Nothing in the first two years of fighting had prepared the soldeirs for these huge losses. In the summer of 1916, British and German soldiers-separated by a desolate, shell-ravaged no-man's-land-peered at each other from zigzagged lines of trenches. Both armies had adjusted to the trogiodyte horrors of trench warfare, where the best weapons often were "clubs, ax handles, daggers, medieval man traps, and crossbows, primitive catapults."1 But even then death came slowly and painfully. Philip Gibbs of the Daily Telegraph reported that "the horrors of the first aid post were standard-men hold their intestines in both hands, broken bones tearing the flesh, arteries spurting blood, maimed hands, empty eye sockets, pierced chests, skin hanging down in tatters from the burned face, missing lower jaws ... men with chunks of steel in their lungs and bowels vomiting great gobs of blood, men with legs and arms torn from their trunks, men without noses and their brains throbbing through open scalps ...."2
Survivors of battle sought safety and refuge in their trenches. But here the horror of combat only continued: "the incredible mud, into which horses and men sometimes sank clear out of sight, the stench of excrement and rotted flesh and explosives and mustard gas, the maggots that writhed underfoot and oozed up from the cracks in the dried mud, the rats, gorged on human meat (they preferred eyes and livers), some of them as big as terriers and as bold as cats, the churned-up battlefields lost and won and lost again, a dozen times since 1914, in which the earth itself seemed to be composed of dead bodies, where arms and legs and heads protruded through trench walls and had to be covered with empty sandbags or chopped off with shovels and buried."'
To break the deadlock of two years of immobility, the British High Command
ordered the Somme offensive to crack open the Western Front and break the
German Army's hold on northern France. However, slaughter rather than victory
awaited the 120,000 British soldiers who attacked the German lines on July
1, 1 91 6, the first day of the Somme offensive.
Men began to fall one by one.... One officer said we were OK, all the machine-guns were firing over our heads. This was so until we passed our own front line and started to cross No Man's Land. Then trench machine-guns began the slaughter from the La Boiselle salient [German positions]. Men fell on every side screaming. Those who were unwounded dare not attend to them, we must press on regardless. Hundreds lay on the German barbed wire which was not all destroyed and their bodies formed a bridge for others to pass over and into the German front line.
There were few Germans, mainly in machine-gun posts. These were bombed out, and there were fewer still of us, but we consolidated the lines we had taken by preparing firing positions on the rear of the trenches gained, and fighting went on all morning and gradually died down as men and munitions on both sides became exhausted.
When we got to the German trenches we'd lost all our officers. They were all dead, there was no question of wounded. About 25 of us made it there....
Yes, as we made our way over the latter stages of the charge, men dropped all around like ninepins. Apart from machine-guns, the German artillery was also very active, great sheets of earth rose up before one. Every man had to fend for himself as we still had to face the Germans in their trenches when we got there.
I kept shouting for my MOTHER to guide me, strange as it may seem. Mother
help me. Not the Virgin Mother but my own maternal Mother, for I was then
only 20 years of age.
The dead were stretched out on one side [of the trench] one on top of the other six high.... To do one's duty was continually climbing over corpses in every position.... Of the hundreds of corpses I saw I only saw one pretty one-a handsome boy called Schnyder of the Berkshires who lay on our firestep shot through the heart. There he lay with a sandbag over his face: I uncovered it as I knew he was an officer. I wish his Mother could have seen him-one of the few whose faces had not been mutilated.
The 2nd Middlesex came back with 22 men out of 600....
Just in front the ground was pitted by innumerable shellholes.... More holes opened suddenly every now and then. Here and there a few bodies lay about. Farther away, before our front line and in No Man's Land, lay more. In the smoke one could distinguish the second line advancing. One man after another fell down in a seemingly natural manner, and the wave melted away. In the background, where ran the remains of the German lines and wire, there was a mask of smoke, the red of the shrapnel bursting amid it. As I advanced I felt as if I was in a dream, but I had all my wits about me. We had been told to walk. Our boys, however, rushed forward with splendid impetuosity....
A hare jumped up and rushed towards me through the dry yellowish grass, its eyes bulging with fear... At one time we seemed to be advancing in little groups. I was at the head of one for a moment or two only to realize shortly afterwards that I was alone. I came up to the German wire. Here one could hear men shouting to one another and the wounded groaning above the explosion of shells and bombs and the rattle of machine-guns....
Suddenly I cursed. I had been scalded in the left hip. A shell, I thought,
had blown up in a waterlogged crump hole and sprayed me with boiling water.
Letting go of my rifle, I dropped forward full length on the ground. My
hip began to smart unpleasantly, and I felt a curious warirnth stealing
down my left leg. I thought it was the boiling water that had scalded me.
Certainly my breeches looked as if they were saturated with water. I did
not know they were saturated with blood.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
1. Does this set of recollections suggest anything about the quality
of civilian morale in France during the Great War?
2. Do these recollections coupled with the diary entries (see Reading
56) help to explain the appeal of fascism (see Reading 67) to some of the
men and women who survived the battles and devastation of World War I?
Franqois Carlotti, "World War 1: A Frenchman's Recollections," The
American Scholar 57:2 (Spring 1988), pp. 296-88. Copyright (C 1988 by the
author. By permission of the publishers.
