What Are the Most Significant Finds of World War One Archeologists?

Last week, the wife and I were watching the excellent 4-part docudrama The Mummy of Tutankhamun that tells the story of archaeologist Howard Carter's long search for the Boy King's tomb. It was particularly engrossing for me since I had visited the Valley of the Kings site in 1989 and subsequently got to view much of the collection at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.  Given my interest in the First World War,  I naturally started asking myself:  "What about WWI + Archeology = ?"   I have a little feel for this since I've taken my WWI  battlefield tour groups to a few such sites over the years, but I've decided to do a little fresh "digging" myself.  Here's what I came up with. Of course, people have been exploring and excavating the war's battlefields probably before the Armistice came. What I've focused on here are fairly recent efforts.

Western Front

1.  The Carspach "Pompeii" Kilianstollen (Kilian tunnel)  (Alsace, France)

The Underground Shelter

The Discovery: In 2012, archaeologists excavating ahead of a road project near Carspach uncovered a collapsed 1918 German underground shelter. 

Significance: Often called the "Pompeii of the Western Front," the anaerobic, oxygen-deprived conditions preserved the remains of 21 German soldiers exactly where they sat when an Allied shell collapsed their tunnel. Personal items, boots, leather gear, and newspapers were left intact alongside the soldiers. The soldiers were reburied at the Illfurth German War Cemetery in Alsace.

2.  The Fromelles Mass Graves (Nord Department, France)

Sites of Original Burial and New Cemetery

The Discovery: Excavations led by archaeological teams at Pheasant Wood in Fromelles exhumed eight mass pits containing the remains of 250 Australian and British soldiers. 

Significance: Supported by over 5,000 recovered artifacts, modern forensic archaeology and DNA profiling successfully identified hundreds of previously "missing" soldiers, closing generations of uncertainty for families. The soldiers were reburied nearby at the new Pheasant Wood Commonwealth War Grave Cemetery in 2014.  A museum is also included at the new site. Roads Article

3.   Yorkshire Trench Systems (Boezinge, Flanders)

What the "Diggers" Found

The Discovery: In 1992, Amateur researchers, known as the "Diggers" working on an industrial site near Ypres Canal site in Boezinge uncovered remarkably preserved wooden duckboards and wall supports buried deep beneath agricultural fields.

Significance: The woodwork and structural integrity of this Flanders trench system survived better than almost any other site on the Western Front, revealing improvised engineering details overlooked by standard military records. Remains of 200 soldiers were discovered during the digs.  The Yorkshire Trench can be visited today, as it is fully restored and open to the public

4.  Dig Hill 80 Project (Wytschaete "Whitesheet", Flanders)

A Century Later, the German Strong Point Had Been Long Forgotten

The Discovery: In 2018 in anticipation of a new housing project,  a team
 of archaeologists discovered a well-preserved German strongpoint at a ridge top near the village.

Significance: The archaeologists had stumbled upon was unique; a piece of the formidable trench fortress that had remained virtually untouched since that the end of the war. Farm buildings had been incorporated into the defensive trench system to create an almost impregnable redoubt that was taken only in June 1917, in the Battle of Messines.

5. The Glory  Hole Tunneling Site (La Boisselle, Somme)

A British tunnel at 80 feet depth  (Iain McHenry/La Boisselle Study Group)

Discovery: In 2011 a three-year investigation was conducted  in an area of intense mining and counter-mining operations near the enormous Lochnagar mine crater.

Significance: Researchers mapped and explored approximately 7 kilometers of WWI tunnels and trenches buried between 12 and 30 meters deep. Several remains of fallen soldiers were discovered and turned over to their nation's authorities for identification and reburial.

Dardanelles

6.  The Gallipoli Anzac Sector Battlefield Survey (Turkey)

A New Zealand Representative Marks a Battlefield Trench

The Discovery: A five-year (2009–2014) joint Turkey, Australia and New Zealand Historical and Archaeological Survey of the Anzac Battlefield mapped thousands of meters of intact trenches, collapsed tunnels, and dugouts that were previously unrecorded or known only through flawed wartime maps. Hundreds of artifacts have been discovered, so far.

