Lecture given at the Conway Hall, 11 November 2014, as part of a series on World War I organised by the Socialist History Society

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.

BRECHT[1]

In 1914 millions of men across Europe went to war. Michael Gove assures that they were “not dupes”,[2] and who are we to disagree? In fact it’s clear that many went to war because they genuinely believed in the defence of their native country – and many more went because they felt it was their duty or were pressured in various ways.

Often their initial motivations did not survive the experience of trench warfare; what they had expected would be a short war became both unimaginably horrific and apparently everlasting. Some deserted, others resorted to self-mutilation (for which, in the French army, the punishment was to be tied up and thrown into No Man’s Land.[3]) In some sections of the front soldiers engaged in what Tony Ashworth  has described as the “live and let live system”,[4] whereby a tacit agreement between rank-and-file soldiers was made to minimise casualties. Despite this casualties continued at a horrific rate.

By 1917 discontent was growing, and the years 1917 to 1919 were marked by waves of strikes and mutinies right across Europe – and beyond.[5] I’m just going to look at three instances – the French army mutinies of 1917, the German naval mutinies of November 1918 and the French naval mutinies in the Black Sea in 1919. Mutiny is a fateful decision for soldiers. Strikers can walk out and, if they fail to win, go back to work. Failed mutineers face execution or long jail sentences. But faced with a high mortality rate, generals who were quite happy to squander their soldiers’ lives with foolish attacks and a war which seemed to be continuing interminably, many soldiers came to feel that they had nothing to lose by mutiny.

In May and June 1917 there were widespread mutinies in the French army, reaching a peak around 2 June. It is very difficult to calculate exactly how many men were involved – one recent estimate puts the figure at between thirty and eighty thousand mutineers,[6] out of a total army strength of a little under two million. Obviously many more who did not actively mutiny were touched by the general mood of discontent that affected a large part of the army.

The mutinies were often simple, apparently spontaneous, refusals to obey orders. A couple of incidents are recorded as follows:

Thus one battalion was due to make its way to the trenches. “The men had formed up without incident. But when the signal from the battalion leader sounded, nobody moved. The companies remained lined up behind stacks of rifles and kit bags.

“There were a few seconds of anguished expectancy … The whistle was blown a second time, and again there was no movement. The situation was suddenly obvious.

“The whole troop remained a state of immobility which might seem concerted, in order, but refusing to obey.”

In another incident:

“The battalion was stationed in a mushroom farm with the divisional headquarters. When they were told to pick up their kit bags, nobody moved, the candles went out and it was pitch dark. Every time an officer lit a candle, it was immediately put out. It was impossible to assemble the troops. When orders were given, the men replied with sneers and insults. The divisional officers tried to intervene and exhort the men to do their duty, but they were shouted down.”[7]

Among those who mutinied were many of the Russian soldiers who had been sent to France to fight on the western front. They had heard news of the fall of the Tsar and refused to fight. The authorities were very keen to isolate them from French soldiers so that revolutionary ideas would not spread. Eventually they were taken away and shelled into submission. Many of the survivors who remained intransigent were then deported to Algeria.[8]

Also involved were some of the troops brought from the French colonies to assist with the war. These were treated particularly badly. Of 157,000 black African troops brought to Europe some 30,000 were killed, a very high proportion. Some Senegalese troops literally died of cold, as the French army provided no alternative to the tropical clothing they had worn at home.[9]  When a mutiny broke out among Senegalese troops in August 1917, the authorities made some concessions, being afraid that too heavy repression might have a disastrous impact on other Senegalese, Madagascan and Indochinese troops.[10]

Obviously the initiative in the mutinies was often taken by individuals, some of whom were probably politically motivated, or may have been influenced by the extensive anti-militarist propaganda carried out by the trade unions in pre-1914 France. But there was no central political leadership or coordination to organise the movement. As a result it was often extremely volatile. Rumours and false information undoubtedly played a significant part.

