Stretching for nearly twenty miles along a narrow, steep wooded limestone ridge between the Aisne and Ailette river valleys north of Reims lies a scenic country road built in the eighteenth century for the daughters of King Louis XV, known peacefully as the Chemin des Dames—the Ladies’ Road. Yet in the spring of April 1917, during the third year of the First World War, this ridge became the scene of one of the most catastrophic military miscalculations on the Western Front. Ordered by French Commander in Chief General Robert Nivelle with the promise of ending the war in forty eight hours, the Second Battle of the Aisne along the Chemin des Dames resulted in such staggering, futile slaughter that half of the French Army rose up in widespread mutiny, nearly breaking the Allied war effort.
General Nivelle’s Promise of a 48-Hour Knockout Blow
By late 1916, after the ten month meat grinder of the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of the Somme had cost France over half a million casualties without pushing the German army out of northern France, public and political patience with cautious Commander in Chief Joseph Joffre had run out. In December 1916, Prime Minister Aristide Briand replaced Joffre with General Robert Nivelle, an articulate, charming artillery officer who had recently executed brilliant limited counterattacks at Verdun using a “creeping barrage”—a curtain of artillery shells moving forward just yards ahead of advancing infantry.
Fluent in English and radiating infectious optimism, Nivelle seduced both British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the French cabinet with a bold promise: if given fifty French divisions and a gigantic concentration of artillery along the Aisne River, he could scale the German fortifications atop the Chemin des Dames ridge and rupture the entire German front line within twenty four to forty eight hours. So confident was Nivelle that he declared if the breakthrough did not succeed in two days, he would call off the offensive immediately to save lives.
Lost Secrecy and the Underground Fortress of the Dragon’s Lair
Nivelle’s grand strategy began unraveling weeks before a single whistle blew. First, the general and his staff discussed the offensive so openly at Parisian dinner parties and distributed operational blueprints so far down the chain of command that during two German trench raids in March and early April 1917, German soldiers captured complete written maps and timetables of the upcoming French attack from fallen officers. Second, in March 1917, the German army executed Operation Alberich, withdrawing voluntarily from the neighboring Noyon salient to the heavily fortified Hindenburg Line, which shortened the German front and freed up fourteen fresh divisions to reinforce the Chemin des Dames.
Worst of all, the geological terrain of the Chemin des Dames favored the German defenders like no other sector in France. For centuries, locals had quarried soft limestone out of the ridge, leaving behind vast networks of deep underground caverns known as creutes—most famously the Caverne du Dragon (the Dragon’s Lair). Throughout the ten day preliminary bombardment in which five thousand French cannons fired millions of shells at the ridge, tens of thousands of German soldiers sat completely unharmed fifty feet underground inside electrically lit limestone caves, waiting for the barrage to lift so they could rush up hidden staircases and set up interlocking Maxim machine guns along the reverse slope.
The Slaughter of April 16, 1917
At six o’clock on the freezing, sleet swept morning of April sixteenth, 1917, over half a million French soldiers—including elite Senegalese Tirailleurs whose fingers were so numb from the unseasonable snow that they struggled to load their rifles—climbed out of their trenches to charge up the muddy, forty five degree slopes of the Chemin des Dames. Because the French artillery had failed to destroy the deep German cave shelters or cut the thick belts of barbed wire, and because the French creeping barrage moved up the steep hillside at a hundred yards every three minutes—twice as fast as weighed down infantry could climb through knee deep mud—the protective curtain of shells rolled away and left the French infantry completely exposed.
From the crest of the ridge and from untouched concrete bunkers, German machine gunners mowed down wave after wave of sky blue French uniforms. Later that afternoon, when the French army deployed one hundred and twenty eight Schneider CA1 tanks in their first massed armored assault in history near Berry au Bac, German artillery spotters on the high ground targeted the slow moving tanks directly, setting more than half of them ablaze as their external fuel tanks exploded. Instead of breaking through six miles on the first day as Nivelle had promised, the French gained only a few hundred yards of mud at the cost of forty thousand casualties in the first twenty four hours alone, and over one hundred and thirty thousand casualties within the first ten days.
The French Army Mutinies and the Baaing of Sheep
The spark that ignited the French Army Mutinies was not the slaughter of April sixteenth itself, but the fact that General Nivelle broke his sacred promise to halt the attack if it failed in forty eight hours. Refusing to admit defeat, Nivelle kept throwing exhausted divisions up the blood soaked slopes of the Chemin des Dames throughout late April and May. For veterans who had endured three years of mud, lice, rotten food, and canceled home leave, the betrayal was the final straw.
Beginning on April seventeenth and exploding across the front in May 1917, soldiers of the French Second Colonial Infantry Division and dozens of other units refused orders to march back up into the front line trenches. Crucially, the mutineers did not desert to the enemy or shoot their officers; instead, calling their movement a soldiers’ strike, they declared they were fully willing to hold their trenches and defend France against any German attack, but flatly refused to participate in any more suicidal attacks against intact machine guns. As fresh regiments marched past supply depots toward the Chemin des Dames ridge, thousands of soldiers made the loud “baaing” noise of sheep being led to the slaughterhouse, waved red flags, and sang the Internationale.
How Philippe Petain Restored the Army Before the Germans Realized
By early June 1917, sixty eight out of the one hundred and twelve divisions in the French Army—more than half of France’s entire fighting force on the Western Front—were affected by collective indiscipline. Had the German High Command realized that the French front line between Soissons and Reims was refusing orders to attack, a major German offensive could have marched straight to Paris and ended the war in 1917. Miraculously, strict French military censorship kept the mutinies hidden from German intelligence.
On May fifteenth, 1917, the French government dismissed Nivelle and appointed General Philippe Petain, the defensive hero of Verdun, as Commander in Chief. Petain immediately quelled the rebellion through a combination of genuine empathy and measured discipline. Traveling personally to ninety divisions to listen to ordinary soldiers’ grievances, Petain promised the troops that there would be no more grand suicidal offensives: as he famously summarized his strategy, he would wait for the Americans and the tanks. He instituted regular ten day home leaves, built proper rest camps with clean beds away from the sound of artillery, and improved field kitchens and wine rations. While military courts martial handed down over five hundred death sentences to ringleaders, Petain and President Raymond Poincare commuted the vast majority, executing fewer than fifty men for mutiny. By October 1917, morale had recovered so completely that Petain’s soldiers launched a meticulously planned, artillery heavy attack at La Malmaison that finally captured the western end of the Chemin des Dames with minimal losses.
