1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Vive le roi indeed.

  * When the Prince broke up with Daisy after finding out that he wasn’t her only lover, he began a relationship with Alice Keppel, the great-grandmother of Camilla Parker Bowles.

  24

  Britain and France Fight Side by

  Side for Once

  August 1914: it must have been a very strange sensation for the French. An invasion force of British troops was streaming across the Channel, but not (for once) to rape and pillage. And they weren’t pointing their guns at Frenchmen. Well, not deliberately, anyway – the British army was actually here to defend France after ten centuries of attacking it at every opportunity.

  For the Brits, too, it must have felt very new. They had fought on the same side as the French a few decades earlier in the Crimea, but that was little more than a colonial expedition. This was a mainland European campaign covering all the old battlefields of northern France and Flanders. Once again, soldiers were clashing in the Somme valley, near Crécy and Agincourt, yet this time les Anglais were side by side with les Français. It was highly suspect, as if the Duke of Wellington had changed sides in the middle of Waterloo and turned on the Prussians. Many were wondering how long the partnership would last …

  An Englishman called French

  The British government knew that the sight of a hundred thousand or so English-speaking soldiers sailing towards France might shock the locals, so they decided to break them in gently. In August 1914, the first British troops to disembark were Highlanders, reminders of the Auld Alliance and living ambassadors of France’s all-time favourite Brit, Mary Queen of Scots. The men in kilts paraded through the streets of Boulogne playing the ‘Marseillaise’ on their bagpipes. Yes, the welcoming crowds must have thought, this is going to be a pretty surreal war.

  The mood of subtle diplomacy was heightened by the nomination of a certain Field Marshal Sir John French to lead the incoming army, the British Expeditionary Force (or BEF). Not only did he have the perfect surname, but he was also a great fan of Napoleon and an avid collector of Napoleonic memorabilia.

  The tactic worked (initially, at least) – the French were delirious to see the Brits coming to defend them. One English artillery officer recalled later that when his unit drove inland it was ‘flowers all the way’ from the cheering crowds. ‘The cars,’ he said, ‘look like carnival carriages. They pelt us with fruit, cigarettes, chocolate, bread.’ And when he stopped to buy some driving goggles to keep out the dust, the shopkeeper refused to let him pay. Someone even bought him lunch.

  The free lunches didn’t last long, though. Very soon, the Brits were no longer flavour of the month. The advancing Germans might not have received as many bouquets as the BEF, but they were making fast progress through Belgium and encroaching on France. The Kaiser’s orders were to ignore the French and ‘exterminate the treacherous English and walk over Sir John French’s contemptible little army’.

  In this, they were helped by Sir John himself. Although he no doubt owned some of Napoleon’s books, he can’t have read any of them, because he was a lousy tactician. His first move was to march his troops to Belgium despite warnings that he would be out on a limb and vulnerable. The Germans duly pushed him back, forcing the BEF to abandon most of the trucks that the French had so recently covered with flowers.

  In retreat, the Brits resorted to their old pillaging tactics, emptying orchards, helping themselves to chickens, eggs and milk, and stealing coal or ripping down whole farm buildings for firewood. It was the Hundred Years War all over again.

  Worse, the retreat meant that a mood of Anglo-French distrust set in almost immediately. The French were angry at Sir John for apparently giving up the fight, while the British Field Marshal defended himself by saying that he was forced to pull back because sudden, unannounced withdrawals by the French kept leaving his men exposed. In the end, Sir John had to be persuaded by a combined force of French leaders and Britain’s Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, not to pack up his army’s troubles in their kit bags and march straight back to Boulogne.

  And as the two Allies bickered, the Germans came stomping through France. By the beginning of September, just a few weeks into the First World War, they were within 50 kilometres of Paris, with the prospect of a siege sending a shiver down the capital’s spine.

