Poilu -- A Grisly WWI Memoir from the Trenches

French soldier at lookout, WWI

grisly:  
ɡrizlē / adjective/
"causing horror or disgust"

gruesome:
ɡro͞osəm/ adjective/
"causing repulsion or horror"

Synonyms: ghastly, frightful, horrifying, fearful, hideous

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I recently had a discussion with a friend with whom the topic of World War I came up. I was recommending that he watch Kubrick's Paths of Glory again, as I had just revisited it recently. This led to discussions about books, of which he made three recommendations: The Great War by G.J. Meyer, Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves, and Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker. The latter two I requested the next day from the library and then purchased Meyer's volume as a Christmas present to myself. 

The word "poilu" is literally translated "hairy" but its meaning is similar to the dismissive term "grunt" that is used in our American lingo. After a few short pages I became utterly immersed with this detailed and insightful account of life in the trenches and its horrors. The words grisly and gruesome only begin to describe the experience for these grunts who suffered the most appalling indignities. 

One of the recurring themes in the narrative is how much the soldiers despised their commanders, and rightly so. The abuse they endured for no reason and the lack of any kind of empathy or attempt to relate to the circumstances these poilu were being sent into is unbelievable. 

A second theme that closely parallels the first is that over time there developed a greater camaraderie between the German grunts and poilu than either group of fighting men with their own officers.

On one occasion the French troops were crawling forward in a heavy rain through the mud and, emboldened by the silence they encountered, they arrived at the German trench they had been ordered to take. They found it stuffed with corpses. There was only one wounded German, who was taken away and the trench reoccupied.

"They tossed out the dead bodies to both sides, front and rear, and covered them insufficiently with the earth they shoveled out while deepening the trench. But the steady rains uncovered the bodies, little by little, and they had to abandon the trench. A sign post at its entrance bore this lugubrious inscription: Trench of Death. In truth, there were only dead men there." (p. 34-35)

Over and over the weather brings additional challenges to bear upon the men. It becomes apparent that there will never be any kind of "winning" in this war. The real objective is to not lose one's sanity.

"The steady rain brought on landslides which uncovered many French cadavers alongside our trench, which had been taken on September 25. They had been tossed out of the trench and insufficiently covered with a bit of dirt. It wasn’t unusual to be grabbed while passing by a skeleton hand or a foot sticking out of a trench wall. We were so blasé about it that we paid it no more attention than to a root we might trip upon in our paths." (p. 134)

And then there were the lice. 

"We had six days of rest at Agnez-les-Duisans. With heavy rains each day forcing us to stay inside our billets, our primary occupation was hunting lice. Each of us carried thousands of them. They found a home in the smallest crease, along the seams in the linings of our clothing. There were white ones, black ones, gray ones with crosses on their backs like crusaders, tiny ones and others as big as a grain of wheat, and all this variety swarmed and multiplied to the document of our skins.

"And these lice bore in as well on the tough skin of a rude peasant as on the soft skin of an effeminate Parisian. It made no distinction among levels of society. To get rid of them, some rub themselves all over with gasoline every night; others carried sachets of camphor, or powdered them selves with insecticide; nothing did any good. You'd kill 10 of them and 100 more would appear.

"This all came from the repulsive filthiness of our bedding, which was hardly ever changed, and the difficulties we had and doing laundry. The cold was so pervasive that as soon as everything was washed it froze solid. Where could we thaw out and put it out to dry?"

There were good reasons the poilu detested their officers. Here is one example. In order to motivate the soldiers to run toward the German trenches, Balthas' unit was told that they must go relieve the 23rd division at a certain location. The soldiers pressed forward only to find no French soldiers at all. They had been lied to and advanced into a withering blaze of machine gun fire. The lie was supposed to make them feel more confident in their advance. Naturally it made them distrust their commanders even more.

If a soldier requested leave because his frostbitten feet made it impossible for him to walk, the soldier would be court-martialed for making excuses to avoid having to fight. And just as in Paths of Glory, sometimes the officers would order the shooting of their own men if they failed to run forward into blistering machine gun fire.