Significance: It proved that large-scale non-destructive battlefield surveys can map close-quarters combat environments (where trenches were often only 10 to 20 yards apart) without disturbing sensitive war graves. An interesting discovery was that Ottoman frontline kitchens were much closer to the trenches than Allied kitchens, meaning Turkish soldiers often had access to fresh hot meals.

Italian Front

Dead Italian Soldier Exposed by Melting Snow

7. Melting Alpine Ice Discoveries (Dolomite Alps)

The Discovery: Receding glaciers and melting ice in the Italian Alps have exposed high-altitude Austro-Hungarian and Italian frontline positions.

Significance: Archaeologists have found exceptionally preserved wooden barracks, clothing, snow goggles, personal letters, and even perishable organic waste like food rations and latrine contents, offering a direct window into brutal high-altitude mountain warfare. Roads Article.

Eastern Front

8. Veretyičiv Hill (Carpathian Mountains Slovakia)

2017 Survey Defining the 1915 Battlefield

Discoveries:  Researchers surveyed high-altitude combat zones like Veretyčiv Hill and Kobyla Hill. Metal detection and geophysical surveys here successfully mapped hidden Austro-Hungarian and Russian rearguard firing lines, foxholes, and shell impacts in heavily forested terrain.

Significance: Because of the scale of WWII fighting, WWI-oriented archeology is still quite rare.

A Monumental Tribute to Tommy—The Hauntings—Is Visiting Albert

 

A new "Tommy" statue recently arrived in Albert, France. It is a magnificent, 6.5-meter-tall (23-foot) scrap-metal sculpture officially named The Hauntings. It was installed in June 2026, on the Place d'Armes, directly in front of the famous Basilique Notre-Dame de Brebières.

Created as part of the town's commemoration of the 110th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme by artist Martin Galbavy and blacksmith Chris Hannam of Dorset Forge & Fabrication, the statue is meticulously crafted from hundreds of pieces of scrap metal. The installation is temporary for Albert. In 2027, it will be transferred to Arras for the commemoration of the 1917 battle fought in that sector.

My Favorite French War Poem

Relief

By Charles Vildrac (Trans. Christopher Middleton)

Poilu
Charles Huard

In our place

Fresh Troops have come

Sent up the line

As bait for death

Met face to face.

We needed all night to make our escape

All night and its darkness

Sweating, frozen, to cross

The martyr forest and its swamp 

That shrapnel scourged.

All night in which to crouch,

Then to run line the wind,

Each man picking his moment,

Trusting to nerve and instinct

And his star.

But beyond the last entanglement,

Out of it all, on the firm road,

Met together, with no delays,

In the glow of the first pipes lit,

Then, mates, O lucky winners, 

Then what stumbling voluble joy?

That was the joy of shipwrecked men

With hand and knees upon the shore,

Who laugh with an agonized happiness

As they recover their treasure again;

All the treasure of the vast world,

And of memory unplumbed,

And of the thirst that can be quenched,

And even the pain you feel

In the shoulders since all danger passed.

And the future! Ah, the future!

Now is smiling, in the dawn:

A future of two long weeks ahead,

In a barn at Neuvilly.

All the apple trees in blossom!

I'll put blossoms into my letters.

I'll go and read in the middle of a field.

I'll go and have a wash in the river.

The man who is marching in front of me

Whistles a song that his neighbour sings

A song that is far away from the war:

I hum it too, and savour it.

Yet: to think of those killed yesterday!

But the man who has tripped

Between death's legs and then

Recovers himself and breathe again,

Can only laugh or only weep:

He has not the heart to mourn.

Today's first light makes all too drunk

The man who finds himself alive;

He is weak and is amazed 

To be dawdling so along the the road.

 

And if he dreams it is of the bliss

Of taking off his boots to sleep

In a barn at Neuvilly.

