Haller’s Blue Army

Centennial Commemortive Stamp for the Blue Army

By James Patton

During the Middle Ages the kingdom of Poland was a vibrant state, a bastion of power and Catholic enlightenment. The dynasty reached its zenith in 1683 when the Polish King Jan III Sobieski led the army that defeated the Ottomans in the Battle for Vienna, which proved to be the high water mark of the Ottoman incursion into Central Europe. The subsequent decline of the Polish state paralleled the rise of the Prussian state to the north, and beginning in 1764, Polish territory was nibbled away by Prussia, Russia and Austria, until in 1795 the entire nation had disappeared into the "partitions," the largest of which was the Russian and included the city of Warsaw. 

In the 19th century, disaffected Poles left the area in considerable numbers. It has been estimated that 5 million Poles migrated to North America and considerable numbers went to Western Europe as well. There was even substantial emigration from the Russian partition to the Austrian partition, where the regime was more lenient. Influential Poles in the west, such as the musician Ignacy Paderewski and the scientist Maria Sklodowska Curie, spoke up passionately and persuasively about the unjust treatment of their people, most particularly those under the tsar. 

In 1918 the Polish cause became a war aim. Woodrow Wilson devoted Point XIII of his Fourteen Points to Polish independence. When stating His Majesty’s war aims David Lloyd George said "An independent Poland is an urgent necessity…"

But even before these actions, in August 1916 the Germans and Austro-Hungarians had agreed to create an autonomous (but not quite independent) Kingdom of Poland (no king was ever crowned), and in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in early 1918 the Bolsheviks were required to renounce any claim to the Russian partition.

General Haller Honoring His Troops

Before the war, there were "Polish Legions" formed in the Austrian partition, ostensibly as sportsmen’s clubs. Among the leaders of this movement were the socialist Jósef Pilsudski (1867–1935), a long-time agitator against tsarist rule, and Jósef Haller von Hallenburg (1873–1960), a former cavalry captain in the Austrian army. These paramilitary units also included Polish refugees from the Russian partition as well as veterans of Austrian compulsory military service and, later on, Polish prisoners of war who had served in the Russian army. The real objective of these Legions was to permanently oust the Russians from a large swath of the ancestral Polish domain. In 1915, these units were accepted by the Austro-Hungarians as co-belligerents.

On the other side of the Atlantic, a group of Polish immigrants sought to start a different Polish Legion. American law made this problematic, so they set up shop in Canada. Neither the Canadians nor the British had much use for an all-Polish unit, but the French were much more welcoming.  In fact, they bankrolled the whole operation, and over 20,000 volunteers responded to the call. After the U.S. declared war in 1917, 24,000 more Polish-Americans signed up, and 35,000 Polish POWs held by Italy were recruited as well. Altogether nearly 90,000 men were assembled in France, and the overall command was given to Haller, who had escaped to the West after the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, when his Austro-Hungarian Polish Legion was ordered to stand down. The organization in France became known as Haller’s Army and under his command these soldiers fought on the Western Front from July to November 1918 and who, along with French colonials and the borrowed Americans of the 92nd and 93rd divisions, were among the few units the French Army had that were willing to mount frontal assaults.

After the Armistice, Lt. Gen. Haller and his army were shifted to the east, where they merged with units formerly in Russian service to form the first Polish Army in 124 years, under the overall command of Pilsudski. The French provided massive logistical assistance and an advisory mission led by Gen. Maxime Weygand (1867–1965). Since Haller’s Army still wore their "horizon blue" French uniforms, they became known as  the "Blue Army" but were still under the overall command of Haller. 

The Miracle on the Vistula

The feats of the Blue Army became legendary in the postwar wars, in the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1919, and at the Battle of Warsaw (12–25 August1920). There is a famous painting called The Miracle on the Vistula by Jerzy Kossack (1885–1955) that depicts the Polish soldiers spurred forward by an Apparition of the Virgin Mary leading a host of angelic knights, just as some believe she did at Vienna in 1683. Acting against the advice of Weygand, and significantly outnumbered, Haller’s Corps, including the Blue Army,  successfully turned the northern flank of the Soviet armies attacking Warsaw, forcing them into a chaotic withdrawal.

Pilsudski was a seasoned political infighter and emerged from the Soviet War as the most influential person in Poland. After staging the May 1925 coup d'état he ran the country until his death in 1935.   

Haller, on the other hand, was a great soldier but a poor politician. After he declined to participate in Pilsudki’s coup he was forced out of the army.  He moved to London, where he resided for rest of his life, with frequent visits to America. During WWII he was active in the Polish government in exile in London.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Cemetery for Soldiers of Haller's Corps Who Fell in the 1920 Battle of Warsaw (Photo by James Patton)

Many of those who served under Haller emigrated or returned to the U.S. after their service ended. They were the antecedents of the Polish Legion of American Veterans, which received a federal charter in 1984. Membership has always been restricted to veterans, but the requirement that they be of Polish ancestry was dropped in 1992.  There are currently about 75 posts in 12 states plus DC, mostly located in historically Polish neighborhoods.

Source: Article originally appeared in KansasWW1.org on 5/19/2018

Oscar and the Great War: WWI Veteran Academy Award Winning Actors

Eyewitness: Returning to Wipers After the War

The Ruins of Ypres

By Correspondent Philip Gibbs

The city of Ypres was the capital of our battlefields in Flanders from the beginning to the end of the war, and the ground on which it stands, whether a new city rises there or its remnants of ruin stay as a memorial of dreadful things, will be forever haunted by the spirit of those men of ours who passed through its gates to fight in the fields beyond or to fall within its ramparts.

