France's Forgotten Victory

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Notes

¹In that genre see Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory. The First World War: Myths and Realities (London: Hodder Headline 2001) and John Mosier, The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War One (London: Profile Books 2001).

²Jere C. King, Generals and Politicians: Conflict Between France's High Command, Parliament and Government, 1914–1918 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1951).

³Joffre lacks a modern English-language biography. Roy Prete's recent Strategy and Command: The Anglo-French Coalition on the Western Front, 1914 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP 2009), the first of three projected volumes, focuses only on one over-familiar aspect of his command. Reviewed in Journal of Strategic Studies (Feb. 2011), 145–6.

⁴Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory, 2.

⁵Douglas Porch, ‘The French Army in the First World War’, in Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray (eds), Military Effectiveness, Vol. 1: The First World War (London: Unwin Hyman 1988), 190–228, esp. 225.

⁶Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory, 3.

⁷For France's post-war pretensions to world leadership, and her inevitable decline in the face of a resurgent Germany, see A. Adamthwaite, Grandeur and Misery: France's Bid for Power in Europe, 1918–1940 (London: Arnold 1995).

⁸See for example, Brian J. Bond, The Unquiet Western Front: The First World War in Literature and History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2002) and Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon Press 2005).

⁹Adopted as the title for a recent study of one unfortunate episode in Franco-Russian relations, Jamie H. Cockfield, With Snow on their Boots: The Tragic Odyssey of the Russian Expeditionary Force in France during World War I (New York: St Martin's Press 1998).

¹⁰Winston S.C. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–1918 (London: Odhams Press, revised 2 vol. edition 1938) ii, 941, 951 and 966.

¹¹Churchill, World Crisis, 940–1.

¹²Michel Goya, La Chair et l'acier: l'armée française et l'invention de la guerre moderne, 1914–1918 (Paris: Talandier 2004), 9.

¹³See William Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century (London: Little Brown 2009).

¹⁴Anthony Clayton, Paths of Glory: The French Army, 1914–1918 (London: Cassell 2003).

¹⁵Although this school has produced fascinating insights into how and why armies and nations engaged with and continued the war, despite its horrors, this does little to explain the nature of and progress in the strategic and military conduct of the war. See for example, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 1914–1918: Understanding the Great War (London: Profile Books 2000).

¹⁶Len Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division During World War One (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP 1994).

¹⁷It should be acknowledged that this author has had occasion to question Greenhalgh's understanding of the nature of the Somme offensive elsewhere. See Elizabeth Greenhalgh, ‘Why the British Were on the Somme’, War in History 6 (1999), 147–73: William Philpott ‘Why the British were Really on the Somme: A Reply to Elizabeth Greenhalgh’, War in History 9 (2002), 446–71; Elizabeth Greenhalgh, ‘Flames over the Somme: A Retort to William Philpott’, War in History 10 (2003), 335–42; and William Philpott, ‘The Anglo-French Victory on the Somme’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 17 (2006), 731–51.

¹⁸Greenhalgh, Victory Through Coalition, 281.

¹⁹Rémy Porte, La Mobilisation industrielle: ‘premier front’ de la grande guerre (Paris: 14–18 Éditions 2005).

²⁰So much so that similar institutions were established when the two nations again went to war together in 1939. See William Philpott, ‘The Benefit of Experience? The Supreme War Council and the Higher Management of Coalition War’, in Martin Alexander and William Philpott (eds), Anglo-French Defence Relations Between the Wars (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan 2002).

²¹Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition, 285.

²²Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory, 461.

²³William Philpott, Anglo-French Relations and Strategy on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (London: Macmillan 1996).

²⁴In the pages of this journal for example, William Philpott, ‘The Strategic Ideas of Sir John French’, Journal of Strategic Studies 12/4 (Dec. 1989), 458–78; and ‘Kitchener and the 29th Division: A Study in Anglo-French Strategic Relations, 1914–1915’, Journal of Strategic Studies 16/3 (Sept. 1993), 375–407.

²⁵David Dutton, The Politics of Diplomacy: Britain and France in the Balkans in the First World War (London: I.B. Tauris 1998). Surprisingly, neither Doughty nor Greenhalgh make reference to this work.

²⁶Robert B. Bruce, A Fraternity of Arms: America and France in the Great War (Lawrence: UP of Kansas 2003).

