John Sherwin Engall was barely 18 when World War I broke out in August 1914. He had just left St Paul's School, London, and was articled to a city firm as an accountant. Suspending all thoughts of career, he enlisted as a rifleman in the 16th County of London (Queen's Westminster) Rifles. By January 1915, he was a second lieutenant. In 1916, he left England on a military ship to Rouen. This was Engall's first time abroad and it was this, not war, that dominated his early letters home. Shortly after disembarking, he described his impressions:
Rouen's a dirty old town; though I think it is merely a typical French place and is neither better nor worse than anywhere else. I haven't had time to go over the Cathedral yet, but I hope to manage it on Friday afternoon which is a half holiday. From what I have seen there seems to be quite a number of fine churches to have a look at . . . The quaintness of the whole place fascinates me and I love the old carts and so forth, that you see everywhere. The rule of the road mystifies me and I'm always finding myself in such difficulties as trying to get on a tram on the wrong side . . . or trying to push past people on the left of the path instead of the right.Footnote 1
Engall's main themes – curiosity about unfamiliar urban scenes, fascination at their difference from home, a desire to explore noted monuments – recur throughout soldiers’ writings from or about the Western Front. This fixation is understandable, as many of these young men had never visited a foreign country before. Vigorous recruitment drives and the introduction of conscription increased the 150,000 professional soldiers in the British Expeditionary Force of August 1914 to a presence of over two million on the Western Front by 1917. As most were new to war, it is their reactions to combat which preoccupy historians. Yet, in an age when private cars were rare and foreign holidays an exception, few soldiers had experienced international travel. How they reacted to French life, landscapes and culture must surely merit attention.Footnote 2
This article opens up this neglected dimension of Great War history by considering how British soldiers perceived and negotiated French cities during their military service. In recent decades approaches drawn from social and cultural history have shifted the focus of World War I historiography away from military leaders and their tactics to question the impact of war on those who fought it.Footnote 3 Central to this is the aim to recapture how ‘ordinary’ combatants made the transition from civilian to military life.Footnote 4 Historians have argued for a broader identity for the combatant subject and recognized the value of multiple versions of ‘war experience’.Footnote 5 The stereotype of the cheerful Tommy who volunteered in 1914 to become a bewildered victim, returning (if at all) broken and disillusioned after the Armistice has been seriously challenged.Footnote 6 Several studies have demonstrated continuities between men's pre-war and army lives, suggesting that these were essential for survival; others have found instances when troops’ reactions to fighting were less negative.Footnote 7 Yet, although front line service accounted for a minority of men's time on the Western Front, little is known about where or how they spent the remainder.Footnote 8 The combatant subject remains fixed not in the French city, but in the countryside, confined to the Anglophone world of the front line trench, his war experience extrapolated from his reaction to fighting.
This is not to say that sites beyond the trenches have been ignored completely. They frame a growing body of literature investigating non-combatants’ World War I experiences. Studies of the occupation (a term more commonly associated with 1940–45) have detailed war's impact on civilians in towns and villages of northern France.Footnote 9 The capital cities at war project demonstrated war's social, economic and cultural effects on urban communities in London, Paris and Berlin, reminding us that whilst ‘nations’ went to war in 1914, its consequences were felt through ‘collective life at the local level’.Footnote 10 Building on earlier histories that recognized the urban context as ‘an entry point into the study of civilian life in wartime’, it accepted the importance of the city as a unit of analysis through which war experience may be more broadly understood, but moved beyond the ‘top down’ approach of previous work to consider the agency of civilian populations rather than viewing them as problematic groups with needs to be met.Footnote 11 The civilian focus of much recent urban history of World War I complicates attempts to place the figure of the soldier into this framework, however. Although soldiers feature in this writing, their position is transitory, as occupiers, or permissionaires. It is the impact of their presence on the city that is emphasized rather than how the city may have shaped their broader combatant experience.Footnote 12
It is with precisely this question of how urban locations shaped British soldiers’ experience that this article is concerned. It builds on Gibson's concept of the ‘temporary community’ which describes the areas of the Western Front occupied by the British army between 1914 and 1919.Footnote 13 Behind a front line of about 200 kilometres, at any one time, over half a battalion would be at rest in billets, often requisitioned from and shared with French civilians. Rural ‘temporary communities’ were not the only significant location shaping men's war experiences behind the lines, however. Soldiers on rest could explore the towns and cities along the Western Front that remained open for business throughout the conflict; some even visited Paris. Whilst histories told from a civilian perspective have tended towards describing disruption or rupture, British troops who encountered French urban life for the first time during the war were less preoccupied with change. They did not see the wartime city as a site of ‘mobilization, occupation and combat’, the themes of one recent account of metropolitan life in wartime, but as somewhere that might reconnect them with their pre-war lives.Footnote 14 Here, I explore this across three sites; the first sections give soldiers’ first impressions of France then explore attitudes to northern French cities in more detail, demonstrating their importance in providing material comforts and pleasures. The third section examines Paris, whilst the conclusion summarizes the meanings that French cities came to hold for British soldiers who could wait years for home leave.