I went through Ypres so many times in early days and late days of the war that I think I could find my way about it blindfold, even now. I saw it first in March of 1915, before the battle when the Germans first used poison-gas and bombarded its choking people, and French and British soldiers, until the city fell into a chaos of masonry. On that first visit I found it scarred by shellfire, and its great Cloth Hall was roofless and licked out by the flame of burning timbers, but most of the buildings were still standing and the shops were busy with customers in khaki, and in the Grande Place were many small booths served by the women and girls who sold picture post-cards and Flemish lace and fancy cakes and soap to British soldiers sauntering about without a thought of what might happen here in this city, so close to the enemy's lines, so close to his guns. I had tea in a bun-shop, crowded with young officers, who were served by two Flemish girls, buxom, smiling, glad of all the English money they were making.

St. Martin's Cathedral

A few weeks later the devil came to Ypres. The first sign of his work was when a mass of French soldiers and colored troops, and English, Irish, Scottish, and Canadian soldiers came staggering through the Lille and Menin gates with panic in their look, and some foul spell upon them. They were gasping for breath, vomiting, falling into unconsciousness, and, as they lay, their lungs were struggling desperately against some stifling thing. A whitish cloud crept up to the gates of Ypres, with a sweet smell of violets, and women and girls smelled it and then gasped and lurched as they ran and fell. It was after that when shells came in hurricane flights over Ypres, smashing the houses and setting them on fire, until they toppled and fell inside themselves. Hundreds of civilians hid in their cellars, and many were buried there. Others crawled into a big drain-pipe--there were wounded women and children among them, and a young French interpreter, the Baron de Rosen, who tried to help them--and they stayed there three days and nights, in their vomit and excrement and blood, until the bombardment ceased. Ypres was a city of ruin, with a red fire in its heart where the Cloth Hall and cathedral smoldered below their broken arches and high ribs of masonry that had been their buttresses and towers.

Site of Menin Gate

When I went there two months later I saw Ypres as it stood through the years of the war that followed, changing only in the disintegration of its ruin as broken walls became more broken and fallen houses were raked into smaller fragments by new bombardments, for there was never a day for years in which Ypres was not shelled.

Source: Now It Can Be Told, 1920

Global Inflation during the First World War

Last Banknote Issued by the German Empire, 50 Marks

By Nicholas Mulder, Columbia University

The Great War required war-making states to mobilize and sustain the financial resources for a global war on an unprecedented scale. What made war finance during the conflict so special is that this challenge had never been confronted in a world economy as large, deeply interconnected, and sophisticated as that which existed in 1914. [With the belligerents, for example, taxation]  served to control inflation and to uphold the creditworthiness of governments in the eyes of their creditors. By removing excess money supply from the civilian economy, taxation would reduce the strong upward pressure on prices caused by increased spending and money issuance. [Note: This article does not cover the great German inflation of 1918–1923 or the origins of the Great Depression].

The First World War created a global rise in prices. Taking the price level of the last prewar year, 1913, as a benchmark level of 100, the increases were significant everywhere. In all economies that were at officially war, prices had risen at least twofold by 1918: from 196 in Japan and 203 in the USA to 235 in Great Britain, 217 in Germany (soon to cascade into dangerous hyperinflation), 340 in France, and 409 in Italy. Shortages of raw materials, excess liquidity spillovers, and foreign import binges also affected the neutrals, most of which saw the 1913 price levels more than triple.  

Click on Image to Enlarge

Selected Commodity Prices Before and After
the First World War

Since European central banks also controlled currency and securities circulating in their colonial economies, deficit financing in the metropole caused inflation in the periphery. Because colonial subjects lacked rights and democratic institutions, this inflation fueled social unrest and anti-colonial uprisings. In Central Europe, town-country exchange was breaking down by the end of the war, causing famine in urban centers; Asian peasants from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific confronted a rice crisis that would persist for three years after the end of the war.  

The way that these high price levels were brought down was through a sustained, purposeful deflation of the global money supply, initiated by the Federal Reserve’s hiking of interest rates in March 1920 and (due to America’s leading role in the return to the gold standard) thereafter forcibly followed by most central banks around the world. The economic result was a sharp worldwide recession in 1920–1921. This monetary consolidation was accompanied by a wave of violent political repression and counterrevolution—a “world-wide Thermidor” that ended the revolutionary aftermath of the Great War. 

Source: Encyclopedia 1914-1918; Research Gate by Niall Ferguson

Somewhere East of Verdun: Some Forgotten Battlefields of 1914

 Nomeny War Memorial

By Christina Holstein

In France, the Grand Est,  the area between the eastern side of the St. Mihiel Salient and the Vosges Mountains is largely overlooked by battlefield visitors, and its rolling hills and quiet villages do not feature in many guidebooks. However, it is an area that saw fierce action in the early weeks of 1914, and although superseded in popular imagination by the later "great names" of the Western Front, the battles fought there set the stage for later events and were the scene of great casualties and destruction.

Nomeny Civilian Memorial

In Nomeny, for example, a little town on the salty River Seille, where four French infantry regiments barred the road to Nancy, losing 1,000 men as they did so, the town was plundered and burned by the Bavarians. A poignant memorial by the river commemorates the 73 civilian victims of the dreadful event, the youngest being a little boy of three. Just across the bridge, the town war memorial—which features a dramatic statue of a soldier clasping the French flag as he falls—lists another 58 men. It is hard to imagine today the effect of such losses on such a small place. Did it ever revive? [Its population today is 1,139.]