 

________________________ 

Charles Vildrac (1882–1971), born Charles Messager, was a prominent French poet, playwright, and essayist. Before World War I, he was celebrated for his humanistic philosophy and his role in co-founding the Abbaye de Créteil, an utopian community of artists and writers. Despite his pacifist convictions, Vildrac reported when he was mobilized in August 1914. He was sent to the front lines as an infantryman and stretcher-bearer and witnessed the horrors of front line combat, while losing close family members, including his cousin.

U.S. Naval Aviation vs. the U-boats

Navy Blimps Escorting a Convoy

Editor's Introduction:

The U.S. Navy aviation entered World War I as a tiny force of just 54 obsolete aircraft and 48 pilots, but expanded rapidly into a major anti-submarine patrol network operating 44 stations globally by the 1918 Armistice. Naval aviators flew seaplanes, dirigibles, and kite balloons on more than 22,000 patrols across 3 million nautical miles, targeting German U-boats threatening Allied supply shipping. By the Armistice, the U.S. Navy was operating  over 2,100 aircraft, 15 airships, and 215 kite balloons.

_________________________________________

The primary role of naval aviation in WWI was anti-submarine warfare. The first recorded attack on an enemy submarine by a U.S. naval aviator was made by Ens. John F. McNamara on 25 March 1918, while serving at the Royal Navy Air Station, Portland, England. Although his attack was successful enough to warrant special commendations from the Secretary of the Navy and Adm. Sims, the later evaluation was “possibly damaged.” This was typical of the 30 recorded attacks on enemy U-boats during the war. On the score sheet U.S. naval aircraft did not receive credit for a single sinking. There was, however, considerable interference with U-boat operations, especially in the last year of the Great War.

Curtiss N-9 Seaplane (Primarily Used for Training)

The first attack from a U.S. Naval Air Station was from Ile Tudy, France, which, perhaps because of its location, had more anti-submarine action than any of our overseas stations. Two coastal convoys passed through its sector daily, one bound north, the other south. Around Penmarch Point, the water was deep near shore, free of reefs and sandbars and ideally suited to submarine operations. A majority of the “allos” received at Ile Tudy were from this area. The operating routine was described by the station historian. “The sector was marked off into 25-mile squares, subdivided into squares of five miles. By this means planes were able to report position every half hour and be quickly and accurately located. Communication was maintained with shore bases by radio and pigeons, and with vessels by message buoys, phosphorous buoys, Very pistols and the blinker system. . . .

“A section of two planes escorted each convoy. As the sector was too long to be covered entirely by two planes, it was necessary to send out another section to relieve the first, when the convoy was approximately halfway through the area. This necessitated using at least eight planes per day for convoy work alone. In addition, there was always a section known as the ‘Alert’ ready to take the air from daybreak to dark in response to any ‘allos’ received. When the convoy was picked up, the planes would first circle over it. Then while one plane would remain around the convoy the other would fly as far as 10 to 15 miles ahead, zigzagging broadly on both sides. This plane would return, again circle the convoy, repeating the same maneuver again and again. Before leaving a convoy, the planes circled a last time in its neighborhood. In this way the convoy was well protected from surprise.”

U.S. Battleships Departing the Firth of Forth with
Observation Kite Balloons Aloft

On 23 April 1918, a convoy escort of two Donnet-Denhaut seaplanes, piloted by Ens. K. R. Smith and R. H. Harrell, QM1c, saw the first action. They joined the southbound convoy of about 20 ships, approximately six miles north of Penmarch Point. As the weather was very foggy, they first flew to the rear of the convoy to look for stragglers, then flew a wide circle toward the main body. Shortly after, they sighted a suspicious wake, apparently being made by a submarine moving at good speed, and went in to attack. Smith dropped two bombs, the first landing on the fore part of the wake and the second ten feet ahead. The explosions created a heavy disturbance in the water followed by many air bubbles and appeared so successful that Harrell did not drop his bombs. Instead, he marked the spot with a phosphorous buoy and circled. Smith then flew to a destroyer, USS Stewart, and dropped a message buoy. Stewart arrived in the target area, followed soon after by the French gunboat Ardente, and dropped three depth charges. The pilots circling overhead saw small pieces of wreckage, particles of sea growth and large quantities of oil coming to the surface, and shortly after returned to their base. The oil was still visible from the air as late as the sixth of May. Ens. Smith and his observer, Chief O. E. Williams, were officially credited by the French naval authorities with a submarine, were cited in the Order of the Day and awarded Croix de Guerre with Palm.