My main source here is soldiers’ own writings.Footnote 15 World War I was ‘a literary war’ on many levels.Footnote 16 Out of – and occasionally in – the lines, British troops, literate (albeit in varying degrees), wrote and read copiously, producing a continuous stream of correspondence between home and front.Footnote 17 By 1917, the Army Postal Service handled over eight million letters weekly, estimated at one a day for each soldier.Footnote 18 The suggestion that letters contained a sanitized version of war has been challenged by David Englander who noted that, as the army surveyed correspondence to gauge troops’ morale, its veracity may be greater than previously thought.Footnote 19 There were also allocations of uncensored ‘green envelopes’ and some men slipped mail to friends to post on leave despite prohibitions.Footnote 20 Soldiers’ letters thus provide a unique insight into the sensibilities of an entire generation of British men.Footnote 21 I also consider diaries and accounts in the war memoirs through which many sought to order and comprehend their experiences retrospectively. Although some historians caution against such mediated accounts, retrospective writing can be freer in discussion of certain topics.Footnote 22 This is particularly true of non-combatant experiences such as the sexual encounters outlined in many descriptions of wartime urban visits. Charles Carrington, ‘writing for readers in the nineteen-sixties’, admitted that soldiers’ sex-lives were ‘one topic I dare not shirk, though for 1914 readers it would have been a topic I dared not face’.Footnote 23
First impressions
Soldiers’ first letters teem with (largely negative) impressions of France. ‘What I have seen . . . is rotten as yet . . . the whole place looks dirty and most of the French people ditto’, was one typical summary in November 1915.Footnote 24 Nevertheless, a sense of excitement pervades accounts of disembarkation, the sights and smells of the streets and docks of Rouen, Calais and Le Havre and the first sounds of spoken French. Many wrote similarly about the first night in camp, the slow rail journey to the front in trains with huit cheveaux/40 hommes chalked on the side, the gifts from civilians and the mobbing by children shouting for souvenirs in the hope of being rewarded with pennies, or cap badges.Footnote 25
Excitement at hearing French soon gave way to problems in comprehension. Although French was not needed for front line combat, soldiers needed to communicate with locals when on rest. The Active Service French Book acknowledged that troops faced ‘real and constant difficulty if unable to converse with the inhabitants’, but men received little formal language training.Footnote 26 Books like E.F. Harris’ French for the Front provided basic military vocabulary for ‘where is the enemy’ and ‘where have the troops gone’.Footnote 27 Impromptu lessons helped. One captain was amused to find a group of his men ‘surrounding a French Tommy who was endeavouring to teach them French’ in his first weeks in France, but many struggled.Footnote 28 ‘I am afraid that the French “parlez” is not getting on very well “avec moi”’, Ted Trafford wrote to his sweetheart, Pat, in July 1915, ‘but by using very bad grammar and making statements (of not more than three words) with a note of enquiry in my voice I can ask questions. In this manner and with many gesticulations I can carry on a limited conversation.’Footnote 29 Those without French quickly learned enough to buy food and drink in local shops, and wrote proudly of knowing that ‘for an egg you have to think of a horse and say HOOF. Bread is Du Pain, butter is De Burr’ (sic).Footnote 30 Things altered as the war continued. By 1917, soldiers found ‘[t]rench French . . . very little used . . . the people speak very good English, the children especially have picked it up with startling rapidity’.Footnote 31 French traders’ willingness to adapt to English coupled with troops’ rudimentary linguistic skills eased commercial transactions to the benefit of both parties and facilitated movement around towns and cities close to the fighting lines.
