Books: Reason or Treason?

DARE CALL IT TREASON (344 pp.)—Richard M. Watt—Simon & Schusfer ($5.95).

Seasoned soldiers, baaing like sheep, flatly refused to fight. At Soissons, the men of the 370th Infantry Regiment stormed the railway station, captured a train, and headed for Paris. A whole division was so rotten with mutiny that it was cajoled into holding against the Germans only by the hand-wringing eloquence of its commanding officer. By June 1917, out of some 100 infantry divisions, the French high command could count on fighting obedience from only two.

This weird moment of chaos, when France...