The North Sea coast of England, where NAS KILLINGHOLME was located, was also a favorite sub-hunting ground. In the month before the station was under U.S. command, Ens. J.J. Schieffelin attacked a submarine which, possibly because of damage, surfaced after he left the scene and was sunk by gunfire from British destroyers. Ten days later he was again in action. While he was en route to the Whitby area, extremely rough air over Flamborough Head bounced his plane so hard that one of the suspending bomb hooks was bent and he was forced to jettison half his bomb load. Off Whitby, he sighted a surfaced submarine and attacked. His one bomb exploded under the stern of the submarine, kicking it clear of the water and exposing its rotating screw to view. The sub then disappeared under water at a steep angle. Later that day, after he had directed surface craft to the position, a submarine surfaced in the general area only to be rammed and sunk by the destroyer HMS Garry. There was initial confusion over whether this submarine was the one attacked by Schieffelin, but later information confirmed that his submarine returned to base in damaged condition. The evaluation of both attacks was “probably seriously damaged.”

Curtiss HS-2L: The Major Patrol Flying Boat for Hunting German U-boats

NAS LOUGH FOYLE in northern Ireland, which guarded the north entrance to the Irish Sea, made its first attack 19 October 1918. Ensign George S. Montgomery, in seaplane LF-4, was escorting a 32-ship convoy when he sighted and successfully bombed a submarine apparently moving into position for an attack. Both bombs functioned, one striking 30 feet to the right of the periscope and the other ten feet forward. The assessment was “probably damaged” and the station history reported that “undoubtedly at least one ship in the convoy was saved by the timely bombing.”

Submarines did not always react passively to these attacks. On at least one occasion against a seaplane and once against an airship, the U-boats fought back. On 13 August 1918, four seaplanes, one piloted by Ens. J. F. Carson, left NAS DUNKIRK on patrol. A short distance off the coast, a large submarine was sighted proceeding on the surface at high speed. Since it carried no identification marks, Carson fired a challenging signal. At that point, the submarine apparently spotted the planes and opened fire with its four-inch gun. Five shots were fired, three passing close to Carson’s plane, and several pieces of shrapnel pierced his fuselage and wings. Carson immediately returned fire with his machine guns and moved into bombing position. The submarine cleared the deck and dived. As she went down, Carson dropped two bombs, one exploding in the swirl and the second slightly forward of it. The submarine reappeared, her bow projecting from the water at a sharp angle. Within four minutes she again submerged, sliding stern first under water. Carson was credited with a sinking by the French government and awarded the Croix de Guerre.

The airship involved was the AT-13 out of NAS PAIMBOEUF. On 1 October 1918, after escorting one convoy through the area, the airship turned to meet another. On the way, she fired two shots on a rock for target practice. On the second shot the firing spring broke, putting her only gun out of action and reducing her offensive capability to bombs. At about two-thirty, the convoy was picked up and the airship made the usual circle overhead. Then, as two storms were observed approaching from the north and northeast, the airship took a heading to pass between them. Shortly after, a suspicious object sighted to the north was investigated. While still a mile away, it was made out to be a submarine and when it opened fire there was no doubt that it was enemy. Thirteen shells burst near the airship but none struck her. The airship took up the chase to get into bombing position but the head wind was so strong that the submarine could not be overtaken. Signals by radio and Aldis lamp informed the convoy of the situation and the chase continued until the submarine disappeared in the darkness.

