Debout les Morts!

In Depth Images (2)

A postcard (carte postale) showing ten men who are from various units of the First World War French Army. Two men in the front row have arms in slings, while another is clearly a doctor (médecin). Five men stand on a bench behind the other five. Behind the men are trees and this looks like a park as two other park benches are visible.
Three of the men are black. One in khaki uniform stands proudly with a look of confidence and one arm by his side, his right arm on his hip.

Carte postale from my collection. It shows an unknown location with wounded and recuperating men and a surgeon. The postcard is badly damaged on the reverse but looks to be dated 25[9?].10.1916. The carte was manufactured by R. Guilleminot, Bœspflug et Cie, Paris.

*** This is not the work of an expert! ***

Ever since I bought this postcard, I’ve wanted to use it for a blog post. I’m fascinated by the image, and I hope you are too. Sadly, the back of the card is quite damaged (looks like it was stuck to something). Also, to be honest, I keep having doubts about its veracity. The image is ‘upside down’ for the reverse of the card and is there just something too ‘studied’ in the poses? Is it really what it seems? But then again, why would anyone fake it?
Anyway, to the detail!

Star of it all, for me, is ce gar exuding pride and confidence. He wears the darker uniform of khaki* cloth of the armée d’Afrique, the turned-down collar favoured by the tirailleurs sénégalais and a calot (maybe not his? Read on) at a rakish angle. His collar has what looks like the daffodil-yellow edgings.

His calot. His collar…
Neither seem to carry the ‘fouled anchor’ of the colonial troops – although every time I expand the image, it looks like there’s something on the collar. The calot like those worn by all the others is probably horizon blue. But look at the guy with the pipe in the back row. Has he and our man swapped hats? The double-breasted M.1914 tunic (paletot) looks right otherwise. It has the two pockets with outside flaps and the ‘pointed cuff’ made of more daffodil yellow braid (see below).

These details suggest we are looking at a fairly late war image. Also, it doesn’t appear cold and there are leaves on the trees. Late spring 1918? So, not 1916 as the message on the card suggests? Another doubt.

It’s interesting that the guy behind him doesn’t seem to be wearing the khaki colonial uniform. But there are several reasons for this that should be obvious.

And then there’s the man in the beret. We can clearly see his insignia. Should be easy to identify his unit, right? Notice, by the way, he wears his beret in the ‘opposite’ style to the chasseurs à pied.

It’s at this point I descended into the murky world of les crapouillots – the trench mortar units. They need a whole blog post of their own. But the bottom line is that he wears the insignia of a member of a batterie de 58 on his beret. A trench mortar battery. But it looks to be upside down! That’s not, I think, totally unusual. So, what about his collar tabs? Nice and clear.

If the numbers (’49’) on his collar are in light blue on red cloth, they say he’s a member of the 49e régiment d’artillerie de campagne – which means he’d be on the ‘bigger’ mortars – by 1918, the 150 mm T Modèle 1917 Fabry, 240 mm LT Modèle 1916 or 370 mm Filloux. That doesn’t work. But the alternative – that he served in a trench mortar battery as part of the 49e régiment d’infanterie – only works if the collar tabs are light blue with dark blue numbers and dark blue braid. They aren’t. Chasseurs à pied? daffodil yellow on light blue. And remember the beret?

Ah, but during March 1918, the trench mortars of the French Army were reorganised into régiments d’artillerie de tranchée. Each régiment had 10 Groupes de 4 Batteries: 1 or 2 of 58 mm, 2 or 1 of 150 mm, 1 of 240 mm so … Doesn’t work. The regiments were numbered 175, 176, 177, 178 and 179ème. So, I can’t make his ’49’ map to a trench mortar regiment in 1918. Is there more insignia/headgear confusion (fun for them, confusing for us!) going on, or this is not taken at the time I thought.

Or we’re back to the question: Is it really what it seems?

The last bit’s going to be hard to write but … if someone colorized [that’s one ugly word] the image, that might offer clues. What am I writing?! Usually, unless in the hands of someone really skilled, the results are dreadful. Kill the thought. Admit it. This one’s got you beat!