 Grand Couronné

That was 20 August 1914. Similar events occurred in a number of other nearby villages, and the fighting continued into September as the Germans pushed on toward the city of Nancy. The range of rocky hills to the north of Nancy is known as the Grand Couronné, and on them the French stopped the advancing Germans. The main monument to the fighting is to be found at Ste. Genevieve, a tiny hilltop place, obviously entirely rebuilt, with views that stretch for miles in all directions. It had to be held by the French, and it was. In those days, Ste. Genevieve was in France, but the border with German-occupied Lorraine was only a few miles away. 

Manhoué

At Manhoué, a traditional village that cannot have changed much over the years, stands a memorial to the first two Great War Frenchmen to fall on the soil of German-occupied Lorraine. On 7 August 1914, the 26th Infantry, a local French regiment, pushed across the border into Manhoué and in an exchange of fire, Soldiers Chretien and Ganayre were killed. The high-spirited inscription on the monument commemorating the event refers to them as "the first two lads" of the 26th Infantry to fall on the soil of Lorraine. It is an unusual word to use on a monument. Were they the wild boys of the regiment, always ready for a scrap, determined to be first on occupied soil? The regimental history does not mention the event, but their monument stands just a few feet inside the old border, and it is easy to imagine them racing toward it, yelling and cheering, their bright red trousers making them a perfect target for any German guns in the area.

The Silent Service’s First Hero: The First Submariner to Receive the Medal of Honor

Newspaper Account of the Episode

By Ryan C. Walker 

Pen and Sword Maritime, 2024

Reviewed by Professor Jeffrey LaMonica 

Ryan C. Walker’s The Silent Service’s First Hero: The First Submariner to Receive the Medal of Honor  is a 224-page “microhistory” covering the life and service of World War I veteran Henry Breault from 1900 to 1941. The author is an historian with a graduate degree in naval affairs and was a US Navy submariner from 2014 to 2019. He defines this “microhistory” as a collage that is equal parts biography, military history, cultural history, and local history. His research draws upon military personnel files and reports to tell the story of Breault’s military career and his heroic action that resulted in his Medal of Honor. Walker utilizes newspaper articles, census data, and Hollywood films to set Breault’s life in the larger scope of American society and culture in the 1920s and 1930s.

Click HERE To Order

Walker’s “microhistory” unfolds over eleven chapters. It begins with an overview of the navy’s commemoration of Petty Officer Breault’s heroism and addresses the overall neglect of enlisted personnel in naval history. The book chronicles the history of the Medal of Honor and U.S. Navy during the interwar years. The author tells of Breault’s early life as a French-Canadian in New England and service in the Royal Navy’s Canadian Volunteer Corps during the Great War. He likely witnessed the horrible aftermath of the 1917 munitions explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Breault enlisted in the U.S. Navy after the war and “saw the world” as a submariner in the Caribbean and South Atlantic in the 1920s. Walker dedicates a chapter to sorting through numerous accounts of Breault’s rescue of a shipmate during a submarine accident in 1923 for which Congress awarded him the Medal of Honor. Breault’s naval career continued through the 1930s in the Far East. Subsequent chapters cover Breault’s failed attempts at promotion, court martial for missing muster, and health problems causing his death two days before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

______________________________

Medal of Honor Citation

Torpedoman Second Class Henry Breault

For heroism and devotion to duty while serving on board the U.S. submarine 0-5 at the time of the sinking of that vessel. On the morning of 28 October 1923, the 0-5 collided with the steamship Abangarez and sank in less than a minute. When the collision occurred, Breault was in the torpedo room. Upon reaching the hatch, he saw that the boat was rapidly sinking. Instead of jumping overboard to save his own life, he returned to the torpedo room to the rescue of a shipmate who he knew was trapped in the boat, closing the torpedo room hatch on himself. Breault and Brown remained trapped in this compartment until rescued by the salvage party 31 hours later.

______________________________

Walker pieces together Breault’s personal relationships with family and friends despite scant sources and makes honest assessments concerning his shortcomings as a husband and father. He uses Breault and his shipmates to provide a glimpse into the everyday experiences of enlisted personnel in the navy in the 1920s and 1930s, including global travel, material/consumer culture, hygiene, tattoos, and sex. The author admits to drawing his own conclusions about many unknown aspects of Breault’s life and personality for the sake of constructing this mosaic narrative. This confession captures the essence of “microhistory,” where the individual, their deeds, and the overall world around them share equal significance. Walker’s book is an absorbing tale of the navy’s only enlisted submariner to receive the Medal of Honor and demonstrates the value of exploring military figures beyond their military careers.

Jeffrey LaMonica

Who Was Rufus Isaacs? And What Did He Do During the Great War?

Rufus Isaacs (1860–1935)

On my shelf is a book titled Who's Who in World War One that claims to contain 1,000 entries on notables persons from the war. It's been very handy for me over the years but has no information about the gentleman shown above.  The Imperial War Museum identifies him as Lord Reading, Rufus Isaacs, First Marquess of Reading, Lord Chief Justice and Viceroy of India. His photo is included in the museum's collection which suggests he did, indeed, play a significant role in the Great War. One, however, has to do some additional digging to discover just what that might have involved. The first interesting fact this researcher discovered, though, is that the good lord was one of the principals in the prewar Marconi Scandal of 1912. More on that below.  Further research, made it clear to me that, in any case, he deserved an entry in the above mentioned work.