Once the novelty of foreign life had worn off, letters shifted in tone and content. Joanna Bourke's study of masculine identity during World War I noted how the normality represented by soldiers’ own homes became the ‘touchstone’ against which all else was measured.Footnote 32 The predominantly urban experiences of most British soldiers made them ill-prepared for life in rural France. French farm courtyards with their central middens evoked universal criticism; sleeping arrangements and the quality of drinking water were similarly derided. Lieut. P.A. Brown wrote to his mother of the ‘tremendous flood of patriotic sentiment in the letters’ he censored, in which ‘English bread and English beer . . . and English countryside and the English language’ were all considered superior.Footnote 33
French civilians proved adept at altering their business practices to accommodate the tastes of incoming troops. Egg and chips and British beer (usually dearer than French) soon appeared on the menus of the estaminets which littered the villages behind the lines. Estaminets (often just the front room of a cottage) grew alongside army numbers; the small village of Maroueil had over 60 by 1917.Footnote 34 They were a popular haunt for men on rest. Private R.K. Lawson explained to his sister that whilst his billet was ‘quite a good one, as long as we have the cash we prefer to sit in a café or estaminet’.Footnote 35 Although some estaminets undoubtedly functioned as makeshift brothels, the majority facilitated more innocent socializing.Footnote 36 One Rifleman described a place in La Gourge
where you simply couldn't get inside the door after 6pm owing to the swarms who went there to feast their eyes on the proprietor's charming daughter, who, to be frank, was remarkably pretty and unfortunately knew it. There were several slightly lesser stars who likewise drew crowds of worshippers to their estaminets.Footnote 37
Army authorities exercised some restriction on opening hours and the type of alcohol sold.Footnote 38 Wine and beer were permitted but premises selling liquor to soldiers could be closed or placed out of bounds. Troops were barred from nine estaminets in Rue at Christmas 1916 when owners took advantage of the season to sell coffee laced with spirits.Footnote 39 Despite regulation, there were no attempts to shut down estaminets entirely, and aside from occasional complaints about price or hygiene, they feature as a high point in soldiers’ writings, forming a hinterland between military and civilian worlds with a semblance of normal life.
Front line towns
Troops on rest could move further afield. The urban centres along the Western Front that remained accessible for much of the war offered welcome diversions from fighting. The Great War magazine in 1917 explained how ‘periodical visits to town did a great deal of good by coming as a pleasurable break to a life of great anxiety, hardship and monotony’. Towns like Bethune, Albert and St Omer were close to billets; larger cities such as Amiens, ‘the half-day holiday centre of all who soldiered in Picardy’, could be visited if the necessary passes were procured; one unit ran a regular bus for ‘any officers and men who cared to spend a day’ there.Footnote 40 Urban outings assumed great importance in soldiers’ writings. They delivered a transient sense of normality by allowing men to re-engage with a familiar landscape of pavements, shops and restaurants, notwithstanding the foreign context. Some enhanced this through comparing French cities with the known, describing Lille as ‘the French Manchester’, or Calais as ‘a dirty hole rather like Blackpool’.Footnote 41 Towns’ proximity to the front line heightened the sense of escape. In earshot of gunfire, they offered a ‘normal everyday appearance of everything . . . cafés with terraces and people drinking beer . . . fine large shops with attractive shop windows’.Footnote 42 Soldiers went to French towns in a true spirit of tourism. Some took complex preparations. Arthur Cornwall Stanton, an older soldier who once worked in Lyons, asked his wife for the Baedeker guide to northern France.Footnote 43 Others explained fares and transport routes or précised the content of local pamphlets for relatives. Roland Mountford had not visited Amiens Cathedral before May 1916, but confidently told his mother that the porch was sandbagged as it ‘contains some famous statuary’.Footnote 44 Historic monuments, particularly ecclesiastical buildings, were described in detail in letters home, and featured prominently in post-war memoirs.
On arrival, sightseeing yielded to different priorities, shaped by men's immediate needs. The ubiquitous presence of death provoked a sense of enhanced engagement with the present that emphasized corporeal realities over aesthetic impressions in soldier's writings so that for most, the urban spaces of the Western Front represented sites of consumption rather than cultural instruction. Shopping became the priority. Villages supplied basics but towns had a variety of shops where men could stroll and look, replicating civilian behaviour in their leisurely browsing. Roland Mountford was struck by the contrast of coming from the front line to Armentières in 1915 where ‘a number of good shops are still open and the townspeople might never have heard of the war’.Footnote 45 Urgent spending could be pragmatic; some French money issued by the regional chamber of commerce had limited validity so had to be used before leaving.Footnote 46 Yet other reasons underpinned soldiers’ frenetic spending sprees. Wandering around Amiens after a period of fierce front line combat, Lieut. Sidney Rogerson realized that, for men deprived of ‘the ordinary amenities . . . and . . . the more sensuous refinements’ of peace-time life, shopping offered a means of escape. Here, ‘[t]hough my actual purchases were few, my shopping took me a long time. There was so much to see, so many temptations to squander money.’Footnote 47 Inessential goods delivered a little private luxury. Rogerson bought scented soap, bath crystals, perfumed pomade and silk pyjamas ‘for the sheer joy of buying’ whilst Lancelot Spicer ‘ruined’ himself ‘on a magnificent pair of silk pyjamas’ in the same city.Footnote 48 Men who could afford such luxuries could easily have had them sent out, but preferred to buy them, suggesting that the pleasure of buying outweighed the importance of what was bought.