Get in touch if you have knowledge, ideas or expertise. Let me know your thoughts. Feel free to tell me where you think I’m right or wrong. Also, tell me your sources and I’ll share the information here.

I hope you enjoyed the post.

* Although frequently described as drap moutarde by English-language sources, I’ve only seen this cloth (so far!) described as kaki, with some references to drap de jaune moutarde (cloth of a mustard yellow colour). Maybe it’s the influence of Second World War French Army uniforms that encourages this.

Photos, Regiments

In Depth Images (1)

22 juillet 1916 – Bois de Lachalade (Meuse) Au lieu-dit du Ravin du Triage, un barbier du 82e régiment d’infanterie rase ses camarades. Réf. : SPA 8 N 221 © Pierre Pansier/ECPAD/Défense

I really liked this photograph. There’s lots going on. So, I set myself the task of studying it in detail. Not as an expert or collector of militaria, but a learner. I came up with this list of things to draw attention to, and maybe hazard some informed guesses about. I shared what I found on Twitter. This post is an expanded version of what I shared there.

I wanted to show the richness of evidence in a single photograph and see the paths the details would take me on to build layers of knowledge. I think that part was a success and, like exercise, it’ll get easier the more you do it.

Let’s start with the unit: This information in the caption is confirmed by the collar insignia of the ‘headless’ man standing on the right – the 82e régiment d’infanterie (RI). Meanwhile, his left sleeve insignia (« chevrons d’ancienneté de presence ») (see below) say he’s had more than 18 months’ front-line service. These length of service chevrons had only been approved in April 1916 and just introduced in July – so they are very new here. His trade badge beneath the chevrons is difficult to be sure about – ‘Canonier-observateur’ or perhaps a ‘télégraphiste’ (were the latter engineers?).

He wears the ‘reduced’ style rank insignia on his lower sleeve and is a ‘Caporal’. There don’t seem to be any other signs of rank on other tunics but there’s another length of service chevron on the jacket that’s hung up. Intriguingly, the man being shaved is wearing gaiters.

This is a really good photo to see the M 1912 Other Ranks’ Boots as modified in 1916. The additional row of hobnails on the heel are visible in this expanded image.

Lots of questions remain. I need to do more learning about tunics and jackets. Is that dark piping on the breeches or the shadow of the seam? Is there more to learn about the officer? Dr Sarah Ashridge, a respected authority on such things, in response to my query, confirms that our man being shaved looks like he may be wearing the thin chain of a plaque d’identité – as is the man in the foreground. From 1915, the French identity tag system included discs to be worn around the neck & on the wrist, so that would fit. More info on French discs here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379073820304308

I’ve not commented on the location: Bois de Lachalade in the Argonne and what might have been happening in this sector at the time: the 82e RI was part of 9e division d’infanterie (DI) and had been in this part of the Argonne for over 18 months. The sector of the Haute Chevauchée had seen considerable mining activity and significant fighting in mid-1915. By 1916, it had notionally become a purely defensive sector, although mine warfare continued, broken only by a local truce lasting two months in Spring 1916. Nevertheless, the regiment had recently had to retake la crête de la Fille–Morte, the name giving some indication of the closeness of the opposing trenches in the sector. However, the Journal des Marches et des Opérations (JMO) of the regiment on this day captures well the situation in a defensive sector:

« 22 Juillet. Même situation, mêmes emplacements. Pertes 2 blessés. »

But a change was coming and, in September 1916, the regiment was drawn northwards into the maelstrom of Verdun.

Maps, Mobilisation, Regiments, Resources, Uncategorized

Google Map Resources: Les Régiments d’Infanterie Territoriale [RIT]

The fourth resource using Google Maps – a visual reference resource to make some of the ‘core information’ on the French Army in the First World War easily accessible.

