I think you misunderstood my point. It was not that morale and motivation, will and “elan” is not important, it is that in certain circumstances it is irrelevant.

The British were extremely impressed with the cohesion and bravery of the Mahdi’s troops at Ormdurman. The Mahdi forces outnumbered the British, and were certainly better motivated,being religious fanatics, yet at the end, Around 12,000 Muslim warriors were killed, 13,000 wounded and 5,000 taken prisoner. Kitchener’s force lost 47 men killed and 382 wounded.

Reality and technology trumps “will” was my point. It doesn’t matter how fanatically you believe in your cause, or how strong your “will”, if I shoot you in the head, you die.

The biggest problem for the French was not necessarily the whole “elan” thing, but the fact that their military was hierarchy-bound and completely tied in with their post-Napoleonic fixation with the “grande école” mentality. It’s a symptom of a larger dysfunction in French society, one that we here in America have taken up with equally idiotic enthusiasm.

What went wrong for the French was the technocratic mentality they’d developed; the essential idea of the credentialed being the only ones you should trust, while discrediting any of those scruffy types who insisted on learning by doing. The inherently self-referential world they built up in their military missed a lot of things, and encouraged a “closed-shop” mentality the same way unions do in the workplace. There’s a reason that most of the French economy is sclerotic and bound up in self-imposed chains, unable to adapt and innovate–And, that reason is closely tied to their worship of the graduates of all those grande école institutions.

You can see a lot of the same problems in the US, particularly in the military. We copied the French for all too much of our military culture, I’m afraid. Their influence has been insidious, far more than most realize.

Hierarchy and the worship of “structure” has probably killed more people than anything else in the last few hundred years. You can’t tell the King that his ideas are bad, so you go along with him when he does stupid things, and then you die. It’s the same feudal mentality across all too many of our institutions–The boss-worship is destructive of initiative and pragmatic recognition of reality. Boss says “That’s not true, we’re not going to do it that way…”, and even though it’s undeniable that they’re wrong as wrong could be, they still go ahead with it all. Blindly stumbling along, while most in the ranks know in their guts that “This is stupid…”. But, because they’re in the ranks, and not out in front…? They’re bumbling along to their deaths.

Hierarchy and the worship of status within that hierarchy will be the death of humanity. It’s that damn simple–We blindly follow the “expert”, and where does that get us, when the anointed ones turn out to be f**king idiots?

Examples abound–The French experience in WWI and WWII, the current incompetent response by the “system” to our current “pandemic COVID” problem… You name it; look around. Failing businesses almost always have employees that recognize the failure, and could turn things around, but since they’re not in charge due to “hierarchy”, guess what? The idiots that are will fly the enterprise straight into the ground.

Some day, we’ll all grow up, and the idiots that wind up in charge today will be relegated to roles more in keeping with their actual competency, while the “rest of us” keep a clear eye on what’s really going on and deal with the reality of things as they are, not what we want to see and believe.

And you’ve picked up a somewhat superficial impression of it. During Francis I’s Italian campaigns, “la furore francese” was a well-known thing, and Gibbon in Decline and Fall talks about the psychological effect on the Arabs of the seemingly endless waves of invading “Frankish knights”. The fact is that strongly motivated troops will do things, and find ways to do things, that more sedate ones won’t. It doesn’t necessarily mean charging face-first into bullets.

Verdun was perhaps not elan but definitely something closely related. It couldn’t have been done without that vigor in morale. No American really comprehends what happened there — particularly not the ones joking about “never fired, dropped once”. Americans have been extremely lucky, and lucky enough not to know how lucky they are.

The French had a strange obsession in the late 19th and early 20th Century about élan, that will alone could prevail. The Nazi government (and previous German generations, see for example Sebastian Junger), had similar beliefs, Yet no amount of will and the “spirit of the bayonet” could overcome machine-guns and bombs.

Fanatics can do a lot of damage, but they are not bulletproof.

I suspect that H. John Poole could be interesting reading for some. He wrote a bunch of books about the “Eastern Way of War”, including one that outlined a lot of the IJA tactics, Phantom Soldier. Other stuff of Poole’s is worth a read, like The Last Hundred Yards and others. Man’s a bit of a Marine iconoclast, and definitely not politically correct, but his history is solid, well-footnoted, and his thinking is clear enough that I can safely say he’s a better tactician than about 90% of the idiots we have writing the manuals for the Army and Marines.

I think Fehrenbach is off with a lot of this, in other words.