Poilu

A day-to-day chronicle of a remarkably observant Frenchman who served from the beginning to the end of the war, this fascinating book is full of minute observations, perceptive insights, and the real, gritty texture of military life, service at the front, visits home, and confrontations with civilian life and politics. Barthas recounts all of this with an engaging immediacy and passion that makes the reader sad to part company with him at the war’s end.

The notebooks kept by a French barrelmaker and father sent off to the horrors of the Western Front had an underground presence for many decades. However, Poilu, the word means hairy one and became the apt term for the French infantryman in the war, did not reach a wide audience until its publication in France in 1978. It became an antiwar classic and a bestseller, only recently published in an English translation. “Cheating death,” he writes, was both a matter of luck amidst “this monstrous avalanche of metal,” this “veritable curtain of steel and fire,” “the disagreeable tic-tac of… show more.