  Not-so-gay Paree

  Only forty-three years earlier, in the autumn and winter of 1870–1, Paris had suffered a four-month siege at the hands of the Prussians. From September to January, Otto von Bismarck’s army had camped in the suburbs and bombarded the city. The starving Parisians had ended up eating dogs, cats, rats and all the animals at the zoo – a famous restaurant menu for Christmas 1870, the ninety-ninth day of the siege, featured stuffed donkey’s head, antelope terrine, camel roasted à l’anglaise and consommé d’éléphant. The siege had ended in French defeat and the temporary occupation of Paris by the Prussians, with a victory ceremony in the Château de Versailles – all this within living memory of many of the city’s residents in the summer of 1914.

  The glittering days (and nights) of Edward VII’s gay Paree were at an end. Indeed, the mere prospect of war had snuffed out the city’s notorious gaiety before a single shot had been fired, and any initial gung-ho excitement about the declaration of war was suppressed as Paris went into hibernation. Martial law was declared, café terraces were cleared away, the sale of absinthe was banned (the country needed its men sober), and cafés-concerts were not allowed to play music. The cabaret dancers hung up their frilly skirts, and trade for Montmartre’s filles de joie became morbidly slow – most of their younger clients disappeared when the men received their call-up papers. Suddenly the only males on the streets were boys, older men, a few stunned American tourists and the police patrols, as Paris became seized by the fear that German spies might already be inside the city planning for another siege.

  When the German army arrived at the river Marne at the beginning of September, the city was on full alert, and one of the first emergency measures was a decision to commandeer all Paris’s taxis for use as military transport vehicles. This was an excellent idea, in theory at least – the city had 10,000 taxis, belonging to several different private firms, with enough seats to transport 50,000 men. In practice, though, there were some major headaches. For a start, 7,000 of the taxis were out of service because their drivers had been called up. The others were being driven by men too old for military service.

  When the order was issued on 6 September for all available taxis to gather at Les Invalides, outside Napoleon’s tomb, only 350 turned up. It was a disappointing turnout, but these, along with some 250 buses and private cars, were loaded with supplies and sent out of the city towards the front line about 50 kilometres to the northeast. On the way, there were rumblings of mutiny. As the taxis came within hearing of the artillery fire, a few of the drivers got scared and wanted to turn back. An officer had to threaten to disable the vehicle of any man who turned around, leaving his car to be captured by the Germans or destroyed in battle. Others complained about the lack of food, or its quality – the older men were having trouble chewing the hard army bread.

  Overall, though, the supply mission was declared a success, and next day began the troop convoy that has gone down in French history as the ‘Miracle of the Marne’.

  Several hundred more taxis had been requisitioned by now, and they all flowed out of Paris in a long snaking line towards the battle that was raging in the Marne valley. The order was to carry five soldiers per cab – one in front with the driver and four in the back – though many soldiers travelled in luxury, only two or three per vehicle (even today, Parisian taxi drivers hate to carry more than three passengers, and are especially allergic to having someone sit up front with them).

  Contrary to popular belief, the troops weren’t all picked up in Paris; many of them were based out in the northeastern suburbs, much closer to the fighting. And progress was slow – in convoy, the taxis could only travel at around 25 kph
(15 mph), so the drivers took forty-eight hours to ferry 6,000 or so troops out to the front line. This was in fact a tiny contribution to the Battle of the Marne, which eventually involved a million men on either side (half of whom would be wounded or killed). But in Paris, which had been holding its breath in terror, the Taxis de la Marne took on instant legend status. People began saying that these few brave civilians had saved the city, and the taxi drivers were seen as modern embodiments of St Genevieve, the fifth-century nun whose prayers supposedly kept Attila the Hun from attacking Paris in 451 (he went to ravage Orléans instead).

  And it is true, as symbols of national unity and resistance, the small army of taxis had a huge impact on French morale. With a little help from 250,000 British troops, the French army and its taxi drivers had halted the German advance. Paris would not be occupied, and the fighters could stay out in the countryside and dig in for a few years of trench warfare.

