(Sometimes we tend to forget how horrible war can be.  We should be reminded.)

This is a repeat of some sanguinary lessons from the Great War of 1914-18.

In the years leading up to the Great War, French military thinkers had wavered back and forth over the best strategy and tactics to employ in the forthcoming struggle with Germany.  Most of them were not pushing for war, but there was a general feeling that it was inevitable.

In 1870-71 France had lost to a united Germany in what is generally referred to as the Franco-Prussian War.  During that war the French army, consisting of professional, long-serving soldiers, had been overwhelmed by a virtual nation-in- arms.  Prussia and some of the other German states had universal military conscription, and the French were seriously outnumbered in all the critical early battles.

After 1871 France also adopted universal conscription.  There was a problem by 1910, however, in that Germany’s surging population outnumbered that of France by more than 50%.  To compensate for its increasing inferiority of numbers, in 1913 France changed the term of recruitment to three rather than two years.  This meant that the standing armies were approximately equal in size, but Germany could immediately mobilize superior numbers of recently trained soldiers.  As for older reserves, military doctrine at that time assumed that these older reserves would be shuttled into combat as replacements for regulars, but the German high command, in an all-out effort to overwhelm the French, decided to place many of its reserve divisions in line with its regular units, thus giving the massive German right wing an enormous numerical advantage as it swept through Belgium into northern France in August 1914.

As for tactics, the French had adopted a belief in “offensive à outrance” (offensive to the extreme) theories.  Essentially, this was a conviction that the will to win combined with a vigorous charge into the face of the enemy would achieve victory.  The enemy’s own capabilities and dispositions were of secondary consideration.  In the early days of fighting, German numerical superiority and advantages in heavy artillery and machine guns, when combined with these unrealistic French tactics, produced almost unbelievable casualties.  On one day alone, August 22, 1914, an estimated 27,000 French soldiers died in the fighting and 70,000 or more were wounded.  This was almost 100,000 casualties in a single day of warfare.  Heavy bloodletting went on up and down the lines of battle from mid-August through the first weeks of September as the massive armies engaged in open fighting and maneuver.

Nothing is more instructive than the actual shock of combat.  Nevertheless, it is somewhat amazing that the French army was able to recover from its wounds, learn from its mistakes, and throw the Germans back at the great Battle of the Marne on September 6 – 10, 1914.

Casualties remained high on all sides throughout the four years of hostilities. More than half of all French males of military age were killed or wounded during the war, and other combattant nations also suffered grievous losses. The battles of Verdun and on the Somme in 1916 were particularly bloody, but no single day of combat ever matched the slaughter experienced by the French on that calamitous day in August 1914.

P.S. For purposes of comparison, the bloodiest one-day battle of the American Civil war took place at Antietam in 1862. The Union Army lost 2,100 dead and 9,560 wounded. The Confederates suffered 1,550 killed and 7,750 wounded. America was shocked by these casualties. France, with a 1914 population only modestly larger than that of 1862 America, had seven times more men killed in a single day of battle. Also note that far more Frenchmen were lost that one day than all Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan during 20 years of conflict.