Born into a talented Jewish family engaged in the London fruit trade, Isaacs went on to become a brilliant Queen's Council, Member of Parliament, Knight, and Attorney General. For starters! A stalwart of the Liberal Party, he was trusted by Prime Minister Asquith and became  very close to  future P.M. David Lloyd George and his allies, like Winston Churchill.  

His succeeding—even more brilliant career—was almost sidetracked by his familial connection (through his brother, Godfrey) and his own financial ambitions to the infamous Marconi scandal. Despite being cleared in a parliamentary investigation dominated by Isaac's fellow Liberals, it was eventually shown that he had purchased shares in the American Marconi Company that had been made available through Isaacs's brother at a favourable price. As one Labor MP put it, there had been "scandalous gambling in Marconi shares." Nevertheless, his career rolled on as he was appointed as Lord Chief Justice of England in October 1913 and was raised to the peerage as Baron Reading of Erleigh. War came the following year and there was lots to keep him busy as public attention was drawn away from last year's scandal.

Second from the Right, Chief Justice Isaacs Joins
Lloyd George on a Visit to the Front

By August 1914, Lord Reading, Rufus Isaacs, the Lord Chief of Justice of England was a Reading resident, living at Foxhill House in Whiteknights. Following the outbreak of the war, he became increasingly involved in government finances by helping Lloyd George, then Chancellor of Exchequer, during the financial crisis that was brought about by the outbreak of the war.  In 1915 he went to the United States as president of the Anglo-French mission and secured a loan of $500 million. As Lord Chief Justice (1913–21), Isaacs presided over the trial for treason of the Irish patriot Sir Roger Casement (1916) and sentenced him to death.

He was to return to the U.S. in August 1917, this time as a special envoy with the object of persuading America to join the Allies. In the following spring he went for a third time and was central to convincing the American government to to integrate America's war effort (recall, the U.S. was an "Associated Power" not an "Ally" per se) more closely with that of the Allies, to prioritize the deployment of military supplies and shipping, and to grant regular credits for the duration of the war. Isaacs is credited with securing financing for the Allies to win the war.

Wearing the Ceremonial Robes of Viceroy of India

After the Armistice, Issacs became Viceroy of India, and, despite pursuing a conciliatory policy with forces for Independence there, he goes down in history as the man who imprisoned Mahatma Gandhi in 1922.  He did, however, reach the conclusion that self-rule for India was inevitable and made his views known at the highest circles.

On his return to England in April 1926, Isaac was granted the new title, the Marquess of Reading. He was the first commoner to rise to the rank of marquess since the Duke of Wellington. He refused to retire and held many diplomatic, business, and governmental posts, culminating with his appointment as Foreign Secretary. Rufus Isaacs died of heart disease on 30 December 1935. Despite his intense, relentless ambition, business dealings, and his involvement at the center of the Marconi affair, he remained popular throughout his career and, apparently, made few enemies.

Sources:  The Reading Museum; Spartacus Educational; Wikipedia; Imperial War Museum; TwelveYearHistory.com

War Inside a Little Village Church

Village Church, Marbotte France
St. Mihiel Sector

The village of Marbotte was situated just behind the southern boundary of the St. Mihiel Salient for almost four years. The French Corps command in the area converted the community's small church into a field hospital and, eventually a morgue. Nearby is a cemetery with 2,464 burials of Poilus who passed through the church. The cemetery contains a monument in honor of the 30,000 men who died in the surrounding area.

They were laid out in rows in the middle of the church, on the pavement between the pews. There are eight of them, nine, ten, eleven.  I shall not pass them by.  Their feet frighten me.  They are dead from head to foot.   

Paul Cazin "L'Humaniste a la guerre."

Deceased in the Church During the War

After the war, the church became a focal point of remembrance and funds were collected to replace the stained glass windows of the church with memorial panels honoring the events of 1914–1918. The windows and the great variety of unit and personal memorials make the church one of the most moving locations on the Western Front to visit. Left to right on top these examples depict: the episode of the "Trench of Thirst" in the nearby Bois d'Ailly where a French unit cut off without water was forced to surrender, and the "Arise-Ye Dead!" legend which occurred in the nearby Bois Brulé, when Adjutant Jacques Pericard stirred his wounded men to a stalwart defense against a German assault. Below is the window honoring the service of the church as a morgue. 

Marbotte Church Today

Remembering a Veteran: John Boyd Orr, MC, DSO, and Nobel Prize

 

John Boyd Orr in Wartime Uniform

Add renowned Scottish nutritionist Lord Boyd Orr (1880–1971) to the list of Nobel Laureates (Peace, 1949), who served in the Great War.  At the start of the war John Boyd Orr was head of research institute in Aberdeen being set up to look at animal nutrition. Two World Wars later, his peace prize would be awarded  for research into nutrition and his work as the first Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). 

He was given leave to join the British Army where his first commission was in a civilian section of the R.A.M.C. dealing with sanitation in training camps. Boyd Orr was able to push through schemes for improvement in hygiene. After 18 months he was posted as Medical Officer to an infantry unit, the 1st Sherwood Foresters. He spent much of his time in shell holes, patching up the many wounded. He was awarded a Military Cross after the Battle of the Somme, and the Distinguished Service Order after Passchendaele. He also made arrangements for the battalion's diet to be supplemented by vegetables collected from local deserted gardens and fields. As a result, unlike other units, he did not need to send any of the men in his medical charge to hospital. He also prevented his men getting trench foot by personally ensuring they were fitted with boots a size larger than usual.

