Battle Studies, Ardant du Picq
I read this cutting criticism of the French government's actions in the Crimea, and thought it surprisingly applicable to the French government of today. Ardant du Picq, killed by a Prussian shell in 1870, was a free thinker who's writings have left their mark on military history that is still felt today. Unfortunately the French have never taken his worthy advice to heart, and their failings too are still felt today. In this selected reading Ardant du Picq complains bitterly of the administrations failure to properly outfit and prepare for the soldiers welfare, and contrasts that to the humanity of the British military towards both English and French wounded, and also points out the diligence that the American citizenry took upon themselves as individuals to care for their own wounded.
Its a great book to read in it's entirety, and a great companion peace to B.H. Liddell-Hart's Strategy.
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How administrative deceits, in politics or elsewhere, falsify the conclusions drawn from a fact!
In the Crimea 100% of the French operated upon succumbed, while only 27% of the English operated upon died. That was attributed to the difference in temperament! The great cause of this discrepancy was the difference in care. Our newspapers followed the self-satisfied and rosy statements given out by our own supply department. They pictured our sick in the Crimea lying in beds and cared for by sisters of charity. The fact is that our soldiers never had sheets, nor mattresses, nor the necessary changes of clothes in the hospitals; that half, three-quarters, lay on mouldy straw, on the ground, under canvass. The fact is, that such were the conditions under which typhus claimed twenty-five to thirty thousand of our sick after the siege; that thousands of pieces of hospital equipment were offered by the English to our Quartermaster General, and that he refused them! Everybody ought to have known that he would! To accept such equipment was to acknowledge that he did not have it. And he ought to have had it. Indeed he did according to the newspapers and the Quartermaster reports. There were twenty-five beds per hospital so that it could be said, "We have beds!" Each hospital had at this time five hundred or more sick.
These people are annoyed if they are called hypocrites. While our soldiers were in hospitals, without anything, so to speak, the English had big, well-ventilated tents, cots, sheets, even night stands with urinals. And our men had not even a cup to drink from! Sick men were cared for in the English hospitals. They might have been in ours, before they died, which they almost always did.
It is true that we had the typhus and the English had not. That was because our men in tents had the same care as in our hospitals, and the English the same care as in their hospitals.
Read the war reports of supply departments and then go unexpectedly to verify them in the hospitals and storehouses. Have them verified by calling up and questioning the heads of departments, but question them conscientiously, without dictating the answers. In the Crimea, in May of the first year, we were no better off than the English who complained so much, Who has dared to say, however, that from the time they entered the hospital to the time that they left it, dead, evacuated, or cured, through fifteen or twenty days of cholera or typhus, our men lay on the same plank, in the same shoes, drawers, shirts and clothing that they brought in with them? They were in a state of living putrefaction that would by itself have killed well men! The newspapers chanted the praises of the admirable French administration. The second winter the English had no sick, a smaller percentage than in London. But to the eternal shame of the French command and administration we lost in peace time, twenty-five to thirty thousand of typhus and more than one thousand frozen to death. Nevertheless, it appeared that we had the most perfect administration in the world, and that our generals, no less than our administration, were full of devoted solicitude to provide all the needs of the soldier. That is an infamous lie, and is known as such, let us hope.
The Americans have given us a good example. The good citizens have gone themselves to see how their soldiers were treated and have provided for them themselves. When, in France, will good citizens lose faith in this best of administrations which is theirs? When will they, confident in themselves, do spontaneously, freely, what their administration cannot and never will be able to do?
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