Anti-war literature, whether anarchist, socialist or syndicalist, circulated widely among troops at the front, and undoubtedly contributed to the degree of dissatisfaction, and encouraged soldiers to stand up for their rights.[11]

One demand that arose in a number of places was the idea of a march on Paris. Clearly this represented a recognition of the need for a political solution, a wish to force the government to bring the war to an end. But without any political leadership it was very unclear how this could be achieved. In fact the authorities had little difficulty in sealing off the railway stations and suspending the train service to Paris.[12]

What remains a matter of dispute among historians is to what extent the mutinies were “political”. Were the soldiers simply in revolt against poor conditions and a military strategy which seemed wasteful of human life, or were they committed to bringing the war to an end?[13]

The truth seems to lie somewhere in the middle. Those involved in the mutinies had a variety of motives; as an eye-witness reports of one mutiny: “Some wanted peace, some wanted to go on leave, and others were singing the Internationale.”[14] But what is clear is that consciousness was very fluid. Soldiers who had decided to reject military discipline and to refuse to do as their officers told them were moving into uncharted waters. Even if their initial motivation derived from specific discontents about conditions, they were moving into a new situation where they were open to new ideas; the old certainties that had held their world together were collapsing. Those who survived the next year and a half of fighting would return to civilian life profoundly radicalised; many would become involved in the Clarté movement[15] or would help to found the French Communist Party.

The soldiers rapidly improvised forms of organisation – for example by the use of flying pickets to try and spread the action to other sections of the army.[16] But without any  political coordination it was too little, too late. Moreover, there was the problem of unity between the soldiers and industrial workers. Troops in the trenches often felt initial hostility when they heard of strikes behind the lines, feeling that civilians were having a much easier time of it than they were. So even when, as in France in the summer of 1917, strikes in the munitions factories coincided with mutinies in the trenches, it was not possible to bring the two together in a way which could have posed a real revolutionary challenge to the regime.

So the authorities, headed by General Pétain, were able to regain the upper hand. Repression was severe; there were 629 death sentences,[17] though most were commuted; there were between 26 and 57 executions (it is difficult to disentangle which were directly linked to the mutinies and which were for other offences.[18] There was also an attempt to weed out “trouble-makers” and send them to Africa or Indochina. Many were also sentenced to imprisonment; most of these were amnestied in 1921 or 1925, but a few stayed in jail till 1933.[19]

But it was not a total defeat. Pétain and the government recognised that the mutinies had shown a real threat of the break-down of discipline; they responded with both stick and some rather small carrots.

All soldiers were to be guaranteed seven days leave every four months, with additional rest periods away from the front line. The quality of food was to be improved, with kitchens as near as possible to the trenches.[20] But if Pétain abandoned the strategy of offensive à outrance, which had led to particularly heavy casualties, life in the trenches did not change much.[21]

The French mutinies formed part of an international conjuncture. Working-class support for the war, which had undoubtedly been very real in 1914, was beginning to wear dangerously thin. In Italy there were massive strikes, building up to the near-insurrectionary struggles in Turin in 1917. In September 1917 the biggest mutiny in the British army, at Étaples, took place.[22] And in Russia the collapse of army discipline was part of the situation that made the two revolutions possible. Between February and October 1917 there were some two million desertions – by the end of the year one deserter for every three men in the field.[23]

There were also mutinies in the German navy in the summer of 1917, but they were only a prelude to the much more serious events in the last months of 1918. The conditions of sailors were very different from those of soldiers. Soldiers in trench warfare were constantly on the move and suffered an appalling casualty rate. Although political literature and political ideas circulated widely, the possibility of developing any kind of political organisation was very limited.

