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Professor John Merriman: I'll tell you my favorite
midterm story. Maybe one or two of you have
heard this before. The point of this is that you
don't screw around with midterms because people put their game
faces on; you're going to have your game
faces on, on Monday. But maybe ten years ago
somebody in the first half of this class raised their hand the
day before, the lecture before the midterm
and said, oddly enough, "what language will the midterm
be in?" And this is before we had
French-speaking sections. So, I don't know,
you ask a question that was a fairly silly question,
you give a fairly silly answer. So, I said "Croatian."
And, so, then I started thinking, well I'll play a
little joke on them; "ha-ha, don't screw around with
midterms." And, so, I have a colleague who
is Croatian and so I made up the following question,
which he translated into Croatian.
And, so, the test, you come into the test and you
get your basic piece of paper, it says answer one of the
following two questions, and there's a third question,
in Croatian, with a translation by Ivo
Banac. And the question was mine,
I take full credit or discredit for this.
The question was, "the population of Paris in
1831 was 630,721 people; name these people,
and in a second column list those who owned more than one
apartment." So, if you got a question that
said the population of Paris was 630,731, name these people,
would you answer that question? Three people did.
So you have to think, what have they been drinking,
what have they been smoking? And, so, what do we do?
I'm screwing around with a midterm, and we have three blue
books answering question number three in Croatian;
not responding in Croatian, that would be extra credit.
And the first person says, well, logically enough--people
must panic. I must have done this too when
I showed up late for midterms or whatever, if I remembered to go,
you just--you panic and you start writing.
And the first person said, "well, Merriman,
he's real interested in social geography,"
so he wrote a pretty coherent essay about how the rich people
live in the west and the poorer people live in the east and the
wealthier people in the center, and the poor people on the
periphery." So, we graded that as a real
answer. Person number two takes pen--I
don't remember male or female--person number two takes
pen and starts writing a column: Albert Hassin,
Jean Claude, Albert Hassin,
Jean Marie, Albert Hassin, Xavier--and writes names,
writes French names; sitting there for forty-five
minutes writing names. What do you do with that?
Call psychiatric services, I don't know.
I got to deal with this stuff, you know.
And, so, the third person says, "Question Number Three," and
then just sort of just drooled all over the blue book,
for about the next half hour. And, so, we get these things,
get this soggy blue book, and you get one with a kind of
a half-assed but still okay essay on social geography,
and you get the third, it's a bunch of names.
So, what do you? How do you grade that?
We had a council of--a meeting to discuss this,
and I don't know what we did. I know we gave the first person
some sort of B+ for the essay, and number two I think I
convoked the person and maybe called the college dean to say
"Ça va? Ça ne vas pas?
Ça marche? Ça ne marche pas?
On a un petit problème quand même,
nous." Anyway, I don't mean to screw around
with your midterm. Sorry?
Student: How many names did he get through?
Professor John Merriman: Oh, I guess about maybe--I
tore it up at the end. There was probably about
seventeen or eighteen names, and they were in alphabetical
order. So, it wasn't that the midterm
was a total loss. But that's the last time I
screw around with midterms. Brian, mon brave,
are your people getting this in French, the midterm,
or in English? Brian: Well,
they're getting the French Department to do French.
Professor John Merriman: No, but the exam,
when we do the exam in a few minutes, are we going to do that
in French? Okay, voilà.
So, let's start. Where was I?
I got taken out there a little bit here, thinking about those
old times. I want today to talk about 1917
and 1918, and talk a little bit about the mutinies.
The mutinies have to be seen in the context, of the course,
in all these assaults, but above all the Battle of the
Somme. And the Battle of the Somme,
which began on July 1st, 1916 was the darkest moment
certainly in four years of dark days.
On the first day of the Battle of the Somme--I always give
these statistics, they're so interesting--the
first day, the 1st of July, 1916, almost 40,000 British
soldiers were killed in one day, and--I mean 40,000,
sorry, were wounded, and 20,000 were killed on the
very first day. There was a casualty for every
half meter of the entire front line;
so, one casualty for every half meter of the front line.
And I gave this statistic the first day, when I was kind of
giving an overview of the course,
but there were more British soldiers killed or seriously
wounded in the first three days of the Battle of the Somme than
there were Americans killed in World War One,
Korea, and Vietnam combined. And you can include the 4,000
that had been killed in this current third war.