Les Régiments d’Infanterie Territoriale shows the location of the Territorial* Infantry Regiments by their Base HQs. It also includes the Régiment d’Infanterie Territoriale (RIT) and Battalions Territorial de Chasseurs à Pied [BTCP or BTCA (they were all Chasseurs Alpin units)].

(* NB NOT the equivalent of the British Territorials! (The differences will be explained in a blog post).

As with previous maps, this map is embedded as a link and immediately available ‘on click’ in a new tab:

Les Régiments d’Infanterie Territoriale by Home HQ, 1914

Feedback on the value and accuracy of these is always welcome so do send a comment.

Maps, Mobilisation, Regiments, Resources

Google Map Resource: Les Régiments d’infanterie 1914-1918

The third of my Google Maps – a visual reference resource to make some of the ‘core information’ on the French Army in the First World War easily accessible.

Les Régiments d’infanterie 1914-1918 shows the location of active Infantry Regiments by their Base HQs. It also includes the Bataillons de Chasseurs à pied (BCP) and Bataillons Chasseurs Alpins (BCA). As with previous maps, this map is embedded as a link and immediately available ‘on click’ in a new tab:

Feedback on the value and accuracy of these is welcome so do send a comment.

language, Resources

A few military medical abbreviations (updated)

The following is a (by no means exhaustive) list of acronyms and abbreviations associated with French Army military medicine terminology in La Grande Guerre. If you have further example, or can otherwise improve on what’s here, please feel free to comment and make suggestions.

ACA : Ambulance chirurgicale automobile – (Mobile) ambulance unit (‘MASH’?!)
Amb : Ambulance
CF : ‘coup de feu’ (wound) – gunshot
EO : éclat d’obus (for a wound) Shrapnel
GBD / GBS : groupe de brancardiers divisionnaire / corps – divisional/corps stretcher-bearer company
GS : Groupe de secours
HOE : l’hôpital d’orientation des étapes (d’évacuation) – Casualty Clearing Station?
l’ESSM : École supérieure du Service de santé militaire – school in Lyon which trained military doctors and pharmacists.
PS : poste de secours (? ou santé) – Aid Post
PSD : Poste de Secours Divisionnaire – divisional aid post
PSR : Poste de Secours Régimentaire – regimental aid post
SH : section d’hospitalisation
SHO : Section d’Hospitalisation et d’Orientation
SIM : Section d’infirmiers militaires
SS : le Service de Santé – medical service
SS : Section sanitaire
SSA : Section sanitaire automobile
SSAA : Section sanitaire automobile anglaise
SSU : Section sanitaire automobile américaine

To add to this, David O’Mara has provided the following useful guideance:

Officiers [médecins] served in the ‘service de santé‘ [SS] … Sous-officiers, caporals et ‘hommes de troupe‘ [médecins auxiliaires & infirmiers – of varying degree] served in the ‘sections d’infirmiers militaires‘ [SIM].

A section d’hospitalisation [SH] (4 orderlies, 4 drivers & 3 2-horsed wagons carrying medical stores). There were 6 per corps d’armée & another 6 in reserve. Combined with the ambulances (active & reserve), these become the Groupe de secours [GS]

1919, After the War, language, Resources

More Resources: Dictionaries

If they haven’t already, someone needs to look at the printed material produced during and immediately after the First World War for orientating the foreign soldier and, subsequently, the battlefield tourist or ‘pilgrim’.

Here’s a fine example:

Example page from *Self pronouncing 9,000 names of places in the war zones: Belgium, Germany, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Austria-Hungary, Italy, France*
(Rand, McNally & Co., 1919)

The whole of this very helpful guide (its accuracy needs to be tested before it can be recommended!) can be found here.

A further example was not a new publication but a reprint. Cornélis De Witt Willcox’s A French-English military technical dictionary : with a supplement containing recent military and technical terms had originally been published in 1899, but was republished by the United States’ War Department in September 1917.

