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Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918, by Louis Barthas
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The harrowing first-person account of a French foot soldier who survived four years in the trenches of the First World War
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.
- Sales Rank: #55654 in Books
- Brand: Barthas, Louis/ Strauss, Edward M. (TRN)/ Cowley, Robert (FRW)/ Cazals, Rmy (INT)
- Published on: 2015-03-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.00" h x 5.70" w x 9.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 480 pages
Review
“This translation of the diaries and letters of a French corporal on the Western front in World War I brings the gritty reality of trench warfare to an English-speaking audience in a manner unparalleled even in the best soldier writings from that war. The reader feels and smells and hears the mud, the blood, the fear, the deafening noise of exploding shells, the clatter of machine guns, the cries of the wounded and dying. Here is the war as the men in the trenches experienced it.”—James McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom (James McPherson)
“This book shows clearly and viscerally what were the origins of French soldiers’ pacifism. . . . Barthas’s voice is unlike any other I know in the vast literature on the First World War. The translation is excellent; the grittiness of the text is captured beautifully, and so is the humanity of the man who wrote it.”—Jay Winter, Yale University (Jay Winter)
"A revelatory book that brings the French experience of the Great War to life as you read. However much we may think the British and Americans suffered, their agony was shorter and less intense than the tragedy that overwhelmed the French nation in 1914-1918."—Peter Hart, author of The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War (Peter Hart)
“Ah, the notebooks of Louis Barthas! This book has profound historic value. It is also a genuine work of literature.”—François Mitterrand, former president of France (François Mitterrand)
“Louis Barthas’ stunningly honest, graphic and gripping narrative has rightly made Poilu a classic trench memoir.”—Douglas Porch, author of The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force (Douglas Porch)
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“In Barthas’ telling, the fighting men on both sides of No Man’s Land shared a more natural bond with their fellows than with those career officers who pitted them against each other. Barthas’ detailed real-time reportage captures instances of informal truces and slowdowns between combatants, as they tacitly aid one another in their shared struggle to survive the madness.” —David Wright, The Seattle Times
(David Wright The Seattle Times)
“Among World War I books being published in this centennial year of that conflict's start, none likely can connect readers more directly or vividly to the experience of those who fought it.”—Alan Wallace, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (Alan Wallace The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
About the Author
Louis Barthas (1879–1952) was a cooper in a small town in southern France. Edward M. Strauss is a fundraising director in higher education and former publisher of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. He lives in New York City.
Most helpful customer reviews
30 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
A gripping read
By HH
I stayed up late last night to finish Poilu, the WWI diary by a French infantryman who fought in the trenches, which was recently translated by Ed Strauss. It is a fascinating read for anyone interested in WWI history and the book's straightforward recounting of life in the trenches is gripping.
This is a contribution to the literature on WWI; I'm sure anglophone scholars will relish it, especially during the centennial celebration period.
I personally read it more as a story and couldn't put it down.
Just as I was getting ready to post this comment, I read a laudatory review from the New York Times dated April 20, 2014.
56 of 66 people found the following review helpful.
5 stars. French Trench Horrors Vitiate the Allied Victory in World War One
By Dr. Robert S. Kurtz
The republication in a new edition from Yale University Press in 2014 of the trench notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas provides a strong counter to the extant interpretation of the meaning of WWI as opposed to the view of those who fought the war. The centennial of the start of the war has already resulted in studies by major historians of the how the conflict began, such as "The Sleepwalkers" by Christopher Clark, "July 1914 Countdown to War" by Sean McMeekin, and "The War that Ended Peace" by Margaret MacMillan. Over the next four years no doubt accounts of the various battles of the war will also be published. For approximately four decades after the end of the war, the western historical impression was that it was a futlile, pointless, bloody slaughter, a war in Churchill's phrase of "lions led by donkeys", worst among whom was Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commanding the BEF at the Somme, Passchendaele, etc. Historiography began to change in the late 50's and early 60's, with the principal provocateur the late John Terraine, a non academic but prolific historian. His study of Haig, "The Educated Soldier", shifted at least the opinion of conservative historians away from viewing Haig as the butcher of the Somme, and a callous uncaring man, to thinking of him as brilliant and tenacious enough to keep trying to pry open the German lines until at last in September 1918 he succeeded and shortly thereafter ended the war with Germany by an Armistice. However, we now have in a form accessible to American and British readers the hair raising concurrent war notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, who, incredibly, survived four years in and out of combat in the French Army on the Western Front, often in close contact with, replacing and replaced by English troops. Obviously he did not serve under Field Marshal Haig, though he did serve under formidable French commanders including Joffre, who were equally important as Haig and shared his mentalite.