²⁷Glenn E. Torrey, Henri Mathias Berthelot: Soldier of France, Defender of Romania (Oxford: The Centre for Romanian Studies 2001).

²⁸Prete, Strategy and Command.

²⁹One aspect of the relationship with Britain is addressed in George Cassar, The Forgotten Front: The British Campaign in Italy, 1917–18 (London: Hambledon Press 1998).

³⁰Keith Neilson, Strategy and Supply: The Anglo-Russian Alliance, 1914–17 (London: Collins 1984).

³¹See Keith Wilson, The Policy of the Entente: Essays on the Determinants of British Foreign Policy, 1904–14 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1985).

³²Martin Horn, Britain, France and the Financing of the First World War (Montreal: McGill-Queens UP 2002).

³³The expression comes from Brian J. Bond, The First World War and British Military History (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1991).

³⁴Marshal Joffre, The Memoirs of Marshal Joffre, trans. T. Bentley Mott (London: Geoffrey Bles 1932); Marshal Foch, The Memoirs of Marshal Foch, trans. T. Bentley Mott (London: Heinemann 1931); Maréchal Pétain, La Bataille de Verdun (Paris: Payot 1929).

³⁵Raymond Poincaré, Au Service de la France: neuf années de souvenirs (Paris: Libraire Plon, 10 vols., 1926–33), partially translated as The Memoirs of Raymond Poincaré, trans. George Arthur (London: William Heinemann, 4 vols., 1926–30); Georges Clemenceau, Grandeur and Misery of Victory (London: G.G. Harrap 1930); Paul Painlevé, Comment j'ai nommé Foch et Pétain (Paris: F. Alcan 1923).

³⁶Charles Lanrezac, Le Plan de campagne français et le premier mois de la guerre, 2 août–3 septembre 1914 (Paris: Payot 1920).

³⁷Service historique de l'armée, Les Armées françaises dans la grande guerre (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 11 tomes in 103 vols., 1922–1937).

³⁸Most easily discovered online at <www.servicehistorique.sga.defense.gouv.fr>.

³⁹Recent battle studies of note which review French operations are Michael Neiberg, The Second Battle of the Marne (Bloomington: Indiana UP 2008), and Philpott, Bloody Victory.

⁴⁰An honourable exception, perhaps by accident rather than design, is Torrey, Berthelot.

⁴¹Exemplifed by the many works by France's leading popular historian of the First World War, Pierre Miquel, such as Le Gâchis des généraux: les erreurs du commandement pendant la guerre de 14–18 (Paris: Plon 2001).

⁴² 14–18, Le magazine de la Grande Guerre (St Cloud: SOTECA).

⁴³Although two recent studies of the opening engagements of the war, Terence Zuber, The Battle of the Frontiers: Ardennes 1914 (Stroud, UK: The History Press 2009) and Holger Herwig, The Marne 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle that Changed the World (New York: Random House 2009) essentially consider events from the German perspective.

⁴⁴Douglas Porch, The March to the Marne: The French Army, 1871–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1981), 219.

⁴⁵Porch, ‘The French Army’, 214.

⁴⁶Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory, 25–9.

⁴⁷Fayolle diary, 30 Aug. 1914, in Marshal Fayolle, Cahiers secrets de la grande guerre, ed. Henry Contamine (Paris: Plon 1964), 27.

⁴⁸Philpott, Bloody Victory, 515–16.

⁴⁹Porch, ‘The French Army’, 191.

⁵⁰Ibid., 214–20.

⁵¹The German High Command's lack of operational sophistication is brought out in David Zabecki, The German 1918 Offensives: A Case Study in the Operational Level of War (London: Routledge 2006).

⁵²Several doctorates recently submitted in the Department of War Studies, King's College London, sustain this interpretation: Simon House, ‘The Battle of the Ardennes, 22 August 1914: A Comparative Study’; Jonathan Krause, ‘The Second Battle of Artois and the French Army's Evolution in Spring, 1915’; and Tim Gale, ‘La Salamandre: The French Army's Artillerie Spéciale and the Development of Armoured Warfare in the First World War’.

⁵³Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory, 3.

⁵⁴Ibid., 512.

⁵⁵Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army's Art of Attack (London: Yale UP 1994), 11.