French population in 1914 = 40 million
Dead combatants in WWI = 1.39 million
Wounded 4.5 million
A very high price.
Valiant fighters.
The vast majority of dead and wounded in WWI were men.
So of the 13,000,000 men in France eligible to fight, about 1/4 were directly killed or wounded during the war. Over half the men in France directly served on the front.
The Germans and the British didn't fare much better but the French manhood were indeed bled white.
In WWI it wasn’t that French men couldn’t fight.
For the allies, it seems that their officers (English, French) were incredibly terrible at strategy and their solutions to everything were to just throw bodies at whatever and subsequently get those guys massacred. They stacked up like cordwood.
I mean when the officers and politicians fear that the fighting will stop because the troops on both sides at Christmas come together and start singing, and don’t want to go back to fighting, your officer leadership has problems in the head.