  The French turn beer and wine into water

  And dig they certainly did, because by the end of 1914 there was a 700-kilometre line of trenches stretching from the coast of Belgium to the Swiss border, and the First World War as we know it had begun – that is, each time there was to be a major offensive, the Allies or the Germans would open up with artillery, obliterating not only trenches but also any French or Belgian towns and villages nearby. Then soldiers would march forward across what used to be fields and orchards, and litter the ground with their bullets, shrapnel and dead bodies. The survivors would dig in, and the whole pantomime would start over again. France was being defended, but it was also being destroyed.

  The stagnation of trench warfare changed French attitudes towards their British guests. They had been happy to shower the Tommies with flowers, chocolate and driving goggles when they thought the Brits were not going to stay any longer than lunch. Even Christmas hadn’t seemed too far away. But soon it became obvious that the Tommies were going to be there for much, much longer, along with the Aussies, Kiwis, other colonial troops and, later, the American Doughboys. By the end of the war, there were over two million Allied troops in France, almost all of them billeted chez l’habitant.

  Even at the beginning of the war when French opinion of the Allies was at its highest, the billeting didn’t always go well. The problem was that many of the British regular soldiers had served in the colonies, and treated their French hosts no better than they had the Indians and Africans, to whom they hadn’t been exactly respectful. In short, there was a whole class of British soldiers who saw French villagers as little better than primitive savages.

  The French reacted with predictable logic – they profiteered. Knowing that they could get bombarded at any moment or forced out of their homes by a German advance, they did whatever they could to survive. Even so, the exploitation infuriated the Tommies and their Allied comrades.

  The most vociferous critic of the profiteers was probably the poet and novelist Robert Graves, who wrote a bitter account of his time in the trenches ten years after the war, when he had had plenty of time to let his outrage about the inhumanity of war come to the boil.

  In Goodbye to All That, he is shocked to learn that the French railways are actually charging British hospital trains £200 a day to use their rails. He also savages the French civilians around the town of Béthune where he was based: ‘The peasants did not much care whether they were on the German or the British side of the line … They just had no use for foreign soldiers and were not at all interested in the sacrifices that we might be making for their dirty little lives.’*

  He fumes at the way these French civilians exploited the 100,000 men billeted around Béthune in 1916, saying that as soon as a soldier gets his pay ‘he spends it immediately on eggs, coffee and beer in the local estaminets; the prices are ridiculous and the stuff bad. In the brewery at Béthune, I saw barrels of already thin beer being watered from the canal with a hose-pipe. The estaminet-keepers water it further.’ He even says that after the war, French peasants made claims for damages for property they had never had.

  One soldier who took the profiteering more lightly was an American called Arthur Guy Empey, who joined up in 1915 to serve in France alongside British Tommies. In his book Over the Top, he gives a wry glossary of vocabulary used by the troops:

  Allumettes: French term for what they sell to Tommy as matches, the sulphurous fumes from which have been known to gas a whole platoon … Estaminet: A French public house or saloon, where muddy water is sold as beer … Vin Rouge: French wine made from vinegar and red ink. Tommy pays good money for it … Vin Blanc: French wine made from vinegar. They forgot the red ink.

  A French writer, André Maurois, confirms these impressions in his book Les Silences du Colonel Bramble. The hero, Aurelle, like Maurois himself, is a Frenchman assigned to liaise with the Brits, and in one scene his regiment arrives in a French village. All the shops have been turned into Tommy traps. The haberdasher has thrown all her buttons and cottons in the back room and ‘like everyone in the village, she was now selling Quaker Oats, Woodbine cigarettes and embroidered postcards saying “from your soldier boy”.’ Aurelle tells a villager to protect his savings, if he has any, by putting them into government bonds. ‘I’ve already got 50,000 francs’ worth,’ the man informs him. Everyone in Maurois’s book is getting rich except for the troops whose priority was much more basic – to stay alive.

  And amongst the richest of all were the mesdemoiselles.

  Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?

