100 Years Ago - France

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/register/the-third-battle-of-ypres-jvzhm9gwv

august 3, 1917

The third battle of Ypres

“The rain it raineth every day,” and the result is that the third battle of Ypres, which began so auspiciously on Tuesday, is necessarily marked by long pauses. On the other hand the Allied assault has brought the Kaiser to the Western front with a swiftness which does not seem in keeping with the almost elated German bulletin published yesterday. In an effusive message to Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria His Majesty suggests that the Anglo-French attack of July 31 was “intended to conquer the coast of Flanders”. No attack was delivered on that day within 17 or 18 miles of the coast; but doubtless any statement is good enough for the Berlin public. We seem to get a little nearer the anxiety which evidently prompted the Imperial rush from the Riga front when we learn that a War Council was held at Brussels yesterday at which all the military dignitaries were present. A further commentary upon the “great success” which the Kaiser mendaciously claims is furnished by the fierce and costly counter-attacks which the enemy launched on Wednesday along the area traversed by the road from Ypres to Zonnebeke. These counter-attacks at first recovered a little of the lost ground, but late on Wednesday night were driven back at all points. Until the weather clears we must not expect a further advance, but meanwhile the enemy may rest assured that the Allied commanders are well satisfied with the progress made. Considering the difficult ground, the strength of the defences, and the fact that the enemy were forewarned, our Correspondent regards the operation of Tuesday as a “wonderful achievement”. We may add that in no respect was it more wonderful than in the comparative smallness of the number of casualties. The public are perhaps inclined to be sceptical when they are told that the first stage of a mighty conflict has been cheaply won. They may rest assured that on this occasion the statement is in no sense conventional, but is happily true in all respects. The public must not, however, conclude that because our methodical attacks are now being delivered at a lower price, the question of sending steady reinforcements to the armies in the field can be neglected. A steady flow of recruits is as urgently necessary now as it was last winter.






https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2017-08-02/register/account-of-the-attack-8jnzjx3r7

august 2, 1917

Account of the attack

The weather today has been of the vilest, and it is well we made our attack yesterday. Since last evening it has rained pitilessly, so that the ground is everywhere dissolving, and it is impossible to see even a hundred yards. Rain had fallen the night before the attack, and the air when the assault was made was full of mist. One result has been that the battle has been fought practically without any aerial observation, a fact which should have been in the enemy’s favour, because we had driven him, for the time being, from the air. It might have been a serious deprivation for us, but we showed ourselves able to get along without it. Some of our men felt their way in the murk over the enemy’s lines, and there, emerging from the clouds just overhead, used their machine-guns on troops in the trenches. As a whole, however, the battle was fought without aeroplane assistance, though the help that the airmen had given in the days before the attack cannot be overestimated.
It was, of course, largely by their aid that our artillery was able to do what it did. Our infantry is loud in their praise. Not only was the timing of our barrage almost everywhere perfect, so that our men could go behind it as behind a protecting wall, but the destruction of enemy trenches and gun positions was extraordinary.
Much of the ground fought over yesterday was even worse ploughed up than the incredible chaos of the Somme battlefields, and there are woods through which we found progress difficult because the heaped debris made it almost impossible for a man on foot to force his way through.
The favourite type of German stronghold is a structure of concrete made all in one piece, and not built of blocks, which has been nicknamed “the German pill-box”. Used singly they are merely shelters or substitutes for dug-outs. With the proper internal arrangements and loopholes they are machine-gun posts, or clustered together they make redoubts. They are not easily destroyed by shell fire, but so terrific was our bombardment that, where they were not shattered, they were thrown upon their sides or left ridiculously standing on their roofs. Some are big enough to hold 20 or 30 men, and there is every evidence, olfactory and other, that in not a few cases the garrisons are still inside.