A large ship was a different matter. Here several hundred men lived together in a confined space; unless the ship was sunk there were few casualties; in fact the German navy saw relatively little combat, and the ships were kept in port where sailors could maintain contact with the labour movement on shore. Modern ships required skilled workers, and many seamen were technicians and skilled artisans who often had some experience of the trade-union movement. In short, there was a lot in common between a ship and a factory.[24]

Moreover, the class divisions on a ship were extremely visible. The officers enjoyed enormous privileges in terms of food, accommodation and so on, and they treated the common sailors with contempt. On one ship the seamen were required to row their officers ashore so that they could visit the local brothels, and then wait all night in the cold until the officers were ready to return to the ship.[25] As a result there was enormous festering discontent which eventually exploded.

By August 1918 it was clear that Germany could not win the war; a new mildly liberal government was formed to prepare for the inevitable looming defeat. But the heads of the navy did not accept this situation; they wanted to go down fighting – in Daniel Horn’s words they wanted to “order the High Seas Fleet out on a desperate and heroic but completely hopeless and illegal suicide mission against the British.”[26] As rumours of this began to spread, the sailors became implacably opposed to any attempt to sacrifice their lives for the ambitions of the hated officer class.

Thus a contemporary report of events on the Thüringen, which had been the model ship of the fleet tells us:

“The crew simply locked up the petty officers and refused to weigh anchor. The men told the captain that would only fight against the English if their fleet appeared in German waters. They no longer wanted to risk their lives uselessly.”[27]

Very rapidly radical demands were raised: the Sailors’ Council of the First Torpedo Division produced a set of demands that included abdication of the royal family; release of political prisoners; universal suffrage for men and women; and immediate peace.[28] When the heads of the navy agreed to negotiate on some of the men’s demands, they took this as a sign that they had won:

“The enlisted men of Kiel rose up in jubilation and took over the town. Ten thousand of them staged an impromptu parade in which they marched to the jails and freed all political prisoners.”[29]

As Daniel Horn describes, the revolutionary movement now spread very rapidly and moved beyond the navy and the coastal towns:

“As early as November 4, individual sailors and groups of sailors had begun streaming out of Kiel by truck, train, and ship, fomenting revolution wherever they went. Illustrative of this process are actions of the Third Squadron of the High Seas Fleet. On November 5 that unit, flying the red flag of revolution, had anchored at Travemünde and landed five hundred men who marched off towards Lübeck. Without their firing a shot, the entire town with its garrison had surrendered and gone over to the revolution.”[30]

Within a couple of days “on November 7 …. a band of sailors waving red flags arrived by train in Cologne. Within a few hours they subverted a garrison of forty-five thousand men, opened all the jails, and assumed power through a sailors’ council.”[31]

Within a matter of days the sailors had evolved from making demands that related specifically to their life on board ship – such as equal rations for officers and enlisted men and freedom not to salute officers when off duty[32] to challenging the whole social and economic system. As with the French mutinies, ideas were in a state of flux; the sailors were setting out to change things, and in the process they were changing themselves.

A fascinating insight into how people and their ideas change is provided by the diary of seaman Richard Stumpf. Stumpf served as an ordinary seaman throughout the war; he was a devout Catholic and generally nationalistic and conservative in his attitudes; yet he bitterly resented the bullying arrogance of the officers. He recorded his experience of the mutinies, and the way he and his fellow-sailors were beginning to realise their power:

“What has happened to the almighty power of the proud captains and staff engineers? Now, at last, after many years, the suppressed stokers and sailors realize that nothing, no, nothing, can be accomplished without them. Can this be possible? After having lived for such a long, long  time under this iron discipline, this corpse-like obedience, it appears hardly possible.”

He was becoming increasingly aware of the contradiction between his own conservatism and his hatred and resentment of the officer class:

“Long years of accumulated injustice have been transformed into a dangerously explosive force which now erupts with great power all around. My God – why did we have to have such criminal, conscienceless officers? It was they who deprived us of all our love for the fatherland, our joy in our German existence, and our pride for our incomparable institutions. Even now my blood boils with anger whenever I think of the many injustices I suffered in the navy…. Now, however, it feels wonderful to demonstrate our power, to ignore orders and to assert ourselves.”