So, those are phenomenal losses. And, so, the question again
when you look at the poisoning of the political atmosphere and
the absence of able leadership in Europe in the 1920s and
1930s, where were they?
In the case of Britain they were, as that poem went,
hung up on that old barbed wire, because they were dead.
And sometimes it's easy--and British society is such a class
society, and it's easy to kind of poke fun at Oxbridge folks
going to their common room, and then going off to
machinegun Indian insurgents, and this sort of thing.
But the flower of British youth perished and the flower of other
countries' youth during this time.
And, so, the mutinies have to be seen in that context;
and I'll come back to them in awhile.
Now, 1917 is the crucial year, really, in determining the
outcome of a war that seemed like it was going to go on
forever; forever, not defined by truly
forever, but that in the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918,
into March--well, after they slow down the
Ludendorff offensive in 1918, the military planners begin to
think that they'll win the war in 1920,
1921 maybe, if all went spectacularly well in 1919.
And, of course, as so many people died to win a
few hundred meters, or a kilometer,
or two kilometers, or three kilometers at best,
there were wags who said well at this rate we'll reach the
Rhine, somebody figured out,
by the year 2007, which is where we are now,
more or less, if I remember that statistic.
But two things happen in 1917 that are essential.
One is that the Bolshevik Revolution comes along;
but first the revolution in February where the people of St.
Petersberg wake up and find that the emperor has no clothes,
that there's police but no troops,
and the bread lines are long, and the czarist autocracy
falls, leading to that sort of power vacuum and Kerensky's
provisional government. And, of course,
in October the Bolsheviks, after one attempt had failed,
the Bolsheviks seize power. And at that point the war
changes dimensions dramatically in the east.
Russia is still in the war until the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk in March of 1918. But the propaganda,
which was more than that of war, bread, and peace--that's a
motto to live by--means that you've got a de-acceleration in
the Russian war effort and you've got massive desertions
from the Russian Army. Now, one of the amazing things
is that the desertion rate was so low, compared to what you
think would happen. And it is rather amazing that
the Russians were able to hold on, again, just as the Germans
were close to Paris, particularly in March 1918;
the German forces are also quite close to Petrograd,
that St. Petersberg had been renamed
because Petrograd sounded more Russian.
But the other thing that changes the outcome of the war
is that the Americans come in. And in the United States--the
United States were supposedly neutral until 1917,
but outside of places with strong German populations,
for example Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Chicago,
the majority of Americans supported the Allies,
as defined by the British, the French and the Russians,
and particularly through the British component.
But it wasn't really that that brings the Americans into the
war. The German High Command--to
make again one of these interesting long stories very,
very short--had decided that the only way that they could win
is to knock the British out of the war,
and the way that they could knock the British out of the war
is to stop the supply of munitions,
of food, of grain, of almost anything else you
could imagine, to Great Britain.
Now, how are you going to do that?
Well the way you're going to do that is with a campaign of
unrestricted submarine warfare, the famous U-boats,
that sink an incredible number of ships.
And the German government goes down, sends representatives down
to the docks in New York and to other ports,
Boston and other places, and they put up warnings saying
that the civilian passengers or any other Americans who go on
ships ought to know that they're entering a war zone and could be
sunk. And the German U-boats sink
some ships with Americans on them.
The most dramatic event was the sinking of the Lusitania,
which I'm sure you all know about,
in which lots of Americans--I can't remember how many,
but it was hundreds and hundreds;
it might've even been 1,000; I apologize for not have the
statistic in my head--were killed, off, I think it's fairly
near Ireland. And, of course,
the Americans go wild and say that this ship was carrying
passengers going over to Britain and civilians,
and this was an act of piracy, an act of war,
an act of ***, et cetera, et cetera.
It turns out that I think it was in the 1960s or 1970s,
I vaguely remember this, that they sent divers down into
the Lusitania and they found that, as the Germans had
claimed, it was absolutely correct that
the Americans were--this ship was carrying munitions and
therefore--I'm not defending the sinking of the ship,
I'm not for the defending of the sinking of any ship--but
clearly it was carrying weapons, and that's one of the reasons
that the ship went down with such a dramatic impact is
because all the munitions blew up when the German torpedo hit
it. But over the long run what
happens is that the man who was going to keep America out of
war, Woodrow Wilson,
former President of Princeton University, ends up taking the
U.S. into war.
