Professor John Merriman:
Okay, I want to talk about the
war up through 1916 today,
and then followed by 1917 and
1918 on Wednesday.
On the last day of his life
Jean Jaurès was troubled
about what he was going to write
in L'Humanité,
the paper of the Socialist
Party, about whether workers of
France should go to war against
workers of Germany,
and his decision,
which for that matter had been
taken earlier anyway,
not just that evening,
reflects what is called the
sacred union,
union sacrée,
that the political parties put
aside their differences in the
war effort,
in the mobilization of the
total war that World War One
would become.
And, so, he did,
he wrote an article with a
headline called "En
Avant,"
"forward," or "let's go," and
he went out to eat in a
café called Le Croissant,
which is still there,
it's not called Le Croissant
anymore, and he was having a
meal and about to go back to his
newspaper offices right near
there--it's near the Boulevard
Montmartre,
where a lot of the newspaper
offices still are--and a
right-wing nut put a pistol
through from outside,
through the curtain into the
restaurant, and blew him away.
There was this tremendous sort
of turmoil in the street,
and people who remembered it,
including the writer Roger
Martin du Gard,
remembered this sort of swell
of chaos but also of
apprehension.
In a sense it's easy to read
this backwards,
nostalgia, but the sense that
things would never be the same
again,
and Jaurès,
Jaurès,
Jaurès forever.
And Jaurès died and the
world went to war.
And the way the war started,
it started as if the--in the
way that the military planners
had wanted it to start.
I left you last time with the
Schlieffen Plan;
and Schlieffen literally on his
deathbed said that the last
German soldier,
his sleeve should touch the
Manche,
the English Channel,
and that in order to put France
into a headlock,
put Paris into a headlock like
that,
you should sweep this way,
through Belgium--they'd
eliminated the Netherlands as
part of that invasion route,
that would come in World War
II, but they didn't need the
Netherlands in this case--that
they would march into neutral
Belgium,
neutral since 1831,
knowing that this would bring
the British into the war because
the British could never have
Belgium occupied by a
potentially very hostile power.
And, so, Germany is under
pressure to win the war quickly.
They, as I said at the end of
the last time,
last lecture,
they anticipated about two
weeks it's going to take the big
Russian bear to bring all of
these forces,
in many cases using that single
track railroad that went all the
way to Vladivostok,
to prepare to invade Germany,
or to defend against German
incursions into Russia.
And, so, it was if--someone
once said, and I don't remember
who--as if Schlieffen's dead
hand automatically pulled the
trigger when the Belgian
government on the 2nd of August
rejected German demands that its
armies could march through
Belgium.
And the Belgium Army fought
bravely, indeed very heroically,
against overpowering military
strength.
The big fortress of
Liège--when I get so
close here I can't see--but
Liège there falls,
and falls to the young--not so
young, but--commander,
Ludendorff, after a huge
bombardment on the 16th,
followed by the fall of Namur.
And once the Germans get
through the hills of eastern
Belgium then they move fairly
quickly.
But the German commander,
Von Moltke, m-o-l-t-k-e,
the younger Moltke,
uses some divisions to try to
pin down the Belgians,
and he also is having doubts
with a view toward the home
front of wanting--of fearing how
far the French in their
inevitable penetration into
Alsace-Lorraine would go.
And, so, indeed France advances
in Alsace, although they had
been anticipated by Schlieffen
as inevitable and not crucial to
the winning of the war in a very
timely fashion,
now lead von Moltke to transfer
troops, fearing that the home
front might despair of French
advances there.
And, so, what this means is
that the Germans have basically
fewer troops than had been
anticipated in the original plan
by von Schlieffen.
And sure enough the British
Expeditionary Force,
which was not a large army,
finally arrives on the 20th of
August, Mons,
in Belgium.
But everybody is fairly sure
that the war is going to be over
fairly soon.
But one of the things that
happens immediately--one of the
things that happens almost
immediately is that the Germans
are marching so quickly and so
rapidly that they become
fatigued by the pace of their
march,
and also problems with
communications.