Shopping for others redressed the balance of parcels from home. Pressed by the war economy, French traders needed new markets. By November 1917, Peronne boasted several shops ‘stocked entirely with souvenirs’ for troops including ‘shell cases . . . handkerchiefs and pincushions . . . and . . . indecent postcards’.Footnote 49 Many men described French cities in terms of what they offered by way of gifts. In Arras, ‘[t]he things that could be bought were numerous . . . but what sold most was silk cards, cushions and other silk fabrics’.Footnote 50 Sentimental cheap silk cards were a favourite. ‘The soldier sends [these] home in great quantity’, one lieutenant involved in mail censorship noted: ‘there are probably dozens on the mantelpieces of every Durham pit village by now’.Footnote 51 Jewellery, lingerie and children's clothes were popular but shoppers could be more imaginative. Arthur Stanton sent his wife a set of fox furs from a shop supplying Parisian furriers.Footnote 52 With leave uncertain, souvenir shopping allowed men to send something tangible of themselves back home.
Shopping was not the only form of consumption offered by French towns or cities. Cafés and restaurants served civilians and troops although soldiers’ drinking was restricted to the same hours as estaminets, with an extra hour allowed for dining.Footnote 53 Rachel Duffet's research on food and identity during World War I has argued that army practices around meals played a key role in separating soldiers from their civilian life.Footnote 54 This may explain why so many officers and troops were keen to grasp the opportunities urban visits offered to subvert this, or why they described meals in such detail. Visiting Amiens in February 1916, A.J. Sansom spent his ‘happiest day . . . since war began . . . arriving in . . . time for a good lunch, and then a walk all round the town, plenty of bright people and gay shops’. Food shaped Sansom's view of Amiens, and he ended by telling his wife he had ordered her a box of its local delicacies, marons glacés and macaroons.Footnote 55 Divisions of class and rank were replicated in men's descriptions of food. Privates sought out menus adopted for English taste; officers described sumptuous meals such as Graham Greenwell's Christmas dinner in Amiens in 1915, ‘dozens of oysters . . . some scrambled eggs with truffles, then some chicken done in a new way floating in a glorious brown sauce, followed by a lobster’.Footnote 56 Drink was as important as food. French beer fared badly in comparison with English and was variously described as ‘weak’, ‘insipid’ or ‘cats piss’.Footnote 57 Wine drew more comment. Soldiers familiar with it in civilian life discussed its quality – and its decline as the war progressed. Men unused to wine took a different view, typified by C.R. Smith's breathless description of Estaines which shifts from architecture to outlets for food and drink:
some fine shops and ancient churches of gothic architecture, numerous cafes in every street and a piano in almost every one you could have a sing song a good time beer was 1d a glass and red and white wine, red 8d and white 10d a bottle but I never cared much for the French wines, the red was tasteless and the white sour unless you had a bottle of citron mixed with it, the champagne was fair at five francs a bottle.Footnote 58
Soldiers’ desire for drink caused the authorities problems.Footnote 59 Estaminets were close to billets, under the eye of commanding officers; urban France brought opportunities to drink to excess. Local businessmen and women holding débits de boisson (alcohol licences) were frequently admonished by the gendarmerie for selling spirits to British troops.Footnote 60 By 1917, the problem was severe enough to ban restaurants from operating as ‘tea-rooms’ outside of licensing hours.Footnote 61 These changes to the city's usual routine went unnoticed by British troops, whose concerns were more immediate. In urban restaurants, they could eat and drink to civilian standards, temporarily returning their bodies to a pre-war state (military dress notwithstanding). Officers in particular found that French cities provided the perfect environment for recreating pre-war social behaviours. Lieut.-Col. Neil Fraser-Tytler described attending the 4th Army Old Etonian dinner in Amiens in June 1916, with over 160 old boys. Other public schools ran similar events there.Footnote 62
French towns offered troops a vibrant cultural life. Francophone soldiers patronized theatres in larger cities such as Rouen. Smaller French towns had popular cinemas. Private Lawson's visit to ‘a good sized town’ included ‘the pictures . . . It is a change to see a picture show and I quite enjoyed it though the pictures were the daftest I have ever seen.’Footnote 63 French cinema could prove challenging. Jack Sweeney complained to his fiancée that shows in Amiens ‘were not up to much as we could not understand them’, presumably due to the lack of English captions.Footnote 64 French cinemas and theatres were not the only option available. The army and the YMCA supported numerous divisional cinemas and concert parties, in camps and local cities.Footnote 65 Although these were important in maintaining morale amongst troops, the associational culture surrounding them remained militarized. Local venues, by contrast, situated men amidst civilians, enhancing the semblance of normality which was a key feature of urban trips.