And he noted, almost in surprise:

“Within the past two days an unbelievable change has taken place within me. [I have been converted] from a monarchist into a devout republican.”[33]

On 9 November Germany itself was converted into a republic; two days later the war came to an end. The naval mutinies had led to a process which overthrew the monarchy. For the next five years Germany appeared to be on the very brink of revolution. If it had succeeded Hitler’s name would never have been known and “socialism in one country” would have been a meaningless notion. The reasons why this did not happen are outside the scope of this lecture.[34]

But already western leaders had a fresh target – they wanted to overthrow the Bolshevik regime in Russia, which offered workers in the west a model of an alternative to the society that had produced so much death and destruction. On 30 October 1918 an armistice was signed with Turkey, opening up the Dardanelles to the Allies. On 16 November Allied ships entered the Black Sea. A large number of French warships were sent to the Black Sea and the ports of Odessa, in the Ukraine, and Sebastopol were occupied by French troops.

But there was now a widespread feeling among the rank and file that they had done the job they joined up for, and that they should go home. Among troops sent to the Ukraine was  the 58th infantry regiment, originating from Avignon, which had a revolutionary action committee. Some of these were soldiers  who had mutinied on the French front in 1917 and had been deported to the Eastern army. In early February, it was the first regiment to refuse to fight against the Bolsheviks. The regiment was disarmed, and then sent to Morocco, where its men were drafted into disciplinary companies.

The Bolsheviks realised that their best hope was to try and win support from the soldiers and sailors being sent to attack them, men who were war-weary and potentially sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause.

Necessarily this lecture has been mainly about men; but here I want to mention a remarkable woman who played a significant rôle in the process. Jeanne Labourbe was born into a peasant family in Burgundy in 1877, she was a shepherdess in her early years, but at the age of eighteen she went to work in Russia for a Polish family as maid and governess. In 1903 she became politically active for the  first time. She knew Rosa Luxemburg and helped to smuggle people and correspondence across frontiers. At the time of the 1905 Revolution she joined the Bolshevik Party, being the first French member of that organisation. At the time of the October Revolution she was working as a teacher in Russia. In February the French Communist group in Russia agreed that she should immediately go to Odessa with a small group of supporters.       Leaflets distributed by Odessa Communists explained to the French soldiers what Bolshevism was:

You have been told about Bolshevism, and the bourgeois press has made a huge fuss about it, claiming that it is the establishment of arbitrary rule, that the Bolsheviks are thieves and criminals.

Comrades, you must know the truth. A Bolshevik is an individual fighting for the  immediate achievement of a socialist society. Bolshevism is socialist society in practice.

It is the establishment of the power of workers and peasants, of those who have always been the tools of the rich and powerful, of those who have worked unceasingly and without reward in workshops, mills, factories, and in the fields, who have bled for the others in great battles. Bolshevism is the rule of workers’ and peasants’ councils (soviets), established in every town and village, and which control all countries. These councils are the only democratic form which can finally enable the proletarian class to rule for itself. That is what Bolshevism is.

Labourbe wrote articles and leaflets addressed to French troops. But she also took on the more risky, but absolutely necessary task of making direct contact with French troops. Members of her group talked to soldiers in the streets and cafés of the town. News spread through the barracks that there was a Frenchwoman in Odessa. She talked freely to French soldiers, addressing them as ‘my children’. When she argued that the Bolsheviks were developing the revolutionary traditions of 1793 and the Commune, she got a rapid and sympathetic response from the young men. The French-language newspaper Le Communiste published letters from soldiers and sailors showing the development of an oppositional mood.