To keep in touch with medical and nutritional advances, he asked to be transferred to the navy, being posted to HMS Furious. On board ship his medical duties were light, enabling him to do a great deal of reading. He was later recalled to work studying food requirements of the army.  During the Second World War, he was a member of Churchill's Scientific Committee on Food Policy and helped to formulate the nations food rationing program.

A Representative Quote from Boyd's Later Period

In the years following the Second World War, Boyd Orr was associated with virtually every organization that has agitated for world government, in many instances devoting his considerable administrative and propagandist skills to the cause. He died in 1971 at age 90.

Léopold Jules Maréchal's Book of Hours of the Great War, Part III: Aftermath

Old Comrades Remembered in Le Journal des Tranchées
(Note Fine Calligraphy & How Text & Images Are Presented)

By John Anzalone

By 1916, his superior officers had become aware that Maréchal was a capable draftsman thanks to the theater and concert programs the troops put on and for which he had executed cover illustrations (none have turned up, to date). Maréchal’s talent was well known and appreciated among his mates and that reputation made its way up the chain of command to general staff officers seeking draftsmen for artillery units. So it was that in February of 1916, Maréchal received a providential transfer. He was reassigned behind the lines to a cartography unit known as a Canevas de tir, specializing in relief maps that gunnery groups used for aiming and locating. 

His departure from the 86th took place barely a week before the unit was transferred to Verdun. In the preface he writes that only three of every ten men would return from that inferno. At some point after his reassignment but almost certainly not until after the war, Maréchal decided to collect the notes he had been keeping and the drawings made in the trenches and turn them into an illuminated book of hours. The Journal’s preface underscores the weight of the coincidence of his transfer out of combat at virtually the same moment that his friends went off to one of the worst of the Great War’s killing fields.  Did Maréchal intend the Journal as a homage to those who didn’t return? It is tempting to discern in it a token of survivor’s guilt. In La Victoire endeuillée/Bereaved Victory, Bruno Cabanès’s study of protracted mourning in France during the two year period during which the field army was progressively demobilized, the author refers to a widespread incidence of “survivor guilt syndrome.” 

The mixed emotions of commemoration and mourning coincide with the book’s devotional aspect. A moving image of the New Year’s mass of 1915 in the Montigny quarries corresponds to the general tenor of the celebration of the liturgy of a medieval Book of Hours 

Maréchal's Altar at the Quarry

Among the documents uncovered during research for the publication of the facsimile edition of the Journal, we found a photograph of Maréchal standing in front of the altar piece and cross that he and his closest friend, a poilu named Moulin, had sculpted from the available stone, in preparation for the mass. 

Today the chapel, appropriately located in the gallery adjacent to the field hospital within the quarries, has been completely restored at Montigny thanks to the manuscript’s representation of the mass and this corresponding photograph. Upon the release of the facsimile edition of the manuscript in the fall of 2016, a memorial service was held in that very chapel, in front of an altar piece reconstructed from fragments of Maréchal and Moulin’s original sculpture.

There is no evidence in the manuscript to suggest that Maréchal was particularly or even casually religious. His emphasis is much more on aesthetic sensitivity, a love of pageantry and his sense of history, which suggests that he intended his book to fulfill a memorial as well as an historical function. But whether as pastiche of the medieval model or as matter of fact contemporary exposé, the key characteristic of the Great War Book of Hours Maréchal has left us is how relentlessly it exposes the impact of the passage of time, and with it the conflict’s daily quota of death and mourning. That may well explain why Maréchal’s figures are almost always seen from a distance except for the exceptional page of portraits of his mates shown above. 

A Stretcher Team

Bernard and Lucette Lambot tracked down the service records of all these men, as well as those of a half dozen others who are specifically named in the text. Of those depicted above, only one survived the war. More tellingly, there is an oddity here that demands explanation: the page is numbered 67 (of a total of 84), and is placed therefore toward the end of the narrative; but it is dated October 1914. The previous page is dated October 1915; the following page December 1915. No other page in the book violates chronological order. The times are out of joint. Clearly, the portrait page was intended to be placed at the start of the narrative, but Maréchal moved it to the book’s final pages, where he recounts the circumstances of his transfer to the rear and of theirs to Verdun. It is hard not to see in this an acknowledgement of the ironic accident that saved his life and quite probably moved him to encode his memoirs in a book of devotion.

Restraint, guilt and the burden of History inhabit Maréchal’s Book of Hours. Le Journal des Tranchées is a hybrid; it raises many questions about which we can only speculate. We cannot ask them of Maréchal, but it’s not at all clear he would answer them if we could, for if the book has managed to survive the accidents of history, it has also survived Maréchal’s reticence. Like previous accounts of the Great War that have come to light, the Journal adds to a rich testimonial literature by shedding light on a single individual’s experience of war. But chance rather than design has played a major role. 

It is my deep conviction that Léopold Maréchal never intended it to have wide distribution; available evidence suggests that he rarely if ever shared it with anyone. Its iconography encodes a pain that slips quietly in and out of the traumatic. Some pages have in fact the feel of an exorcism, like this half-mummified skull of a German soldier, the book’s most shocking watercolor. A danse macabre image that draws from medieval iconography and was a frequent trope of WWI illustration, its horror has lost none of its power in the more than a century since it was executed on a frigid December morning in 1915. It is however discussed in the text with the kind of clinical detachment that recalls the dissociative defense mechanisms common among soldiers exposed repeatedly to horrific violence.

