I sat down with some archival documents today and decided to transcribe one that I found to be particularly informative. It is a report drafted by a certain "Captain HB," dated 19 June 1917, sent to the French army's 3rd Bureau on the subject of "The Moral State of Some Divisions." You can read the transcription here: Captain HB.

I see three things in this report.

First, HB denies that the indiscipline is the result of pacifism or the corruption of soldiers by agents in the rear, as was so common in other reports, stating that, "the call for revolution, if it is stated at all, does not signify a desire for disorder and anarchy, but on the contrary, to replace the existing state, [with] one that knows how to defend the people [who are] miserable and were thrown into a war from which nothing good could possibly come." Indeed, Captain HB's very closely foreshadows those of Pedroncini (1967) and Smith (1994) in its interpretation of the mutinies as republican political protests against the Third Republic and its conduct of the war, and not as protests against Republicanism and the war tout court.

Second, it shows an understanding that there was a gradation of distal to proximal causes in acts of collective indiscipline. The author goes from the most distal (the lack of rest among soldiers and consequent combat fatigue) to something more immediate (the disillusionment felt after the collapse of the Second Aisne) to the most immediate (excessive drinking among soldiers in train stations at the front). He sees the multiple casual strands that provided the conditions for the possibility of the indiscipline and identifies a series of necessary causes without ascribing any the power of sufficiency. HB implies through omission that sufficient causes for each individual mutiny--which is to day, the things that reacted with the larger-scale, impersonal, and often structural factors that he lists--need to be found in the specific context of the immediate moral state any given unit.

Third, the solutions that HB suggests--which are, for the most part, to wait for the Americans, to rebuild a sense of regimental identity, and to make it hard for soldiers to purchase alcohol--were precisely those followed by Pétain. Or, more precisely, were precisely those that Pétain was implementing in the first weeks of June 1917 and whose effects would be felt towards the end of the month and the beginning of July. These solutions focus consciously on the psychological and emotional states of soldiers, which HB sees as elements of military effectiveness no less, and perhaps more, important than materiel.

I am looking forward to getting more transcriptions up and perhaps getting some comments upon them.