Reading Barthas puts a perspective on the realities of that time. On page one he describes the manner in which the coming war is announced. There is a drumroll in his village followed by the declaration of a general mobilization, which is a prelude to war. 

Barthas writes, "This announcement, to my great amazement, aroused more enthusiasm than sorrow. Unthinking people seemed proud to live in a time when something so magnificent was about to happen... Everyone got ready, at a fever pitch, as if they really feared not getting there in time before the victory was complete."

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“Ah, the notebooks of Louis Barthas! This book has profound historic value. It is also a genuine work of literature.”—François Mitterrand, former president of France

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Related Links

The Great War: So Much Sorrow, And for What?

Paths of Glory (A 2010 review)

1917 Is a Breathtaking, Visually Stunning Masterpiece

As the film opens you see the words April 6 in small letters above a large 1917. This film is about a single day in the Great War. 

The opening shot begins with a view of a green field lush with wildflowers, slowly pulling back to reveal two weary British soldiers resting, one lying on his back, helmet over his eyes, and the other leaning against a tree. A third soldier enters the frame--we only see his legs--gently kicks the first soldier to wake him, and says, "Blake. Pick a man. Bring your kit."

The two soldiers stand up and begin walking. The camera doesn't blink as they proceed to walk through a camp where other soldiers are busy with various activities, and then proceed into the trenches, the camera eye still open, a single long shot from the first, first leading them and then following them. They arrive at an underground bunker to report to the general -- who would rarely come in person to this position so near to the front. "It must be something important."

As it turns out, it is very important. The Germans have withdrawn from their lines and appear to be on the run, but British reconnaissance has revealed that they've set up a trap, dug in new entrenchments 9 miles back. There is a British wing that intends to pursue the retreating Germans without knowing they will be massacred. And there is no way to communicate with them because their communication lines have been cut by the enemy. Blake's brother is one of those 1600 men who will be wiped out should the next day's attack be undertaken.

Your job, boys, is to bring this memo to the commanding officer Major Stevens, to stop the invasion before it begins. "You think you can get there in time?"

The camera has yet to break. They leave the command center and return to the crowded trench, making haste to get on with the mission, Blake driven by a need to save his brother. You can see Blake's agitation as he pushes through the trench, increasingly disturbed.

Ten minutes in and this whole intro is clearly a tribute to previous masters of film. The long opening shot from Orson Welles' Touch of Evil comes to mind, given a nod again in The Player. And it's impossible not to be reminded of Kirk Douglas walking through the trenches in Kubrick's Paths of Glory.  

The soundtrack's ebb and flow is fairly tense throughout. The scenery is an epic re-creation of what it must have been like in that horrorshow of a war. As the two young men begin their journey, everything they see and experience is undoubtedly the way it was, a stomach-wrenching scene of death and decay. 

The film won three academy awards. It's easy to see why. In a hundred ways the film shows us how awful war can be, but also what heroism is. The latter is why the film garnered such praise.

What is heroism? It begins with a clear sense of purpose, and a commitment to do whatever it takes to attain that objective. 

Unlike the objective in Paths of Glory, capturing an ant hill, the hero here is risking everything to save the lives of 1600 fellow soldiers. The manifold obstacles between him and his goal are what drive the story.  

Lance Corporal Blake is played by Dean-Charles Chapman, his companion Lance Corporal Schofield played by George MacKay. 

There are so many features that make this a great film. The directing, cinematography, acting, soundtrack, the storyline and the emotions it invokes all contribute. The simple, subtle manner in which you find yourself drawn into the story is utterly brilliant, a sleight of hand maneuver that effectively weds you to these two young men who must carry out an impossible mission.

In short, the film is an achievement of the first order, and as grisly and gritty as it was, it leaves you rewarded for having invested the time to see it. 10 stars out of 10.

The Great War: So Much Sorrow and for What? Lessons from the Horror.

As the 20th century dawned, intellectual optimism ran rampant. True, the Industrial Age had its critics, but there was a general feeling that life was good, that the trajectory of human progress was upward bound.