And, indeed,
the army--the army is commanded
by a forgettable guy called
Kluck-- is spread too thinly
across a wide front,
and that thinness made more
serious by the departure of
troops to fight in Alsace,
and also by troops still left
in chasing down and rounding up
the Belgian forces in Belgium.
But he sends four divisions to
Russia, also,
because the Russians have
advanced far more rapidly than
he thought was ever possible.
And, so, one of the things that
the German High Command does is
instead of going all the way
this way,
they turn down south and then
southeast, quicker than had been
originally planned.
And despite huge losses,
on both sides,
the German side and the French
side,
and with the British also
getting into the action,
the German forces are within
thirty-five miles of Paris,
thirty-five miles,
within Paris,
so that you could hear the
cannon in Paris,
from the fighting just east and
north of the capital.
Now, if one wants an
explanation for how the French
home front was able to hold
spectacularly,
through the entire war,
that is, one of two key
factors, and it's the most
important,
is that the Germans are so
close to Paris that they can
bombard Paris on Easter Sunday
1918--more about that
later--with this huge gun,
Big Bertha as it was called by
the English, firing way down
from up here in the north,
lobbying these huge shells all
the way.
So, the pressure is there and
the response is heroic.
The second factor,
which is often forgotten,
is that the Sacred Union,
this Union
Sacrée,
is extremely effective in
mobilizing through propaganda
but also through extremely
intelligent action,
bringing help,
for example,
to people trying to bring the
harvest in, using troops,
and when they have them fairly
soon, capture German soldiers to
help bring the harvest in,
and they also begin to give
allocations familiales,
or sort of family allocations,
family resources I guess is a
way of putting that,
to families who the departure
of sons,
brothers, and fathers was
catastrophic;
but, of course,
they hadn't seen anything yet.
But they're very shrewd in
this, and the home front,
unlike Berlin--and that's
another story--but the home
front in France holds throughout
the entire war.
There are some exceptions in
that, and I'm going to talk
about that next week,
and it's fairly--I mean on
Wednesday--it's fairly
interesting.
And, so, as the Germans are
trying to drive to Paris in what
became known as the Battle of
the Marne,
at the dawn of air warfare,
planes--their first use was
reconnaissance,
they're not used for--really as
weapons,
in the very beginning.
There are attempts to drop
small bombs and things like
that, and the French do this
fairly early on in Germany,
in German cities,
and the Germans do this as
well.
But there's a guy flying around
up there who,
a reconnaissance pilot,
who notices that Kluck's army
is changing directions,
leaving its flank open as it
moves to a point southeast of
Paris.
And, so, at that point the
French rush every conceivable
soldier into the Battle of the
Marne,
which takes place basically
between Lagny,
which is a town you can't see
here,
and Champagne,
basically in
Châlons-en-Champagne,
the Battle of the Marne.
And everybody knows this as a
famous story,
and there's of course a metro
stop named after him,
inevitably, but the commander
of the military defense of the
Paris Region is a guy called
Gallieni,
g-a-l-l-i-e-n-i,
and he conscripts the taxis of
Paris.
And, so, the Parisian taxis
literally carry soldiers out to
fight in the Battle of the
Marne, which can be clearly
heard, to repeat myself,
in Paris;
that there was a sense of
impending doom,
obviously.
But the miracle occurs and the
British pour through another gap
in the German armies further up,
along the Aisne River,
a-i-s-n-e, and force them to
retreat forty miles back.
And that's the largest exchange
of real estate that would occur
until 1918, because of what
happens next.
And on September 14th along the
Aisne River the Germans begin to
fortify their position by
digging trenches,
and rather like the Battle of
Valmy in the French Revolution,
in 1792, the sans-culottes,
that is the ordinary people who
defended the revolution,
the Battle of the Marne saves
Paris and without any question
saves France.
So, then what you've got
is--and you have to--again I
always give ridiculous sports
analogies since most of what I
did over the weekend was watch
football--it works anyway in
this case.
And what you have to do is
imagine somebody trying to get
outside in a football game,
Mike Hart or somebody trying to
get outside, and as the guards
pull and as you move toward the
outside,
the defense,
and above all the linebackers,
and everybody kind of moves
along.
And what you have basically is
you have a race to the sea.
