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Experience, which occurs within a particular timeframe and is communicated by narratives, represents an important analytical framework for understanding the soldiers who fought in the Great War. French soldiers were caught between a future defined by the need to expel the German invaders, and a present that resisted this imperative owing to the predominance of defensive warfare. The narratives that faced up to this dichotomy turned on the notion of sacrifice, and the erosion of this language led to the mutinies of 1917. Nonetheless, a functional narrative was reinstated during the last year of the war. The more distanced memory constructed by the veterans after the war, without being less “true,” is by its very nature different from the experience of the conflict.