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Roux the Bandit
A Novel
André Chamson
A MON FRÈRE
The Cévenols make good soldiers, and are well qualified for war and for service in the infantry.
—Memoirs of Basville.
INTRODUCTION
In 1914, rural France was as far removed from the bustling cities as we are today from the world that existed before the First World War broke out. The world in which Roux lived was one where people went about their daily existence in the same way as their forebears had before and since the Revolution. With the arrival of summer, well-heeled Parisians set off for the coastal resorts of Deauville or south towards Nice and Cannes, along new rail networks in first-class coaches shining with mahogany fittings and Limoges porcelain. The other France, that of the country, took ancient tools and began the task of collecting the crops.
Indeed, France in the early 20th century could be defined as being mostly rural with only 44% of the population of 42 million living in urban areas according to the census of 1911. Thus, 40% of the active population was involved in agriculture, fishing or forestry. The various regions of France had strong cultural identities and in many cases spoke in local dialects rather than French. The rural populations were not very mobile and, in mountainous areas especially, there was little contact with the outside world. News would be passed on in the village café, or pasted onto the noticeboard of the mairie that even the smallest village possessed.
A new annual event might have brought a taste of the modern world which lay beyond to these remote areas – a procession of dust-covered convicts of the road, toiling up mountain tracks on heavy bicycles and followed by cars carrying men in tweed suits. The pioneers of the Tour de France were hard men and the race was three weeks of hard labour, something to which the men and women of rural France could relate. Cyclists became national heroes and in urban areas the sport became a thriving pastime. The heroes of the Tour gained national fame, men such as Lucien Petit-Breton, Octave Lapize and François Faber … all of whom fell in the war.
Another reality for people such as Roux was that of the école républicaine and national military service. A law rendering obligatory secular education between the ages of six and 13 was passed in 1882. It was in this environment that the idea of duty to the nation was instilled and also the notion of revenge for the loss of the Alsace and Lorraine regions to the Prussians following the disastrous and costly war of 1870–71. Despite this, many of the more remote areas remained closely attached to the church, despite the separation of the latter and the state in 1905. There was a certain apprehension towards military matters; after all, it was only a century since Napoleon had caused such demographic damage with his campaigns. However, on the eve of war, three years’ military service was compulsory and it was through the fulfilment of this obligation that rural and urban populations mixed and were imbued further with the notion of duty towards the motherland, especially in view of the increasing bellicosity of their neighbour across the Rhine. Once released from his military service, a man would remain liable to be called up as a reservist.
Following the events in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, life went on the same as it always had. Indeed, in rural areas the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife would have barely raised an eyebrow. In the towns and cities, attention was focused on the political scandal and trial of Henriette Caillaux, the wife of the Minister of Finance, Joseph Caillaux. On 20 July 1914, Madame Caillaux stood trial for the murder of Le Figaro newspaper journalist and chief editor, Gaston Calmette. Joseph Cailloux had been the subject of a campaign, led by Le Figaro, accusing him of corruption. His wife, exasperated and exhausted by this three-month campaign, purchased a pistol and went to the newspaper’s offices where she confronted and shot Calmette. The trial was on the front pages of regional and national newspapers, overshadowing the dark clouds gathering on the geo-political stage. Pleading a crime of passion, Madame Caillaux was acquitted on 28 July, the day on which Austria declared war on Serbia and set the dominos tumbling.
France, along with other countries, at last woke up to the possibility of a European war. On 31 July, Jean Jaurès, a leading pacifist and socialist politician, attempted to halt the impending clash of arms. After having written an article for his newspaper l’Humanité he went to a café where he was shot by a pro-war nationalist. Paradoxically, his death led to socialists rallying to the Union Sacrée of national unity. On 2 August, mobilisation posters were placed in village squares and on town halls. Church bells rang out across fields and valleys, calling men from their occupations; many of them would be in combat within three weeks. It is often said that the men were happy to go, after all this is what the nation had prepared them for since their school days and military service. However, in rural communities the men left behind the ripening crops – who would deal with the harvest?
The men of Roux’s rural community liable to be called up as reservists – aged between 24 and 34 years of age – would make their way to the barracks, which were usually situated in larger towns. Once there, many men were met with scenes of chaos as the regular regiments were marched away. Reserve regiments were formed on the basis of the regular units. Many of the reserve regiments were left with second-rate equipment and uniforms but were mostly ready to move out by 5 August. The French army was organised into 22 military regions with each one capable of raising an army corps comprising several divisions. Like the Germans’ Schlieffen Plan, the French had devised their own, the ill-fated Plan XVII which comprised of a rapid mobilisation and attack into the lost regions of Alsace and Lorraine. However, given the German plan of attack, this was akin to placing their head in a noose. The archaic nature of the plan of attack was matched by that of the uniforms; men were sent into battle wearing dark greatcoats and garance red trousers that harked back to Napoleonic times.