And those of you who have had American History from Glenda or
other people, Glenda Gilmore or other folks
here, will know that in the end most
Americans really didn't want to go to war.
And Wilson, wbo was the first American President,
by the way, ever to leave the United States during a term of
office, goes to Versailles,
to the Treaty of Versailles after the war,
and then he can't get the treaty ever ratified by the U.S.
Congress after that. His repudiation is really
complete, unfortunately for him, at the end of the war.
Now, what difference did the Americans coming into the war
mean, in 1917? It was not the troops--lots of
troops begin to arrive, led by Pershing,
John Pershing, who had honed his skills by
shooting down Mexicans in Mexico.
And they have the reputation for being sort of cowboys in
earnest, and sort of the typical American image is
really--although that's been devastated in the last four or
five years--but really is created by the Americans
arriving to fight, and they're well-trained,
pistol-wielding sharpshooters and all that.
And they first go to- they first fight at
Château-Thierry, which is not very far from
Paris, it's northeast of Paris, in 1917.
But that's not what makes the difference.
American troops in the long run will help tilt the scale to the
Allies, and it compensates for what we've discussed in terms of
the French not having--they're going to run out of soldiers.
But the big difference is that the curves cross,
that the curves of the ability of the Germans to supply their
own forces; that the German war machine is
not going to be able to compete with the combined power of
American industrial might, and Detroit can be easily
converted--the factories in Detroit, and Ypsilanti,
and Flint, Michigan, and lots of other places,
can be easily transformed into production of--Ypsilanti into
the production of arms, and places like that.
And, so, the curves cross. And it's at that point when
many people in the French and the British High Command,
along with the Americans--they know they're going to win the
war in the long run, but the question, at what cost?
And there's lively discussion, as there had been in Germany,
over German war aims. The Germans,
if they win the war in the west they're going to want--demand
part of Belgium, they're going to want probably
more of Lorraine, et cetera, et cetera.
The French also have their war aims.
They're going to want to have a permanent French presence;
they're talking about that in the Rhineland as well as taking
Alsace and Lorraine back. And so that helps set up--which
I'll come back to talk about in awhile--1918,
March, because that's when the Germans say, "baby it's now or
never." And, so, that's the big
Ludendorff offensive, which I'll come back to,
in March of 1918. That's important to say,
to discuss at least a little bit.
Now, what about the mutinies and what about other aspects of
the war? They have to do with the home
front. And the mutinies are not on the
home front but they're quite close to it.
As I said at the beginning here, most people in France did
not want war in 1914, but because it was easy to
portray Germany as the aggressors, which they were,
the vast majority of the population obviously was
prepared to hold on because of the proximity certainly of Paris
to the front; and this is right through the
war, it's right through into the failure of the Ludendorff
offensive. Now, to be sure there are
tensions within French society about the war.
There was tremendous resentment, and you can see
photos of this resentment, as in Paris the opera was one
place where they distributed coal,
that was rationed, in order to have heat.
And as you know from discussion previously of the Grands
Boulevards, that's where many of the famous restaurants and
cafés, the Café
American, the Café de la Paix, ironically the
Café de la Paix, the café
of peace, and all those things are located.
And, so, as people waited in line to hope to get a few chunks
of coal in order to stay warm in these cold Parisian winters,
they saw the fancy people in their big cars,
driven by chauffeurs, going off to the great
restaurants, and people who had profiteered
from the war. And name me a war in which
people do not profit enormously and in which some aspects of big
business are not just gleeful with every extended tour of
duty, and you'll have discovered
something that I didn't know existed.
And, so, there's a lot of tension toward profiteers,
to les gros, the big guys,
the fat guys, les gros bonnets,
the big hats. And you've got those tensions.
But you have--more than that you have tensions between those
people who, peasants, les paysans,
who are conscripted without any real possibility,
unless they're already had two brothers killed,
and that saves them; and, for example,
skilled workers in the armament industry.
For example around Saint-Étienne,
Saint-Étienne is an armament manufacturing town,
or was--they used to make bikes there, too.
They don't make either there anymore.
