Fear (40 page)

20
The battle of Charleroi in August 1914 ended with the first major German victory of the war and the flight of thousands of civilians. The French Fifth Army, commanded by General Lanrezac, was eventually forced to retreat. Though Lanrezac took much blame for this (Joffre claimed he lacked ‘offensive spirit’), the retreat probably saved the French Army from complete destruction.

21
Rosalie was French army slang for the bayonet. The name comes from a popular (at least among patriotic civilians) song by the Breton poet and singer Théodore Botrel. ‘Rosalie is so pretty that she had two or three million admirers . . . Rosalie loves to dance to the sound of the cannon . . . she is white when the dance begins but crimson when it ends . . .’ etc. Having been turned down for military service because of his age, this Catholic and Royalist became the official ‘Bard of the Armies’ and toured the front entertaining the troops.

22
Poculotte is using part of a well-known declaration by General (and Comte de) Rochambeau, which he made in 1781 when he brought French troops to aid Washington in the American War of Independence.

23
Blessed are the poor in spirit.

24
A spur in the Vosges mountains, also known as Hartmannswillerkopf, the scene of very fierce and bloody fighting at several times in 1915.

25
The French term is
embusqué
, literally ‘under cover’. An ambush is
une embusquade
, a sniper
un tireur embusqué
. Although the WWI French word is sometimes translated perfectly well as ‘shirker’ or ‘skiver’, there are British equivalents from the same period. Thus a ‘dugout’, as well as being a shelter in a trench, often referred to men, mainly officers, recalled to active service from leave or retirement or a comfortable job. And a ‘dug-in’ was the name given to anyone with a relatively safe job at or near the front, a term usually used with a mixture of scorn and envy.

26
Pauvres Cons du Front. Poor sods of the front line.

27
Huts made from wood and metal, similar to Nissen huts.

28
Author’s note: This quote is from
Leurs figures
. So this is of course Barrès at a late stage of his development, a Lorrainer and nationalist. [
Leurs figures
(1902) was the third novel of Barrès’s trilogy,
Roman de l’énergie nationale
.]

29
Gabions were large wicker tubes, open at both ends, rather like a roll of carpet, used mainly in breastwork defences around gun emplacements and, as here, around look-out positions.

30
The artillery NCO is describing the beginning of the Second Battle of the Aisne, a catastrophic attack on well-entrenched and defended German positions on the Chemin des Dames, a road running along a high ridge for some 30 kilometres between the valleys of the Aisne and Ailette rivers. It began on 16 April 1917. There were approximately 40,000 French casualties on the first day alone. The ‘Mangin’ to whom he refers was General Charles Mangin, known as ‘the butcher’. It was Mangin who bought thousands of troops from French colonies in West Africa, especially Senegal and Niger, to join the slaughter. On 21 February 1917 Mangin wrote to the Ministry of War asking for ‘as many black units as possible, so as to save French blood’.

31
A battalion usually consisted of about 1,000 men.

32
One of a number of cave networks in this area, given its name because of the role played by Moroccan troops in the fight to capture it from the Germans.

33
After the disaster of the Second Battle of the Aisne, a wave of mutinies spread through the regiments who had suffered most. Sixty-eight divisions were affected, about 40,000 men involved. Actions ranged from simply refusing to move to attacking officers, waving the red flag and singing the Internationale.

34
‘Look, a nice bit of meat!’

35
‘c . . . nassa’, of course, is ‘cunt’, and I do not think any reader needs to know Occitan, or this variant of it, to understand the rest.

36
‘Hey! Barrachini, how are you, my friend?’
‘Son of a whore! What you doing there?’
‘The captain took me for a ride, the son of a bitch!’
‘Come on, my beauty, give us a cigarette!’
‘Ah, you’re a lovely lad!’

37
Compiègne in Picardy was French General Staff HQ for much of the war. It was in a forest outside the town that the armistice was signed in 1918.

38
‘La Champagne pouilleuse’ (meaning lousy, verminous, miserable . . . ) is the name given to an area of the Champagne region east of Reims with chalky soil, formerly very barren and impoverished. It is contrasted with ‘La Champagne humide’ and sometimes, rather awkwardly, called Dry Champagne in English.

39
The Gascon cadets were the youngest sons of nobles from Gascony in southern France, sent into the service of Louis XIII (
r.
1610–1643). Supposedly romantic and swashbuckling, they were the source for Alexandre Dumas’s
The Three Musketeers
and Edmond Rostand’s
Cyrano de Bergerac
.

40
The reference is to something the future Henri IV is supposed to have shouted to his troops before the Battle of Ivry in 1590: ‘Follow my white plume: you will find it on the path to honour and glory!’

41
‘
They
are at Chateau-Thierry’, that is, only about 90 kilometres from Paris, putting the capital within range of the biggest German guns.

42
Two national heroes. Georges Guynemer, a popular fighter pilot, lionised by the press, missing in action in 1917 at the age of twenty-two. Emile Driant (1855–1916), career soldier, journalist, politician, and prolific writer of war fiction coloured by nationalism and Catholicism. One of the first high-ranking officers to be killed at Verdun.

TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOR THEIR VALUABLE ADVICE
on some difficulties in this translation, many thanks to Pete Ayrton, Martina Dervis, Donald Nicholson-Smith, Ifor Stoddart and Chris Turner. I am also very grateful to Deborah Lake and Mick Forsyth, two extremely knowledgeable historians of the First World War in general and the French army in particular, for their help with military terminology. My thanks, too, to Andrew Kinross for the kind loan of some useful background reading.