They're trying to outflank each
other, where the Germans are
going back to the strategy
penned by Schlieffen in 1905,
they're trying to get around to
go around, and then put this
headlock.
And of course what the French
and the British are doing is
they're racing along also to try
to hold their ports,
the French ports,
and also to keep them from
being outflanked.
And, so, then you have the
famous Western Front--and
that's--we're not talking about
the Eastern Front.
There's a lot of good work done
recently on the Eastern Front,
but you have this Western Front
that's generated so much
magnificent literature,
some of which you're reading in
Barbusse, as well as the
inevitable All Quiet on the
Western Front by Erich Maria
Remarque,
and Siegfried Sassoon,
and the British war poets.
Now, there were a few
journalists--I can't remember if
I mentioned this or not--who had
followed the Russo-Japanese War
in 1904 and 1905,
and they had noticed that in
some of these very prolonged
battles that trenches had been
dug,
and in the mud and just
horribly bad weather,
that two forces stared across
no-man's land against each
other.
And that's exactly what happens
in World War I;
and that is,
to make a very long story,
complicated story,
and sometimes overly-simplified
story very short,
that's exactly what happens on
the Western Front is that the
spade and the shovel,
along with the machinegun,
which is a defensive weapon,
along with ultimately gas and
flamethrowers--there were new
ways of dying too--become the
weapons of the war,
along with artillery,
and artillery kills more people
than any other weapon,
followed by machineguns.
And, so, basically,
as you can see from this map,
that the trenches go all the
way from Switzerland,
literally, to the English
Channel, and that is where la
jeunesse of France and these
other countries,
where the youth,
the young men,
and some older men,
too, of these countries,
died.
That was the end,
where their short lives ended,
in the vast majority of the
cases.
And attempts in the Fall of
1914 to break through simply
don't work, and it's not too
hard to figure out why they
don't work,
you don't have to be a
specialist in military warfare
to know that if you're going to
break through like this,
and you're going to--either
side, you pick your side and
you're going to get across.
The question is how are you
going to do that?
Because by--very quickly the
Germans have lines behind.
Here's from the point of view
of the French,
they're building railroads,
they can supply.
And if you're going to go
across and break through these
are sort of rubber band
defenses,
and in order to break through
with the strategy that they
adopt really throughout the war
is what are called creeping
barrages,
is that with all of these tens
of thousands of cannons you have
to soften up your opposition by
killing as many as people as
possible.
So, you're shelling,
you're anticipating where
you're going to go,
and this of course tips off
your opponent and says,
"ah-ha, that's where they're
going to go this time;
last time they went down there
and this time they're coming
here."
And, so, all this does--anybody
can see this,
and you'll see it in awhile,
got live here,
or not so live,
but we'll see it on your
screen--is that these creeping
barrages,
besides killing lots of--the
Americans invented the term
"friendly fire"--besides killing
their own people,
but what they do is they create
these enormous craters,
craters of death that are
filled with just awful pestilent
waters and make it impossible to
really get to the other side.
Because once you--once somebody
goes up and blows the whistle,
and says, "follow me,"
and you jump out of the
trenches, you've got to carry
sixty pounds,
sixty pounds worth of
equipment--now that's a lot of
equipment--down into these
things,
come through these craters,
and then what you do is you
find these machine guns,
layers of them,
aimed right low,
and they just take you out,
one right after another.
I've been to the Imperial War
Museum in London various times,
and I just went about six weeks
ago for the hell of it.
They've made it--they've
really--it's not as good as it
used to be.
But there used to be this one
clip where you could see these
guys, these three guys,
and one of them is an officer.
The officer has his whistle and
he blows the whistle,
that is, en avant,
here we go, let's go,
allez les gars,
let's go guys.
And you see him,
he gets one foot over there and
he's shot dead;
so you see his body slumped
down.
You see the second guy,
you can imagine the terror in
his eyes;
you can't see him,
his eyes, you don't see him
very long because then he's
killed to.
And then you see the third guy
get over;
and you don't know what happens
to him, his odds weren't very
good.
But this is a story of the war.
Now, there's a vigorous
historical debate always on did
they know what they were doing?