Or in Tulles, in the Corrèze,
places that make arms, people, skilled workers got out
of the draft because of that. And thus they worked very hard
but there was some tension towards that from,
for example, people in the Massif Central
where you have the most endless lists of names killed that one
could ever see, in Auvergne and places like
that. So, you have those sorts of
tensions, as well. Now, the role of women in all
this is of course crucial because it's in the factories,
particularly in not highly skilled work because they didn't
have the formation or the training in that,
that women step up and replace men.
And also, again the role of nurses is so important.
And, so, that's why it was inconceivable for many French
women, after all of this, not to get the vote after World
War One; whereas in Britain women get
the vote after World War Two; and in the United States Rosie
the Riveter, working in a factory in Detroit or in
Pittsburgh, became sort of an icon for sort
of the crypto-feminist movement in later decades.
So, you have some tensions there.
You also had workers who would come back--and of course after
the war, if they were lucky enough to survive--Bruno Cabanes
will probably talk about this next week,
after midterm--they get thrown out;
they're the last hired so they're the first fired.
And there's some tensions between males and females over
that, too, because the males had been out in the trenches,
and they want those jobs back, and all of that.
But another thing that's rather interesting is of course the
role of women and the nurses; and the big,
the northern French nuns and the Belgian nuns with those huge
hats. And it was easy to become
anti-clerical, and we've talked about that
before, but one of the things that
calms that situation is the role of the clergy,
and in particular of the female clergy,
in attending to these horrible, horrible wounds,
and in some cases going to the fronts,
working with ambulances and this sort of thing,
as other women did who didn't happen to be nuns.
And for example the case of Lyon has been documented;
and Lyon was the capital of Radical party,
with a big R; socially conservative and
moderate politically but based upon, built upon
anti-clericalism. And in Lyon where there was
this vibrant kind of anti-clericalism,
before World War I, that calms down because these
nuns who people attacked, representing in some ways the
institutionalized role of the Catholic Church in French
society, were extraordinarily heroic,
and so were these priests, and ministers,
and indeed rabbis, who of course get killed by
shells as they're giving the last rights to all these people
who have been killed. And there's another tension too
that's not talked about so much, but I can--I've heard it in the
sort of collective memory of where we live too,
is that one of the things that happens with the war--and
obviously when you look at a map of France--that
départements like the Ardennes,
and the Ain, and the Marne,
and the Pas-de-Calais, and the Nord are basically
German, or the front line is running
right through that département.
So, you've got these millions of people who become refugees
and they are going--in a more organized fashion than in 1940
when everybody's seen the pictures of them walking along
the roads, carrying what they can,
and then diving into the ditches as the Luftwaffe,
the German fighter plane, the German air force is
strafing them, in a more organized fashion.
But you still have to have somewhere to go,
you have to have someplace to end up where you're going to be
fed. And, so, where do they end up?
Well, they end up in the places in France where there is not
fighting. And it became that people get
tired of the war by 1917--well, everybody's tired of the war.
But as one gets even tireder of the war you hear this sort of
grumbling about these people from the north,
and they speak a different accent in some cases--if they
speak German they speak a different language;
if they speak Flemish, and there are lots of Flemish
speakers who come down from the Nord, from places like Hasbrouck
and all of that. And, so, they are strains on
local resources, which are already extremely
limited. And, so, you even have this
talk, grumbling, it's not more than that,
but grumbling in cafés and bars about Paris's war,
but also about les borschts du nord, that is the Germans
of the north. And one of the things is that a
lot of people in the north of France are blonde,
and a lot of people, the majority of the people in
the south of France have dark hair.
And, so, all of a sudden there's this arrival--it was a
silly way of viewing it, but this is how people viewed
it, is that you had your blonde people in the south and you have
dark people in the north, that life is like that.
But you have the arrival of these people,
many of whom look like they're Dutch,
who're arriving and who cause some sort of strain on the
ability of communities to take care of those perceived as of
their own. And, so, 1917 is a big year for
that as well. You have other kinds of
problems. 1917 is the year lots of men
and women go on strike. Now, they are not,
these are not "defeatist", in quotes, strikes,
but the strikes in Saint-Étienne,
and many of them are involving women, are demands for better
working conditions, for better wages.
They're part of the Sacred Union, Union
Sacrée, but they want better
conditions. And, so, the strikes in 1917,
again they're not defeatist strikes, they want to win the
war, but it's the same thing as the
movement before the war for better conditions.