The civilian population was, of course, mixed and city visits facilitated easier contact with women. Whilst family or neighbours might curb village girls’ behaviour, urban sexuality was freer with an influx of prostitutes to towns and cities close to the front lines. Despite losing men to mobilization, Amiens’ population rose by 5,000 to 100,000 between 1914 and 1917, much of the increase being attributed to femmes galantes.Footnote 66 Amiens’ size made it the focus of concerns about a wartime ‘resurgence [in] debauchery’, but smaller towns registered similar change on a lesser scale; in Abbeville, only one of thirteen women under police surveillance for soliciting in 1917 was born locally, the others arriving during the war.Footnote 67 Casual prostitutes flocked to the bars and restaurants of Amiens, Abbeville and elsewhere, augmenting the numbers working in licensed Maisons de Tolérance, official brothels that welcomed British troops until spring 1918 when they were reluctantly placed out of bounds after domestic pressure, increasing French concerns about clandestine prostitution.Footnote 68 Whilst villages witnessed some casual prostitution, Maisons de Tolérance and high concentrations of bars and restaurants were an urban phenomenon, hence French cities became associated with the opportunity to have sex.
As most surviving letters were addressed to women, detail of sexual encounters was rare, although not entirely absent.Footnote 69 George Begg told his mother that French girls were unattractive whilst Reginald Oxtoby reassured his sister, ‘you scarcely ever see one worth speaking to’.Footnote 70 Fiancées were similarly appeased. ‘I am being as good out here as I was in England. I am not surprised to hear you mention about chaps getting ruined out here . . . I know how you hate such things and I can assure you that . . . I have a bit more respect for myself than to do such things’ wrote Jack Mitchell to his fiancée, Doris.Footnote 71 Not all troops agreed, however. Mitchell and Smith have calculated that by 1918, 3.24 per cent of British soldiers on the Western Front had contracted venereal disease, often in Maisons de Tolérance.Footnote 72 When a new Maison opened at the Hotel Bellvue in the small town of Cayeux-sur-Mer in August 1917, it was reported that its 15 prostitutes received 360 British soldiers from an adjacent convalescent camp daily.Footnote 73 Such figures suggest brothels were a popular form of urban recreation, despite the relative silence around this.
Not all men enjoyed the sexualization of urban space. In a memoir intended for his child to read in adulthood, Ralph Smith recalled visits to Amiens being marred by constant harassment from ‘a dozen or more little children all chanting the only English I think they knew “Anglais soldat, my sister 2 francs, follow me”’.Footnote 74 Contemporary accounts betrayed similar ambivalence. One man declared himself ‘astonished at the large number of prostitutes [in Amiens] . . . nearly all the women and young girls appeared to be in the streets for no other purpose. I was personally accosted continually.’ This pestering did not preclude his drinking with two women in ‘a flash sort of dining room’ but he left, ‘well aware that this type of women (enjoleuse) merely want money and nothing else and I was determined to give them neither’.Footnote 75 For young Jack Sweeney, Amiens represented the worst kinds of French vice including ‘something . . . I would have not believed anyone if they had have told me . . . [but] I can understand it as it is allowed in France . . . Temptations is not the word for it. Robbery and temptation is at that place.’Footnote 76
When men did write about their urban sexual encounters, their opinion of a town was shaped by the memory of what happened there. Hence, for Lieut. Dixon, ‘It was always pleasant to visit Dunquerque’, where the officer's brothel had ‘a paved courtyard at the back, with a rectangular lily-pool in the centre. Here you might stroll, or sit and drink a bottle of wine with your very sketchily-clad companion – they all sported exceedingly gaudy shifts decorated with ribbons and lace, and not a stitch underneath.’ In this perpetual summer, Dixon found a ‘black-haired, black-eyed wench, whose enthusiasm was quite adequate and whose skill likewise – I stuck to her on the rare occasions when a visit seemed desirable’.Footnote 77 Others remembered the town less fondly. Capt Harold Dearden, RAMC, was ‘dragged round to a motel tea-shop’ by fellow MOs for a squalid, unsatisfactory encounter with a local prostitute.
She was fairly good-looking in a coarse way, dark, big-chested and greasy about the nose and forehead . . . and a series of little dirty pin-heads running symmetrically back along the parting in her hair . . . Her two modes of entertaining were, firstly to show you . . . real pictures of ninth-rate music-hall artists with nothing on doing tedious things with very dirty-looking men who, to do them justice, looked thoroughly bored with the whole affair . . . [then] . . . she proceeded by endeavouring to put her hands in our trouser pockets – a ruse combining the advantages of enabling her at once to give pleasure to us and also to pick up any loose cash that might be there.
