But John having died, the Pope and the English aristocracy changed their allegiance to his nine-year-old son, Henry, forcing the French and the Scots armies to return home.

This had two aims: firstly to put pressure on the Elector to fight or come to terms before Tallard arrived with reinforcements ; and secondly, to ruin Bavaria as a base from which the French and Bavarian armies could attack Vienna, or pursue the Duke into Franconia if, at some stage, he had to withdraw northwards.

Hermann Göring had promised the Luftwaffe would complete the destruction of the encircled armies, but aerial operations did not prevent the evacuation of the majority of Allied troops ( which the British named Operation Dynamo ); some 330, 000 French and British were saved.

This left the French armies much reduced in strength ( although not demoralized ), and without much of their own armour and heavy equipment.

It has been argued by John Mosier that, while the French soldiers in 1940 were better trained than German soldiers, as were the Americans later, and the German army was the least mechanised of the major armies, its leadership cadres were both larger and superior and their high standards of leadership were the primary reason for the successes of the German army in World War Two as it had been in World War One.

In the First World War, the Cubist painter Andre Mare designed camouflage schemes for the French, British and Italian armies.

Ironically, the rise of infantry in the early 16th century coincided with the " golden age " of heavy cavalry ; a French or Spanish army at the beginning of the century could have up to half its numbers made up of various kinds of light and heavy cavalry, whereas in earlier medieval and later 17th century armies the proportion of cavalry was seldom more than a quarter.

The British and French armies dismounted many of their cavalry regiments and used them in infantry and other roles: the Life Guards for example spent the last months of the War as a machine gun corps ; and the Australian Light Horse served as light infantry during the Gallipoli campaign.

There was a general reduction in the number of cavalry regiments in the British, French, Italian and other Western armies but it was still argued with conviction ( for example in the 1922 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica ) that mounted troops had a major role to play in future warfare.

These theories were given credence by the fact that when Germany surrendered in November 1918, its armies were still in French and Belgian territory, Berlin remained 450 miles from the nearest front, and the German armies retired from the field of battle in good order.

Earlier dragoon responsibilities for scouting and picket duty had passed to hussars and similar light cavalry corps in the French, Austrian, Prussian, and other armies.

In 1809, French dragoons scored notable successes against Spanish armies at the Battle of Ocana and the Battle of Alba de Tormes.

In 1914 there were still dragoon regiments in the British, French, German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Peruvian, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Spanish armies.

In 185 battles that France had fought over the past 800 years, their armies had won 132 times, lost 43 times and drawn only 10, giving the French military the best record of any country in Europe ".

Resurgent French armies secured victories in dynastic conflicts against the Spanish, Polish, and Austrian crowns.

The French armies defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Jemappes on 6 November, and had soon taken over most of the Austrian Netherlands.

In the Brunswick Manifesto, the Imperial and Prussian armies threatened retaliation on the French population if it were to resist their advance or the reinstatement of the monarchy.

The Foreign Legion has remained an important part of the French Army, surviving three Republics, the Second French Empire, two World Wars, the rise and fall of mass conscript armies, the dismantling of the French colonial empire, and the loss of the Foreign Legion's base, Algeria.

French domination was assured by the defeat in 1898 of the armies of Samori Touré, Mansa ( or Emperor ) of the Ouassoulou state and leader of Malinké descent, which gave France control of what today is Guinea and adjacent areas.

Whatever the reason for the failure, the French and German armies returned home, and a few years later Damascus was firmly under Nur ad-Din's control.

These Berber militias were able to resist the French and Spanish armies for over 30 years, from 1907 to 1933.

Known to the Iranians by the Pahlavi compound word kah-ruba ( from kah “ straw ” plus rubay “ attract, snatch ,” referring to its electrical properties ), which entered Arabic as kahraba ' or kahraba, it too was called amber in Europe ( Old French and Middle English ambre ).

Aimoin ( c. 960-c. 1010 ), French chronicler, was born at Villefranche-de-Longchat about 960, and in early life entered the monastery of Fleury, where he became a monk and passed the greater part of his life.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word baroque is derived from the Portuguese word " barroco ", Spanish " barroco ", or French " baroque ", all of which refer to a " rough or imperfect pearl ", though whether it entered those languages via Latin, Arabic, or some other source is uncertain.

As usual in such cases, many other loans from French, English and the classical languages have subsequently entered the language as well.

The term " Bohemianism ", when used to mean " social unconventionality ", comes from the French bohémien " Gypsy " " because Romani people were thought to come from Bohemia, or because they perhaps entered the West through Bohemia ".

The word clarinet may have entered the English language via the French clarinette ( the feminine diminutive of Old French clarin or clarion ), or from Provençal clarin, " oboe ".

The original Berber name, Anfa ( meaning: " hill " in English ), was used by the locals, and Berber-speaking, city dwellers until the French occupation army entered the city in 1907 and adopted the Spanish name, Casablanca.

The word dragon entered the English language in the early 13th century from Old French dragon, which in turn comes from Latin draconem ( nominative draco ) meaning " huge serpent, dragon ," from the Greek word δράκων, drakon ( genitive drakontos, δράκοντος ) " serpent, giant seafish ", which is believed to have come from an earlier stem drak -, a stem of derkesthai, " to see clearly ," from Proto-Indo-European derk-" to see " or " the one with the ( deadly ) glance.

Caliburnus or Caliburn became Excalibur, Escalibor, and other variations when the Arthurian legend entered into French literature.

Via the French Alberon, the same name has entered English as Oberon – king of elves and fairies in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream ( see below ).

The word flute first entered the English language during the Middle English period, as floute ,, or else flowte, flo ( y ) te, possibly from Old French flaute and from Old Provençal flaüt, or else from Old French fleüte, flaüte, flahute via Middle High German floite or Danish fluit.

On 19 March, the first Allied act to secure the no-fly zone began when French military jets entered Libyan airspace on a reconnaissance mission heralding attacks on enemy targets.

The earliest use of the term " Industrial Revolution " seems to be a letter of 6 July 1799 by French envoy Louis-Guillaume Otto, announcing that France had entered the race to industrialise.

It is unlikely that the Germans named the lake so for being shallow since the adjective is a Greek loanword that was borrowed via French and entered the general German vocabulary in the 17th century.

The word entered English from a French word which probably derived from Italian moschea, a variant of Italian moscheta, from either Armenian mzkiṭ or Greek μασγίδιον, from Arabic masjid, meaning " place of worship " or " prostration in prayer ", from the Arabic sajada, meaning " to bow down in prayer " or " worship ", probably ultimately of Aramaic origin.

German, French, Flemish, Danish, Dutch, and Norwegian colonists entered the area shortly afterward.

With the support of Prince Louis the French Heir and of King Alexander II of the Scots, they entered London in force on 10 June 1215, with the city showing its sympathy with their cause by opening its gates to them.

The English word nitrogen ( 1794 ) entered the language from the French nitrogène, coined in 1790 by French chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal ( 1756 – 1832 ), from " nitre " + Fr.

But when French minister Citizen Genêt set up a network of pro-Jacobin " Democratic-Republican Societies " that entered American politics and attacked President Washington, Webster condemned them.

The term changed little with the Latin philologia, and later entered the English language in the 16th century, from the Middle French philologie, in the sense of " love of literature ".

Peine forte et dure ( Law French for " hard and forceful punishment ") was a method of torture formerly used in the common law legal system, in which a defendant who refused to plead (" stood mute ") would be subjected to having heavier and heavier stones placed upon his or her chest until a plea was entered, or as the weight of the stones on the chest became too great for the condemned to breathe, fatal suffocation would occur.