Back in the villages, towns and cities, events were followed with great passion. This time the hated Boches would be defeated and France would regain its honour and lost provinces. There would have been little sympathy for deserters or shirkers. Men who had not shown up on the day their mobilisation cards stipulated could expect the gendarmes to knock on their door and forcibly escort them to the barracks. Those who were not at home were deemed as having deserted and thus liable to the full force of military law; moreover, they could not rely on any help from their communities.
The French plan of action took men from all corners of France by train towards the border with Germany. A French priest, Jean Bouysonnie from Périgueux, called up as a stretcher-bearer, recalled seeing the men pointing excitedly as their train passed through the outskirts of Paris, enthralled as they saw the capital for the first time in their lives. As elsewhere, they were all told it would be over by Christmas. Fighting began as early as 7 August with small-scale clashes along the border. However, this soon intensified into a series of battles known as the bataille des frontières and losses mounted. Fighting on 22 August 1914 cost the French army a staggering 27,000 men killed in action. The French, supported by the small British Expeditionary Force, began to fall back. On 27 August, the men of the rural reserve 338e régiment d’infanterie, from the Limousin, awaited the Germans in the rolling Picardy countryside astride the main road leading south towards Paris. Within a couple of hours they were massacred by an enemy shrouded in morning fog – more than 700 men would not return to their villages.
Despite the appalling losses of the first four months of the war – almost a million casualties – there was s
till an overall feeling that the men had fallen gloriously for a noble cause in defending their homeland, even if the northern parts of France were essentially foreign to the rural population of regions such as the Cévennes, where the novel is set. The dead were eulogised in their communities and in the newspapers. However, it could be argued that an anti-war sentiment came relatively early to France. Hundreds of villages and towns were hit with heavy losses in the early days of the war, locally raised regiments such as the 338e RI were wiped out and the local gendarmes were kept busy informing families of their losses. In Britain this would come later; while the small BEF also lost many men, these were mostly professional soldiers doing their duty, albeit nobly and honoured by their country.
As 1914 came to a close, the Western Front had settled into siege warfare along over 700 kilometres of trench lines from the North Sea to Switzerland. Moreover, six French departments, including the industrial heartland of the north, were under partial or total German occupation. This was exploited by the French press, especially the brutality of the Germans in the opening phase of the war. The German approach to the occupied areas was one of domination based on fear. In the Nord department, the second largest industrial zone after Paris, factories and mines were requisitioned, and machinery dismantled and taken to Germany. Agricultural sectors were also affected with the confiscation of livestock and crops making food scarce for the local population. The latter were also used as a source of labour by the Germans.
It was not surprising, therefore that truces, such as those held between the British and Germans near Ypres and Armentières at Christmas 1914, were not as widespread on sections of the front line held by the French. There were cases of temporary cessations of hostilities but the French attitude towards their enemy had not softened, they were still very much the invader. This attitude would change as the war progressed and front-line soldiers felt a sort of brotherhood of common suffering with their German counterparts.
The year 1915 saw France take a resolutely offensive stance. According to their commander-in-chief, Général Joffre, the French army would nibble away at the German lines before breaking through and pushing out the invader. The problem was that artillery was not yet powerful enough to crush defences and neutralise enemy fire. This second year of the war was, therefore, extremely costly to the French; indeed, in this grim parade of death, 1915 takes the front of the procession with 349,000 killed. People at home, especially in more remote regions where news took time to filter through, were not yet aware of the scale of losses nationwide. The French military high command did not communicate its losses to a government which, in any case, was keen to stifle such terrible statistics in order to maintain national morale. Moreover, the French army was unable to keep track of its losses and many men killed in action were simply registered as missing. Thus families continued to hope that their missing loved ones had been taken prisoner. The first of the 1915 offensives took place in the Artois region around Arras (March–May 1915), in which the British played a comparatively minor role. Gas was unleashed on the French in the Ypres region on 22 April and this new development in industrial warfare was decried as yet another example of a barbaric enemy. Further attacks were launched in September, in the Lens region and Champagne, but resulted in nothing more than adding to the grisly pyre.
At the end of the first full year of war the trench lines had barely moved and success, if any, was measured in metres rather than kilometres. Joffre, imperturbable and calm as ever, saw this as part of a necessary wearing-down process. However, for the front-line infantryman this was nothing more than a futile waste of life; he had no concept of strategy and even less so of tactics, which if there were any, soon fell apart against the grim reality of German bullets and shells. French military justice was extremely brutal and would reach such levels that it took parliamentary intervention to rein in the martial ardour and expedient methods of regimental and divisional commanders. One such example is that of the 63ème régiment d’infanterie of Limoges involved in the grim fighting in the Flirey sector of the Lorraine. Exhausted from countless attacks, the men had no more to give and refused to attack yet again. The general commanding the corps took the extraordinary decision to court martial an entire company. A compromise of sorts was reached with four men chosen for execution. However, those chosen were known for pre-war membership of the CGT trade union … something seen as threat to the ruling classes. After the most basic of trials on 19 April, the four were shot the next day. Such injustices did reach the ears of civilians via letters that escaped the eyes of the censors; diaries also told tales of such travesties where the men of the regiments involved were forced to witness the executions and then marched past the poles against which slumped the limp bodies of their comrades. All of this was sowing bitter seeds that would yield deadly fruit in 1917. The end of 1915 also saw a major inter-Allied conference held at Chantilly. It was decided to undertake a series of offensives on such a scale that the Germans and their allies, hit on all fronts, would have no option but to sue for peace. It was hoped that the British and Empire forces would be able to take more of the burden. Indeed, the junior ally was increasingly taking over parts of the front line, and the volunteers of Kitchener’s Army were arriving in larger numbers. They would be able to play a part in the forthcoming offensives, despite the fact that the French military viewed them with some disdain, seeing them as nothing more than amateurs led by amateurs.