One night, my squad is digging a new trench right on the front line. Tessier calls me over: “Corporal, come look at this dead Boche right near the top of the trench. You can see his skeleton...” I jump up on the embankment and see the guy in question. He has rotted 3⁄4 of the way through and his skull is shining in the moonlight. With a shovel I loosen the skull—it has separated from the torso. As the head rolls over I realize that flesh still covers the side where it had been resting on the ground. Pressed against the earth in a mold sculpted by the rains, it had mummified in the clay when the frosts came on.  Crows and rats had picked clean everything on the side exposed to the air. I pick it up with my shovel and we clamber down into the trench to examine it out of danger. In the moonlight, the silhouette of this half-eaten head is striking. I carefully put it by, promising myself to return the next day to do a study of it. And I managed to succeed in my plan because the weather cooperated. I placed the handle of a shovel across the trench and positioned the Boche skull on the blade. It was so bloody cold that there was no stench, thankfully. But there wasn’t a drop of water to be had either, so I had to resort to the “call of nature” to provide “water” of my own to use my paints.”

Marechal’s intricate barbed wire borders, in their evocation of the Crown of Thorns are inseparable from the commonplace war themes of Christian suffering and redemption. But they also serve to hem in both text and image in a tightly controlled space that offers safety as well as remembrance, thus ensuring that once Maréchal had given voice to his memories, he could, as in one of the manuscript’s final images, walk away from the war. His experiences could no longer escape the constraints in which he had both literally and figuratively bound them; he could at last put the war behind him.

A Centennial Remembrance

Today: The Quarries Where Maréchal Once Served

A two-volume facsimile was published in an edition of 500 copies in September 2016. Volume One contains the exact reproduction of the manuscript. Volume Two contains the full text in French with accompanying English translation by John Anzalone, Maya Mortman, and Anna Tracht,  with historical and cultural annotations by John Anzalone. Additional appendices on the biography of Maréchal and the topography referenced in the Journal are the work of Bernard and Lucette Lambot. The set was issued in celebration of the opening of the Machemont quarries for the Great War centennial observations and recognized by the European Union as possessing historical importance.

3 April 25 NEWS!  The entire manuscript of Journal Des Tranchées  can now be viewed online HERE (in 4 sections) thanks to JSTOR.org.

About Our Contributor

John Anzalone is Professor of French and Media/Film Studies, Emeritus at the Department of World Languages and Literatures, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs NY.

Contact John at: janzalon@skidmore.edu

Eyewitness: General George C. Marshall Looks Back on His AEF Experience

 

From VMI Cadet to Key Staff Officer of the AEF

In 1957, 39 years after the 1918 battles in France, George Marshall was interviewed by his official biographer Forrest Pogue. In the past, I've drawn on the recordings of these revealing  interviews to gain insights on events like the Meuse-Argonne Offensive or personalities such as General Pershing or Premier Clemenceau, with which Marshall had direct experience.  In this article, the focus is on Marshall, himself. I've combed the manuscripts of the interviews for places where the general—an austere, highly reticent individual—revealed interesting aspects of his personality and unique experiences in the Great War. These are excerpts from those interviews in which the questions and spontaneous comments from the general jumped around chronologically. I've tried to rearrange them at least semi-chronologically. MH

1.  Going Over There

I left San Francisco [in May 1917] . . . and went directly to Governors Island. The next thing of excitement that occurred was that General Pershing arrived, headed for Europe. I found out that he had asked for my services. He didn't do it personally, but his chief of staff did-his new chief of staff, General Harbord. But when General Pershing found that I was with General Bell, he had them drop the request and, therefore, I didn't go, though I didn't know of it at that time. . . General Pershing arrived in civilian clothes and straw hat. We put him on the ferryboat at Governors Island at a secluded dock and sent him over to the Baltic which he boarded for his trip to Europe [28 May 1917]. 

Then I received a telegram that my services were requested by General Sibert, the man who had built the Gatun Dam [at Panama Canal]. . .  He had asked for me to go and I was to report to him. He made my desk, my  services, the headquarters for troops just coming in to go to Europe in the first convoy, which was to be the First Division. [Subsequently] we got on board the Tenadores [4 June 1917], and I was in the same stateroom with [future WWII General] Lesley McNair.  

[During the voyage] something occurred there that I never forgot, because it was about as significant an indication of our complete state of unpreparedness as I have ever seen. I was standing up under the bridge and they had mounted a three-inch gun on a pedestal mount on the forward part of the deck, and these trim-looking naval files under a naval noncom were rigging up the gun. Having dealt with this multitude of recruits in this regiment as we had and their complete ignorance of their weapons or anything, I thought to myself, "Well, thank goodness, there is one thing that's organized, the Navy." Just then the captain called down to this yeoman, or whatever he was, in charge of this detail and said to him in a very strong voice, he said, "Have you your ammunition?" And this fellow in a rather offended voice replied, "No, sir, we haven't any ammunition." Well, I thought, "My God, even the naval part isn't organized here and we are starting off to Europe." It was altogether a terrible exhibition of our paucity of means with which to go to war.

2.  Called to the Front [1918]

[While Marshal was at a school in Langres] the great German offensive broke loose March 21st and was going on at the time I lectured. The first day, the 21st, of course we just got the news of the affair and a little bit of the extent of the affair. You will recall the British Fifth Army was literally destroyed in this first part of this offensive and a great gap was made in the line. . . The second day the thing was getting very much hotter, we could tell that. The German advances were far greater than had been customary in trench warfare. They generally made very, very short advances. . . 