The detail is simply staggering. But how useful a book using terms for technology from the previous century was in the rapidly changing environment of the First World War is questionable. Judge for yourself from this sample page:

Example page from . Cornélis De Witt Willcox, *A French-English military technical dictionary : with a supplement containing recent military and technical terms*
(US Government Printing Office, Washington, 1899)

The variety of anneau (a ring, collar, hoop or link of a chain) is astonishing and some outdated technology (such as the Gardner Gun) feature among the equipment-, harness, pole-chain- and mooring rings.

There’s a growing field of study around language and war but it’s of particular interest to me when it comes to the operational co-operation and liaison between two nations that speak different languages. Specifically, the British and the French. There’s been some work on the methods of liaison in use between the two high commands (particularly on the Somme in 1916, by the late Elizabeth Greenhalgh). My own focus is on this infrastructure, if it existed, under extreme crisis, as it was in the Spring of 1918 during the German Kaiserschlacht offensives.

I’ll add further examples of what might have been less-than-adequate tools of the trade as my research continues. Meanwhile, if you want to maximise your enjoyment of Willcox’s work, you can find viewable and downloadable versions here (courtesy of the Internet Archive).

language, Resources

Further examples of French Army Slang

Azur, used preceded by the word Pif to designate a man with a large nose. For example, Eh! Pif d’azur.

Barbelé (avoir le barbelé dans le ciboulot), sort of cafard.

Bougie, face. For example, T’en fais une bougie!

Bourrin, prostitute.

Braise, mail.

Brin, excrement. For example, Bientôt on nous donnera à bouffer du brin.

Casino, chest.

Cassolettes, shoes.

Ciseaux, sur les appareils Farman, le manche à balai (barre de direction) est remplace par une tige qui se termine par deux boucles, d’où le nom de ciseaux.

Contre-torpilleur, iron field kitchen.

Encaisser, to fly in bad weather and be violently buffeted by the wind.

Esgourdacher, to listen.

Geignot, sort of cafard.

Grenade à cuiller, one which bursts on touching the ground.

Grougnon, sort of cafard.

Homme a lunettes, person who is not resourceful.

Jojo, light, poor wine.

Macaron, automobile steering gear.

Métro, narrow gauge railway behind the lines for transporting supplies.

Negre, black smoke shell.

Nord-Sud, same as Métro.

Parisse, Paris.

Placard, chest.

Polyte, Boche.

Potache, service stripe.

P. P. T., pauvres poires des tranchées.

Rinpinpin, sort of cafard.

Saint-Gothard, same as Métro.

Simplon, same as Métro.

Soixante-quinze, beans.

Tinette, automatic machine gun.

Tricoteuse, bayonet.

[Taken from Milton Garver, ‘French Army Slang’ in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 35, No. 8 (Dec., 1920), p. 508.]

1914, Mobilisation, Saint-Cyr

The 99th ‘promotion’ of the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr

The Pulitzer Prize winner, Barbara W. Tuchman, holds some responsibility for encouraging two enduring myths of ‘La Grande Guerre’.

Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August
© Penguin Books Limited

In a footnote to her 1962 book The Guns of August, Barbara W. Tuchman’s wrote that ‘In the chapel of St. Cyr (before it was destroyed during World War II) the memorial tablet to the dead of the Great War bore only a single entry for “the Class of 1914”’.

Useful ammunition in support of a portrayal of ‘the French Army and the Futility of War’, this claim, like her statement that ‘Officers from St. Cyr went into battle wearing whiteplumed [sic] shakos and white gloves’ makes for great reading, but is somewhat lacking in terms of supporting evidence.

As the foremost French military academy, L’École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr was created by order of Napoléon Bonaparte on 1 May 1802. The school, originally at the château de Fontainebleau, received its first pupils in 1803.

Since 1829, each year the class (‘promotion‘) chooses a name for itself. Typically, these are battles, famous graduates of the school, slogans or nicknames. In January 1915, the 1913-14 promotion was named ‘la Grande Revanche’ – in keeping with the nation’s chief goal in 1914: revenge for the defeat in War of 1870.