For the French, 1916 was the year of Verdun, a titanic struggle for national survival that overshadowed everything else. Blissfully unaware of Allied plans to attack in 1916, it was the Germans who struck first at Verdun, a small town on the banks of the river Meuse and one of great symbolic, rather than strategic value. It was in Verdun, in the year 843 that Charlemagne’s great empire was split into three in a treaty that many historians consider as being the foundation of France and Germany. It was at Verdun that the war became truly industrial; the might of the Krupp factories poured a storm of steel onto the French defenders. Verdun became a mincing machine through which virtually every French infantry regiment passed. The nation shuddered at the loss of the jewel in the crown of the French defences, Fort Douaumont, and other names, such as Fleury, Vaux, Côte 304 and Mort-Homme gained national and worldwide notoriety as the French clung on in the face of the German onslaught. The battle rallied France once more behind the war effort. This was not a time for political cleavage, but rather one of union sacrée as had been the case in 1914. Towns and villages all over France renamed squares and streets in honour of the fighting at Verdun. The battle would eventually come to a halt in December 1916 with the French back to their original front line. They had held on against the industrial might of Germany, but had been left exhausted and spent.
1916 was also the year of the Somme, an offensive planned in December 1915 at Chantilly as a joint Franco-British attack. There was not much to be gained strategically, no major town, nor any main railway lines used by the Germans as a vital means of transferring supplies and reserves from one end of the Western Front to the other. For the French, however, it was the point where the two Allied armies met and they could, therefore, keep an eye on their junior and amateur partner.
The attack at Verdun threw plans into disarray with the initial French contribution greatly reduced. However, the attack was now essential in order to draw away German reserves from Verdun. The British losses on the first day of the attack are well known and documented; what is less well known is that the French attack, just north of, but mainly to the south of the Somme river, across the Santerre plateau was a great success. It could be argued that topography offered fewer challenges, but moreover, the French were able to draw upon experience that the British had yet to gain. Unlike the extended lines of advancing infantry of the British, the French used fire and movement tactics and could call upon heavy artillery (which the British did not have in sufficient numbers), in order to neutralise German defences. Indeed, it is quite remarkable that France, given its lower
industrial output prior to the war, was capable of producing prodigious quantities of war matériel and this is even more notable when one considers that much of its ore-producing and heavy industry sectors were under enemy occupation.
As in Britain and Germany, women were mobilised on a massive scale to play a vital role in the war effort. This was not only in the fields, but also in the factories, driving trams, and many other occupations that had previously been seen as exclusively masculine. As in many countries, there had been a suffragette movement in France before the war. In 1909, Jeanne-Elizabeth Schmahl established the French Union for Women’s Suffrage but by 1916, the majority of French women were too busy working in exhausting jobs, grieving or apprehending the knock on the door to be worried about the right to vote.
Attitudes towards the war were perhaps beginning to change towards the end of 1916. The work of Henri Barbusse and his famous novel, Le Feu, at first serialised, woke people up to the brutal realities of the war, hitherto hidden behind censorship and glorified imagery. Published in November 1916 and widely read, the novel marked a change in public perception of the war. This led to a sharp increase in charitable institutions sending gifts and comforts to the men at the front, as well as a movement of marraines de guerre, women who adopted a soldier and sent them correspondence, food and other comforts.
The soldiers’ perception of civilians, however, was somewhat different. If a soldier was lucky enough to obtain a short period of leave, he could be standing on a Parisian train platform within half a day, still caked in the damp mud of the Aisne or the Somme. He was no longer met by a euphoric and grateful crowd but rather a sullen indifference. In Paris, where the sound of artillery fire could be clearly heard when carried on a favourable wind, the well-connected could still enjoy an expensive meal or a music-hall show. It was a world of rear-echelon officers wearing tailor-made uniforms and service chevrons earned not in the misery of mud-filled trenches, but in comfortable offices where the only weapons were fountain pens. The gulf between the combatant and the rear was huge. The fighting men, of a caste created in the cauldron of battle, formed unions after the war and fiercely protected their status as anciens combattants.
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