Fear

NOTES

1 Author’s note: I have discussed this in another book: Le Petit Général.

2 Author’s note: ‘The courage, the recklessness, call it what you will, is the flash, the instant of sublimation; then flick! The old darkness again…’ William Faulkner, ‘All the Dead Pilots’, 1931.

3 The ‘raging little Borgia’ was Joseph Caillaux, former prime minister and more recently minister of finance, a Radical and pacifist. During his brief spell as prime minister he had averted war with Germany during the Agadir Crisis of 1911. His wife, Henriette, had shot dead the editor of Le Figaro, Gaston Calmette, after he had accused Joseph Caillaux of partiality in office, and had threatened to publish some potentially scandalous correspondence between Caillaux and his wife (who had at the time been his mistress). The trial of Madame Caillaux was the most sensational in France for many years, and ended with her acquittal thanks to the oratory of her lawyer, Labori. ‘Caillot’ — pronounced the same as Caillaux — ‘de sang’ is French for blood clot.

4 The buildings of Les Invalides in Paris include a retirement home for war veterans.

5 François Achille Bazaine was commander-in-chief of the French army during the Franco-Prussian War. He surrendered the city of Metz and a force of 180,000 men to the Prussians in October 1870.

6 Pseudonym of Emmanuel Poiré, a popular political cartoonist.

7 Charles Martel, ‘Charles the Hammer’ (688–741 AD), Charlemagne’s grandfather, most famous for leading the victory of Christian Frankish and Burgundian armies against the Muslim forces of the Umayyad Caliphate at the battle of Poitiers (or Tours) in 732.

8 Louis IX.

9 In fact he is supposed to have said ‘Paris is well worth a Mass’.

10 Differences between French and British army ranks can be confusing. Here, it is worth noting that an adjutant (adjudant) is a sub-officer, immediately above a sergeant, and has some of the same duties as a lieutenant (same spelling and similar role to the British one). A commandant is an officer one rank above captain, thus almost but not quite the equivalent of a British major. A French major, however, is a staff warrant officer, above an adjutant and below a lieutenant. And to make matters more complicated still, at least for luckless translators, a major was also the term used for an army doctor, at least until the late 1920s.

11 In fact Cicero wrote ‘Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?’, ‘How long will you abuse our patience, Catiline?’

12 He is referring to an infamous quote from General Joffre, who, when asked in October 1918 by leading politicians what his strategy was, replied ‘I’ll just keep nibbling at them for the time being.’

13 The German offensive that began the war had initially been very successful and by September Paris was in danger. During the Battle of the Marne between 5 and 12 September, a French counter-offensive drove the Germans back to lines where the armies remained for much of the rest of the war. On 7 September the French 6th Army was helped by the dispatch to the front of 10,000 reserves from Paris, of whom some 6,000 came in Paris taxi cabs sent by General Gallieri, the city’s military governor. The taxis — whose drivers apparently received 27 % of the actual fare for the journey — became a symbol of national unity, though in fact their military role was relatively insignificant.

14 Bat d’Af was the usual name for the Bataillons d’infanterie légère d’Afrique, also known as ‘Joyeux’, who mainly served in the French colonies of north Africa. Many of the men in the Bat d’Af had previously served relatively short prison terms, usually for crimes of violence or immorality. Discipline in the Bat d’Af was especially tough.

15 Author’s note: This is the effect of foreshortening. A pilot flying over the battlefield would obviously not have seen a blue plain but a plain dotted with blue. In the same way, the earlier expression ‘kingdom of the dead’ may seem excessive to those who judge coldly at a distance. What must be understood is the state of mind of a young man who, after a night of danger and exhaustion, suddenly finds himself facing hundreds of corpses — thousands, even, if you take account of those too far away for him to see. This young man is there as a participant… A man who watches a bombardment from a distance might find the sight curious, even amusing. But take him a kilometre closer, where he can look down on what is happening, and his judgement will be strangely different. One should thus not be surprised if emotions bring a few distortions, but remind oneself that no exaggeration, no invention, could ever surpass the horror of the reality.

16 This is a precise description (author’s note).

17 These were used as revetments to retain the soil at the sides of trenches.

18 The 75mm field gun was the main artillery piece used by the French, effective in open country but not much good against trenches.

19 A devout Catholic organisation for young women.

20 The battle of Charleroi in August 1914 ended with the first major German victory of the war and the flight of thousands of civilians. The French Fifth Army, commanded by General Lanrezac, was eventually forced to retreat. Though Lanrezac took much blame for this (Joffre claimed he lacked ‘offensive spirit’), the retreat probably saved the French Army from complete destruction.