[On 29 March] we were having breakfast when an order came in for me to return to the First Division immediately and a car would meet me north of Chaumont near Domremy. About a half an hour later, or less than that, because I got out as fast as I could, I left for the First Division.  I got up there and found it was just preparing to leave for the scene of the battle where the British Fifth Army had been driven out and very badly handled. . . We moved immediately, going south of Paris motoring. The troop trains were going south of Paris, too, and the motor trains and all were going south of Paris, because there was too much confusion north of Paris in supplying the French Army and everything to meet this great German offensive.

Then the next morning we started again up the trail. We were now west of Paris and we finally came into these assembly areas as they called them. I learned a great deal about troop movements during this procedure, because it was a tremendous affair and I thought perfectly, beautifully done by the French in their handling of the railroads. The trains would come through, it seemed to me, at ten minute intervals, and I would have to be at the train when it came in because I didn't know who was on it-maybe part of a French division or part of an American division. If it was an American division, I had to catch the fellow and give him his orders as to where he was to march to after he detrained. So we had a very hectic time there grabbing these trains as they came in.

3. Early Experience of Combat

We learned a great deal about fighting up at this time. It was a continuous affair, terrifically heavy artillery bombardment. The night was just hideous. I used to try to sleep upstairs in this chateau, but they drove me down when they began hitting the building with these 8-inch shells which sounded like the end of the world. So I found more composed rest down in this deep wine cellar that I have already referred to. Then we had a very difficult situation. We had the first mustard gas attack and that was a vicious thing. The brigade commander had directed the regimental commander at this town-he sent word up to him-to evacuate the town and go out into the fields and woods. Well, it was raining hard and shells were breaking all over the place. So the fellow preferred his dugout. Of course, the worst thing you can do with mustard gas is get in a wet dugout. That just permeates the whole business. They were ordering him out and he wasn't going. So I was sent up. The brigade commander didn't go. I was sent up from division headquarters with orders to relieve him, and that isn't very pleasant.

4.  The Performance of the AEF at St. Mihiel

It went off pretty well; it went off very well, as a matter of fact. I think we could have gone a little farther at the end if the corps commanders had followed out their orders. The order provided that when they got to the line rigidly specified, specifically outlined, and there was any opportunity to go forward, they should send forward battalions with some artillery and reconnaissance units and push ahead as fast as they could. They didn't do this. In one division this was proposed and that was done by Douglas MacArthur, who was chief of staff of the Forty-second Division. He wanted to push right on at that time. The trouble was none of the others had gathered themselves, and General Drum and the army commander thought we should leave well enough alone. Undoubtedly, if they had pushed on, they would have gone much closer to Metz at the first lunge. However, they already had authority to organize a battalion or regiment in the division and push ahead with that, but they didn't do that. Of course, it was their first big battle and there's always much confusion and there's always much uncertainty as to what the exact conditions were which is to be carefully considered when you are trying to judge whether you did this just right or not. You didn't have a Stonewall Jackson who had been experienced in many fights already.

Lt. Marshall, 1907
Instructor, School of the Line, Ft. Leavenworth

5. The Move from St. Mihiel to the Meuse-Argonne

[After St. Mihiel] the  complications now began. I had been concerned now with the full battle. Now suddenly I was called over to headquarters, which was across the street, and they outlined the Meuse-Argonne, That's the first time I'd ever heard of it, and that's what the other fellows on the staff had been working on-the plan for the deployment for the Meuse-Argonne and the initial plan for the battle. I was told to concentrate the troops and I was given the line-up they were to have in the battle. That was my first intimation of the Meuse-Argonne battIe.

Finally came the great concentration for the Meuse-Argonne. It went across the rear zone of the St. Mihiel battle and then cut up towards the Meuse-Argonne front. When I went to work on this troop movement, it was one of the most difficult ones I have ever heard of in military performance prior to the great rush across Europe in the last war. I found that I was familiar with the names of practically every village and every city, more so almost than the little villages near my home, because they were all on this Griepenkerl [a German tactical guide adopted by the U.S. Army] map and had all been involved in Griepenkerl problems and were right in the track of these great moves we were making towards the Meuse-Argonne front. It seemed rather a commentary on the fact that we were being criticized, even in Congress, for using German maps, and all when it developed afterwards they were most useful to us in our being familiarized with the very ground we were going to fight over.

6.  Problems in the Meuse-Argonne

Once we got into the battle, the great problem was to resume the advance. The division on the left, the division next to the Meuse-Argonne forest, got into trouble and the First Division had to be hurried out of support position and carried up to the front. They had to travel more or less off the road over these deep trenches and, with the machine gun carts and all, it was a very difficult thing to do. No Man's Land was some kilometers in width and it was a morass that didn't look like there was a space ten yards square that hadn't been struck by a great shell. It was a morass. There was no trace of the roads left at all except the Route National, and there was some trace there, but in the retirement from a German attack, the Italians had blown up the road so successfully that we had a terrible time getting around the crater.

So it was the crossing of No Man's Land and getting the artillery across that was so very difficult and so very important. One commander, who had previously lost his regiment for something a long time back and now had it again-he didn't have the light [artillery] regiment this time-he had a ISS-mm regiment and these heavy guns. And he hastened up on his own initiative, crossed No Man's Land, and the weight of these guns completely wiped out this very poorly ballasted trail that we had made across No Man's Land and set the affair back about a day and a half, which was a great tragedy at the time, as we were trying to get light artillery across and supporting troops across.