Clearly the French authorities could not allow this to continue. On 2 March a group of French and White Russian officers arrested Labourbe and a number of her comrades following betrayal by a provocateur. After interrogation six women were taken by car to a cemetery and there they were shot. Some of the women were raped and the bodies were viciously disfigured.

But the French authorities had to admit defeat. Just one month later it was decided that the troops were not reliable enough to hold Odessa, and the French withdrew. A pro-Bolshevik regime was re-established in the city. A hundred thousand people attended Labourbe’s funeral.

Mutiny now spread to the French warships in the Black Sea. As in the German navy, warships had much in common with factories, and there was a high level of politicisation. On most of the French warships action committees had been formed, often instigated by sailors or petty officers who were engineers; engineers were often more revolutionary because of the  similarity between their work and that of a factory worker.

One of the Socialist Party deputies, Pierre Brizon, who had attended the anti-war conference at Kienthal in 1916, edited the paper La Vague (The Wave) which had a circulation of 300,000. It had an enormous influence in the army and navy, where it was often passed around hundreds of readers. Each issue had a column of correspondence from soldiers and sailors. Cuttings from it reached soldiers, inserted inside reactionary papers. Or else the sailors took out a subscription to the paper, and if it arrived on board, even if it was confiscated by the officer in charge of censorship, the sailors had it returned to them surreptitiously by the officer’s orderly.

There were a number of political activists on the ships, for example chief engineer André Marty, who had a long political past; he had been a  professional seaman before 1914, involved with the socialist paper Cri du  marin; since 1917 he had been in close contact with the revolutionary syndicalists and anti-war socialists from Paris.

Marty used to give technical instruction to the mechanics and stokers, but he took the opportunity to make political propaganda; he always began his lectures by saying that the working class would soon have to take over the running of society, and that therefore young workers should be prepared technically for the task. He also circulated copies of newspapers received by the ship’s officers; although these were reactionary, they reported strikes and revolutionary events in Germany, Austria and Hungary, and helped to make the sailors aware of the world situation.[35]

A participant account[36] describes how events developed.

“On 16 April, the battleship France arrived at Sebastopol from Odessa. The landing party went ashore.

“It was their job to block the advance of the Red Army which was approaching Sebastopol. On 17 April the ship’s bugles called them to battle stations.

“A substantial number of the engineers went on deck and refused to work as a sign of protest. Under threats from the NCOs, some sailors went down to the machines with a bad grace. The die-hards, who refused to obey, were arrested and locked up in the ship’s cells.

“It was then that the sailors realised that a peaceful demonstration had no chance of success. And they decided to take clearly revolutionary action.

“The opportunity came some days later. The officer in command had decided that the loading of coal would take place on 20 April, which was Easter Sunday. It was a laborious task, and so there was great discontent.

“The word went round: ‘Those who don’t want to carry coal, assemble on the forecastle, after piping to quarters in the evening.’

“Lagaillarde, who had been appointed to give a lead to the meeting, first of all sang love songs, then the Odessa Song (a French revolutionary song, composed by unknown soldiers), then the Internationale. Almost all the crew turned up, with 600 men taking up the chorus. The officers were going crazy; they gathered on the quarter deck, and took up arms. The neighbouring Jean-Bart was joining in. In turn the sailors rushed to the stern where the infantry arms were stored, shouting ‘Guns!’ They went down to the prison cells and opened them up. Thus among others they released Virgile Vuillemin, a sailor-engineer aged twenty, who had been in solitary confinement and who was to take the lead of the mutiny. Vuillemin was elected at the same time as two other comrades.

“The delegates presented their demands to the deputy commanding officer:

1. An end to the war against Russia;
2. Immediate return to France;
3. Less rigorous discipline;
4. Improved food;
5. Leave for the crew.

“Then they went in a steam-launch to the battleship Jean‑Bart and stated their demands: ‘To Toulon! No more war against the Russians!’ ‘Rise up! Rise up! Revolution!’ they shouted, shaking the hammocks.