‘Dunkirk’, he concluded, ‘is a rather dismal place.’Footnote 78
Not all encounters between British troops and French women in the urban centres of the Western Front involved commercial sex. Men who felt constrained by the artificial single-sex atmosphere of service welcomed the chance of enjoying female company in towns, ‘escaping from the man's to the woman's world’.Footnote 79 French women became ‘a symbol of much that [men] were missing’ amongst ‘the softer if not the finer influences’ of life.Footnote 80 Underage volunteer T.S. Hope was terrified by Calais’ brothels but delighted by its local women:
The girls with their silken-clad ankles and summer frocks are like angels to us, they are all so charming. It is only now, when we are once again mixing in feminine society, that I realise how much we . . . owe to their presence. We become more particular with our talk . . . our behaviours become less boisterous . . . all because there are females about.Footnote 81
Classifying local girls became another way for men to characterize French cities. As R.H. Mottram wrote of Armentières, ‘the town-bred girls of the cotton metropolis . . . were lively, sociable and used to commerce with men . . . that is what Armentières came to mean to some millions of English-speaking men . . . scenes [that] might have been laid in any Lancashire mill town’.Footnote 82 Flirting, chatting with or simply looking at women, as they had in civilian life, drew men into towns as effectively as maisons de tolérance.
Paris
Visiting Paris brought the chance of more prolonged urban pleasures. The wartime capital has attracted more research than other cities on the Western Front, emphasizing the extent to which war altered the city and its inhabitants.Footnote 83 Emanuelle Cronier's analysis of Parisian street life explained how war transformed it.Footnote 84 Following de Certeau's contention that the streets came to ‘speak the war’, she described the city as managing only ‘a kind of normalcy’ amidst ‘a desolate and dark time’.Footnote 85 British military visitors, however, were less aware of change and depicted the city's key pre-war tourist sites in terms evoking popular stereotypes of the Belle Epoque. Men who previously knew Paris sought similarities. Capt. Smith, a close friend of the writer Edith Wharton, had ‘never seen Paris looking so beautiful’ as in the spring of 1917.Footnote 86 Brigadier-General John Charteris noticed how panic in September 1914 gave way to a city ‘as merry and as happy as if there were no war; lots of uniforms, of course, but the cafés are crowded, places of amusement are in full swing’.Footnote 87 First-time visitors were delighted to find the Paris they expected less altered than wartime urban England. Lieut. Pat Campbell noticed ‘so much colour, [and] none of the drabness I had seen in London’.Footnote 88 As Parisians grappled with change, particularly in the banlieu, British soldiers found only enjoyment, excitement, leisure and luxury on scales exceeding the offerings of cities nearer the front.Footnote 89
Soldiers reached Paris in various ways. Some combined military duties with sightseeing.Footnote 90 At least one young private secured ‘special’ leave ‘for business reasons’, to visit the French arm of his family's textile firm.Footnote 91 Resourceful officers with some knowledge of French geography subverted regulations for a few days there. Henry Dundas, a young officer in the Scots Guards, used a two-day Christmas pass for Amiens to take the afternoon train.Footnote 92 But most men came on a five-day ‘Paris Leave’ pass. An addition, not an alternative, to home leave, this was particularly popular with wealthier officers who could afford hotels and entertainment (although ordinary ranks had designated facilities such as the British Army and Navy Leave Club or the YMCA canteen). It was usually easily obtained although experiences differed; one soldier recalled his delight in securing one of his units ‘two passes . . . for one officer and one other rank’.Footnote 93
Five-day passes allowed for a fuller engagement with civilian urban life. The city's size brought greater possibilities for sightseeing and entertainment, and staying overnight was essential. Longer sojourns encouraged a vibrant trade in activities such as touting and pimping, less common in smaller cities. The contrast was evident as soon as men stepped off the train at the Gare du Nord into a station which was refashioned by the informal war economy and ‘oriented towards the hurried pleasures of rest and recreation; gastronomic, alcoholic and sexual’.Footnote 94 As uniform was compulsory on Paris leave, British troops were easy targets as one man explained: ‘If one stops to look into a shop window it is ten to one some Frenchman with very little English will touch one on the shoulder and say ‘Would you look for . . . the Colonel Brett, or is it the Opera you require. You wish perhaps I show you Paris!’Footnote 95