Sailors Grappling with a B-Class Blimp

Action against the U-boat was not confined to overseas waters. On a Sunday morning, 21 July 1918, the U-156 surfaced off Nauset Beach, Cape Cod, and began what has since been called the Battle of Chatham. It was tersely reported in the weekly Aviation Bulletin as: “Sunday morning off Chatham, German submarine of the latest type appeared. She had two 6-inch guns with which she shelled and sank some barges. Seaplanes were sent out and submarine submerged.” There was more to it. Details were reported by dispatch and telephone. The gist of it was that an enemy submarine was reported at 10:10, three miles off Coast Guard Station 50. Four minutes later, an HS-2, piloted by Ens. Eric Lingard, left the station, flew over the submarine at 400 feet and dropped a bomb which failed to explode. At 11:15, the C.O. of the station, Lt. Philip Eaton, USCG, took off in an R-9, reached the scene a few minutes later and bombed from 500 feet. The bomb hit about 100 feet off the starboard quarter. It too failed to explode. After firing four shots at the seaplanes, the sub submerged and was lost in thick smoke.

These are but a few of the 30 attacks reported by Lt. Cdr. Edwards. The evaluation of results was difficult, even as it was in a later war. The appearance of oil and sea growth on the surface after an attack was a common feature of reports in both wars. Then, as later, early assessments leaned toward the optimistic; postwar records gave the hard, cold facts. But more important than confirmed destruction was the extent to which naval aviators met the challenge of their first test in combat and presented a real threat to submarine commanders and kept them from their appointed tasks.

Source: Naval Aviation in World War I, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, 1969

Hell at Anzac: The Turkish Attack of 19 May 1915

Turkish Troops at Gallipoli Early in the Campaign

After the initial Gallipoli landings of 25 April, both attackers and defenders failed to improve their Day-1 positions substantially.  Turkish Minister of War Enver Pasha visited the active sectors and ordered additional troops to the peninsula with specific instructions for a renewed assault against the Anzac sector. 

On 19 May 1915, the German commander of the Ottoman troops at Gallipoli, Field Marshal Liman von Sanders, sent the first wave of his of 42,000 Turkish troops to attack the 12,500 Anzacs then at Anzac Cove. The intention was to drive all Anzac forces on to the beach and kill them there with artillery fire. In places the combatants were only meters apart, but it was one assault for which the Anzacs and their commanders were prepared. British pilots had noticed a build up in the Turkish line, confirming observations by those on the ground, including correspondent Charles Bean, that Turkish firing patterns had changed and that heavier artillery was being used.  Aware that an attack was coming, some of the Anzacs bartered with their mates for positions on the firing line.

Commander of the Ottoman Forces, Liman von Sanders

In the resulting six-hour battle, the Turks were to incur around 10,000 casualties including 3,000 dead as repeated lines of Turkish troops were sent out of their trenches, to be gunned down almost immediately by the Anzac forces. The Anzacs suffered 628 casualties with 160 dead, among them John Simpson Kirkpatrick, who had achieved legendary status among the troops for removing  wounded men from the battlefield on his donkey.

Australian Machine Gun Position

The most successful Ottoman commander of both the Gallipoli Campaign and the later battles of the war, Mustafa Kemal, commanded the 19th Infantry Division in the attack and had been an initial enthusiastic backer of the assault.  In his postwar memoir Arıburnu Muharebeleri Raporu (Arıburnu Battles Report), however, he expressed regrets and was very critical of the preparations and performance of the Turkish forces. He particularly noted:

• Inadequate battlefield reconnaissance and pre-battle positioning in the dark with  incoming reinforcement troops who were completely unfamiliar with the rugged, complex terrain.

• The combination of numerous Anzac machine-gun nests and heavy naval artillery support devastated  the dense Turkish infantry lines.

• Failure to advance by the 5th Turkish Division which exposed his men to intense enfilading fire.

Kemal later wrote: "We buried a university [of Turkey's educated youth] in Gallipoli."

