You must understand that the French mutiny was put under a cone of silence and gets barely a mention in the histories.
Half the army revolted. They had all simply been pushed too far at Verdun in particular. Fixing it meant breaking up units and reassigning the men to stable units
Even then they had to promise no new offensives until the Americans had arrived in force. The fact is that the French army had been beaten into submission. That was not true for the British forces who still pushed.
War planning then called quite naturally for Americaln replacmenrts to open a gap between the two armies allowing the French lines to start shortening. As it turned out, the German army began a broad offensive of their own against the British army, setting the stage for the counter stroke of Ameins.
That counter stroke forced the entire front back over a hundred days and triggered the armistice. The bulk of the forces south of the main advance was able to press against a retreating army without commiting to overrunning a full defensive line.
This item give us a good understanding of just how exhausted the French really were at this point. So were the Germans of course on the Southern wing but that did not matter for either...
Has there ever been a case where the front line troops of two opposing armies simply decided, en masse, they would not follow orders to fight? Why or why not?
There are several sections of France’s national archives that to this day are closed to the general public. Most of the materials in the closed files deal with national security issues and matters of great political sensitivity. Some of them, however, relate to the great French Army Mutiny of 1917. Even now, more than a century later, the French are reluctant to discuss their national embarrassment.
By the third year of the war on the Western Front, France had seen a million of its young men killed in action and the troops, many of them drawn from France’s African colonies, were on their last legs.
The longest and costliest battle of the war had just ended in a virtual stalemate at Verdun. The French had suffered a brutal pounding for the better part of a year. The estimates of casualties differ widely but the combined German and French losses (killed., wounded and missing) were close to a million.
In an effort to relieve the pressure on the ring of fortresses around Verdun, the British and French had launched an ill-fated attack on the Somme in the summer of 1916. It had resulted in even more casualties than Verdun itself. Between them, the British and French forces suffered more than 600,000 casualties, for a total advance of a few thousand meters. German losses were just as heavy.
By the end of 1916, both sides were stretched to the limits of their physical, mental and logistical resources.
One of the casualties at the Somme was the French Commander-in-Chief on the Western Front. Responsibility for the failure of the year’s offensives and the disastrous casualties suffered at Verdun fell on the shoulders of General Joseph Joffre who had surreptitiously withdrawn men and guns from Verdun’s forts because he thought they were of little value. Unlike the poor sods who fell at the Somme, however, “Papa” Joffre was promoted. Just before Christmas, he became the first officer to be promoted Marshal of France in wartime since Napoleon.
It was an empty honour and Joffre knew it. Rather than accept the role of "general-in-chief of the French armies, technical adviser to the government, and consultative member of the War Committee", he asked to be relieved.
General Robert Nivelle - The hero of Verdun
Replacing him as commander-in-chief of the Armies of the North and Northeast was General Robert Nivelle, the dapper hero of Verdun. As commander of France’s III Corps, he had helped stem the German advance early in the battle and when he took command of the Second Army, his use of creeping artillery barrages, (laying down fire immediately in front of his attacking troops), had enabled his army to recapture most of the ground lost in the first six months of the battle.
Nivelle was many things, but a “people person” he was not. He had a reputation as a ‘charger’ but he was careless with the lives of his men. At Verdun, he had done nothing to relieve the horrendous conditions French soldiers were forced to endure. Unlike the British, French units remained at the front until their entire division was relieved.
For the British, the first day on the Somme was the costliest in its army’s history
In the British sector, troops were rotated into and out of the lines much more frequently. After spending 4–6 days in the front lines, they were pulled back, spending an equal number of days in the second line of trenches and, finally, the reserve trenches at the rear. This system of rotation, combined with regular rest breaks behind the lines and periodic leaves in England, reduced stress and the likelihood of combat fatigue, referred to at the time as ‘shell shock’.
French commanders were far less enlightened and their system was more haphazard. There was a rotation at the divisional level, but there was a problem among smaller formations and troops could spend as long as a month at a time on the front line. Extended periods in the front line, exacerbated by the lack of concern for their welfare did little to improve the soldiers’ morale.
The British officers’ code of putting the welfare of the men ahead of their own had no French equivalent and the French poilu was expected to fend for himself far more than a British Tommy. He had to carry everything he owned everywhere he went, always on foot. The British kit weighed in at 66 lbs, the French at 88.
The British detested taking trenches over from French units. They were always filthy, neglected and badly maintained. French officers did not concern themselves with the personal hygiene of their men or the tidiness of their billets. As a consequence, cold, wet conditions (along with infestations of lice) added to their miseries.