The image that you will see of
course in the movie,
The Paths of Glory,
is that there they are drinking
champagne in somebody's
confiscated chateau and sending
runners,
who were the people who carried
messages to the trenches,
and organizing these attacks.
And thus the most famous--just
killing fields,
basically, of the war,
and there's some really famous
ones like Paschendaele,
which is in Belgium,
and when you go through this
idyllic sort of part of Belgium
near Ypres you can't imagine
tens of thousands of people
dying there,
poisoned.
That's where the Germans first
used poison gas.
Or the Somme is the obvious
example that everybody uses and
I will use again in awhile.
Or the Battle of Verdun where
you're fighting a hand-to-hand,
hand-to-hand combat in the
forts of Verdun that--and it
goes,
simply goes on, and on, and on.
And there's now the revisionist
interpretations of the Battle of
Paschendaele--don't write down
Paschendaele,
it's impossible to spell
anyway--that,
say, well if they'd redefined
the idea of the creeping
barrage,
and if they'd managed to just
take one hundred yards,
and hold that,
and then the next one hundred
yards,
et cetera, et cetera.
But increasingly--it was just
clear, it was obvious to the
soldiers and it was clear to
most anybody that there wasn't
going to be a breakthrough,
but the High Command,
the German High Command,
and the French High Command,
and the British High Command
keep insisting that the next one
will be the time we will truly
break through.
But there isn't any
breakthrough until the Germans
break through in the spring of
1918 and the bodies get higher
and higher.
Now, on the Eastern Front,
what you had,
some trench situations but
basically it's a more wide-open
kind of fighting.
There were so many people
killed that one of the Russian
generals despaired,
he said, "we don't have any
idea how many people were killed
because the bodies just stack up
so high we can't see anything
and it's impossible to guess."
On the Italian front,
on the Italian-Austrian front,
Austro-Hungarian front,
there are ten different battles
named after the same river,
the same small river.
And, so, real estate is
exchanged in terms of yards,
not in terms of--it's won or
lost at the expense of all these
lives in a matter of not
kilometers but yards;
and kilometers,
gains of a couple of kilometers
are celebrated by the hysterical
press on both sides.
And these are very old stories,
but it's still true that things
appeared, for example--and the
French press had their
counterparts elsewhere--that
French bodies that are
decomposing don't smell the way
that German bodies that are
decomposing,
that was one story.
Or that the German shells are
so badly made--the expression
was Gerry-made,
that is an expression that came
out of World War II also,
made by the Germans,
because Gerries was a
derogative term for
Germans--that they're just kind
of like playthings,
they just kind of blow up and
go poof and that's the end of
it, that they don't really kill.
And reports put in the civilian
press about the hardy,
vigorous life of these
soldiers,
because they're in such good
shape, because they're eating
well--which was obviously not
the case,
they're eating frozen potatoes,
and when Pétain
increases the rum ration so they
could go over the top a little
tipsy to get killed in Verdun in
1916.
So, there was this
enormous--and this is one of the
scenes in the literature of the
war--there's this huge
discontinuity between the
civilian life and the soldiers.
And the soldiers can't talk
about it when they come back,
and they say things like,
"what do they imagine?
That we jump up every morning
and say, 'long live France,'
'long live Germany,'
'long live Italy'?"--depending
on your case--and jump over the
top heroically in order to get
to,
you name the city,
Moscow, Berlin,
Paris, Saint Quentin,
wherever you want to talk about
it.
And, so, there's discontinuity,
the soldiers when they go on
leave, when the soldiers go back
to the whorehouses of
Montmartre,
or the bars of Montparnasse,
or anywhere else,
or back to Lyon,
or Rennes, or anywhere you
want,
it's impossible for them to
even discuss what has happened.
And, indeed,
one of the interesting things
about this whole thing is lots
of the really great literature
after the war,
about the war,
does not come in the first two
years.
Barbusse does,
that's a fact,
I think he starts in the war,
but All Quiet on the Western
Front isn't really written
until late in the 1920s,
and then of course the Nazis
try to keep it from being shown,
because it's obviously an
anti-war film,
in German theaters.
