1914-1918: Refusing the War
Mutiny, desertion and dissent
Description
In late May 1917, in the chalk country of Champagne, French infantry regiments coming out of the line began to do something armies are not supposed to do. They sang. They marched with their rifles pointed at the ground. Some refused to climb back into the trenches after a rest. Delegates were chosen, petitions drafted, red flags glimpsed on a few troop trains. Within weeks the movement had touched dozens of divisions along the Western Front. It was not a revolution — most of these men fully intended to defend their positions if the Germans came. It was something harder to name: a collective refusal to keep attacking, to keep dying in offensives that never broke through.
For most of the twentieth century, this episode sat in an uncomfortable corner of national memory. The men who cracked in 1917 were either passed over in silence or treated as a shameful footnote — a moment of weakness in an otherwise heroic story. The historian André Loez set out to look at them without either the accusation or the pious rehabilitation. What he found was not a handful of broken men but a whole underground grammar of refusal that ran through the entire war, in every army, from the first summer to the last.
Refusing the war did not mean being against it in the abstract. Very few of these soldiers were pacifists. What they refused was concrete: this attack, this order, this stretch of mud they were told to die for. And that refusal took a surprising number of shapes — from the man who shot himself in the hand to the whole battalion that would not move. Loez treats these acts as evidence, not as scandal, and asks what they reveal about how ordinary men endured the unendurable, and about what finally made them stop.
The question we’re asking : What did it actually mean to refuse a war that almost nobody could escape, and how did the armies respond?What we’ll see : How dissent lived inside the trenches, why the spring of 1917 became its breaking point, the many quiet forms it took, and what the high command did to keep the machine running.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The soldier who did not want to die
The starting point of Loez's book is deceptively simple. The soldier of 1914-1918 was, above all, a man who did not want to die — and who knew, with a precision earlier generations of soldiers had rarely had, exactly how likely his death was. The industrial war produced casualty figures on a scale that made survival feel like a matter of arithmetic. In some units, the men could calculate roughly how many offensives they had left. That awareness sits under everything that followed.
This is where Loez pushes back against a comfortable myth: the idea that the soldiers of the Great War were sustained by patriotic fervor, that the consent to the trenches was wholehearted and continuous. Consent existed, but it was brittle, negotiated, and constantly renewed under pressure. Men obeyed for a tangle of reasons — fear of punishment, loyalty to comrades, the sense that there was simply no way out — and none of those reasons is the same as enthusiasm. The trench was held together less by belief than by the absence of alternatives.
02Chapter 2 — The spring the front cracked
The French mutinies of 1917 are the most visible eruption of everything Loez describes, and they came out of a specific catastrophe. In April, General Robert Nivelle launched a massive offensive on the Chemin des Dames, promising a decisive breakthrough within days. It failed spectacularly. Tens of thousands of men were killed or wounded in the first week for almost no ground, against defenses everyone had been assured were shattered. The gap between the promise and the reality was too wide to absorb.
What followed spread through roughly half the divisions of the French army over the late spring and early summer. Loez is careful about what it was and was not. Men refused to go back up for renewed attacks; they did not, on the whole, abandon the front to the enemy. The demands were concrete and often modest — more leave, better food, an end to hopeless offensives, sometimes peace. There was singing, there were petitions, there were delegations. It looked less like an insurrection than like a strike carried into the deadliest workplace imaginable.
03Chapter 3 — What refusal actually looked like
The great value of Loez's book is that it refuses to let 1917 stand alone. The mutinies were the spectacular tip of something that ran quietly through all four years and every army. Most refusal was individual, hidden, and undramatic, and it is precisely this ordinary refusal that reveals how contested the war was from the inside. Once you catalogue the forms, the picture of a docile mass of consenting soldiers falls apart.
Desertion is the clearest case. Men slipped away on leave and did not come back, crossed into neutral countries where geography allowed, disappeared into cities, hid with families or lovers. The numbers ran into the hundreds of thousands across the belligerents over the course of the war. Then there was self-mutilation — the deliberate wound, usually to a hand or foot, meant to buy a trip to the rear. Armies watched for the telltale powder burns of a shot fired too close, and men learned to disguise them.
04Chapter 4 — The armies that learned to manage it
Step back from the individual soldier and a larger argument comes into view. If refusal was constant, then the real historical question is not why some men broke but how the armies kept the vast majority in line for so long. Loez's answer is that discipline in the Great War was not a fixed wall but an ongoing labor of management — a system that had to detect, absorb, and neutralize refusal continuously, because refusal never stopped welling up.
The first instrument was fear. Military justice worked as spectacle: courts-martial, death sentences, executions staged so that other men would hear of them. The exact numbers remain debated and are often smaller than legend suggests, but the point of an execution was never the individual killed — it was the thousands meant to be deterred. Repression was theatre, aimed at the men still in the line. Alongside it ran surveillance: censored letters, watched deserters, medical officers trained to spot the self-inflicted wound.
05Conclusion
The singing regiments of Champagne look different once refusal is placed at the center of the story rather than at its shameful margin. They were not an aberration in an otherwise willing army; they were the visible surfacing of a pressure that never left the trenches, in France or anywhere else. What Loez recovers is a war held together not by unbroken enthusiasm but by a constant, grinding effort to keep men from acting on the most natural impulse they had — the impulse to live.
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