The Day of the Truce: Aussies in Foreground, Turks in Distance

On 20 May, several Australians sought to rescue Turkish wounded from the narrow strip of ground between the opposing forces, an area known as No Man's Land, which was becoming littered with dead bodies. An informal truce was called while both sides collected their dead and wounded. On 24 May, an eight-hour formal break in fighting was agreed for both sides to again collect their dead and wounded. The cease-fire was honored by both sides.  [Article]

Attrition: [The Unavoidable Strategy for] Fighting the First World War

By William Philpott

Little, Brown, 2014

Reviewer, Michael Neiberg

Originally presented in the British Journal for Military History, February 2016

Winning the total war of 1914 to 1918 required the total mobilization of societies. While scholars of the war often treat that statement as axiomatic, William Philpott has given us the best-detailed analysis of that process to date. He identifies attrition as involving five factors: the land battlefield; the maritime battlespace; the home front; the diplomatic front; and the alliance front. In order to win the war, the Allies had to defeat the Central Powers on all five. More importantly, they had to do so over time, husbanding resources, reorienting their societies, and suffering casualties at levels equal to or less than those of their enemies.

Attrition has ever since carried a negative connotation, and well it should. As a strategy it counts on winning a war by killing men at “acceptable” ratios rather than seeking territory or some other carefully defined objective that could produce victory. It is anything but Clausewitzian, as it does not set political goals; killing precedes war aims rather than following logically from them. Attrition could become, as one wag quipped, a way of winning the war by having the last two soldiers of your army bayonet the last two soldiers of the enemy’s army, then toast their success with prune juice. On the more intellectual level, attrition proved that modern warfare had come a long way from the period of the German Wars of Unification. Casualties had become not an unpleasant adjunct of military campaigns, but their  goal. Instead of close, carefully managed battles like Königgratz/Sadowa, World War I featured months long campaigns designed to (as the euphemism went) wear out the enemy’s reserves.

Philpott argues that the generals (if not always the politicians) of the World War I era understood this transformation of war quite well. They recognized in 1914 that winning would require years of bloody, murderous attrition on a number of levels. The gruesomeness of a strategy intended to kill millions failed to appeal to the politicians, for obvious reasons. They often reacted by looking for quick fixes like (in the Allied case) Gallipoli and the Nivelle Offensive or (in the German case)  unrestricted submarine warfare. These fixes, Philpott argues, seemed to promise an alternative to mass murder, but never yielded anything close to victory, as indeed the attritional generals knew all along.

Most scholars have identified Lord Kitchener as the prophet of this type of warfare, building up Great Britain’s New Armies in anticipation of using them in 1916 or 1917. Philpott argues that he was far from alone. Both French General Joseph Joffre and (perhaps more controversially) British Field Marshal Douglas Haig saw attrition as the way to victory, notwithstanding the latter’s hope for breakthroughs on the Somme and at Passchendaele. Philpott thus argues (correctly) that Erich von Falkenhayn’s murderous plan for the battle of Verdun was not the novel approach to war that readers of Alistair Horne’s The Price of Glory have taken it to be. Rather, it was simply another in a long, gruesome line of attritional battles designed to kill men in unprecedented numbers.

Order HERE

That attrition became the route to victory should not blind us to its enormous human and social costs. The soldiers of the war understood full well how they were being used, leading to events like the mutiny on the Chemin des Dames, the Revolution in Russia, and the disillusion of men like Rudolph Binding, whom Philpott  quotes extensively. Attrition also meant that the warring powers had to adapt their  domestic and imperial systems to find the resources they needed in enormous numbers. It further meant that they had to tolerate the moralizing of Woodrow Wilson, the leader of the one country whose resources could tip the balance. Attrition: Fighting the First World War thus stands out as a major contribution, even in this period of renewed scholarly attention to the war. 

MICHAEL NEIBERG, US Army War College

France's Long Road to War: 1870 to 1914

Soon to Become Emperor Napoleon III in the 1850s

Excerpted from France and the Great War, 1914–1918 

By Leonard V. Smith, Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker

In The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856), Alexis de Tocqueville described the French as a people “talented enough at anything, but who excel only at war. They adore chance, force, success, flash and noise, more than true glory. More capable of heroism than virtue, of genius more than good sense, they are suited more to conceiving immense plans than to completing great enterprises.” Up to a point, Tocqueville knew his compatriots well. 