So, in terms of--in 1914 you
could--these statistics,
you could just give all these
statistics and you can read
charts in any book,
including mine,
and it's just--these are real
people, which is very hard--it's
an obvious thing to say but it's
hard,
the figures are so numbing.
By the end of 1914,
so you're talking about half a
year, the British,
the German and French forces
had combined casualties of
300,000 killed--that's three
times the number of people
filling up the L.A.
Coliseum, or the Rose Bowl,
or Michigan Stadium;
that's a lot of people--600,000
wounded.
And these are in many cases
just devastating wounds,
and so it's not so hard to
imagine why the Paris metro,
and the subway in the 1920s was
full of people begging with one
arm, or one leg,
or no legs, or coughing out
their lungs because of gas
attacked.
The British 7th Division
arrived in France in October
1914 with four hundred officers
and 12,000 soldiers,
after fighting around Ypres,
which Ypres is right over the
Belgium border,
up by the English--not far away
from the English Channel;
a beautiful old textile town
that was destroyed for obvious
reasons during the war.
They had four hundred officers
and 12,000 soldiers,
four hundred officers,
12,000 soldiers.
At the end, after eighteen
days, they had forty-four
officers and 2,336 soldiers
left.
Figure out your odds,
if you're eighteen,
nineteen, twenty,
twenty-one, male,
in 1914.
And there's a recent movie
which I can't remember the name
of, my wife has seen it,
but it's about in 1914 there
was an attempt on Christmas Day
for people to say "ça
suffit largement";
this is just enough of this
crap, let's sing to each other.
And the Welsh were singing
their ballads,
and the Germans were singing
doleful Lutheran hymns,
and the Catholic French were
singing this and that.
And then somebody said,
"well, let's play some
football."
So, they got soccer players and
they're out playing and kicking
the ball around.
Then they went back to try to
kill each other again.
In 1915 a British soldier
suggested, said,
"hey, let's do that again,"
because he was lucky enough to
be around when they were doing
it in 1914;
they put him up against the
wall and shot him,
for treason.
And one of the things that
happens during this,
and because these people
were--everybody knows all these
stories.
You hear people dying,
you hear them slowly expire,
between--in the craters,
between the trenches,
and so there are all these
rumors that there are all these
people that had managed to
survive with light wounds,
and that there was this huge
underground cavern where
Germans, and French,
and British were all hanging
out,
and they were going out and
getting wine and champagne where
they could find it,
and they were coming and taking
food rations,
and they were the smart ones
because they were down there.
And it was the kind of rumor
that just went on and on.
But the proximity of death and
the proximity of the war was
always there.
Again, another famous
example--if you were an officer
in the British Army you could
have lunch in the Officer's Club
at Victoria Station,
where many of you have been,
and you could take the train to
the front and you could be dead
by--in the same front,
you could be dead,
fini, crevé,
by the end of the day.
When Welsh miners tunneled
under this big promontory in
Belgium, the explosion could be
heard across the English Channel
in Kent.
The war was so close.
That's what made it terrifying.
But that's what makes--also
because the people lost people,
lost family,
everybody lost family--that war
was the dominant experience of
the twentieth century,
at least the first half of the
twentieth century.
And again, you can look at the
whole period,
1914 to 1945 as this long,
horrible, thirty years war,
because the soldiers just
simply kept marching.
But they weren't doing much
marching in the trenches because
there wasn't anywhere to go.
Your marching was running out
and hoping that you were somehow
going to make it back,
after yet another "let's go
over the top."
And to repeat,
machineguns had first been
used--if I remember right they
were called Gatling guns in the
American Civil War;
I think they were used at
Gettysburg, if I'm correct.
They were slowly perfected,
at least to the level of World
War One.
And they, after shelling,
after these big shells
launching tens of thousands of
shells--when they're softening
up the opponent as to where
they're going to go;
these things go on for days.
And that's where--the whole
syndrome of shellshock is a term
that comes out of World War One,
too, because a lot of
people--there are all sorts of
estimates about how many people
really lost their mental
capacity because of all of this.