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-spirit-of-france-5lds6npbb?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_content=&CMP=TNLEmail_118918_2109533

The Spirit of France

The Huns show no present intention to do battle. They are simply attempting to inflict the utmost possible permanent injury upon the civilian population of the districts they have to quit

March 27, 1917

The calm and deliberate confidence with which France continues to prosecute the war is reflected in the statement that M Ribot sent The Times through our Paris Correspondent yesterday. Not the least wonderful feature of the struggle is the constancy which our glorious Ally has preserved, “unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,” since the onrush of the German hordes was stayed and turned back upon the Marne.
There have been dark hours since, but it has never wavered. France has been borne up through the worst of them by unchangeable faith in the righteousness of her cause, by the proud memory of her immortal past, by her fair hopes for the future. It has not flagged, and it has not been puffed up. Much has happened of late to lend it a new buoyancy and a new assurance. The enforced retreat of the enemy, the rapid liberation of hundreds of French villages, the manifest loss of moral in the foe, as the soil is purged of his polluting presence, the rising anger of America against the cold-blooded piracy which Germany seeks to defend, and the introduction into Russia of the institutions and the doctrines of her Western Allies are events greatly to raise the expectations of France.
They have been greatly raised, yet the statement of M Ribot shows no undue elation. His belief in ultimate victory is absolute, and he declares that no Government could exist in France which had any other watchword. But he does not hesitate to proclaim openly that not even Verdun and the Somme have brought the victory near. The enemy is being forced to loosen his grip upon French territory, and all France rejoices as he falls back day by day, pursued and harried by the advancing French and British. But France is under no illusion. She knows that he is still strong; she knows that he is desperate, and it is daily borne in upon her, by the sight of his foul infamies, that there can be no peace worth the winning until he has been crushed. M Ribot well calls the “admirable and eager armies” led by General Nivelle and by Sir Douglas Haig our “splendid instrument of peace,” and he bears witness to the “excellent arrangements” which have been established between them.
The conclusion of these arrangements has certainly presented difficulties. But the unanimity of purpose and the resolution to achieve it, which are common to both nations as well as to both Governments, have swept aside all considerations but one. The supreme question has been how to win the war. The German Armies are abandoning mile after mile of the country which they have occupied for nearly three years. It is in vain that their writers seek after ingenious explanations of the fact. It needs none. It speaks for itself with a clearness which the meanest can understand. The “War Lord” by a delicate euphemism refers to it as “the great army movement on the Western front,” and predicts that in history it will remain “a page of glory.” It is the kind of page which Prussian “militarism,” with its haughty tradition of the offensive, has not been accustomed to read of its free will. We wish them many more such movements and such pages before longs and we believe that they will have to face both.
It is perhaps the temper which the harvest of these curious laurels has aroused that is causing the heroes applauded by the Kaiser to reveal in a particularly bestial and revolting fashion the traits of angry Yahoos. The devastation of a countryside is a legitimate, though a terrible, operation of war when it is undertaken for a real military object. The Germans pretend that the destruction which they are working in the territory they evacuate is undertaken “for the preparation of the battlefield selected in that region.” But the testimony of those who have seen the country from which the Germans have been driven is that the havoc perpetrated is of a character which does not serve, and which could not in any circumstances serve a military object.
There is no question of a “battlefield.” The Huns show no present intention to do battle. They are simply attempting to inflict the utmost possible permanent injury upon the civilian population of the districts they have to quit. They burn and loot, they rob banks and steal cash from the wretched inhabitants, they drive off the men to work for them in their new quarters.
There is the still more degrading practice of smashing everything in private homes which they cannot carry away and of befouling what they leave with the vilest of filth. This last action betrays a perversity hitherto unknown except amongst savages and the most degraded of the criminal classes. Now we know that like the murder of women and children it is a part of the war system elaborated and practised by the apostles of Kultur - by the race whose pastors early in the war adjured us as Christians to see that it was “fought with honourable weapons.”
These abominations are as stupid as they are inhuman. They are intended, we must suppose, by the Higher Command which orders them, to break the spirit of France. Their direct and natural result is, as anybody but Germans would have foreseen, and as our Correspondents explicitly testify, to fill the advancing French soldiers with a fresh determination to end a system which fosters such savagery.


