4 - Soldiers: how did they wage war?

Summary

In the celebrated verse of El Cid: ‘Combat ceases when soldiers disappear’, Corneille reminded us that war is first and foremost about the men who wage it. This is not at all evident when reading the innumerable volumes published on the war since the Armistice and throughout the interwar years. The ordinary soldier was forgotten in these works.

This act of forgetting was not inevitable. Most of these historians had themselves fought in the trenches. For one well-known author of school textbooks, Jules Isaac, who was concerned with the pedagogical message he would transmit, and more worried about pupils than scholars, soldiers' experience would be included in the narrative of the war. He devoted one page to this purpose out of about 100 pages in the supplementary chapter he added in 1921 to the textbook for the final year of secondary school. He insisted on adding to his name that of the author of the immediately preceding issue of this textbook, because he had died in combat. Henceforth this textbook, commonly used in French schools, was known as the ‘Malet–Isaac’:

Depressing in its monotony, repellent in its multiple heavy duties, trench warfare was a war of endurance, in which armies, these national armies composed of men of all social classes, were struggling and suffering more than any professional army had ever struggled or suffered. The infantry above all went through the worst ordeals. In certain sectors, the fight was so atrocious that the front-line trenches and the communications trenches seemed dug out of human remains.[…]