Online Deals by MyDeal

Enjoy up to $0 off your order by spending your Everyday Rewards dollars

Poilu

Image 1
Best Price in the Last 14 Days
Hurry! 4 items left!
$24.80
You save 12%Was $28.13

Collect 24 Everyday Rewards points

Log in to MyDeal to link your card
Sold & shipped by The Nile
Secure ways to pay at checkout
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.

SKU: 9780300212488

Estimated Delivery Time Frame:5-10 business days

Ask a Question About This Product

Reference ID: 15004394

Proudly growing a MyDeal Forest

By purchasing from MyDeal, you're helping us plant 8.6 hectares of trees per year with Greenfleet