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/food-and-fashion-in-paris-2r9gbvgsz?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_content=&CMP=TNLEmail_118918_2109533

Food and fashion in Paris

The two-course law for restaurants has been abandoned as unsuccessful economy, and restaurant keepers may soon have carte blanche once more

April 16, 1917

Food takes the precedence of fashion at present, although fashion is not forgotten. The sense of clothes which is born with most Frenchwomen does not allow them to forget, and although dress has slipped into the background during the war it is proportionately important. Food, on the other hand, has sprung into greater evidence; either by its prices or its scarcity, and in these days one hears little of the old fashion of living the simple life, because so many people live it without talking about it.
We are not rationed except in sugar, and even that has caused little hardship as yet, because most housewives provide themselves with a stock before cards came into force. Of bread there is no scarcity, and of sugar cakes there is an abundance, as there was of Easter eggs, April fishes, and hot cross buns. The sugar cakes may be stopped by law; the war bread is to be more severely insisted upon, and there will soon be less of these luxuries in tea-shops, even if the household table does not derive any benefit from a more equal distribution. Butter is difficult to get, for the dairy farmers do not send it into the Paris markets and the butter merchants are quite willing to be without it unless they may sell it at their own price. This is what the Government tries to prevent, but the esprit frondeur of the people makes it difficult.
The two-course law for restaurants has been abandoned as unsuccessful economy, and restaurant keepers may soon have carte blanche once more. The real Parisians’ deprivation still is coal. The weather has aggravated the situation, and everyone keenly feels the present discomfort, which is not lessened by the fear that next winter may come before the crisis is over. Fabulous prices have been paid for fuel of all sorts during the last six months: 14s a sack for ordinary coal has been quoted, and businessmen are paying 14s a sack for anthracite. Landlords of blocks of flats have stopped central heating, and refuse to supply hot water, although the flats are not built to allow of this being done by the tenants themselves. The restricted gas allowance makes it impossible to heat water in the kitchen for washing. The lack of coal has closed many laundries, and the washerwomen threaten, unless they can have coal at once, to close in large numbers this month. Washing is a luxury, and restaurants show unlovely cloths and dinner-napkins.
PRACTICAL DRESS
But dress in Paris is pretty, dainty, and practical in the sense that light colours are not much used. Even the March gales and April snowstorms have not kept fashion altogether at home. She wears furs and big coats. Little dresses are the rage, with their air of the most demure simplicity. They are made of various materials, according to their purposes: in serge and voile they suit many different occasions; in satin and voile, or in crepe de Chine, they are for the, afternoon and evening; for some more special occasion they can be in satin and embroidered net, in tulle and jet, in satin and Chantilly, or in some other combination which gives an effect of simple richness.
But simple frocks are more worn than any other, short, slim, low at the throat, and long in the sleeve. A long coat of last winter will cover them, or a new one of this spring, for the long coat has appeared in lighter materials, but with much the same cut as before. The wide band of fur is now replaced by satin, and satin has taken the place of the fur at throat and wrists. Serge, djersabure, crepe de Chine, satin, tussore, are all used for these coats, and they have linings of stamped muslins, light silk, and other flimsy materials.
There has been no return to what old-fashioned people called “French fashions” - tight corsets, frills and furbelows, or to colours and designs of various past periods. The preference for Eastern designs and Greek lines has been maintained. Consequently there are no corsets, as known to our grandmothers, no waists, no bones, in well-made dresses, no high throttling neckbands, and no long skirts. To be neat in all details, to be free in movement, and to wear the hair suitable in the weather is every well-dressed woman’s ambition, Only the few wear their hair very high, or very high-heeled boots with bunches of silk laces hanging from the topmost lace-holes.
Most strike a happy mean; and, to judge by what one sees now, this summer should show plenty of pretty and becoming clothes.