When I was in college I used to talk with my grandmother about philosophy, science and technological change, and she would always say that she'd grown up in an amazing era. Born two years after Kitty Hawk and the Wright Brothers' first "manned flight", she saw the advent of the automobile age, radio, television, the evolution of transportation to include jet flights around the world and rockets to the moon--all of it astonishing and inconceivable as a child in rural West Virginia.

What she had escaped, growing up in the U.S., was the horror of that first experience of "total war" that rocked Europe, eventually inducing America to sacrifice its youth for a conflict that no one fully understood.

Two weeks ago I watched a series of lectures about "The Great War" and am reading a book titled "World War I: A Turning Point In Modern History." It's challenging to wrap one's mind around the degree of suffering this conflict generated. At the Battle of Verdun alone there were 800,000 casualties (dead and wounded). At the Somme, the Brits sent 60,000 young men to their death in the first day. Final tally of lost lives for Britain, France and Germany in these two battles was 1.2 million. And there was virtually no progress made in either front in these battles.

British soldiers returning from the Western front.

(It's awful to consider it but what was the strategy at Somme? "We'll keep sending our boys forward until the Germans' trigger fingers get tired.")

If you find these numbers are hard to grasp, think about this: one out of every two French men between the ages of 20 and 32 in 1914 were dead by the end of the war.

Of the 70 million soldiers who fought in this war, 9 million died. Equalling appalling: nearly 6 million civilians died as well.

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French soldier in the trenches on the Western Front.

What prompted me to revisit this war was the current eruption of violence these past weeks in response to the George Floyd fiasco, combined with the previous months of COVID-19 lockdown.

This brief blog post will note just a few of insights I gleaned from the this book by Jack Roth and the lectures by Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius of the U of Tennessee.

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Here is a brief list of things that occurred beginning in 1914 that seem noteworthy.

1. When the year 1914 began, few people had the slightest inkling that by late summer all hell would break loose.  Few saw it coming. How many of you were expecting a pandemic and race riots this year?

2. The trigger event that unleashed the violence of that war was a terrorist act. The response by leaders of the various European nations caused tensions to escalate until all Europe was consumed. The earliest days of the conflict resulted in a power stalement. Instead of attempting to negotiate and make concessions, each side believed the only way out was to continue full bore until the other was annihilated.

Russian soldiers on the Eastern Front.

3. This was the first conflict involving entire societies mobilized to wage unrestrained war, devoting all their wealth, industries, institutions, and the lives of their citizens to win victory at any price. The Civil War here in the U.S. foreshadowed this on a smaller, but still devastating, scale.

4. The victors, being idealists, believed that when all was finished everything was tidily tied up. Aristocratic empires had been dethroned--Germany, Austria, Russia, Turkey--and "democratic-sounding constitutions" put in place, most farcical being the Soviet Union.

5. By all accounts the war was a manmade disaster.  Who got the worst of it? Everyone got their share, but for the British--who for the previous century ruled 20% of the world's geography and 25% of the world's population and had adopted the role of global police--the sun finally began to set on the Empire. They would never be a world leader again, and their Colonial history would tarnish the glory that once animated them in the same way slavery has stained a measure of our own history.

6. Ironically, the American doughboys who helped bring an end to the war also brought a new strain of virus to Europe which spread everywhere with disastrous effect. Thinking it originated in Spain it was nicknamed the Spanish Flu. It was later determined to have originated in Kansas where our soldiers trained before transporting it to Europe.

Aerial photo of German (bottom and right) and British (upper left)
trenches in 1917 at battle of Loos. No man's land in between.

Trivia 
There were 35,000 miles of trenches dug during the war, all dug by hand. The French and Germans built fairly deep trenches with boardwalks so as to keep soldiers's feet dry as much as possible. The British, confident that these trenches would not be long occupied, built shallow trenches that filled with muck, that would became dreadfully inadequate. At some points enemy trenches were only 15 yards apart. (If you watch NFL football, that's a first down plus a five yard run.)

There are a number of expressions we use today that originated during this war. Here are a few:

"No Man's Land"
Trench Coats
"going over the top"
Life in the trenches

"Here today, gone tomorrow" came into use because so many soldiers were alive one day and gone the next.

