A Good Idea of Hell: Letters from a Chasseur-a-Pied, and: France and the Great War, 1914-1918 (review)

With barely a decade until the centennial of the Great War, there is perhaps just enough time to alter the popular misconception—fueled by the "Simpsons'" hilarious if unfair characterization—that French military history is the story of "cheese-eating surrender monkeys." (Some readers might add, "but why would you want to?"—but that is best debated another time.) The fortitude and endurance of the French in World War I—J. P. Duroselle called the national effort "incomprehensible"—is virtually unknown in this country, has long been ignored or glossed over in the greater Anglo-Saxon world, and has to some degree been neglected in contemporary France itself. Modern French historians are hard at work reconsidering this epic of their modern history; some 140 books, all published since 1990, are currently available for sale on the French version of one international on-line bookseller, and this steady stream will doubtless become a flood as the centennial looms. France and the Great War provides an introduction to this scholarship, and to the magnitude and intensity of the French war effort itself.

The volume is the collaborative effort of scholars whose individual works well qualify them to offer this attractive synthesis, a concise and informed (by the most recent historiography) treatment of the French "war culture," something they define as a "broad-based series of representations through which the French made sense of the war, and persuaded themselves to continue fighting it" (p. xv). Welcome is the volume's resolute focus on the war and how it was experienced by both civilians and soldiers, and how that experience shaped twentieth century France: fully 95 percent of the "class of 1917" was mobilized, for example, illustrating just what a national ordeal the war was. French strategy is neatly summarized in the shifts from percer (breakthrough) to grignotage (attrition—Joffre's infamous "nibbling away" at the enemy), to tenir (holding on). The origins of the frequently misunderstood French offensive tactics of 1914 are clearly explained. The volume provides an excellent summary of 1917 with its "mutinies," labor unrest, and the "brutalization of French politics," as the authors describe the advent of Clemenceau. France only survived this terrible year by a "second mobilization" that destroyed the Union sacrée ("Sacred union" or political truce of 1914) and thus set the stage for the political, economic, and societal bitterness of the years after the war. The concluding chapters provide real insight into the "ambiguous victory" of 1918, and the myriad ways in which this epochal conflict still resonates in French society. France and the Great War is an outstanding overview and introduction to the seminal event of modern French history—warmly recommended.

A Good Idea of Hell is a "trench memoir" whose unique history makes it all the more appealing. Its author, Robert Pellisier, was born in France in 1882; raised and educated in the United States, he was a young professor of French at Stanford when the Great War broke out. Although not drafted because of his long stay in this country, Pellisier felt obliged to serve, and he returned to France in 1914 just as the great Battle of the Marne engulfed the combatants. After basic training he was sent to the trenches in the Vosges Mountains. Here he experienced the horrors and tedium of trench warfare, was wounded, and returned to the rear areas, where he spent much of 1915 in convalescence and officer training. Returning to...