The Operational Impact of the French Mutinies

If there was to be a “grand narrative” of the Western Front during the Great War, it would
go as such: the BEF began as a junior partner of the French, grew in importance, became an
equal partner in 1916, and then, following the grievous blow suffered by the French during the
mutinies of 1917, had to shoulder the primary burden of the fighting for the rest of the war.
While authors like Michel Goya and the late Elizabeth Greenhalgh have helped challenge this
narrative for 1918, the key moment, the mutinies, remains somewhat of a mystery.
` What was the actual impact of the mutinies? For all the volumes written on the cultural
history of the mutinies, their impact on the French army’s performance remains only
perfunctorily studied. This article, on its own, is insufficient to fully tell the history of the French
army in the latter half of 1917 but will hopefully provide at least a solid foundation.
The Roots of the Mutiny
In the popular, and even scholarly imagination, the Great War does not truly begin on the
Western Front until July 1st, 1916, when the divisions of the B.E.F. left their trenches to begin the
Battle of the Somme. This has left a blind spot for the period between the ending of the 1st Battle
of Ypres and the Somme.
While this period was marked by smaller, subordinate, offensives for the B.E.F., for the
French it was to be the bloodiest period of the war. Unlike in later years, there was no winter
pause in the West. Upon the ending of the German breakthrough attempts at Ypres, the French
army remained in a state of constant counter-offensive until the end of October 1915, paying a
terrible price. According to the French Department of Defense archives, from the beginning of
the war through the end of November 1914, the French would lose 269,360 war dead. By the end
of October 1915, when the counter-offensive finally calmed, that total would rise to 627,000
cumulative war dead. The entire Commonwealth would not hit this mark until September 20th,
1917. It is from this bloody soil that the roots of the mutiny grew. A nation with too few military
age men had absorbed too much loss for too little gain. 1916 would give little comfort.
With the benefit of hindsight, it was a year of victories. At the Somme, the French would
fight a successful battle, inflicting more losses than they suffered. At Verdun, they would not
only absorb the great German offensive, but erase most of the gains made on the right bank of
the Meuse through the great counter-offensives of October and December. At a relatively low
cost, they would take Douaumont, mastery of the battlefield, and more than 17,000 prisoners.
Yet, as the French Official History notes, despite these victories, there was little change
on the maps of the front. The losses had also been grievous, 1916 would claim another 251,000
war dead. Joffre would relieve Foch, until then the primary French operational commander, in
order to protect his position. It was in vain, a few days later Nivelle, the victor of Verdun, replace
him at the head of the French armies. At the beginning of Verdun, Petain had promised “on les
aura”, “we’ll get them,” now Nivelle promised “on les a,” “we have them.”
The Battle of the Aisne
 Labeling the Third Battle of the Aisne “the Nivelle offensive” distracts from its scope and
objectives. Along a front of 48 kilometers, stretching from north of Soissons all the way to
Reims, 22 French divisions from the Vth and VIth armies would see heavy fighting on April 16th,
1917. The next day, 6 more divisions from the IVth would join the fray, in a subsidiary assault in
Champagne, to the east of Reims. It would be the largest French operation since the twin
offensives of September 1915.
There were two linked goals to the battle. The first was to be the complete removal of
German observation and harassment fire along the critical lateral railways that ran just behind the
front, from the valley of the Aisne, through Reims, and then on to Verdun and beyond. This
would be achieved through taking the German observation posts along the commanding heights
of the Chemin des Dames, the hills to the northwest of Reims, and the imposing Massif of
Moronvillers to the east of Reims. The second was to be the breakthrough of the German lines
along a wide front, followed by the resumption of mobile fighting.
In the popular imagination, the assault on April 16th was an unmitigated disaster, swiftly
followed by the mutinies. This is unsupported by the reality on the ground. In the face of a
prepared and reinforced enemy, the VIth army bludgeoned its way onto the Chemin des Dames,
capturing significant amounts of prisoners along the way. In fact, the hardest fighting would be
south of the Chemin des Dames, along the low hills to the north of Reims. There the Vth army
would suffer higher losses than the VIth, but also capture more prisoners. On the 17th, the IVth
captured a solid foothold on the three of the four crests of the Massif of Moronvillers, though the
Massif would remain a zone of serious friction between the armies.