21 Rosalie was French army slang for the bayonet. The name comes from a popular (at least among patriotic civilians) song by the Breton poet and singer Théodore Botrel. ‘Rosalie is so pretty that she had two or three million admirers… Rosalie loves to dance to the sound of the cannon… she is white when the dance begins but crimson when it ends…’ etc. Having been turned down for military service because of his age, this Catholic and Royalist became the official ‘Bard of the Armies’ and toured the front entertaining the troops.

22 Poculotte is using part of a well-known declaration by General (and Comte de) Rochambeau, which he made in 1781 when he brought French troops to aid Washington in the American War of Independence.

23 Blessed are the poor in spirit.

24 A spur in the Vosges mountains, also known as Hartmannswillerkopf, the scene of very fierce and bloody fighting at several times in 1915.

25 The French term is embusqué, literally ‘under cover’. An ambush is une embusquade, a sniper un tireur embusqué. Although the WWI French word is sometimes translated perfectly well as ‘shirker’ or ‘skiver’, there are British equivalents from the same period. Thus a ‘dugout’, as well as being a shelter in a trench, often referred to men, mainly officers, recalled to active service from leave or retirement or a comfortable job. And a ‘dug-in’ was the name given to anyone with a relatively safe job at or near the front, a term usually used with a mixture of scorn and envy.

26 Pauvres Cons du Front. Poor sods of the front line.

27 Huts made from wood and metal, similar to Nissen huts.

28 Author’s note: This quote is from Leurs figures. So this is of course Barrès at a late stage of his development, a Lorrainer and nationalist. [Leurs figures (1902) was the third novel of Barrès’s trilogy, Roman de l’énergie nationale.]

29 Gabions were large wicker tubes, open at both ends, rather like a roll of carpet, used mainly in breastwork defences around gun emplacements and, as here, around look-out positions.

30 The artillery NCO is describing the beginning of the Second Battle of the Aisne, a catastrophic attack on well-entrenched and defended German positions on the Chemin des Dames, a road running along a high ridge for some 30 kilometres between the valleys of the Aisne and Ailette rivers. It began on 16 April 1917. There were approximately 40,000 French casualties on the first day alone. The ‘Mangin’ to whom he refers was General Charles Mangin, known as ‘the butcher’. It was Mangin who bought thousands of troops from French colonies in West Africa, especially Senegal and Niger, to join the slaughter. On 21 February 1917 Mangin wrote to the Ministry of War asking for ‘as many black units as possible, so as to save French blood’.

31 A battalion usually consisted of about 1,000 men.

32 One of a number of cave networks in this area, given its name because of the role played by Moroccan troops in the fight to capture it from the Germans.

33 After the disaster of the Second Battle of the Aisne, a wave of mutinies spread through the regiments who had suffered most. Sixty-eight divisions were affected, about 40,000 men involved. Actions ranged from simply refusing to move to attacking officers, waving the red flag and singing the Internationale.

34 ‘Look, a nice bit of meat!’

35 ‘c… nassa’, of course, is ‘cunt’, and I do not think any reader needs to know Occitan, or this variant of it, to understand the rest.

36 ‘Hey! Barrachini, how are you, my friend?’

‘Son of a whore! What you doing there?’

‘The captain took me for a ride, the son of a bitch!’

‘Come on, my beauty, give us a cigarette!’

‘Ah, you’re a lovely lad!’

37 Compiègne in Picardy was French General Staff HQ for much of the war. It was in a forest outside the town that the armistice was signed in 1918.

38 ‘La Champagne pouilleuse’ (meaning lousy, verminous, miserable…) is the name given to an area of the Champagne region east of Reims with chalky soil, formerly very barren and impoverished. It is contrasted with ‘La Champagne humide’ and sometimes, rather awkwardly, called Dry Champagne in English.

39 The Gascon cadets were the youngest sons of nobles from Gascony in southern France, sent into the service of Louis XIII (r.1610–1643). Supposedly romantic and swashbuckling, they were the source for Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

40 The reference is to something the future Henri IV is supposed to have shouted to his troops before the Battle of Ivry in 1590: ‘Follow my white plume: you will find it on the path to honour and glory!’

41 ‘They are at Chateau-Thierry’, that is, only about 90 kilometres from Paris, putting the capital within range of the biggest German guns.

42 Two national heroes. Georges Guynemer, a popular fighter pilot, lionised by the press, missing in action in 1917 at the age of twenty-two. Emile Driant (1855–1916), career soldier, journalist, politician, and prolific writer of war fiction coloured by nationalism and Catholicism. One of the first high-ranking officers to be killed at Verdun.