“Vice-Admiral Amet, commander of the fleet, arrived on board the France. Sailors and Admiral stood face to face. The Admiral’s sermon was interrupted by shouts of ‘Take him away! Kill him!’ When he claimed that the Bolsheviks were bandits, a mutineer shouted at him: ‘You’re the biggest bandit’. The demonstrators abandoned Amet there  and went to the quarter deck singing the Internationale and the Odessa Song.  The Admiral, furious, left the ship shouting threats.

“Amet had no more luck on the Jean-Bart. Almost all his musicians were playing the revolutionary anthem accompanied by the sailors singing in chorus. The officers of the ship then ordered hogsheads of wine to be brought up onto the deck in the hope of getting the crew drunk. But the mutineers placed a picket around the receptacles. Nobody touched them.

“The next day, 20 April, Easter Sunday, almost all the sailors of the France and the Jean-Bart, instead of saluting the tricolour flag raised aft, stood facing the bow and sang the Internationale, while the red flag was raised on the bowsprit mast on both boats simultaneously.

“A lieutenant-commander, shaking his fist at the red flag, shouted: ‘You don’t know what that rag stands for, it means civil war!’ Two hundred sailors lined up three deep in front of the revolutionary standard. The Vice-Admiral came on board. When he approached the first row of men protecting the red flag, the sailors warned him that if he took one more step forward, they would throw him in the sea. There were shouts of: ‘Kill him! Throw him in the water!’

“The Admiral then gave the crews permission to go ashore. But it was a planned ambush. A group of sailors formed a procession singing the Internationale through the streets of Sebastopol, and received a warm welcome from the population. In front of the town hall the president of the Bolshevik revolutionary committee greeted the demonstrators. But a lieutenant-commander tried to grab the red flag and got a couple of smacks in the face. In response, without warning, salvoes of bullets swept across the street: fire had been opened by Greek soldiers and the sub-lieutenant, accompanied by two petty officers from a section of the landing party from the Jean-Bart, while for their part, the men were firing in the air. It was a massacre. There were a very large number of killed and wounded among the sailors and Soviet working-class population.”

But this setback did not prevent the mutinies from spreading. Thus on the battleship Justice which had anchored close to the other two,  “the spark which set off the explosion was a simple task concerning potatoes. The sailors had only been given frozen or rotten potatoes to peel. There were lively protests. Vice-Admiral Amet, already very busy elsewhere, had just arrived on the battleship. He summoned the crew to assemble on the quarter deck. When he stated that it was necessary to ‘bring down the Bolsheviks’, the sailors could stand it no longer. They sang the Internationale. Then the superior officer made the ludicrous suggestion: ‘Boys, sing the Madelon if you like. Not the Internationale.’ Shouts burst out: ‘Bandit! Throw him in the water!’ He was jeered and potatoes were thrown at him as he left the ship shattered, while the red flag was raised.”

“A few days later, from 19 to 21 June, it was at Bizerta, then an important French war-port, that the crew of the battleship Voltaire  rebelled, again as it was about to leave for the  Black Sea. The stoker Alquier declared to the officer in command: ‘The bourgeoisie can go to Russia if they want to. We have nothing to defend over there.’”

Though the mutinies were suppressed eventually, they undoubtedly helped to relax the pressure on the Bolsheviks from the south, and make their contribution to enabling the Bolshevik state to survive. The mutineer most harshly treated was André Marty, who was sentenced to twenty years hard labour. A powerful propaganda campaign won an amnesty for the  Black Sea mutineers in July 1922, but Marty was released only a year later. He went to be a leading member of the French Communist Party for thirty years before being expelled on bizarre charges in 1952.[37]

But despite the repression and victimisation, despite the subsequent setbacks, the mutinies should not be forgotten. They demonstrate that, in the last resort, war can only be fought if soldiers are willing to fight it, and that disobedience is the best way to bring fighting to an end.