The freedoms of Paris leave demanded greater surveillance by the army. Cronier has shown how non-Parisian French permissionaires were catered for by voluntary organizations such as the ‘godmothers’ or Marraines de guerre whose supervised entertainments and excursions maintained a separation between troops and civilian society.Footnote 96 A few charitable concerns offered similar moral recreation to British soldiers. The British Army and Navy Leave Club in the Hôtel Moderne, Place de la République, was opened on the initiative of British consul general Walter Hearn to prevent troops from ‘falling into bad company’ during their stay.Footnote 97 The club provided 80 beds with prices starting at 1F as well as recreation rooms. Miss Lily Butler's non-residential ‘Corner of Blighty’ Club on the Place Vendome welcomed 40,000 men for refreshments in 10 months.Footnote 98 This popularity paradoxically provoked the problems such venues sought to stem. High numbers of foreign men with money and time to spend made them an attractive target and the French police were soon involved in trying to curb the flow of prostitutes and ‘louche’ characters thronging the Hôtel Moderne.Footnote 99 So, for the most part, men on Paris leave were unorganized and not segregated from the civilian city. After reporting to Maurice Brett, the city's assistant provost marshall who recorded where they were staying, they were free to amuse themselves in a city ‘where civilian atmosphere was the rule, not the exception’.Footnote 100
Accommodation was an important part of freedom. Men had to find this themselves, and it was not until later in the war that the ‘Corner of Blighty’ produced lists of moderately priced suggestions. Most men chanced to luck or recommendations from friends. The more affluent followed pre-war habits; the Hotel Continental which overlooked the Tuilleries from the Rue de Rivoli was a favourite with British officers, along with the Ritz where Henry Dundas discovered new meanings of luxury in 1916:
[N]ever did I imagine that mere bodily comfort could mean so much. After all, going on ordinary leave one generally manages to clean up at Havre or Boulogne, so it isn't the same as this when we practically walked out of the line – and a bloody line at that – into the most amazing comfort. First a wonderful room, with a bathroom attached – then in the said bathroom a bath, which mere words are quite inadequate to describe. Boiling water, huge towels, a tiled floor, aaach!Footnote 101
Such luxuries were not to be taken for granted; the Amy and Navy Leave Club advice to first-time visitors warned men to check that the cost of baths was included in room fees to avoid unpleasant surprises on the final bill.
Home leave was mainly spent indoors with family or sweethearts. The absence of domestic bases increased the sociability of Paris leave and encouraged wider encounters with the city's landscape; with five days men could balance consumption and sightseeing with no fear that the latter could displace the former. More than any other French town, going to Paris meant seeing the sights. There were some organized opportunities. Lily Butler led daily walking tours of historic Paris from her ‘Corner of Blighty’ club, and the Army and Navy Leave Club employed uniformed female British guides to shepherd groups around the main highlights.Footnote 102 There were other sources of advice, including a special issue of Country Life in June 1916 devoted to ‘An Appreciation of France’ that included articles on the Arc de Triomphe, presumably with the intent that readers would send it to men embarking on Paris leave. Men who knew the city were in great demand leading groups of friends around key attractions and, despite writing of the impossibility of covering everything, most managed the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and the Louvre, whilst some reached Versailles. The attitude of this accidental incursion of tourists was not lost on contemporary observers; writing in a special issue of L'Exportateur Français to accompany the 10th Foire de Paris in May 1917, the French socialist MP Antoine Borrel called on his readers to become more ‘proficient in the art of organising tourism’ to tempt English visitors who had come to know the country through war to linger there on peacetime excursions.Footnote 103
As well as sights, other attractions abounded. Cinema and music hall attendance expanded in wartime Paris, partly fed by the influx of allied soldiers. Jan Rüger's analysis of the city's wartime entertainments noted a certain ambiguity towards this expansion which countered men's need for diversion with concerns about the morality of enjoying frivolous amusement so close to the front.Footnote 104 British soldiers described no uncertainty in the pleasure they took from cabaret or music halls. A night at the Folies Bergères was a must with Mistinguett, its star, a great favourite. Henry Dundas wrote excitedly about her to his mother; ‘what a woman, an artist to the finger tips, incredibly attractive . . . superb’. Meeting Mistinguett at the stage door was the highlight of his Paris leave in December 1916.Footnote 105 Others described cinemas, theatres and café concerts with equal excitement.
