ABSTRACT
In the course of their long history before the twentieth century, the French and the British had fought side by side only rarely. In the nineteenth century the only instance was the siege of Sebastopol in the Crimean War, when alongside 90,000 French soldiers there were only 20,000 British. The tradition was rather for ‘Joan of Arc, Waterloo and Fashoda’, and at the turn of the century the idea of war between France and Britain was not unthinkable. In 1901 the son-in-law of General Boulanger, Commandant Driant, who wrote military novels under the pseudonym of ‘Captain Danrit’, published La guerre fatale, about an invasion of England by French troops.
