Introduction

The First World War has cast a long shadow across the history of modern France. The campaign on the Western Front, the war's critical theater, soon settled down into a narrow belt of congealed horror running from Switzerland to the North Sea. The concentrated destruction, the staggering numbers of young men expended to reclaim a few acres of blood-drenched mud, the eerie, lunar landscape of the combat zone were images etched on the minds of generations of French men and women. Indeed, so frightful was the experience of millions of men, who faced each other across a narrow killing ground, and who were driven to nervous exhaustion by the constant danger, filth, wetness, noise, death of comrades, and anticipation of one's own demise that, for many years, the First World War was dismissed as an aberration, an alpine failure of human intelligence and imagination.

There can be no denying that intelligence and imagination often seemed on short ration between 1914 and 1918. But it must not be forgotten that the Western Front was not a product of cynical minds, a plot by committees of military Machiavellis eager to raise the status of their profession by multiplying war's destructiveness. Trench warfare did not come about by design. Digging was simply the natural response of massed soldiers forced to coexist with the enemy on a small patch of disputed terrain.