According to research published by Général de brigade Jean Boÿ in 2010, a total of 781 (subsequently revised to 765) students were members of the class and he quotes figures from Colonel Jean Le Boulicaut, le Livre d’or des Saint-Cyriens morts au Champ d’honneur (Ed. la Saint-Cyrienne, 1990) that give 463 members as « morts au Champ d’honneur » (quite a particular expression, rather than the ‘official’ « morts pour la France » or « morts en service »). Of these 463, 406 died during la Grande Guerre or as a result of wounds they suffered in it. The others died or were killed in conflicts from Mesopotamia in 1920 through Syria in 1924, the Second World War (24 deaths) and on to Algeria (2). Surprisingly, 20 are known to have died but not where or when.

So, not all were killed (although a high percentage (53%) – high even to an experienced historian of the Great War – were). A few did die in 1914 – those who couldn’t wait to get into the fighting – but the great majority of the students were engaged as infantry, and grouped together at the end of August 1914 in « pelotons spéciaux régionaux » where they received basic training as chef de section. On 5 December 1914, those passing the final exam became temporary second lieutenants; their less successful comrades left as non-commissioned officers.

The life stories of these men are as varied as every person’s during the war. The worst year for casualties was 1915 when 223 were killed, but there were significant numbers who died in the other years of the war as well. Here’s just one example of a Saint-Cyrien who made it to 1918 but was killed in June during The Battle of the Matz: Jean Eugène Marie René ARTHAUD de La FERRIÈRE. Engagé volontaire le 17/08/1914, Lieutenant à la 9ème Compagnie du 151ème Régiment d’infanterie. (If you use Twitter, please consider following @Indre1418 – one of several accounts specialising in the service history of men from a particular commune, ville or département).

I still need to find a photograph of the memorial in the chapel as it stood before 1940 (can you help?). It’s true that the “vieux bahut” (old school) was indeed badly damaged by Allied bombing during the campaign to liberate France. It would be good to confirm just what the memorial did say.

And the white gloves and plumes? This seems to be a myth of a longer pedigree. On 15 April 1940, as a combined British and French force struggled to resist the German invasion of Norway , Life magazine published a short photo-article ‘The Best Blood of France. Graduates from St. Cyr’. With recently-released images of some of France’s ‘glorious dead’, the article compared the graduates of the 1940 ‘promotion‘ – Amitié Franco-Britannique (‘Franco-British Friendship’) – with the graduating class of 1914 who ‘swore to die in white gloves and plumes and promptly did, at Charleroi, on August 22, 1914.’ Their 1940 counterparts, Life‘s readers were told, were ‘equally willing to die’ (but this time in khaki, not white gloves) and the magazine grimly speculated based on the evidence of the previous war that not half of them would return…

Maps, Resources

Google Map Resource: Wartime expansion of the French Army, 1914-1918

Another map presented as a visual reference resource to make some of the ‘core information’ on the French Army in the First World War easily accessible.

Like the map for ‘Plan XVII’ – the French mobilisation plans implemented after war was declared at the beginning of August 1914 – this map is embedded and immediately available ‘on click’ and provides detail on the wartime expansion of the Army through ‘new’ and Reserve divisions. It opens in a new tab:

*Map showing reserve divisions formed on mobilisation in 1914 as well as Territorial and war-formed divisions*

Maps, Resources

Google Map Resource: Plan XVII

I’m working on a few ideas for Google Maps as visual reference resources to make some of the ‘core information’ on the French Army in the First World War easily accessible.

The first one (and it will remain a work in progress) is for ‘Plan XVII’ – the French mobilisation plans implemented after war was declared at the beginning of August 1914.

The map is embedded and immediately available ‘on click’. It opens in a new tab:

map and link for Le plan de mobilisation et de concentration XVII de l'Armée française — Le plan de mobilisation et de concentration XVII de l’Armée française

Google maps are fun to make and great ways of presenting information visually. I was pleased to be able to load my own icons but still used Google’s own (ahem) ‘Private Club’ XXX symbol to represent the ‘home’ locations of the Corps d’Armée.