The Diary of a French Private: War-Imprisonment, 1914-1915

Do you remember last May, during the week when the great poplars of the Allée Sully were scattering their down on the water of the pond? There was some of it in your hair the mo...

It was obvious when we awoke that we were going down hill. We crossed the duchy of Baden, traversed Würtemberg by way of Stuttgart and the Swabian Jura, with its green valleys,...

It was on August 19th that our company set out from the village of Couture. We crossed the fields to rejoin the Metz road. After we had marched two kilometres along this road, w...

In the evening, when the roll-call was finished and the round was leaving with the _Feldwebel_ and our new Bavarian sergeant, only just recovered from a wound in the foot receiv...

The task is done. They sweep up the peelings. How limp are their movements! To think that they are all men between twenty and thirty years of age. The Lenting curé told us in on...

Everything betrays the stimulus of hunger. Hunger is here the universal mother of artistic, commercial, and industrial inventions; it even induces devotion to the collectivity,...

Dominating the troop was a gigantic chasseur d’Afrique whose appearance drew the most indolent in the fort to look at him. Seen close at hand, he was simply a foot soldier of th...

All at once, seeing a pastrycook’s window, with a grand display of buns and tarts beneath the lamps, with one impulse, without stopping to parley, we hurl ourselves, all six, in...

These were their happy days. The gateway leading to the open was black on Sundays with a gaping crowd: townsfolk in their Sunday best, wearing cocks’ feathers in their green fel...

Now farewell. We must take leave. We must charge our muskets. With stout hearts we shall give to the war and to the fields of battle the finest days of our youth. Farewell, dear...

A Frenchman cannot understand how utterly indifferent are the common people in Germany to political ideas and to questions of state. A Frenchman, whether he knows it or not, and...

Throughout the evening there was an intoxication of generosity. Thrifty men at ordinary times, the French now gave all they had. Il Poverello could not have done better. The hug...

The weather is sombre. The winter is coming on apace. On the grass, rusted by the frost, the leaves fallen from the willows have already rotted. This morning a gentle, damp wind...

Some weeks after the scene in the Place de Broglie, M. von Arnim, attached to the Prussian general staff, accompanied me through the barracks of Potsdam and the camp of Döberitz...

An end, I said to myself, to our evening walks on the roads adjoining the fort. An end to those pleasant saunters in the twilight, a little band of five or six, almost as good a...

“But there’s no end to it. How bitter winter seems in the trenches. Always more dead, and more, and more. My feet are freezing. I am badly fed. Oh, my slippers, my nice, comfort...

They differed little from those of M. Moritz von Bethmann. But on the lips of M. Baum they received an apostolic breadth. The young banker had not shown that he felt any insurmo...

Elbow to elbow and forehead to forehead, the six men at the table are silent. I look down upon the circle of light and the smoke of the pipes. Not a sound is to be heard. Buried...

I had the honour … three years ago to write the Preface to M. Gaston Riou’s first book, _Aux écoutes de la France qui vient_. It was full of fire, impetus, and passion; it was a...