The word "Cooties" first came into usage in the trenches. It was the British term for lice.

"Sniper" was another new word. In previous wars they were called sharpshooters.

"Shellshock" was another new word. At the Battle of Verdun the Germans opened with a bombardment of 2 million shells—more than in any engagement in history to that point—and the two sides eventually fired between 40 and 60 million shells over the next ten months. In this drawn out demolition that went nowhere there were 800,000 casualties.

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The senselessness of all that happened is astounding. The fear and suffering it generated feels incomprehensible.

In our world today we need leaders with integrity who see the need to de-escalate, who will use dialogue to build bridges, generate understanding, bring a new era of peace and prosperity for all. The last several weeks have revealed a powder-keg below the surface of our contemporary culture that is a threat to everything we've sacrificed to achieve.

Who speaks for peace?

The Balance of Power Concept as Applied to Domestic Issues Today

Signing of the Constitution, Sept. 17, 1787 

As nearly all of us learned in our earliest Early American History classes, the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and other founding documents for our nation had been written primarily by a bunch of white males. White males with primarily good intentions put their lives on the line to create a nation built on the concept of Rex Lex, Latin for Law Is King, based on a document by Scottish Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford.

Lex Rex stated that The Law of God Is King, the idea here being that we have the right to exist as a nation under the jurisdiction of God's laws, not arbitrary laws based on the whims of monarchs or mobs.

Another feature of the Constitution and these early documents was the concept of limited government. One of the biggest threats to individual liberties was oppressive and intrusive big government, hence restrictions on government were set in place.

Though the ideals may have been right and good, it proved to be flawed in practice. Women, from the start, had no voice in the decisions of power. They could not vote. And slavery remained an institution that dehumanized the Negro to the extent that the Law treated slaves not as people but as property.

As for the Native peoples who inhabited this continent before our (Western caucasians) arrival, well, they certainly had no voice at the table of power.  Details of that forgotten story can be found in Dee Brown's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.

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Early tanks and machine-age killing machines.

This weekend I have been listening to a series of lectures by Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius of the University of Tennesseee titled World War I: The "Great War". In the second lecture he lays the groundwork for the war that could be cited as the century's first great catastrophe. The ruling principle that "maintained the peace" for those many decades previous, was the notion of a Balance of Power.

Having grown up during the Cold War, I believe the idea of balance between the superpowers was something we experienced ourselves in a real way. The tension created by means of the threat of nuclear annihilation was real. The Cuban Missile Crisis certainly made it visible and films like On the Beach and Dr. Strangelove gave it a visual//emotional/psychological tactile aspect that resonated with deep-seated anxieties.

Is "perceived powerlessness" the underlying cause of our current crisis?

As Professor L. outlined the manner in which the strengthening of Germany threatened the balance of power in the years preceding the war, I could not help but believe a primary fundamental issue today is derived, in part, from an imbalance of power.

Women's Suffrage was all about giving women a voice at the table of power. The Civil War certainly upended the power structures that dehumanized blacks and kept them powerless. After the war, however, the Ku Klux Klan and later Jim Crow laws strove to keep the balance of power imbalanced. That is, no balance at all.

It takes humility to relinquish a measure of power, something uncommon in a political culture more inclined toward Machiavellian values than virtuous ones. To craft solutions will also require honesty, listening, integrity and wisdom born of dialogue, a dialogue where all voices can be heard.

This in and of itself is a challenge. Social media gives a megaphone for the loudest, drowning out much of the wisdom that resides in the quiet people who are less assertive about speaking up, sometimes for fear of being on the receiving end of a smackdown.

Gardens produce their best yields when the conditions are right. What we need is to create a culture committed to working together to produce the best solutions for all. There are a lot of good, caring people in this country, but many don't feel safe speaking out.

The problem seems mountainous. And yet, Jesus once said, “I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it would move. Nothing would be impossible.”

Can this really be so? Right now I am searching the pockets of my heart for that mustard seed.