Why should you work for worse conditions than men,
for example, or why should you work for
conditions when the profiteers are getting rich and the gros
bonnets, the big bonnets,
the big hats are getting wealthy, why should you have
terrible conditions? And, so, these strikes are very
widespread. Clemenceau has more power;
in 1917 he becomes prime minister, he says,
"I wage war, I wage war, I wage war,
that's all." There were attempts to break
the strikes but it's a year where the morale of the home
front is extremely fragile. It's more fragile in 1917 than
in any other time. And there seems to be this
enormous disparity between the sort of howling propaganda of
big newspapers, in which everything is a great
victory and defeats are just tiny setbacks,
a step back; and if things are so damn good
why are the Germans still close to Paris?
And, so, it becomes pretty hard to explain.
Now, they don't have the problems that the Germans will
have because--and that's a different situation.
A very good book edited by my friend Jay Winter and Jean-Louis
Robert called Capital Cities at War--because conditions
are worse in Berlin than they are in Paris.
But conditions are much better in London than they are in
Paris, and that's for fairly obvious reasons,
though the losses are still equally bad.
So, that year, 1917, is a bad year but overall
things are calmed down and for these reasons I've already said
it is a turning point. Now, what about these,
the mutinies? How serious were the mutinies?
There were probably only two divisions that were totally
reliable, standing between the Germans and Paris,
at that point. Not reliable again to the
extent that they want the Germans to win,
because they don't, but they want,
for example, the rights--the French were
trying to keep representatives from the Socialist Party from
going to Switzerland or going to Sweden to meet in international
peace conferences, and that sort of thing.
I spoke earlier, whenever it was,
Monday, about this sort of discontinuity or the contrast
between the soldiers' view of the war and that of the
civilians--and one of the--and how the soldiers back on leave
didn't want to talk about it and couldn't really give that
precise kinds of information anyway,
because often it's all swirling around them and they don't
really know what's going on in other places except where they
are. But one of the best evidences
of that is the fact that nobody, as far as we can tell,
at the home front really knew, at the time of the mutinies,
about how serious and widespread the mutinies were,
that they didn't really know. Now, remember also that--in
fact, this is one of the key sources for Bruno Cabanes'
magnificent book on--the translation to English would be
something like Victory Plunged into Mourning,
that is the return of the soldiers.
One of the principal sources are letters written by soldiers
from the front that were collected and censored by
military censors who don't want these letters revealing to
civilians much of what was going on at all.
And, so, that also explains why people at the home front really
didn't know about how widespread these mutinies were,
nor did the Germans, nor did the British,
outside of High Command, have any sense of what was
going on. Now, these mutinies,
it's not too hard to say why these mutinies take place when
they do, or why they take place at all.
It is not again defeatism, they don't want the Germans to
win. They have some respect,
lots of respect for the German soldiers they're fighting
against, although at the end of the war
they still just sort of--what seeps out of these letters--and
maybe Bruno will talk about this next time,
is hatred for the horrible Hun, et cetera, et cetera,
but that anybody could tell that these tactics were just
killing hundreds of thousands of people for nothing,
for nothing, that there wasn't going to be a
French-British breakthrough; that the Battle of the Somme
grounds to a halt, all along the front,
for obvious reasons, after a matter of really days
but weeks, and that there isn't any hope.
It began when one company-- Oh, by the way, how do we know
this? We don't know it from Kirk
Douglas. Most archives in France can be
opened up fifty years after the fact.
So, what year is this? 2000 something or other, 2007.
So, we can see the archives fifty years ago,
but not forty-nine years ago. But with the military archives,
because this was so sensitive, the mutinies,
all of these documents were in the war archives in Vincennes.
And I saw them before they were open because I bribed my way in,
not to see them, I was working on something else
but the person that ran this, the war archives was just
totally clueless, totally clueless,
and she'd leave for about three hour trysts or lunch breaks I
guess, more appropriately.
And I knew these documents were there and so I knew also,
somebody had tipped me off that the gardien likes stamps,
and so I would put all these wild sort of stamps on my mail,
letters, when people still used stamps;
I had ones from Latin America and ones from Africa.
And this guy comes up and he says, "oh, very beautiful these
stamps." I said, "oh,
do you like stamps?" And he'd be, "yes, yes."
