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An Eerie Struggle. Watt skillfully evokes the eerie, secret struggle of a nation to reform its will and its army in midwar and somehow keep the enemy from knowing about it. That wholesale bloodshed did not occur was partly due to the skill of General Henri Pétain, the hero of Verdun. Petain regained the soldiers' confidence with reforms of outrageous army policies on pay and leave and a promise that he would not attack without some hope of local success. But much credit must go to the mutineers themselves. In an odd way they emerge as something very like heroes, their action as much an evidence of reason as treason. The mass mutinies were largely a form of passive resistance, protesting not so much the war as how the war was being fought. Defecting companies ignored but practically never harmed their officers. They stayed together as units. They never resisted the loyal cavalry—better disciplined because they had not endured the ordeal of prolonged trench warfare—pressed into service to round them up. Until Pétain's reforms, though, they refused to attack.
A Gift from the Kaiser. Appalling as the mutiny was, it was, in retrospect, effective. The army high command abandoned its disastrous policy of attack at all costs. France turned to Georges Clemenceau, a tough leader who clamped down on political freedom but drove the country hard to the end of the war.
That France survived the crisis, of course, owes a little something to German stolidity. The Kaiser's generals did hear of the mutinies. But they could not believe that such goings-on could occur, even among Frenchmen. When they finally launched a tentative thrust in July 1917, it was too late; the attack ran up against one of Pétain's reconditioned divisions and was stopped cold.