OPINION:
POILU: THE WORLD WAR I NOTEBOOKS OF CORPORAL LOUIS BARTHAS, BARRELMAKER, 1914-1918
By Louis Barthas
Translated by Edward M. Strauss
Yale University Press, $26, 436 pages
Of the more than 1,000 books about World War I listed in standard bibliographies, very few can truly be said to come firsthand from the ordinary soldiers who grappled with death in the mud-soaked trenches of France. Most armies strictly forbid keeping such diaries; even letters home are usually censored. Few have the time to put down coherent thoughts on their ordeal.
What we have here is the edited translation of 19 schoolboy pocket notebooks compiled by a French laborer-turned-infantryman as he sat in the blood-soaked slurry of trenches during brief respites from almost unceasing machine gun and cannon fire. For all its stark depiction of the total brutalization of ordinary human beings, the author has managed an unadorned literary voice that is both eloquent and passionate. It is spiced by the earthy, wry humor that serves to keep all foot soldiers throughout history from going mad.
The hinges of history that swing from one era to the next always move slowly. Our Civil War marked the first attempts at the industrialization of warfare — rifled weapons, the telegraph, the railroad, destruction that afflicted civilians as well as the combatants.
World War I marks the completion of that swing, but in the first years of the conflict, the French were still hobbled by equipment last used in the Franco-Prussian War and tactics of mass charges of infantry that pitted French elan against the mass wall of death from German machine guns and accurate concentrations of artillery.
The French foot soldier began the war wearing traditional red trousers and a cloth kepi. It was well into 1915 before they were issued less visible uniforms and the first thin-metal helmets — the infamous Casque Adrian — that provided scant but welcome protection against shrapnel head wounds. Those who sneer at French courage would do well to remember that 60 percent of all Frenchmen aged between 18 and 28 were either killed outright or permanently maimed in that war, a catastrophe that echoes in the French memory even today.
Louis Barthas was a 35-year-old husband and father of two young boys living in a small village in the Aude region of the Languedoc wine province when, on Aug. 2, 1914, France’s general mobilization of troops was announced in the village square. He had followed his father’s craft of barrel-making for the vintners, and despite having only the equivalent of a grade-school education, he had read widely as a young man. Like many autodidacts of the day, he had become an ardent socialist and achieved a certain local status as a vocal, if unsuccessful political activist.
Despite his age and family commitments, Barthas would not be spared the mobilization call-up. Starting in 1900, when he was 21, he like all Frenchmen underwent three years of military training and then, as a reservist, would undergo periodic training exercises in 1906, 1909, and finally, another round in June 1914. The tactics he had practiced were of another age.
He had achieved the important rank of corporal (a leader of a squad of a dozen to 15 men), but as a reservist he might reasonably have expected not to actually be thrown into combat in a war that nearly everyone thought would be quick, dramatic and end in the defeat of the hated Hun before Christmas.
However, in large part what draws one into the gothic horror Barthas would endure and, miraculously, survive, is that he is not fooled by what is going on around him. He has a sardonic eye, but an open heart. Like all foot soldiers, he hates officers and despises sergeants. He is uncomfortable in the demands he, as a corporal, must put on the men under his command, yet he loves them as brothers. Most of all he scorns the foolish passions of his fellow countrymen as much as he rebels against the lies being put out by the generals and politicians.
Reacting to the mobilization decree being read in his village square, Barthas calls the prospect of yet another war as “the most frightful cataclysm to affect humanity since the Flood.”
His neighbors appeared overjoyed by the news. “Unthinking people seemed proud to live in a time when something so magnificent was about to happen Everyone got ready, at a fever pitch, as if they really feared not getting there in time before victory was complete. A few headed off even before their appointed departure dates.”
Barthas instinctively knew better. He would not have long to have his dread confirmed. France’s active army was quickly ground into oblivion in the first weeks of the conflict. By December, he and his reserve regiment were rushed to Flanders for the first of their disastrously inconclusive attacks against the wall of German firepower.
He would become a poilu, literally “a hairy one,” the name they gave themselves for the lice-ridden, unshaven, mud-caked wretches they became. For 41 months of the 54 he spent on active duty, Barthas would be out of the trenches for only brief respites. He would fight in campaigns in Champagne, the Somme and the Argonne; he would fraternize with the enemy during rare lulls of peace; and sympathize with but not participate in the later mutinies that swept the French army in 1916-17.
Most of all, he would observe and record faithfully the hell he occupied. We owe him a debt of gratitude, as well as thanks to the original French editor of Barthas’ notebooks, and to Edward M. Strauss, the English translator, a former editor of MHQ, The Quarterly Journal of Military History, for reviving this voice from our common past.
Washington author James Srodes’ latest book is “On Dupont Circle: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt and the Progressives Who Shaped Our World” (Counterpoint).
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