Given the pre-war reputation of Paris as a site of permissive recreation, it is unsurprising that men's descriptions of their time there dwelt on the presence of women. As Cronier has noted, a feminization of streets and other public spaces was one of the main features distinguishing wartime Paris from the pre-war city.Footnote 106 Soldiers found women in other cities, as we have seen, but the prospect of days and nights in female company and the persistence of pre-war stereotypes leant an added erotic dimension to Parisian stays. C. Lewis’ post-war memoir summarized this, describing Paris in 1916 as ‘a sort of gigantic brothel where women wore nothing but georgette underwear and extra long silk stockings’.Footnote 107
Men's descriptions of Parisian prostitution suggest a larger-scale but more subtle trade than elsewhere. Lieut. Yvone Kirkpatrick even described one encounter to his mother, shortly after the Armistice:
I'm not new to the side shows one finds in these big cities but the quantities of ‘petites femmes’ astounds me. Before I'd been in five minutes one came up to me and asked if I'd have something to drink with her, yes? To which I tactfully declined to her rage . . . still, Paris wouldn't be itself without them, and I must say for the most part they are wonderfully dressed.Footnote 108
Local authorities attempted to reduce unlicensed prostitution. Unaccompanied women were barred from certain cafés and there were strenuous efforts to curb excessive female drinking.Footnote 109 Yet soldiers welcomed the chance of enjoying female company. The size of Paris exceeded the scale of mixed-sex environments elsewhere. This may have increased its sexualized dimensions in some soldiers’ descriptions but for others what mattered most in Paris, as in other cities, was the opportunity to chat, dine with or simply be amongst women over consecutive nights, augmenting their sense of distance from the masculine world of the front line.
Conclusion
Recent developments in World War I scholarship have argued for a less rigid divide between military and civilian society and their varied experiences of war. Urban histories of wartime have begun to consider how cities reacted to the transition from peace to war and the particular challenges this posed. Yet, whilst the various strategies designed to cope with wartime influxes of troops on leave or in transit feature in many of these studies, less attention is paid to what the troops themselves made of their passage through the wartime city. At the same time, whilst studies of morale in the British army have considered the importing of domestic civilian cultural practices into military life in France, they have not considered the extent to which men sustained themselves by engaging with French civilian society beyond the front line trenches.
Studying soldiers in settings beyond the front line reveals further layers of war experience, especially when examining men's relationship with French cities beyond the immediate combat zone. Although periods of ‘rest’ were often spent in village billets, these were shaped by drill, maintenance work and the rhythm of army life. Visiting towns and cities in France, even for a few hours, enabled soldiers to enjoy the sensation of being abroad which was less present in the Anglophone world of the front line trench. Soldiers on rest sought out the urban centres of northern France. Once there, they immersed themselves in civilian leisure, entertainment and recreation, categories that are rarely considered part of ‘war experience’ despite their recurrence in both contemporary and later war writings. In contrast to rural village billets which offered a limited level of engagement with a largely peasant culture, towns and cities introduced British troops to a broad range of foreign experiences ranging from architecture to commercial sex.
Some men found opportunities for self-improvement in urban visits and toured monuments with enthusiasm. Yet, although all noticed dissimilarities between urban life in France and Britain, these were less remarked on as the war continued. Increasingly, what soldiers sought in urban France was not difference but a sense of familiarity and reassurance and an alternative to the army's collective associational culture. These were achieved through various avenues, each involving a degree of replication of civilian behaviour. Some were physical; the commonplace and simple ways of occupying urban space, sitting and looking, but also strolling, eating and drinking, developed new meanings for men separated from these by the front line. Physical pleasures were augmented by more commercial forms of comfort and consumption whose importance was evidenced through men's enthusiastic embracing of the traditionally feminine pastime of shopping as a leisure activity.
Cities held imaginative pleasures too. The profound need of war-weary civilians to access a sense of normality through a nostalgic revisioning of the pre-war past which Rüger and Cronier found to be a critical part of shaping metropolitan entertainment and street cultures during the war is replicated in soldiers’ reactions to the cultural life of smaller urban centres.Footnote 110 Café concerts, theatres and cinemas brought their own forms of escapism not least through the opportunity of sharing space with an audience whose civilian composition and dress contrasted with that at camp entertainments. Between the physical and the imagined were women, who were an integral part of any French cityscape. Whether they were viewed as potential sexual partners or as objects of light flirtation, their presence was a constant visual counterpoint to the masculine world of frontline warfare.
Viewing French urban wartime life through the eyes of British soldiers questions the extent to which war transformed it beyond recognition. Admittedly, foreign visitors were not in the best position to assess change, particularly when making their first visits to unfamiliar towns where their own presence was one of the most noticeable differences. They may also have been prone to exaggerate similarities with their own pre-war urban experiences for the reasons discussed above. Nonetheless, the extent to which men were able to find continuities with their pre-war urban experience suggests that, for much of the war, the surface patterns of urban life remained on show. As one soldier explained, the sense of relief during trips to Amiens, Abbeville and similar places derived from ‘knowing that we were in a town where we could rub shoulders with real civilians and gaze in real shop windows and walk on real pavements’.Footnote 111 For troops uncertain when – or if – they would get home, French towns and cities became sites of pleasure and consumption which were indispensable to their individual survival strategies.