In contrast with the Terrain type portrait of the ministrations of Haig, and his French analogs as commanders, the picture of war as it evolves in Barthas' notebooks is hair raisingly horrible. Constant exposure to heat, rain, freezing ice snow and cold, living in the open, or in filthy verminous manure-filled shelters, for four years, while being shelled, gassed, and shot, was the lot of frontline French and English troops. The cruelty, utter callousness, tyranny, crude disrespect, unwillingness to share revolting conditions in the front lines or usually to lead attacks, were all characteristics of the overwhelming majority of officers with whom the troops contended. Medical care by the "major", the French equivalent of a battalion surgeon, was sadistic, incompetent and brutal. Barthas apparently by the end of the war had contracted tuberculosis, based on "suspicious rattling in the right upper lung", as picked up by one of the rare good physicians attending him, and marasmus and weakness accompanying his chest symptoms. All this to say that all these manifestations of extremely disgusting conditions in the front lines happened on the watch of Joffre, Haig, and analogous leaders on the Allied (and undoubtedly the German) side, all through the war. Haig and his cohorts then had responsibility for the conditions under which their men froze, starved, sickened, and died, and with poor medical care. They also bore responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of lives wasted in minor combats, with no change in outcome. Their failure to meet these responsibilities counts very heavily in the balance against them. That Barthas is a militant socialist adds zing to his accounts. He hated to have to shoot at German working men, who in his opinion were no more interested in carrying on the war than he or his comrades from Provence were. That his fellow Occitan speakers, and even the Bretons with whom he later served, and who in those far off days seemed initially as if they were from another planet, all saw the war the same way, and had contempt and even hatred for most of their leaders, in direct proportion to the elevation and distance of the leaders from the battle, should prompt us, and concerned historians, to reevaluate the role of the victorious British and French commanders. These men permitted their men to suffer horribly, and as Barthas explains, they could have done better, even as they pursued victory.
This review can just begin to do justice to this densely detailed, beautifully written, and at times, considering its subject matter, even humorous book, based on the weary and often cynical observations of the author. Barthas though through poverty having only finished the 7th grade, won a first prize for excellence in his studies, coming first in his district of France. He is sharp enough to point out that his leaders had stumbled into a war with no clear idea how they got in or how to get out of it. His notion on this account is amazingly close to Clarks idea in "The Sleepwalkers", an historical study written 100 years later. In other circumstances he could have been a professor, rather than a barrel maker.
HIs writing, and the piquant nature of his observations and the importance of the subject make this a very special book, fascinating to read, and important enough to prompt a a historical re-evalution of the role of Marshal Joffre, Marshal Haig and various other French and English worthies among the general officers commanding in World War 1.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Best history of World War I and what is was like in the trenches.
By bb lambert
My grandfather served in the US Army during WWI and I shiver to think of the suffering of men on both sides. Barthas gives a no baloney narrative of what war was about and the insanity of the political and military leadership in that "war to end all wars"! It is amazing to read what men did in the name of cause and country, and how the burden of shedding the country's blood fell upon those of a lower socio-economic class while the elite were pampered and the fat cats made their millions. I have read a number of good histories of the first world war and this was a great addition to my library. Well worth the money.
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