Most importantly, the fighting did not end the 16th. Over the next few days, the French
would consolidate their local gains while defeating continued major German counterattacks,
including a multi-divisional assault to the east of the Chemin. A renewed push on May 4th by the
Vth army would make little headway north of Reims, while the VIth and recently inserted Xth
completed the conquest of the key high points of the Chemin des Dames on May 5th and 6th. The
IVth, meanwhile, would take the last major observatory of the Massif on May 20th.
From April 16th to May 6th, the French IVth, Vth, and VIth armies lost roughly 35,000
dead in the highest daily casualty rates suffered since September of 1915. These losses were not
for nothing. The Aisne valley and the lateral Reims-Verdun railways were now cleared of
German observation, the Chemin des Dames was mostly under French control, barring the
Laffaux salient, and more than 29,000 German prisoners had been captured. But this was too
high a cost for a French public and army desperate for decisive victory, and Nivelle was relieved
by Petain on May 15th, 1917. Yet the mutinies had not truly begun.
The Mutinies
The pattern of the mutinies becomes clear when reviewing the table from the French Official
History organizing incidents of what it calls “collective indiscipline.”
April 29th - May 25th 10
May 25th - June 10th 80
 June 11th - July 2nd 20
July 2nd - July 24th 5
August 3
September 1

The mutinies do not follow the simple logic of the bloody fighting on April 16th immediately
leading to a mass outbreak, unlike the collapse in Russian morale following the July offensives
in 1917. Rather, the crisis of confidence with the army broke out as it became clear to the
frontline soldiers that the French state and high command considered the bloody fighting of April
and May to have been a disappointment.
Petain, rather than riding to the rescue, ironically played a large role in helping spark the
crisis, as his relief of Nivelle was the most public sign that the offensives were not considered to
have been a success. He would face a difficult problem. The projects that would become the
offensives of late 1917, Flanders, Verdun, Malmaison, had already begun development before he
took command, the question now was whether the French army could complete them. This was
not only due to the mutinies, but also to the need to withdraw resources from the fronts of the
April and May offensives, which now found themselves under constant local attack as the
Germans adopted an aggressive stance.
The German Counter-Attacks of the Summer of 1917
A common refrain with the mutinies is that of a lost German opportunity, that if the Germans
knew what was happening they could have made major gains. What this misses is that the early
summer of 1917 saw a consistent period of German offensive activity all along the ground taken
during the Third Battle of the Aisne. Meanwhile, along the left bank of the Meuse at Verdun,
fighting raged in front of Hill 304 as the Germans launched spoiling attacks to halt the French
offensive before it began.
These counterattacks were marked by the techniques that would be replicated on a wider scale in
1918. Wide front bombardments were used to disguise attack sectors. In those sectors, French
soldiers would find themselves suddenly caught under brief hurricanes of fire, before specially
trained units of picked men, the storm troops, landed in their trenches within seconds of the
shelling ceasing.
These attacks were not mere local actions either. Over the course of June and July the German
army would launch several division or multi-division strength assaults along the Chemin des
Dames and the Massif de Moronvillers, seeking to throw the French army off the key
observatories on the Aisne. Some, like the creatively named Operation Witches Dance
(Unternehmen Hexantanz) east of Craonne, would achieve only minor gains at a high cost. Far
more serious was the steady grinding down of French positions in the middle of the plateau.
Over the course of two months of intense infantry fighting and four major German attacks, the
French lines would be forced around 500 meters back along a three-kilometer front. The worst
loss was that of several high points on the plateau, which returned Germans observation over the
valley of the Aisne, undoing the primary achievement of the April offensive.
By July, the zone of friction along the Chemin des Dames had become an open wound for the
French army. This was where the mutinies had their greatest impact. In the trenches, French
infantry continued to fight vigorously while exposed to heavy German artillery fire, both in
defense, counterattack, and even local offensives of their own. But the operation that could close
the wound, the Malmaison offensive planned since May, had to be delayed. Malmaison would
render the remaining German positions on the Chemin, and their launching off points on its
northern slopes, untenable, by subjecting them to enfilade fire. This would force a German
disengagement from the plateau and an end to their local attacks. However, due to the exhaustion
of the units intended for it and the concern of French command as to the army’s morale, it had to
be delayed. Unable to make a single large expenditure of men and materiel, the French were
forced to make a significantly higher combined expense in the grind of daily fighting.