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A Tribute to Major Joseph P. Gomer and the Tuskegee Airmen

Duluth airport lobby. Major Joseph P. Gomer,
Tuskegee Airman 

This past week I finally watched The Tuskegee Airmen, the true account of a group of African American pilots who overcame racist opposition in every way to become one of the most successful fighter squads of World War II. It's another important film that uplifts you for the heroism recounted, and depresses you for the various ways racist attitudes continued to be an impediment to making our country what it ought to be.

The trigger for watching this film is a statue in the lobby of our Duluth International Airport. I don't know how many dozens of times I walked past this statue of airmen Joseph P. Gomer before actually reading the story etched on the base.

How this came about was that in 2014 I interviewed sculptor Timothy Cleary who teaches here in the Twin Ports at the University of Wisconsin--Superior. He was in the process of creating a sculpture to honor another pilot, Cdr. David Wheat, who had been shot down over North Viet Nam and taken captive, a man who spent seven years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton.

When the David Wheat sculpture was installed, I became curious how a sculpture of this Tuskegee Airmen came to be here. As it turns out, Major Joseph Gomer was born in Iowa Falls, Iowa and eventually lived in Duluth, where he passed in 2013.

According to an October 2013 Bob Berg story at LakeSuperior.com,
After the war, Joe stayed in the Air Force, in aircraft maintenance and missile work, becoming a nuclear weapons technician. He retired as a major in 1964, then worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Minnesota, retiring in 1985.

At Duluth International Airport is a life-size bronze statue of Joe Gomer as a young pilot in his flight suit. The pedestal contains a quote from Joe: “We’re all Americans. That’s why we chose to fight. I’m as American as anybody. My black ancestors were brought over against their will to help build America. My German ancestors came over to build a new life. And my Cherokee ancestors were here to greet all the boats.”

THE TUSKEGEE AIRMEN (film)

The film does an excellent job of displaying the various ploys racist whites attempted in order to thwart these pilots' desire to serve their country. Upon their arrival at the training base in Tuskegee a white officer whose job is to train them gives them a written test because he doesn't believe they could have scored the high scores purportedly reported. He, and many others did not believe blacks were smart enough to fly airplanes.

In my own life I have heard a variation of this idiotic assertion a few times by people who did not believe blacks were smart enough to be an NFL quarterback. I would like to have these people debate Thurgood Marshall, Tony Dungee or Thomas Sowell on that point. We'd quickly see who had the low I.Q.

Another way in which the airmen's efforts to serve took place in Washington. "Sure, they can learn how to fly, but our white bombers need white escorts." The Tuskegee Airmen did get deployed, but they were left in North Africa and not slated to help protest the bombers.

Once that barrier was overcome the Tuskegee Airmen proved to be so successful that there was not a single bomber shot down in Italy while under their protection.

When the final assault on Berlin was being orchestrated, the Tuskegee "Red Tails" (they painted their planes' tails red so they could clearly identify comrades) the top command did not want to deploy them, again for race reasons. What happened, however, was that the bomber pilots requested the Red Tails because with the white fighters protecting them they lost about a third of their teams. When the Red Tails were their guardians NOT ONE was shot down by enemy fighter.

Here are a couple comments from reviewers at imdb.com

reviewer 1
This is a movie that should be viewed by all Americans interested in seeing a slice of Americana which has for so long been ignored. Most will identify with the raw emotion evoked by the plight of these brave and talented men. Black Americans will be moved to tears as we are reminded of what those trailblazers overcame so that future Black soldiers, airmen and every day citizens could take their rightful place in American society, proud of their past and heritage. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the Tuskegee Airmen. This movie makes it clear why.

from another review
I've met a couple of the original Tuskeegee pilots, and I've heard their stories. The discrimination and bigotry shown in the film was NOTHING compared to the realities that they faced day after day. Even after the war, as decorated fighter pilots, the bigotry they faced on their return to the US was unbelievable.

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The film is in our local library, but if it is not in yours you can probably find it on Netflix.
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ABOUT JOSEPH GOMER

Retired United States Air Force Major Joseph Philip Gomer served as a fighter pilot with World War II's famed Tuskegee Airmen. Gomer was born on June 20, 1920 in Iowa Falls, Iowa. From the time he was a small boy, he dreamed of flying airplanes.