Over the course of the 19th century, France had gone to war many times and, in general, had fared poorly at it. The French had mainly themselves to blame. The century began in a blaze of Napoleonic glory, followed by complete national defeat in 1815. Not that this prevented the French from erecting to Napoleon their greatest military monument, the Arc du Triomphe, an unusual tribute to a defeated commander. Some victories came at mid-century, against the Russians in the Crimean War of 1853–56, and against the Habsburg Monarchy in Italy in 1859. 

Yet these were classic 19-century “limited” wars, in which France ventured and gained relatively little. But the “immense plan” of Emperor Napoleon III (allegedly the illegitimate nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) to install his protégé, Archduke Maximilian (the brother of Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph), as emperor of Mexico in 1861 ended in utter failure. France had nothing to show for it but the famous 1867 painting by Edouard Manet of Maximilian’s execution by Mexican patriots.

Le Siège de Paris, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier

Worst of all, France provoked a war with Prussia in 1870, over what seemed the relatively minor matter of the succession to the Spanish throne. In fact, Napoleon III wanted to forestall the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership. He had reason for concern, but blundered without allies into a war that invoked the very thing he sought to prevent. The overconfident French army met defeat within two months, and on 18 January 1871, the victors proclaimed the creation of the German Empire. 

To maximize the humiliation of their foe, the Prussians chose to do so in France, in one of the most splendid spaces created by the old monarchy–the Hall of Mirrors at the palace at Versailles. According to the armistice with the new republican government of France signed a few days later, France had to pay a large indemnity and surrender Alsace-Moselle and most of Lorraine, two wealthy provinces now absorbed into the Reich. France could fume and swear one day to get its revenge, but not much else. Worse, a new Great Power had been created at its doorstep, far more dangerous to France than Prussia had ever been. The Third French Republic had to prepare for a new war with Germany virtually from the day of its inception. France would never again feel safe from Germany until the Allies divided Hitler’s Third Reich after World War II.

Proclamation of Prussian King Wilhelm I as German Emperor at Versailles,
Anton von Werner

Yet Tocqueville, who died in 1856, did not live long enough to see the whole picture. Perhaps he was too taken with his idealized version of the young republic in the United States to see his own country clearly anyway. The French economy boomed through most of the nineteenth century, and French literary and artistic life remained the envy of the West. By the end of a century of war, revolution, and social turmoil, the French, in part through a massive investment in institutions such as the education system and the army, had forged one of the most cohesive national communities in the world. France had also become the only republic among the Great Powers of Europe. The Third Republic proved more cautious about going to war than the regime of Napoleon III. The guardians of the republic made alliances, in order to contain a Germany much larger, wealthier, and militarily stronger than itself. 

Those among the French who sought Napoleon’s sort of military glory did so mainly through the vast French global empire. The French military, as we will see, had many problems, in doctrine, funding, and leadership. But the army and navy of France continued to be feared throughout Europe and even the world. Moreover, despite decades of civil–military turmoil, democracy took hold in the French military. Unique among Europeans mobilized in 1914, the French soldier served neither kaiser nor tsar nor king, only himself and his compatriots. Even before the outbreak of the war, he was a citizen-soldier.

France Mobilizes — 1914
The Departure of the Infantrymen (Detail), Albert Herter

But success in the great enterprise of national rehabilitation came at a price. The alliances made by the Republic, in the end, provoked rather than deterred Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary, and thus helped render the diplomatic situation in Europe more perilous. In the crisis of August 1914, France had little room for maneuver, because of diplomatic and military choices made decades earlier. But this did not obscure the fact that Germany and not France chose war in 1914, because of the inflexibility of prewar German military planning. France had war forced upon it more than any other European country except Belgium and perhaps Serbia. German aggression in August 1914 responded to a long-term threat posed by the alliances made by France. But it was aggression all the same.