Tanks and the Americans?
The twin stresses of the mutinies and the German seizure of the initiative precipitated one of the
most important French doctrinal decisions of the war. A debate had emerged within French
military leadership as to whether the stormtroop model should be adopted. Petain made his
intentions clear: there would be no picked units of “gladiators” in the army. France would
continue to have its corps d’elites, but the burden of conducting offensives would remain a
shared one. This is not to say that this rule was always strictly followed. The Official History
describes an incident where a divisional commander requested the IInd army’s body of elite
grenadiers for a local action, hinting at some off-the-books units.
At a wider level Petain’s famous statement “I await the tanks and the Americans” is used to
characterize his attitude in 1917, but it would be the French artillery park that would see the
greatest evolution. The French had long suffered from a lack of modern heavy artillery compared
to the Germans. In 1917 the balance would finally start to equalize, as programs initiated in 1916
began to bear fruit. Leading the way were two evolutions of Schneider kit originally designed for
export to Russia.
The first was the Schneider 105mm, which would quadruple in number in the French park from
106 to 407 from January 1917 to January 1918. But it was the Schneider 1917 155C (155mm
court) that would have the largest impact. Trench warfare demanded howitzers, especially as the
Germans embraced rear slope defenses, but the French army had lacked a modern quick firing
model. The 155C finally redressed this, with the number of 155mm howitzers in French service
nearly tripling over the year, from 509 to 1294. More than anything else, the 155C would be
Petain’s hammer. 450 would be massed at Verdun (55% of all available), while 475 opened the
way for the VIth army at La Malmaison (52%).
The French army would need this increased firepower, as it was hemorrhaging men. Peaking at a
size of 2.7 million men on the Western Front in April of 1917, the needs of the economy and
agriculture, as well as increased leave, steadily drew down this number to 2.2 million by the end
of the year. The French manpower crisis, combined with the increasingly apparent collapse of
the Russian war effort, and the tide of German divisions that would be released by it, loomed
large in Petain’s thinking during the latter half of the year.
The First Test : Flanders
Verdun
The Verdun offensive project had been approved prior to the April offensives. Much like that
massive assault, the first goal was the disengagement of a railway, by retaking the remaining
observatories still in German hands and pushing German artillery out of harassment range. The
long-term strategic view pointed east, towards the Briey basin in the Metz region, the primary
German source of iron ore and only 30 miles away from Verdun.
While often portrayed as an artillery operation, the 2nd Battle of Verdun was much more. Four
corps and nine divisions would be in the first wave, attacking along an 18-kilometer front, the
largest individual attack by either the Germans or French in the region since 1914. They would
be supported nearly 2,300 artillery pieces, 1,300 heavy. On the left bank the goal was the
recapture of Hill 304 and the Mort Homme, to the right a further push to retake Samogneux and
Hill 344.

La Malmaison
While some scholars have estimated German losses in the range of 35,000 killed or wounded,
with another 15,000 captured, these numbers are like
The French Official History concludes its lengthy discussion of La Malmaison as such: the Fr. In
reality, this could apply to the entire campaign along the Chemin des Dames. At the cost of over
100,000 losses in the VIth army alone, from April 16th to the end of La Malmaison in October,
the French army, against a well prepared and expecting German opponent, had first battered its
way onto the plateau, expanded its gains, faced a crisis of morale at the same time as the
Germans sought to throw it back off, and then completed the conquest of the plateau. While
modern histories tend to split the operation into multiple parts, this is a false distinction. In the
view of the French officers who planned the Malmaison operation, it was the conclusion of a
project begun more than six months earlier.
To historians of the war, the process of the operation is almost as important as its results. If
limited to merely the assumed disaster of Nivelle and then the success of La Malmaison, then the
operation is a picture of radical evolution. The French army, in its old ways, bled horribly and
failed. The French army, in the new ways forced upon it by the revolt of its soldiers, succeeded
at low cost under the watchful eye of Petain. However, this is a false dichotomy, and the saga of
the Chemin des Dames is as much a story of continuity as it is of evolution. Even as the French
soldier lost confidence in himself and his commanders, his efforts never slackened at the front.
Much like with the 2nd Battle of Verdun, when asked to fight in a prolonged and brutal infantry
engagement, he remained capable of doing so.
In short, what was the impact of the mutinies?