillery in 1915: ‘Perhaps they were right. Someone gave them good advice. It’s much less dangerous than it is in the infantry.’

The army was structured on a local and regional basis. Each regiment recruited from a number of specific areas, and regiments from the same military region were brought together to form divisions and army corps. This system could be a source of weakness, as the British were later to discover with their Pals battalions. But its great strength was that it allowed soldiers to serve with men from their immediate locality, an advantage at a time when outsiders found regional accents or patois difficult to understand. Two country lads from the Pyrénées-Orientales ended up with the Algerians of the chasseurs d’Afrique. ‘Their accent made them almost incomprehensible,’ reported their sergeant, ‘but they did have the gift of great good sense.’ On transferring from 1st Hussars to 18th Infantry in late 1915, one soldier from Béziers felt very much alone, ‘surrounded by Béarnais all speaking their own patois, with only a Toulousain and an Aveyronnais [for company]’.

A Savoyard from 108th Territorials – all from the Chambéry area – told the tale of a similar, and potentially more dangerous, experience late in 1914. He and his pals shot a partridge which fell to earth between the lines. That night the would-be hunters set off to retrieve the bird and were challenged by a sentry: ‘“In the name of God,” [I] said. “Let’s get the hell out of here. We’ve lost our way somehow. Whatever he’s speaking, it’s not French!’’ And did we scarper, I can tell you!’ But in the light of day they realized that in fact they had never left their own lines. They had simply failed to recognize anything resembling French in the thick south-western accents of the neighbouring 129th Infantry, from Agen.

Speakers of patois were often reluctant to speak French, preferring their native tongue. Several trench newspapers continued to print articles and poems in patois, some as late as 1917: Poil … et Plume (81st Infantry; Montpellier), for example, published items in Occitan; Hurle obus (12th Territorials; Amiens), in the Picard dialect. But personal preference did not always carry the day. Soldiers usually had no option but to speak French because that was the language used by their officers. In 1915 the future Communist leader Jacques Duclos recalled a Basque who spoke not a word of French, ‘but events would force him to learn it’.

Problems of language between men from different regions were sometimes compounded by an undercurrent of prejudice and suspicion. Anxious parents sought reassurance that their loved ones were serving with men from their own area and not among ‘strangers’. Georges Faleur, a medical officer in 52nd Division, came from Hirson, near the Belgian border. Faleur had mixed feelings about one man in his ranks: ‘a grand lad, very obliging. His main fault was … that like most southerners he remained an inveterate braggart: he was a know-all.’ Raymond Garnung (60th Artillery), a native of Mios (Gironde), was rather more generous in return. Shortly after volunteering in 1915, Raymond reassured his sister: ‘The northerners aren’t as cold as people try to make out … [they’re really] very kind when you get to know them.’

Medieval historian Sergeant Marc Bloch (272nd Infantry) had little time for Bretons: ‘In our view men from inland Brittany were no great shakes as soldiers. Prematurely aged, they seemed worn down by poverty and alcohol, their ignorance of [French] only adding to the impression of stupidity. To cap it all, they came from all over Brittany, so each man spoke a different dialect, and even those who knew a little French could seldom interpret for the rest.’ Another officer marvelled at the hardiness of the Bretons and their ability to defy the wet of the trenches. He put it down to their native climate, living as they did ‘amid fog and mist’.

The main part of the army consisted of French conscripts serving on French soil (conscripts were prevented by law from serving abroad in peacetime). However, France could also call on a number of other regiments, all raised specifically to serve in her overseas possessions – particularly in Africa and Indochina – but also available for service at home if required. Unique in offering opportunities for combat experience, these regiments were particularly attractive to energetic career officers and volunteers reluctant to spend their days mouldering in a dusty French garrison town. In 1914, therefore, they were the ones with the most recent combat experience. But the French high command largely ignored their expertise, dismissing skills gained in colonial warfare as irrelevant to any future European conflict.

XIX Corps was made up of regiments raised in north Africa from a mixture of conscripts and volunteers. The zouaves, tirailleurs and Foreign Legion were infantry regiments; the chasseurs d’Afrique and spahis, cavalry. The zouaves were conscripts raised from the white colonists, while the tirailleurs were raised among the indigenous peoples of Algeria and Tunisia, using volunteers and a limited form of conscription. The cavalry was made up entirely of volunteers – the chasseurs recruiting from French colonists, the spahis from native Algerians.

Then there were the colonial regiments. These were of two different kinds: volunteer units recruited among French citizens in France and its colonies, and regiments raised by a system of quotas among the indigenous peoples (those from west and equatorial Africa were styled ‘Senegalese’, whatever their country of origin). Their main depots were in the principal French naval ports – Cherbourg, Brest, Toulon and Rochefort – and most volunteer regiments were on hand to take the field in 1914. A corps of three divisions, including regulars and reservists, became part of Fourth Army. The indigenous regiments were based overseas and none was immediately available on the outbreak of war, although they took part in increasing numbers as the conflict ground on.

Foreigners who volunteered to serve with the French Army (perhaps as many as 80,000 over the course ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Introduction and Acknowledgements
• Map of the Western Front
• 1 ‘To Berlin!’ – 1914
• 2 ‘Nibbling at the Enemy’ – 1915
• 3 ‘They Shall Not Pass’ – 1916
• 4 ‘Hold’ – 1917
• 5 ‘Victory!’ – 1918
• Appendix: French and British Army Ranks
• Bibliography and Sources