Guerre totale et guerre sacrée

While many authors used to depict the World War I as a senseless and gruesome carnage, some gave it a spiritual meaning and tried to show it as a fight for the highest values of humanity. La Chanson de Vaux-Douaumont, by French catholic writer Henry Bordeaux is a perfect illustration of this tendency: describing the fights around Verdun in 1915 for the control of the Fort de Vaux and the Fort of Douaumont, he presents them as parts of a holy war, comparing the French victory to Charlemagne’s revenge after the last stand of Roland at Roncevaux. This contribution will focus on the three main arguments used by Bordeaux in this process: his references to the Middle Ages, his comments about the death of the soldiers on the battlefield, and the depicting of the Germans as desperate yet feral enemies, fighting for an oppressive and cruel empire who needs to be defeated by the Virtue of the French and their allies.