Travels to Alsace: The Prequel

Before the family left for our holiday in France, I watched the French mini-series Les combattantes (Women at War, released in 2022) on Netflix.

Tracing the fortunes of four women, it explores fighting in the forested, mountainous Vosges region of France near the border of present-day Germany, after World War I started in 1914. The Vosges formed the southern end of the French front, which has tended to predominate the imagination of many people who learn about WWI, to the detriment of many other fronts, for example in Gallipoli, or around Austria. (Serbia lost by far the highest percentage of soldiers.)

Caroline is the wife of a minor aristocrat who had inherited his family's vehicle manufacturing company as part of a family tradition, but leaves home to serve as a military engineer. Left on her hands: a factory full of workers who are at imminent risk of being treated as deserters because they are waiting for an official exemption from military service, and half-finished delivery trucks for a local grocer's; her daughter Madeleine, her mother-in-law Éléonore, and her brother-in-law Charles.

Marguerite is a prostitute, capable and chain-smoking and a little fierce, who has driven into town from Paris to find the whereabouts of her biological son. After being adopted out, he has been educated at a prestigious military academy and is now serving as an officer amongst what I think would be termed riflemen.

Mère Agnès is the head of a convent, trying to mitigate the risks to the civilians who live nearby and trying to help the casualties of war (physical and emotional) who stream in from the battlefield — with exemplary gentleness, kindness, and forgiveness.

The nurse Suzanne is fleeing the vengeful husband of a patient who died on the operating table; he wants to prosecute her for a failed abortion. (While I have never read Les Misérables, I think you just need to picture Javert to get an idea of this figure.) In the early 20th century, performing abortions really was considered equivalent to murder by most people, resulting in correspondingly brutal legal penalties, and the series spells this out. The character Jeanne is trying to smuggle her across the border into Switzerland.

But Suzanne feels drawn to her medical work again as she sees the influx of badly wounded men when she is forced to take shelter in the convent. Eventually she makes the decision to risk arrest and death by foregoing an escape to Switzerland, instead assisting the only surgeon, who is the son of a general and deeply overworked as he is the only man capable of triaging cases and performing surgery. (I found the scenes pretty gory. If you dislike blood, guts, and loud groaning, you will not enjoy the mini-series.)

These women are heroines of the series, and one can say that they're nuanced. But I say with all due respect that I've rarely seen a TV series with more one-dimensional villains. Even if redeemed by the plot, they are signaled with the subtlety of a sledgehammer: at least in my opinion, their mean scowls generally give them away. If all villains in real life were that easy to spot, the police would have an easy time.

On the one hand the series departs from tropes like 'a France where only White people ever lived until the 1990s,' or 'a pious Church full of well-meaning people,' or, more trivially, 'guttural-sounding German indicating the brutish soul of the Hun'. — It was quite uplifting for this Teuton to see her fellow country people speaking such flawless French, a tribute to Prussian education no doubt. — It was also good that the filmmakers showed the venality of 'the same side': e.g. sales of cocaine to soldiers who badly wanted to escape reality, even at the risk of an overdose. On the other hand, the screenwriters etc. did take it easy on themselves here and there, taking over a few threadbare tropes like Mère Agnès's wise mother abbess.

The romantic plot for Mère Agnès, I brutally skipped through once I saw which way the wind was blowing. Also I can't say I wholly appreciated being reminded that sexual abuse of children at the hand of other clergy happened in the past as well as the present — because the series was already full of depressing plot lines.

Many historical details seemed correct, based on my past months of research for the story I want to write.

Syphilis was a problem during World War I. Of course the TV series finds new jobs for the affected prostitutes in a kinder way than reality would have done, and as far as I recall doesn't portray the medical effects on soldiers or civilians who contract the disease.

Soldiers were sent back to the front even when they were blatantly unfit due to shellshock or for other reasons.

And so on and so forth.

However the depiction of gas warfare in 1914 is blatantly wrong, as an IMDb website reviewer commented. There must be a storytelling reason for it — perhaps to make clearer that psychologically the nature of war seemed to contemporaries to be growing more perfidious.

Secondly, in battlefield scenes, I think that it would be harder to run dramatically between shells because they would leave gaping holes that would trip up the person who was running.

Lastly, the film does not at all show the perfidious nature of shrapnel...

The filmmakers nodded to outdated social mores of the time, all the while making figures like Marguerite's son rather anachronistically open-minded. But I did think it was silly that the film made the serious injury of one of the characters into a Feminist Moment as the nurse performed surgery to save the character's life... I think that in real life the character would have been focusing on trying not to die and not on cheerleading Suzanne's 'one small step for woman, one giant leap for womankind' sutures.

Mostly the acting is pretty wonderful: it's incredible how the cast sustained so much emotion through very soapy and extreme scenarios that still needed to respect a real-life parallel.

***

Anyway, the film prepared my mind for my peacetime travels to Alsace in two thematic ways:

Firstly, it hinted at the complex history of French-German relations. In Strasbourg [note: not in the film] the semi-recent history was tremendously un-complex, or still complex, depending on how you want to look at it: for one thing the Prussians bombed an entire civilian city quarter to smithereens during the Franco-Prussian War, and for another thing of course the Nazis occupied the city again after Strasbourg was relinquished post-WWI.

Secondly, it showed the beauty of the Vosges region, and hinted at the region's industries and longer-ago history, through the filmmakers' choices of cinematography and locations. It felt shallow to be distracted by summer-lit green foliage, rocky mountain slopes, mysterious forests, soaring vistas from hilltops, a golden hay harvest, etc., during a wartime plot. But the contrast between serene landscapes and mass slaughter was noted by soldiers even during the time of the war, for example as described in All Quiet on the Western Front. The filmmakers shot on location with a genuine sensitivity for what would complement but also perhaps contrast to the plot and its incidents.