Dare Call It Treason - Richard M. Watt

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Résumé :

This is the story of the Mutiny by the French Army at the height of World War I in 1917.
It was not a mutiny in the traditional sense. The French soldiers did not desert their positions.
However, they refused to attack when ordered to do so.
The reason was they knew an attack would have been a suicide mission. The same commander had previously given an order to attack and the result had been an utter defeat of the French Army by the Germans, with many French soldiers dying in battle.
This may have been and probably was the same battle described in the book Mata Hari, Courtesan and Spy by Major Thomas Coulson, O. B. E. ISBN 4871871673 in which the French blamed their defeat on a female stripper and exotic dancer who had figured out their battle plans and communicated them to the Germans. This event is described in the first chapter of the Mata Hari book.
This book however does not place the blame for the French defeated on a stripper. Instead, it is the Commander who gave the order, General Robert Nivelle, that is blamed.
More than one million French soldiers died in World War One.306,000 in 1914, 334,000 in 1915, 287,000 in 1916,121,000 in early 1917, out of a population of twenty million French males of all ages, they had been killed in fighting by early 1917. The losses had weakened the French will to attack.
The 1917 French Army mutinies took place amongst French Army troops on the Western Front in Northern France during World War I. They started just after the unsuccessful and costly Second Battle of the Aisne, the main action in the Nivelle Offensive in April 1917. General Robert Nivelle had promised a decisive war-ending victory over the Germans in 48 hours; and the men were euphoric on entering the battle. The shock of failure soured their mood overnight.