French History: A Captivating Guide to the History of France, Charlemagne, and Notre-Dame de Paris by History Captivating

Author:History, Captivating
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

Illustration 48: “On ne passe pas!” by Maurice Neumont, 1918.

Well, at least the Boche (the pejorative French name for the German soldier, meaning “string bean,” named after the color of their uniforms) didn’t make it to Paris or win at Verdun. But in 1914, and again in the spring of 1918, the Germans came close.

In 1914, the French rallied along the Marne River not far from Paris and stopped the Germans after a bloody battle. In 1918, the Germans were able to transfer hundreds of thousands of men from Russia, who had dropped out of the war after the Bolsheviks of Vladimir Lenin came to power, to the Western Front for one last push before the Americans were able to bring their full strength to bear. The Americans entered the war in late 1917. In their famous Spring Offensive of 1918, the Germans, using innovative tactics and fresh men, almost broke through French, British, and American lines to Paris, but they were stopped. After this last offensive, the Germans were no longer able to continue in any meaningful way. Like most wars, WWI was fought using the tactics and methods of the previous war, at least until its very last days. You likely have seen movies, documentaries, or pictures of troops from all nations going over the top of the trenches that covered the Western Front from the border of Switzerland to the English Channel. You probably also know that in many cases, the order to go “over the top” was a death sentence. This was because, by the outbreak of the war, weapons had changed.

Even though the French had experienced the German innovations of the rapid-firing rifle and artillery in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and then adopted them themselves, many believed the outcome was sort of a fluke, the product of bad planning and leadership. Surely, older French generals, who had grown up on stories of Napoleon I and had even known veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, said to themselves that a hard-driven attack led by able officers and driven home at the right time and place would win the day.

The vast majority of generals and politicians in the combatant nations recognized the need for the use of newer weapons, primarily the machine gun and, as the war went on, the airplane, poison gas, the flame thrower, the tank, and faster-firing, longer-ranged, and deadly artillery. However, these men did not seem to recognize how much these weapons changed warfare. Men charged over the top into fields pocked with shell holes only to be cut down like wheat at harvest.

Making things even worse was that, in the time between 1870 and 1914, industrialization had vastly improved guns, cannons, bullets, and shells, and they were being turned out and used at an unbelievable rate. To name just one country, Germany estimated it had fired over 220,000,000 artillery shells during the war. Most of these were fired in the concentrated areas of the Western Front. Artillery barrages sometimes lasted for days without end.

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