But not only new ways of dying,
but new ways of just having
your head exploding time,
and time, and time again;
living among dead bodies;
comrades who have disappeared;
rats, huge rats,
huge aggressive rats;
mice;
lice and everything else.
And then there were
flamethrowers,
and there are tanks--more about
tanks--tanks aren't any good at
all,
basically, till 1917,
because if you have a tank,
no matter--no tank can go over
these craters,
they just get stuck in their
whatever, not their wheels (I
don't know, you call them their
treads),
just sort of spin around and
there they are.
And so there was new misery.
You could send packages,
little care packages,
to the soldiers with a little
cheese from the Ardèche,
or a little cheese from Savoie
or maybe a bottle of wine from
Burgundy or something like that,
and hoped it didn't get
pilfered.
One soldier wrote back,
"before you can have a drink
you have to chip away the ice.
The meat is frozen and solid,
the potatoes are bonded by ice,
and even hand grenades are
welded together in their cases."
That's another weapon too that
comes up in World War One.
A French soldier remembered,
"we all had on us the stench of
dead bodies.
The bread we ate,
the stagnant water we drank,
everything we touched had a
rotten smell.
Death simply numbed."
An Austrian soldier--here's
some examples I took from the
other front, too,
but why not?
A violinist wrote,
"a certain fierceness arises in
you, an absolute indifference to
anything the world holds except
your duty of fighting.
You're eating a crust of bread
and a man is shot dead in the
trench next to you.
You look at him calmly for a
moment and then you go on eating
your bread.
Why not?
There's nothing to be done,
il n'y a rien à
faire.
In the end you talk of your own
death with as little excitement
as you would at a luncheon
engagement."
A British--one of the war poets
wrote--I can't remember which
one, but the line sticks with
you--he wrote,
"I didn't want to die,
at least anyway until I'd
finished reading The Return
of the Native."
And then he went on,
and the dead filled up these
craters.
Airplanes, just as an
insertion, as I said,
were first used for
reconnaissance.
Pilots carry pistols and fire
at their opponents;
and again there was this sort
of esprit de corps that these
were--so the brave fighting guys
up there are providing
amusements for the people in the
trenches below,
and when one of the aces would
get shot down the other planes
would fly over and drop flowers,
and Baron von Richthofen and
all these big ace guys,
most of whom were killed in the
end,
they get the good idea of
instead of putting a machinegun
on a plane that fires,
and then they found that the
machinegun bullets are sent back
killing the pilot by the
propeller-- someone says,
"ah-ha, let's time it to the
propeller";
so they create ways,
they create bigger bombs that
you can drop and all of that.
But air force planes are
basically used for
reconnaissance planes,
and the war simply goes on and
on.
One of the reasons why it goes
on and on, by the way,
is that atrocity stories
on--that's not one of the
reasons it goes on and on,
but it's one of the things that
sort of would--if you're going
over the top again would give
you some reason to want to go
over the top,
besides simply trying to
survive and not wanting to be
shot as a deserter,
is the atrocity stories.
Of course for the Germans who
had--in the Franco-Prussian War
there were some cases,
not very many,
of them being gunned down by
civilians who were called
franc tireurs,
just civilian sort of
sharpshooters,
and the Germans go into the war
with a sense that they better
watch it because the Belgians
are going to shoot you down from
buildings and so will the
French.
Most of the atrocities on the
western front were committed by
the Germans, not by the French.
There were five hundred Belgian
civilians executed,
most famously the nurse,
Edith Cavell,
who is executed with a couple
of other people accused of
treasons.
There were cases of rape
perpetuated by German troops,
but rape had not yet become a
weapon of war;
that would wait until later in
that very sad century.
But these stories passed very
quickly and were seized upon by
propagandists on both sides,
and that sort of keeps folks
going.
Okay, now what about Verdun?
Anyway, this is from Verdun.
Now, Verdun,
why do the Germans go after
Verdun in 1916?
They know they're not going to
break through,
but again it has ultimately to
do with that French birthrate,
is that they know,
because they have more
children, they can afford to
lose more German soldiers;
that is, if you were German,
you guys, then the French,
that is you guys,
or the British,
you guys, if you were French or
you were British.