As a matter of truth, the men advanced very well at the start. Then they got into these dugouts and they got after souvenirs. They went into the dugout for a German in a sense and then they stayed for a souvenir and the whole advance lost its momentum, and the Germans very quickly readjusted themselves and put up a vicious defense from there on. As a matter of fact, if the troops could have been kept together and have gone straight ahead, they probably could have gone as far that first day as we made in the first month, because we fought a very desperate battle with the Germans after that halt or loss of momentum.

7.  The Final Push in the Meuse-Argonne

We finally came up against what you might call the northern line and there we got ready for the great attack which led up to Sedan. I've forgotten how many divisions took off in that, but we tried to get them rested a little bit. In order to do that, we had to hold the other divisions in line when they were just tired to death. But there was no other way to manage it. It was very necessary to go and see the division commanders and see the regimental commanders. In some of them, the regiments had lost all organization and were just groups of men, but they had to hold on and they fought on so that these partially rested divisions could go forward in the final attack on November 1st, I think it was, which led up finally to the heights above Sedan.

I would go up to the battle front and it was very hard to get up there on account of the traffic. After you got across No Man's Land, the only way you could do it was to get on a horse and go up there that way. I did that and I did that with General Drum, who was chief of staff of the [First] Army, and, of course, we had a great deal of our debating while we were riding. . . 

The great trouble here was keeping the various organizations along the front really aware of what was happening along other portions of the front, because each one thought he was the only one who was having this desperate situation, when, as a matter of fact, everyone was having it pretty much and we were now getting into some French troops over towards Verdun where we had both Americans and French. The Germans had hard luck on this front. They had had several Austrian divisions on that front. They were a little bit leery about them and, as you recall, the Austrians surrendered first. So they kept some Germans there to stiffen up the Austrian front which was to the east and northeast of Verdun. Nothing happened on that front at all, so they withdrew the German divisions that were stiffening up the Austrians and the next day we attacked on that front and the Austrians pretty largely folded up and let us make a considerable advance.

A Postwar Assignment as Pershing's Aide Kept
Marshall on the Road to High Command

8.  About His Superiors

General Pershing as a leader always dominated any gathering where he was. He was a tremendous driver, if necessary; a very kindly, likeable man on off-duty status, but very stern on a duty basis.

I wasn't on intimate terms at all with Marshal Foch, though I travelled with him quite a bit in this country and saw him quite often with General Pershing.  He was rather resentful if I said anything when I was with General Pershing. Nobody below the grade of a full general would say anything in front of Foch in the French army, and I was talking up there with a very much lower rank to General Pershing when he was in conversation with Marshal Foch.

I know when I received the Croix de Guerre in the plaza at Metz [30 April 1919]. . . the French general that  was tried afterwards and imprisoned? I was very fond of him, came to know him very, very well. (Petain?) Yeah, Petain.

I saw General Charles Summerall, who was really the iron man. He was the nearest approach to the [Stonewall] Jackson type that I saw in the war. He was a wonder to watch when the fighting was on as a leader. His influence on the men was tremendous.

I thought [Chief of Staff] Peyton March was a great administrator and a very arbitrary, tactless man. I think his greatest error was having around him a number of men that copied his type. He needed exactly the opposite type as his principal functionaries, it seemed to me.

I would say this in regard to all this being written about my being hostile to General MacArthur. In the first place, it is damn nonsense. . . I don't think I ever said an adverse word about General MacArthur in front of the staff, though he was very difficult-very, very difficult at times-particularly when he was on a political procedure basis. I don't ever recall saying a word in front of the staff, and I do recall suppressing them. I wrote his citation for the Medal of Honor to see that he got it.

9. In the 1939–41 period, did you have the feeling that you were seeing 1915–1916 all over again?

In 1939-1941 I saw very much reflections of the things of '15-'16 all  over again. In fact, in some ways, very little occurred that didn't seem to me was a repetition, but what disturbed me most of all was to find the army, the War Department, and the country in the same shape again. In the same shape again! I was getting rather hardened to coming in when everything had gone to pot and there was nothing you could get your hands on, and darned if I didn't find the same thing when I came into the Korean War. There wasn't anything. We had a terrible time getting ourselves together.

10.  Lessons for Future Wars?

. . . Why, it was a continuous series of lessons. Most of them, what to do and quite a number what not to do. I learnt the technique of high command, the technique of logistics, the technique of a great many of those things, and I saw troops under various conditions. I saw their regard for them in many ways that were an education to me, and I saw so many of the things they did wouldn't have worked with American troops at all. That was all very, very helpful and I would find myself leaning on that knowledge in dealing with things in World War II. 

The big thing I learnt in World War II was the urgent necessity of frequent visits. Well, as I used a plane all the time and about every other week, I would go on the road before we got into the general war. I would visit most of the places in the United States with fair frequency. I know when I went out to Fort Sill the first time, I found out it was the first time the chief of staff had ever been there in the history of the place. I was there time after time, but I could move quickly and I could act quickly. I was abreast of what was going on all over the place. I could sense their reactions and I could see how they felt urgently about this or that, which we at headquarters did not really feel so much, but I would come to an understanding in those ways and I could correct things almost instantly, particularly after Congress-without my request-placed first $25 million and then $100 million at my disposal with no accounting required.

Source:  Transcripts of the entire collection of 10 tapes covering Marshall's entire career can be found starting HERE.