Horror of trenches haunted France

Eighty years after his death in the trenches, great uncle Marcel lives on in a manila envelope on a Paris bookshelf. Marcel Schmitt's records as a child labourer and French conscript show how clinical efficiency oiled the killing machine of the first World War. Along with three sepia photographs and his last letter home, they are the only traces of his short life. For Marcel Schmitt was one of 1.4 million Frenchmen who died in the first World War. His grand-nephew and keeper of the family relics, Thierry Leveque (34), says that for him, Marcel's death symbolises the sadness and cynicism that haunt modern France.

Next Wednesday, France will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the armistice that took effect at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. As one of the Great War's chief victors and victims, the country is acutely aware that the conflict - with its atrocities, its genocide of Armenians by Turks, its chemical warfare and botched peace - prefigured a tragic century that would surpass all others in the sheer number of human beings slaughtering one another.

The first photo of Marcel Schmitt appears to have been taken in the family garden in winter, around the time the 18-year-old was called up in 1916. "The Schmitts were originally from Alsace," Mr Leveque explains. "But when the Germans took Alsace in 1870, like many French-speaking families they emigrated to Belfort. Had they stayed, he probably would have fought with the Germans, not against them."

Marcel was a short and slightly chubby young man in a peaked cap, with a grave but pleasant smile. His military registration notes that he was blond, with blue eyes, a straight nose and full face. The first photograph must have been the family's favourite, for it's the one they chose for his black-edged Mass card two years later. On the back of the original, a hand-written note says that it is to be enlarged for an oval enamel plaque with two holes to screw it on to his tombstone. Distinctive photographic plaques still adorn many graves in the war cemeteries of northern France.

A later photograph mailed by Marcel to his sister Jeanne shows a thinner-faced soldier wearing the kepi, the visored cap of the poilu French soldier, smoking a cigarette. Poilu means literally "hairy" and the affectionate nickname was devised early in the war to create an image of virile, tough warriors. In Marcel's later photo, after his first experience of battle, his eyes are those of doomed youth.

Mr Leveque found the documents among the few possessions of his great- aunt Jeanne when she died in 1987. The old woman had never married - there were few prospects after the war. She never spoke about her lost brother, but appears to have mourned him all her life.

Marcel's papers, which his grand-nephew handed to me this week, tell us that he worked as a factory apprentice at the age of 17, that he was vaccinated five times against typhoid while in the army, and trained as a machine gunner. His military registration number was 13948, and he was issued with rifle number 8697286, three cartridge belts, a water can, a soup bowl, three pairs of pants, two pairs of socks, three shirts. How meticulously the military accounted for each belt and shoebrush, while men were dying in their thousands. One French soldier, whose story was recorded in the film classic Le Pantalon, was executed by firing squad for refusing to wear a dead comrade's blood-stained trousers.

Marcel sewed the worn military registration book with black thread, to hold it together. The thin booklet includes a page of fine print on the etiquette of saluting one's superiors, and a five-page list of military crimes and misdemeanours, a surprising number of which are punishable by death. Yet the army's Mass card asserted that Marcel "blithely made the sacrifice of his life". The back of the card shows Christ, flooded in light, leading a dead poilu from the field of battle.

Letters were censored so that the French population would not realise the full horror of the butchery on the front. Marcel's last letter home, written three days before his death on the battlefield at Aspach, in the Vosges Mountains, reveals no secrets. Eighty years later, the sheet of notebook paper is stained brown with age, and Marcel's pencil scrawl to his "very dear parents", with its poor grammar and misspellings, is hard to decipher. He hints that the February mornings are cold, and seems to have a premonition.

"We are resting a few kilometres from the front," he writes. "I think we will return soon. Do not worry. You will be a few days without receiving news of me. . . Later I will have all the time. Later, the weather will improve."

Among Marcel's personal effects is a picture postcard of a messenger pigeon, with the copied text of a certain Commandant Raynal's last message from Vaux Fort at Verdun: "We are being attacked with gas. . . It is urgent. Send help." For both the Germans and the French, Verdun was the worst battle of the war. Half a million soldiers were killed there, in a tiny, 20 km-square area. On the first day alone, the Germans fired two million shells in nine hours. Nine villages were wiped off the map. A tenth of the shells contained poison gas.

The most accurate - and least censored - accounts of battle survived in trench newspapers published by better educated soldiers. There were more than 400 such newsletters in France.

Fernand Ducom described the panic provoked by the German bombardments at Verdun: "The explosions are terrifying and shake the earth," he wrote. "The entire horizon is on fire. A thick, acrid smoke invades the blockhouse. We cannot see anything. We are suffocating. Innumerable wounded whose hair is beginning to burn cry out like damned souls. In a frantic rush, all of them scramble for the exit. It is a savage melee of wild animals. We run like madmen. These spontaneous movements are summed up in a single verb: to live."

