A French machine gun crew from the 227th Infantry Reserve. It was sent as a souvenir to his little sister by Georges.
Reverse:Souvenir a ma chere petite soeurton Georges
"In the camps of some of the most famous of the army corps, mutineers seized the barracks and promised to shoot any officers who might try to arrest them.There seemed to be no limit to the revolt. Most frightening was the fact that four weeks of mutiny had succeeded in contaminating the troops manning the front lines and they had begun to threaten their officers: 'We will defend the trenches, but we won't attack.' 'We are not so stupid as to march against undestroyed machine guns.' 'We have had enough of dying on the barbed wire.'"
After the failure of French commander in chief Robert Nivelle's 1917 spring offensive — the Second Battle of the Aisne, begun on April 16 — an offensive that Nivelle had asserted would provide the breakthrough of the German line that would lead to victory, mutinous incidents broke out in the French army, particularly among the troops that had suffered the highest rates of casualties in the offensive. The mutinies were of greater or lesser severity, beginning in April, with increasingly disruptive incidents in May, and the most violent and serious in the first weeks of June. The Russian Revolution of March provided a model for some soldiers, but few officers were harmed in France. Among the mutineers were soldiers who had survived three years of the suicidal attacks they now refused to continue.
Dare Call it Treason by Richard M. Watt, page 197, copyright © 1963 by Richard M. Watt, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1963
1917-06-08, 1917, June, mutiny, French mutiny, French soldier, French army, French machine gun crew
