I have been reading a lot of French memoires and histories of the Crimean War over Christmas. Gosh my French is improving. But anyway, I am now massively confused
( Read more... )
I've got to say those sound like fairly standard soldier gripes. I wonder if you looked a sampling of soldiers' letters from the battlefront in different wars they would be roughly "I'm cold, hungry, my boots leak, and management sucks. It's got to be better organized on the other side, right?"
Are there any French newspaper reports of the British military supplies or procedures to compare against the British newspaper reports of the French military? Not perfect, I know. But should hopefully be that odd mixture of man-on-the-street plus some-actual-research that journalism is.
Not that I have found. The French Government newspaper "La Moniteur" was rather heavily censored and other newspapers were 'encouraged' to only write positive things about the war and include positive letters from the front...
My only other avenue is looking in the official War Ministry reports into the Ambulance Service and the Intendence to see how it analyzes itself and if its compared to the British system at all.
I have masses written by British soldiers talking about French organisations etc and praising it and condemning their system
Ive also a certain amount of American material which describes the French army in detail and concludes that the US army should be exactly like the French - no discussion of the US army.
I think some of it might be explained by the traditional (and back then much more recent) emnity between England and France? As in you might complain bitterly to another Frenchman that things were shit, but still boast to an Englishman that everything was much better than it was in England?
Similarly if you were an English soldier and saw the French tent setup was much better, you wouldn't want to concede this without pointing out that your greatcoat was much more awesome. I can imagine that these sort of rivalries might have led both armies to believe that the grass was greener on the other side.
Comments 5
Reply
Reply
Reply
My only other avenue is looking in the official War Ministry reports into the Ambulance Service and the Intendence to see how it analyzes itself and if its compared to the British system at all.
I have masses written by British soldiers talking about French organisations etc and praising it and condemning their system
Ive also a certain amount of American material which describes the French army in detail and concludes that the US army should be exactly like the French - no discussion of the US army.
Reply
Similarly if you were an English soldier and saw the French tent setup was much better, you wouldn't want to concede this without pointing out that your greatcoat was much more awesome.
I can imagine that these sort of rivalries might have led both armies to believe that the grass was greener on the other side.
Reply
Leave a comment