art, academic and non-fiction books
publishers’ Eastern and Central European representation

Name your list

Log in / Sign in

ta strona jest nieczynna, ale zapraszamy serdecznie na stronę www.obibook.com /// this website is closed but we cordially invite you to visit www.obibook.com

ISBN: PB: 9780300212488

Yale University Press

May 2015

480 pp.

23.5x15.6 cm

18 black&white illus.

PB:
£14,99
QTY:

Categories:

Poilu

The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918

Along with millions of other Frenchmen, Louis Barthas, a thirty-five-year-old barrelmaker from a small wine-growing town, was conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of World War I. Corporal Barthas spent the next four years in near-ceaseless combat, wherever the French army fought its fiercest battles: Artois, Flanders, Champagne, Verdun, the Somme, the Argonne. Barthas' riveting wartime narrative, first published in France in 1978, presents the vivid, immediate experiences of a frontline soldier. This excellent new translation brings Barthas' wartime writings to English-language readers for the first time. His notebooks and letters represent the quintessential memoir of a "poilu", or "hairy one", as the untidy, unshaven French infantryman of the fighting trenches was familiarly known. Upon Barthas' return home in 1919, he painstakingly transcribed his day-to-day writings into nineteen notebooks, preserving not only his own story but also the larger story of the unnumbered soldiers who never returned. Recounting bloody battles and endless exhaustion, the deaths of comrades, the infuriating incompetence and tyranny of his own officers, Barthas also describes spontaneous acts of camaraderie between French poilus and their German foes in trenches just a few paces apart. An eloquent witness and keen observer, Barthas takes his readers directly into the heart of the Great War.

About the Author

Edward M. Strauss is a fund-raising director in higher education and former publisher of "MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History". He lives in New York City.

Reviews

"There is nothing like this for the French experience of WWI, almost nothing from equivalent British and German perspectives... I believe this will be a major contribution to the study of Third-Republic France, the French army, and the First World War: regularly cited, regularly assigned" – Dennis Showalter, Colorado College