"Well would you like these?" "Oh, thank you so much."
And pretty soon I'm in the archives, in the back.
And he's an officer too, he's some sort of lieutenant
guy--he's a real good guy. Anyway, so I bribed my way in,
and you could see these, all these cartons,
and they were chained, they were literally all chained
in this big kind of capsule; it looked like a space capsule
except it was just-- looks like the basement of Branford College
or something. But you couldn't get into those
because that was thought to be the national disgrace that there
had been these mutinies. And the mutinies were indeed
widespread. And so what happens is that
refusals to go over the top simply spread.
They spread like wildfire. Soldiers say they don't want to
get killed anymore for five cents a day.
In some places red flags go up and in some places there are
black flags, which are the flags of anarchism.
But remember that the socialists had also joined the
Sacred Union and that Jules Guesde ends up being Minister of
Transport, or Minister of Communication,
or something like that, in 1915, if I remember
correctly. And two regiments that are
posted in Soissons--Soissons is not very far away from Paris,
Soissons is about a forty-five minute drive away from Paris,
by car now. Two regiments decide they're
going to march on Paris to try to set things right.
They're going to force the Chamber of Deputies to find a
way to end the war; not to say we want the Germans
to win but to find a way, get some sort of negotiated
settlement, so that this carnage stopped.
Most of the generals, who are fairly clueless,
see organized Bolshevik propaganda behind this;
or pacifists, those people coming out of
Sweden or Switzerland and trying to stop the useless way this war
is being fought. In May and June about 40,000
soldiers were involved in collective acts of refusal,
and although the generals insisted in their correspondence
that those 40,000 people were cowards--this obviously was not
the case, and many of them had already
been shot up, and already been wounded,
and already were going back. And the first signs of this,
by the way, are that soldiers who were supposed to move up in
order to prepare to go over the top begin baaing like sheep,
going baa, baa, the way that sheep baah on the
way to the slaughter, l'abattoir,
the slaughterhouse, because that's where they were
going. Now, there was socialist and
pacifist literature that had, happily enough,
in my view, had gotten into the trenches.
But this is not the motivation. And Pétain,
who ends up being one of the sort of evil forces in
France--but this was early Pétain,
when Pétain, he realizes that this is not
the case, that in fact the repression is much less severe
than many of the generals wanted--more about that in a
minute. And, so, he ends the policy,
Pétain does, of these mad attacks;
over the top, the whistles blow,
and then they simply get slaughtered.
In some areas--and we don't have exact statistics because
there were certainly some people who were just put up against the
wall and shot, we don't know.
It's just like after 1945, we don't know,
we have a guess of 10,000 people were killed in the
reprisals in 1945 but that's a pretty rough account.
But there were 34,027 condemnations,
about ten percent of the people who were--who faced some kind of
court-martial for something they did or something they didn't do.
And forty-nine were condemned to death, which is not--I'm not
for condemning anybody to death but it--and then these were
carried out as in the movie, as in the film, immediately.
It's just up against the wall, ***, ***.
And Pétain tries to, he tries to bring in better
conditions. He ups the *** ration as
well, and of course that was pretty happy.
So, and in fact I said 40,000, but there's another statistic
that goes as high as 70,000 people.
And let me throw in a statistic as long as we're doing that for
strikes. In 1917 there were 689 strikes
affecting 300,000 workers--that's a lot,
trois cent mille, 300,000 workers,
and that's compared to ninety-eight strikes in 1916.
But, again, a fascinating aspect I'm repeating is that
this was not known, and this was not known--then
you couldn't drive it in forty-five minutes--but this was
not known in Paris by the general population,
what had happened. And in the end France holds on.
Now, in the spring of 1918 the Germans launch their "victory
drive," in quotes, the first major German
offensive since 1914; before it's been the British
and the French attempting to break through.
Now, at the same time the Austro-Hungarian Empire--the
army is--all the cracks that were quite predicted and
predictable, there are all sorts of problems
there. And Franz Joseph has died in
1916, and so the Germans are quite unsure whether the
Austro-Hungarian Empire is going to be able to hold on fighting
against the Italians, for example;
and remember that Brest-Litovsk is not signed until March of
1918. And the Americans have,
by spring of 1918,325,000 soldiers.