Artillery shells were responsible for 70 per cent of wounds in the Great War. Shrapnel ripped off men's faces, heads, arms and legs, tore their stomachs open and scattered comrades with pieces of flesh. Nearly 4.3 million French soldiers were wounded - only Russia suffered more casualties on the allied side - and 700,000 Frenchmen became permanent invalids.

Romain Darchy, a soldier at Verdun, described the aftermath of a bombardment: "We found a head in a red puddle, a few leftover limbs in the bottom of a shell hole and shreds of flesh in the mud. That is all that was left of our poor comrades. The violence of the explosion had buried them in the earth. They had been driven almost completely into the walls of the pit, bunched up like rags. What a short while ago was two living beings is now but a mass of mud and blood. By moonlight, we hastily picked up what we could in a piece of cloth. We dug a hole and in the evening said farewell to them."

Another soldier at Verdun, Lucien Gros, recounted a night patrol in April 1916. Under fire, a man threw himself into the mud and sank to his waist. "Two men held their rifles out to him. But they were slipping, so they quickly returned to the column that was passing by, deaf to the pleas of the tormented man who slowly sank without help. For you die from mud as surely as you die from bullets. The wounded are sucked up by this treacherous tide. . . The glue-like, liquid, horrible mud of the Meuse River, churned up by hundreds of thousands of men, horses, vehicles, is a sea of yellow mud under a leaden sky. It penetrates your skin, sneaks under the blankets. We live in mud. We see mud everywhere. And corpses, corpses. And more mud, and more corpses."

By 1917, the French poilus were so fed up with the hell of the trenches, with rats and lice, thirst and hunger, that nearly 40,000 of the two million men under arms mutinied. The ageing Gen Philippe Petain put down the rebellion through a combination of improved conditions and repression. Of 554 soldiers condemned to death, 49 were executed.

The poilus felt deep resentment towards their officers and the civilians behind the lines. In the trench newspaper Le Carpouillot, an anonymous writer recounted his home leave. "They have got used to the war, to the idea that men are dying 200 km from Paris," he reported. "In the cinema, during the newsreel, most of the civilians get up and leave, saying, `The war again, how boring'. Next to me, a little lady said with a pout, `It's not interesting. You don't even see any corpses'. When they showed men in gas masks, the audience split their sides laughing. Give me a grenade, one big enough to blow up the cinema."

Like other allied powers, France conscripted soldiers from her colonies. Six hundred thousand men were brought by force from southeast Asia, Africa and the Maghreb to fight a war they understood even less than the average poilu. The Germans mocked the dark skin of the foreign infantrymen, whom they considered racially inferior. A German cartoon showed a chimpanzee in the red and blue uniform of the Senegalese battalion.

Among the Europeans and Arabs drafted from Algeria was the father of the writer Albert Camus. In his autobiographical novel Le premier homme, Camus recounted how his family kept the piece of shrapnel that killed his father in a biscuit tin. The mayor of their poor Algiers neighbourhood came to tell Camus's deaf, illiterate mother that her husband had died "on the field of honour" for France.

With their brightly coloured uniforms, the Zouaves, as the North African troops were known, made easy targets for the Germans, Camus later realised. They "melted under the gunfire like multi-coloured wax dolls", he wrote. "And every day hundreds of orphans were born in every corner of Algeria, Arab and French, fatherless sons and daughters who would then have to learn to live without lessons and without inheritance."

When the war ended, the underdogs who had helped France win - the working classes, colonial subjects and women - expected some thanks for their efforts. After waves of strikes in 1919, the workers won a 48-hour week. The Asians, Africans and Arabs who had served and died alongside Frenchmen would have to wait another four decades for independence.

The women who had kept French factories running were shocked to find that, far from obtaining the right to vote, they were expected to revert to their pre-war role as housewives. In hopes of rebuilding the population, all information about birth control and abortion was outlawed in July 1920.

Meanwhile, France built 38,000 war memorials to its dead soldiers - one in virtually every French town. The memorials conveyed the official line that the first World War was a glorious victory. For decades the government refused to inaugurate a memorial in a small town outside Paris because its inhabitants had engraved the words "Cursed be War" beneath their statue.

The horror of the first World War was still fresh in French memory when Nazi Germany invaded in 1940. This time, Frenchmen had no inclination to die, and they gave up. Their attacker, Adolf Hitler, was a corporal when he was gassed by the British at Ypres in 1918. Ironically it was the hero of Verdun, Marechal Philippe Petain, the man who embodied the "glory" of the first World War, who came to symbolise the shame of French collaboration during the second World War. It was another veteran, who spent half of the first World War in German prison camps as Captain Charles de Gaulle, who did most to redeem France's lost honour.