  There were some forms of profiteering that the soldiers didn’t mind at all.

  When the first wave of British troops arrived in Boulogne, they were carrying a letter from the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, telling them to ‘be brave, be kind, be courteous (but nothing more than courteous) to women’. Kitchener was of Edward VII’s generation and knew all about French mesdemoiselles. He was also the soldier who had been in overall charge of the British army that fought the Boer War, and knew what discourtesies his troops were capable of when they occupied a country (mainly because he’d ordered them to do it).

  But the Tommies were also getting more concrete advice on how to deal with French women. A wartime report by France’s Conseil national des femmes françaises (National Council of Frenchwomen) denounces a British booklet called Five Minutes’ Conversation with Young Ladies, which told soldiers how to put Kitchener’s courtesy to practical use. This ‘disgusting production,’ said the report, was helping to ‘facilitate vice by foreigners’, teaching the soldiers such phrases as ‘Voulez-vous accepter l’apéritif?’, ‘Permettez-moi de vous baiser la main’ and ‘Où habitez-vous?’ From ‘Bonjour’ to ‘Let’s go back to your place’ in five minutes – quick work even by French standards.

  The same report criticized American troops in Paris who ‘call upon women quite rudely in the street without being concerned whom they are addressing’. Not that the Parisiennes were unwilling – the report expresses shock at ‘young girls leaving their lessons to let themselves be easily approached on the pretext that they know how to speak English’.

  And amongst the English phrases the girls probably knew were ways of discussing prices. Part-time prostitution was rife in France during the whole of World War One, and understandably caused extreme anguish amongst French troops, who suspected that their wives and fiancées might be showing excessive hospitality to foreign soldiers. For many widows, of course, it was more a matter of survival – a way of balancing the books now that the man of the house had been blown to bits in a trench somewhere. There were more than enough foreign men to help an enterprising homeowner or waitress supplement her income.

  Robert Graves tells a gruesome but typical story of how billeting often led to horizontal fraternization. Two of his fellow officers tell him that they have been staying chez a mother and daughter, and tossed a coin to decide who slept with whom – or rather, to see who won the mother because the daughter was ‘a yellow-looking scaly little thing like a lizard’.

  Graves�
�s colleagues chat endlessly about the hostesses they have slept with, making fun of Frenchwomen’s false coyness. In bed, they rarely agreed to get completely naked because it wasn’t convenable – not right. It seems that the women’s nightgowns were their own last line of defence against complete indignity.

  Eventually, Kitchener had to concede defeat in the war of the sexes and put Napoleon’s ideas into practice. Bonaparte had legalized brothels in France and the rest of his empire to protect his troops against sexually transmitted diseases, and the Brits took advantage of his law to set up their own French maisons de tolérance, fronted with blue lights for officers and red for other ranks. It is estimated that there was an army of over 50,000 Frenchwomen supporting the British war effort from their mattresses.

  Robert Graves gives an unromantic description of one of the brothels:

  A queue of a hundred and fifty men waiting outside the door, each to have his short turn with one of the three women in the house … the charge was ten francs a man [which was about two weeks’ pay for the ordinary soldier]. Each woman served nearly a battalion of men every week for as long as she lasted. According to the assistant provost-marshal, three weeks was the usual limit: ‘after which she retired on her earnings, pale but proud.’

  Actually, Graves (or the assistant provost-marshal) is romanticizing a little here, because a battalion could be up to 1,000 men, which works out at about fifty customers a day per woman. No human body can stay ‘proud’ after taking that much bombardment – especially from men who, through no fault of their own, suffered from appalling personal hygiene.

  The Allied soldiers immortalized French womanhood in the song ‘Parley-vous’. No one is sure who originally wrote it (some say it was French, dating back to the 1830s) and it’s a ditty that seems to have had a life of its own, because countless verses sprung up throughout the war, improvised by anonymous soldiers. Here is a small selection that shows the high esteem in which the Allied troops held their hostesses.