That's not a huge number of soldiers but that's still three
times Michigan Football Stadium full.
So, that's a lot of people. So, Ludendorff decides on a
massive German assault along the poor old Somme River,
therefore avoiding the mud of Flanders and avoiding the forts
of eastern France around Verdun. He was encouraged by the fact
that there are younger soldiers that are just barely eighteen
that have been put into the ranks,
and he also has brought up much older men too.
So, they have some serious troops in order to try to pull
off this breakthrough. And, so, on the 21st of March,
1918, after a relatively brief bombardment of five hours,
as opposed to five days, 1.6 million men--who could have
imagined these numbers, who could have imagined these
numbers in 1913?--1.6 million men attack the Allied defenses
in five separate offences over a front of forty miles.
And they do break through. In five days some German units
have pushed forward more than forty miles, and there was--a
complementary attack in Flanders does very well indeed.
And the British troops and the French, as General Haigh in
Britain famously once said, were fighting with their backs
to the wall. And on Easter Sunday of that
year, again the shells from Big Bertha lobbed all those miles,
from the north, fall on Paris.
The Rue de Rivoli, you can still see a sign where
it took out an apartment building.
Church of Saint-Gervais, right near the Seine.
Boulevard Port-Royal, up by Montparnasse,
the same thing. So, these shells fall and they
begin taking lives. But what happens was
predictable and predicted, is that as on the small scale,
in the big scale the Germans begin to outrun their cover and
supplies, and they begin at each one of these five points of
German offensive to encounter stiff resistance.
On July 15th Ludendorff tries a last desperate attack and it's
repulsed. And for Ludendorff,
he knew this was the last chance to win the war,
and at that point he knows it's la fin des haricots,
the end of the green beans, that they're simply not going
to win and that the French, their resources swollen by the
American entrance into the war, are not going to sue for an
armistice until they push the Germans back across the Rhine.
And at that point morale plunges dangerously in Germany.
In January of 1918,250,000 German workers defy the
government by going on strike; and strikes were illegal during
the war, there was all sorts of hoarding, and so there's a big
problem. And the Allies,
the British, the French, and the Americans,
counter-attack in July. And at this point,
when they're in the open for the first time,
tanks that you've all seen pictures of them stuck in the
mud, now when they're in the open
tanks begin to work rather well, and they begin to adopt the
strategy of having soldiers, infantry following tanks and
therefore not getting picked off in such huge numbers,
and they begin to make a big difference.
On the 8th of August, 1918, the German army's darkest
day, there are all sorts of attacks against the German lines
and a British force moves eight miles;
and that's a territory that was unimaginable in the beginning.
At this point Ludendorff tells the hapless Wilhelm II that it's
all over but the shouting and you better figure out some way
of bringing this whole thing to an end.
And, as you know, in the end Wilhelm II will
slither across the Dutch border and the Armistice will be signed
in a railroad car, in Compiègne,
north of Paris--there's still a railroad car there,
it's not the same one, and that's where Hitler
insisted on the declaration of the Armistice in 1940 being
signed--so the war ends on the 11th of November,
1918. And, as you know,
there were many people--not many, but there were lots of
people killed afterwards because they didn't know that the
Armistice had come along and that the biggest pandemic ever
in human history, at least since the Black Death
in the fourteenth century, the Spanish flu,
as it was called; it probably started in India
but had already begun to sweep through the world.
So, things were not getting better and better but they were
getting worse and worse. Just a few obvious
statistics--you can see these all over but it is staggering;
before I end with something that Jay Winter has begun one of
his books with. Just in terms of dead and
wounded, just a couple--you can write these down,
you can write them down or don't write them down.
But, anyway, Russia, dead,
1,800,000; wounded 5,000,000--now,
that ain't nothing like World War Two, 25,000,000 dead in the
Soviet Union in World War II--but 1.8 million is a rather
lot to be killed. In France, the French at
least--and probably more than this--but you hear figures from
1.4 million to 1.5 million dead; and wounded 4,266,000.
Great Britain, including the empire,
the dominion, the Australians,
the Kenyans, dead, 908,000 and wounded
2,000,000. The Italians,
578,000, with about a million wounded.
And Serbia, which is a very small country,
dead, 278,000; wounded 133,000.
Tiny Belgium, killed, 38,000; wounded 44,000.
