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 almost lost a war by losing control of her exhausted troops, is the subject of Dare Call It Treason, the latest in the recent flood of histories about World War I. Treason is all the more remarkable be cause its author is a complete amateur, a flooring-materials salesman who wrote the book (his first) in the children's playroom of his home in Glen Ridge, N.J., and even taught himself French by pasting scraps of a French grammar on file cards which he carried with him on selling trips.
Fire from the Left. As Watt notes, a great army is not demoralized in a day, nor for purely military reasons. The politicians hated the generals, the generals hated the politicians, and the politicians themselves were divided behind the faqade of a coalition government. The extreme French left, for example, at the height of the war bombarded the trenches with peace pamphlets urging troops to rise up and join with their German brothers in ending the bloodshed.
But what set off the army explosion was an infamous military blunder. After the long-drawn-out bloodbath of Verdun, an ambitious new commander in chief, General Robert Nivelle, staked his career on a decisive punch through the German lines which, he implied, would end the war in weeks. The fanfare and prepara-:ions were so grand that the Germans mew all about it in advance. Nivelle knew they knew it, but he went ahead anyway. And from April 16 to May 9, 1917, French troops flung themselves against the Germans' barbed wire, entrenched machine guns and presighted artillery until 130,000 French casualties had piled up. Morale collapsed. A front-line battalion, scheduled for replacement, was ordered instead to attack, and mutinied. Word of the rebellion traveled along the trenches. Suddenly the masses of exhausted French soldiers realized that they had power. There were too many of them to shoot—even if loyal troops could have been found to fire on them.