And by the way to say "guys,"
it's not at all to denigrate the
role of women in the war,
more about that next lecture,
to a great extent,
because that's extremely
important,
because somebody had to step up
in the factories and all of
that.
But General Falkenhein,
the commander,
simply says,
"we will bleed them so that
they will be forced to negotiate
and to sue for peace.
They cannot afford to lose all
of the hundred thousands of
people that we can afford to
lose."
So, the Battle of Verdun,
the town of Verdun,
in the Meuse,
northeast, you know from maps,
itself was virtually destroyed
by shelling.
And the forts of Verdun are off
to the north and to the east,
and there are two of them--the
names don't matter but they're
interesting,
and someday you should go there;
Vaux, v-a-u-x is one;
and the other is called
Douaumont, which may be the only
French commune that no longer
exists.
Douaumont should be- d-u-- I
can't remember,
d-o-u-a-m-e-n-t;
anyway, it doesn't matter.
But one of the things when you
go there you'll see these
plaques that people put up after
the war,
and I think I mentioned this
the very first day,
and the hardest to take is one
guy at Vaux he went up,
made a--in '21 or '22,
a plaque that says,
"To my son, since his eyes
closed mine have not ceased to
weep."
And, so, the fighting in the
mists of these forests was some
of the worst ever seen in any
war and would take hundreds of
thousands of lives,
as you know.
This is--remember the stuff
about the craters,
this is an aerial view of Fort
Douaumont, the area around
there, and those are all
craters.
It looks like it's your classic
lunar landscape.
This is the south entrance to
the Fort of Douaumont,
which has just been destroyed
by German shelling,
as you can see.
And here you have--these are
the entrance.
You can go, as a tourist you
can go right into there.
These are not where these
plaques are all put up around
here, like they're inside a
church.
That's what it looked like then.
You can see the mont
left from Douaumont,
there, the Douau is
ça n'en existe
plus, it's not there
anymore.
And as a matter of fact when
you go to where the commune was,
the shelling is such that there
are these huge hills;
enormous hills have been
created simply by this land
being blown apart,
and that you're in--this,
you lived in the fort as you
lived in these trenches,
and the trenches were,
as the forts,
are accommodated as best they
can to make things livable for
those who are about to die.
And here is an infirmary where
you have your instant
amputations, there.
And that's what it looked like;
and you've seen pictures of the
Somme, which I'll talk about
maybe next time a little bit.
They had to build these
walkways to get you over all of
the mud.
And the weather in northern
France, whether you're talking
about Boulogne or anywhere else,
anywhere in the Channel but all
the way really into the northern
part of Alsace,
is pretty dreadful.
And here again are these
craters.
You've going to carry sixty
pounds through that stuff?
Not very easy.
And barbed wire,
which I should have mentioned
also, is one of those defensive
weapons of war,
along with your basic
machinegun.
And, of course,
one of the things that adds to
the weight carried by each
soldier is you had to have
barbed wire clippers that are
going to succeed in cutting the
barbed wire.
And the war poets,
one of them,
I can't remember,
maybe it was Isaac Rosenberg or
one of them said that,
well, "where's the finest of
Devonshire?
They're hung up,
they're hung up,
hung up on that old barbed
wire"--because it was easy to
get caught up on the barbed wire
and simply perish there.
And there's your basic real
live trench, with the helmets.
The French troops,
by the way, who'd gone into the
war wearing--this is true,
I couldn't invent this--bright
red pants that could be seen
through the mists by troops
changed to more subtle colors by
the end of the war,
to give them a better chance.
And, so, that was the trench,
and when you were going to
attack what you would do is
climb up over the trench,
and then face this machinegun
fire, and get as far as you
could.
Many did not get very far at
all.
And there is--get your head
down and hope it doesn't land on
you.
That's how most people died,
the majority of people died
through shelling,
in these kinds of creeping
barrages or just basic shelling.
Sharpshooters were also a
problem.
That's how--many of you have
read All Quiet on the Western
Front, and that's how he
gets killed at the end,
because he puts his head up and
someone blows it away.
But generally they used these
kind of periscopes to look up
and to survey the scene.