The first leaves fell at the end of October. After the defeat at the frontiers, the retreat, the miracle of the Mame, the stabilization of the line in the trenches was necessary to give France time to recover her balance.
And then the High Command and government, appalled by the losses that surpassed imagining, probably found themselves little disposed to reveal the truth.
Up to this point we had only bad news of those wounded who, evacuated to the interior, had succeeded in getting a letter or a message through, and they were not many. One had lost a leg and another had been hit in the stomach. We had showed them much sympathy, them and their families. We should soon envy them.
When the two gendarmes who had stayed at headquarters started to go on their rounds with the official notices, "Died on the field of Honor," a terrified silence fell on the town, the villages, and the hamlets.
Gustave was killed, the little clerk who had once worked for my father and who had looked so handsome in his cavalryman's uniform.
Arsene, Alcide, Jules, Leon, K1eber, Maurice, Remi, Raoul-all killed. Georges, the son of the fat ironmonger in the marketplace, who had studied in Paris and come back with advanced ideas-talking English, putting up little hurdles in the field to jump over as he ran, teaching the boys to play with a queer sort of ball that wasn't even round-killed.
Alphonse, Clothaire, Emile, Etienne, Firmin, Marceau, Raymond, Victor-killed, killed....
The grief was often the more terrible because in most cases it was an
only son.
Tall, spare, bony, mother Cochon was always the first to set out and
the last to return. She had four men in the house.
The eldest daughter, married to an employee of the railway from far
away, had made her home with him there in the Capdenac region where he
had a good job.
The father remained at home with his three sons, who had been bom one after the other within the space of five years. The three boys had all done very well at school, while also giving a helping hand at home when required. They had passed their leaving certificates before rejoining their father to toil with him from dawn to dusk.
Yet, despite all their work, their plot of land did not suffice to provide a livelihood for the whole family, and, in turn, one or two of the boys went to work for wages. They were not living as lodgers, like Belgians or Bretons who, at St. Jean, poured from the trains in serried ranks with their round hats and their clogs, their working boots slung round their necks-no, they worked as neighbors who were well favored, eating at their master's table. These Cochons were good boys who would never have worked less than their father.
Happy lads, not bothered by jokes on their name, always the first to sound the trumpet and bang the drum of the town band, first over the parallel bars or the vaulting horse, or leaders at the dance in the mairie2 on holidays.
The father died while the eldest boy was away doing his training. The other two boys slaved away in the garden, working all the harder because the first born did not return home when the youngest son left. And after his three years' service, this youngest son faced mobilization and war.
When the gendarmes arrived that morning, Mme. Cochon received them standing,
with
the one word: "Which?" "Auguste," replied one of them and laid the
little notice on the table.
"Ah, Auguste, my first born, my strongest and my bravest." A slow shudder
passed
across her face, but she didn't flinch.
And then, as the gendarmes stood their ground, shifting from one foot
to the other, she looked them full in the face, till one of them, gathering
all his courage, managed to say, "And Desire," putting the official notification
on the table as he left. "Desire, my most handsome, my most gentle, the
golden-haired one." Now she trembled from head to foot, murmuring. "Auguste
... Desire ... Auguste ... Desire...... ever more softly, as though she
was clasping them.
When the gendarmes returned, a month later, she turned towards them
from her seat in the comer of the fireplace without looking at them and
asked: "Is it Marcel?" They bowed their heads, unable to speak.
"Ah, Marcel, my baby, my last, My dearest, 0 Marcel." And then suddenly a terrible cry rent the air and carried down to the riVeL "Marcel, Marcel. Now there are no more Cochons."
Without hearing, the gendarme forced himself to read the paper. "Cochon, Marcel, sergeant, infantry ... heroic conduct ... citation ... croix de guerre.1,2 She repeated her crazy, despairing threnody, "No more Cochons, no more Cochons."
From that day she hardly ever went out except to walk to her husband's grave. Those who met her would often hear her muttering. "No more Cochons ... there are no more."
But no one ever saw her cry.
She died at the onset of winter
And there were still four years of war to come. The long hopeless agonies in the military hospitals, the boys of classe 16,3 called up at eighteen, who would never see their twentieth year, men who were wounded three times, bandaged up, nursed and healed, who returned yet again to the line never to return, the atrocious deaths in the gas attacks. There was the terrible winter of 1916-17 when even wild animals were frozen to death; and the insane spring offensives of 1917 when for a moment one thought oneself back in the bloodiest days of the summer of 1914, when training regiments were rushed into the line to plug the yawning gaps that held fast, never bending under the shells and the hail of the machine guns. The Americans arrived, the diabolical long-range guns shelled Paris, the last great German offensive began, which again reached the Mame, and the final victorious counteroffensive was launched.
There was the great Roger who fell on November 8.
When it was all ended and there was no family left to ask for the return of their corpses, they remained on their battlefields-the three brothers, with the vast army of shadows in the great military cemeteries, neat and orderly where they rest, hidden forever, the bravery, the gaiety, the youth of this people of France, who were-like the men of Athens before them-the adomment of the world.