Gomer received his wings in May of 1943. He was assigned as a Second Lieutenant to the segregated 332 Fighter Group and sent to Ramitrella, Italy, to join the 301st Fighter Squadron.

The 332 Fighter Group served as escorts for the 15th Air Force, running bombing missions in Germany. Engaging German fighters and attacking enemy positions, they fulfilled their mission to perfection-never losing a bomber to the enemy. The white bomber pilots called their guardians the "Red Tailed Angels" after the distinctive markings on their planes. Many of these white bomber pilots did not know that their guardians were black.

In Italy, the Red Tails flew over 1,500 sorties, downing 111 enemy aircraft and sinking one German destroyer as 66 black pilots were killed in action. Joseph Gomer shared a tent with three other airmen, but within eight months all of them were killed, leaving him the sole survivor. He crash-landed a P-39, lost his canopy, and was bullet ridden in a P-47, but fought with skill and valor in over 68 sorties with the enemy. Fighting racism as well as the Germans, Gomer remained with the Air Force after the war and was still in service on July 26, 1948, when President Truman signed Executive Order 9981 integrating the United States Armed Forces.

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Another Sad Anecdote
This was also shared on imdb.com.
One old fighter pilot told me of how he had just come ashore from the troopship in full uniform, and was almost immediately arrested by the military police in New York City on a charge of impersonating an officer and wearing unauthorized decorations; the MP just KNEW that there was no such thing as a Black fighter pilot. 

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Films like this are important. They bring to light the myriad ways racism has divided us from our brothers and sisters and thwarted African American advances. It's a story that reveals things that should not be left concealed.

Related Links
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
Green Book

Unintended Consequences: Was 1919 the Worst Year in History?

FLASHBACK FRIDAY

Could 1919 have been the worst year in history? Many people were thinking, "Peace at last!" no doubt. The Great War was over. But with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles events were set in motion that would give Adolph Hitler a receptive hearing and fuel to propel his mad, devastating career.

Certainly John Maynard Keynes foresaw this. In his Economic Consequences of the Peace Keynes severely criticized the Versailles Treaty for its vindictiveness, especially as relates to the impossibly high reparations levied against the Germans, among other things. Keynes anticipated the ruin of Europe that would devolve from the economic hardships that were being set in motion.

The war reduced the German economy to shambles and a British enforced blockade made it impossible for Germany to feed its own people. With imports squelched, tens of thousands of Germans were starving, and more every year. When Berlin appealed for 2.5 million tons of food to feed her people, they were denied and the death tolls continued to rise straight through into the post-war peace. The cruelty of this hardship alone was such that British soldiers in Germany after the war pleaded for assistance from Britain. Even when the U.S. Congress approved 100 million dollars in food aid in 1919, it never reached the hungry and starving.

The great flu pandemic of 1918-19 undoubtedly distracted Americans from being overly concerned about Germany's woes. The global communications infrastructure was not in place as it is today. There were no network news broadcasts, though I am sure some of this reached the paper. No Yahoo Buzz or Twitter to follow trending topics such as Germany starvation or Armenian genocide.

Wait, it would appear I have my dates wrong. The Armenian genocide which resulted in 1.5 million deaths at the hands of Ottoman Turks took place from 1915-1918, though slaughter of Armenians did continue into the 1920's. The rest of the world had been distracted at this time by its own Great War. Could this slaughter have occurred had it been during another period of time? Or were the Ottoman's just being opportunists?

On the home front, in 1919 Prohibition kicked in with the 18th Amendment, thus giving birth to the gangsterism of the bootleggers. Since the rich all got theirs without consequence, the common people became still more cynical about their government. More unintended consequences.

Even Einstein's proof of the Theory of Relativity that year had unintended consequences as the notion of relativity was eventually mis-applied, with corrosive effect, into the realm of morals and ethics.

Maybe it wasn't the worst year in history, but it has a lot of reason to get nominated to this ignominious honor. In a few months we'll celebrate its hundredth anniversary.

What year would you call history's worst? And, of course, why?