And if you went out into the
trenches it was--went out at
night as reconnaissance patrols,
and that was pretty dangerous.
Or, if you were particularly
heroic, and many of these people
in the infirmary service were,
you went out to try to bring
back the wounded before they
died.
And that's what--you have to
imagine this as being everything
from Switzerland to the English
Channel.
And there they are preparing
grenades.
Again, a lot of people in
France and in Germany are
hunters and they're used to
shooting,
but the idea of throwing a
grenade, there's not--there
weren't sports in France then--I
mean,
this is a lame,
and I apologize for this lame
analogy, but the idea of
throwing a grenade;
Americans throw baseballs and
stuff like that,
but it was--even that gesture
of throwing something took a
little of getting used to.
But here they are getting ready
to go again.
An incoming.
Going out at night.
And the other thing,
if you went out at night,
you couldn't see,
that was part of it,
because you couldn't be seen.
And, of course,
that's where you can get hung
up on barbed wire that you don't
know or encounter another patrol
from the other side.
And they tried to fool each
other to get people that grew up
in Alsace to speak German and
all of that.
And there's of course a
machinegun in placement,
the second big way of getting
killed.
Go there sometime,
go into Vaux and Douaumont and
try to imagine what it's like.
It must have been just
something.
And also the weather is
so--it's heavy weather so they
were dressed rather heavily.
These are sort of binocular
type things there.
And, well, voilà.
And that's sleeping
accommodations,
such as you would find.
If you look at that you could
also imagine being in a
submarine, because much of this
is underground there.
And then that's where you
slept, and you tried to figure
out who didn't come back,
after the--when the night
patrol came back.
The telephone systems,
the Germans had a huge
advantage in the east because
the Russian telephone system,
they'd managed to figure out
how it worked so they could hear
every single call,
if they were within range.
But the French system worked
better.
And also we're dealing with
telegraphs.
This is modern warfare.
What made it total warfare was
the mobilization of an entire
society, of its productive
capacity, to fight this war on,
and on, and on,
and on.
And, of course,
how the war ends with the
German troops way inside France
will have enormous repercussions
for the poisoning of the 1920s
and 1930s,
because it became easy for
Hitler to say--and for other,
he was just one,
there were lots of rightwing
leaders--to say,
"we were winning the war.
How did we lose it?
We were inside France.
We were stabbed in the back,
by who?
The Jews, the Communists,
the Socialists,
the weak ones,
not part of the true national
Volkish community," et cetera,
et cetera.
And bringing somebody back--I'm
sorry to say the man looks a
little peaked,
hauling him back.
And these are armed soldiers,
so this is not your infirmary
group.
There was some respect of the
Red Cross insignia and the white
flag, people tended to respect
that.
And also across--there were
these images.
In a place called Albert,
like Albert,
a town in the Somme that was
completely destroyed,
there was a statue of the
Virgin Mary, on top of a church,
and it was hit by a shell,
and it was hanging by a thread,
and soldiers on both sides
could see that,
the Virgin Mary hanging by a
thread,
and every day people think it's
going to get hit again,
and it's going to fall down.
And it became--that too became
sort of a myth about if it falls
it's going to sign--show that
France is going to lose and all
of that.
And a lot of these towns like
Arras and Reims--that's how the
Cathedral of Reims,
which is one of the great
cathedrals in Europe,
or anywhere else,
was destroyed because they're
right on the front,
right on the front.
And again infirmary,
there's infirmary guys there.
And I don't know what these
people--oh, they're distributing
water, that's what they're doing
they're distributing water.
Getting ready to go.
Charge over that.
The ones who didn't make it.
There's still a whole trench
with bayonets sticking up that
they more or less left the way
it was.
You can see that too,
they removed the bones.
And that's a night patrol going
out, crawling over those
craters.
It gives you a pretty good idea.
See the movie.
The explosions,
voilà.
That last one,
by the way, was simply called
Verdun Hell,
which is the way it was.
So, we're going to pass on to
not necessarily more cheery
subjects next time,
but we'll talk about why 1917
was the big year,
and talk about the end of the
war,
and what all that meant.
And, again, to discuss the
impact of all of this on French
society.
See you Wednesday.