The consequence of all this was that the French army in 1917 was at the end of its rope. The dash and vigour that had been so evident at the beginning of the war, had long since faded. The Front was a midden. Artillery fire ripped and pulverized the dead; ripped open burial sites, clawing their contents out of the mud; and laid waste to everything it touched.
It wasn’t at all surprising that the French soldiers mutinied, only that they waited as long as they did.
Ironically, the straw that may have broken the camel’s back was a reduction in wine rations and rumours that they were to be suspended altogether. The ‘hairy ones’ could deal with death and destruction all around them but a reduction in their daily ration of wine was a far more serious business.
At the beginning of the war, the daily wine allowance was a quarter of a litre a day per man but bumper harvests in the Midi and elsewhere resulted in a huge glut of wine which producers from the Languedoc donated for army use at the outbreak of the war. By 1915, the allowance had been increased to half a litre a day and by the end of 1916, every french soldier was issued almost three-quarters of a litre. The wine was pretty rough and had many nicknames, none of them very flattering. Most famously, it was referred to as pinard. There were many theories why but no-one seemed to know for sure. By the time Nivelle took command, more than 2 million hectolitres of wine a year (47 million US gallons) were being trucked to the Front and the effort was putting a huge strain on Army logistics.
The caption reads… Oh! It’s nothing Lieutenant, the wine is safe!
The roads and tracks used to move materiel to the trenches, for example, were in a horrendous state after three years of constant bombardment. Even feeding the troops became difficult. Ration parties were often blown to bits or sucked under the mud when they stumbled off the duckboards, weighed down by the panniers and marmites used to carry rations to the trenches. Putting further pressure on the system, Nivelle began building up his supplies and artillery dumps. He would need them for the rolling barrages that would precede yet another bloody offensive.
Something had to give and an unknown officer on the general’s staff decided that cutting the wine ration was a good place to start.
Nivelle’s offensive to take the ridge known as Chemin des Dames finally got underway in April 1917. By then, however, loose lips and French slips meant that the Germans had a pretty good idea of what was coming and took appropriate action.
The offensive was a costly failure that turned into a national disaster. Instead of the 10,000 casualties Nivelle had predicted, French and British forces suffered nearly 200,000 killed, wounded and missing. It was a crushing blow to French morale.
The offensive was finally suspended on May 9, but by then the French army was in open revolt.
On May 3, the 2nd Division refused to follow orders to attack, and the mutiny soon spread throughout the army. Inspired to some extent by Communist agitators, the mutineers’ demands included more liberty, more time with their families, better conditions in the casernes and cantonnements behind the lines and an increase in their daily wine ration. More than 20,000 soldiers took ‘French leave’ and at least one unit marched on Paris, looting as they went.
Even in regiments in which there was a direct confrontation, however, the men did not harm their officers but simply refused to launch new attacks. Most of the mutineers were veterans who, rather than refusing to fight, wanted the chefs d'armée to pay more attention to their welfare.
The veterans who took part in the mutiny expected little more than they should have been entitled to…
Experience had taught them that new offensives were futile. The revolution unfolding in Russia may have influenced their thinking and anonymously-written leaflets calling for peace were in wide circulation. At the height of the mutiny, more than half the French army was involved.
Nivelle was relieved of his command on May 15, to be replaced by General Phillippe Pétain. In June, he confided to British commander Sir Douglas Haig that two French divisions had refused to relieve two divisions in the front line.
According to French historian Guy Pedroncini (one of the first historians to gain access to archival material relevant to the Mutiny), almost half (49 out of 113 divisions) of France’s Infantry Corps was affected by the mutinies. Of these, nine divisions were gravely affected by mutinous behaviour, 15 seriously affected, and 25 divisions affected by isolated but repeated refusals to obey orders.
This photo, supposedly of a mutineer facing execution at Verdun, may have been taken as early as 1915. By 1917, French uniforms had changed somewhat.
Order was eventually restored after thousands of arrests and some arbitrary executions (pour encourager les autres, no doubt). The worst affected formations were dissolved and their soldiers dispersed to other units. Ring leaders either shot (between 30 and 50 ‘officially’) or sentenced to hard labour.
Astonishingly, though the disturbances continued for the better of a year, the Germans remained ignorant of the revolt, but the politicians and the generals knew that the army had been pushed too far.
Pétain decreed that the French army would undertake no more large scale offensives until the Americans arrived in force (as they did towards the end of the year) and more tanks could be produced and deployed. “J'attends les chars et les américains”, he said.
Conditions were improved with leave granted more frequently, units were rotated through the line at more regular intervals and an effort was made to improve rations… and restore the wine allowance.
France continued to perform heroically until the war’s end but by the time the Armistice took effect, its army was a pale shadow of the splendid body that had stopped the Germans at the Marne.
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