Bismarck Henning High School - History of The Blue Devil

History of The Blue Devil

During World War I, the French infantry unit called the Chasseurs Alpins were nicknamed "les Diables Bleus", or "the Blue Devils". They first gained attention when their unique training and Alpine knowledge was counted upon to break the stalemate of trench warfare in their native region of the French Alps. Unfortunately the Vosges Campaign in March 1915 failed to alter the status quo even though the Blue Devils won accolades for their courage. However, their distinctive blue uniforms with flowing capes and jaunty berets captured the public imagination. When the United States entered the war, units of the French Blue Devils toured the country helping raise money in the war effort.

Irving Berlin captured their spirit in song describing them as “strong and active, most attractive…those Devils, the Blue Devils of France.”

Read more about this topic:  Bismarck Henning High School

Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history, blue and/or devil:

    The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.
    Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)

    Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
    Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)

    It was beginning winter,
    An in-between time,
    The landscape still partly brown:
    The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind,
    Above the blue snow.
    Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)

    Now the devil that told me I did well
    Says that this deed is chronicled in hell.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)