And among the Central powers Germany, 2,000,000 dead,
2,000,000 dead; after all that with your
armies, how do you explain to the folks back home all those
people dead, why you surrendered?
Well, it must be someone's fault, and that's what the Right
would argue--"it was the Jews, it was the Socialists,
it was the Communists; there had to have been a stab
in the back." How do you explain this to the
folks back home? Wounded, 4,000,000--more than
that. Austria-Hungary,
the amazing thing is they held on so long, given all the
national differences--1.1 million, with wounded 3.6
million. These are just statistics that
are so incredible. In France there are 36,000
communes and there were only twelve that didn't have somebody
killed. And that's why when you go to
any French commune, except those twelve,
you'll see a list of those people killed;
or even inside churches sometimes they'll have the
parish ones, and if the war monuments are near the
churches--that tends to happen more in areas that were still
Christianized, where people still went to
church; and I mentioned this once
before, but if you go to the Bourbonnais or the Allier you
still find these war memorials that are sort of like Voltaire,
"if God exists, how could he or she let this
happen?" With broken crosses,
shattered crosses; they were lamenting that this
could happen in a so-called civilized world.
And, of course, one thing that happens after
the war, as Charles pointed out the other day,
is that if you've been told--if you're an African or you're an
Asian and you've been told that this is the great civilization,
that the Europeans, they've got it all;
you've been told by them that they're better than you.
How do you reconcile that to what they're screaming at you in
their little schools, trying to teach you their
language? If they're so damn better how
could they bring all of this upon Europe?
There is, by the way, but one soldier left in Great
Britain who's still alive from World War One.
He's a fellow called Harry Payne.
He was born in 1898 and somebody just published a book
about him. And periodically,
on Armistice Day, he is interviewed;
you can hear him on BBC. But with the passing of time of
course you don't have that anymore.
And I can remember even in my jeunesse,
I can remember seeing these very aged people coming out on
November 11th, so proud of what they did,
fighting. And the Americans too that did.
But in those days--those were different wars and those were
different countries, and I would argue also that was
a very different America. Anyway, just to simply end with
something that Jay Winter leaves us with.
He has a wonderful book about mourning and memory.
And he begins with a film, he begins with a film by Abel
Gance. Abel Gance, g-a-n-c-e,
did a very long, over-rated film on Napoleon,
with the famous snowball fight. But he did a book--he takes
Zola's title, but he did a movie called
J'accuse! He makes it in 1918 and 1919;
he made it before the war is over.
The hero is a guy called Jean Diaz.
He's a wounded soldier poet and he goes crazy,
he begins to lose his mind, as so many people did,
after all that in World War One, and he escapes from a
mental hospital, and he goes back to his
village, and he brings all the villagers
together, and he tells them about a dream that he's had in
the asylum. And in the dream,
in the movie, you see a battlefield graveyard
with all the crosses, they're all there,
and they're all askew, and a big black cloud comes up
behind the village graveyard, in the movie,
and magically these ghost-like figures emerge from the grave
with tattered bandages, missing arms--their bandages
begin to unravel around their head.
And some are blind, they've lost their sight,
and some are coughing out their lungs from the poison gas.
And they leave the battlefield and they go back to their own
villages to see if the sacrifices have been worth it.
And what they find is what Jay calls the pettiness of civilian
life, the black-marketing, the profiteering.
Their wives have been sleeping around.
Things aren't the way they should be, whereas they have
suffered. But they come back,
they're alive again but they're really dead.
And their appearance so terrifies the villagers that
they decide to mend their ways and to become better people,
better people. And so these ghost-like figures
and their bandages, they march back to the cemetery
and they go back into their graves, and it's all over.
But what's really interesting about it is that some of the
soldiers who were on leave at that time,
en permission, were used as extras in the
movie, and you can identify them--someone who has lost his
arm really, it's not a fake missing arm,
it's a real one. And some of them who were
there, in the movie, go back to the war and are
killed, they die real deaths, in their graves,
with their tattered bandages. And it's as if art and reality
have merged. And that's an important theme
in all of this because there's no war, no more powerful moment,
in history, that has brought us such great literature and all of
this. And there's no war like this
ever that unleashed so many demons into the world,
and it's some of those demons that we will now next turn but
not today. Good luck on the midterm,
have a great weekend. Rock and roll.