During the first world war, Corporal Barthas kept a diary, totaling some nineteen notebooks; in those books, he recorded his thoughts and actions while serving in the French Army.  A simple but educated man, he hailed from what is known as the Midi, which is Southern France, bordered by the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.  He was a barrel maker, a respected craftsman, a socialist and anti-militarist, none the less, he was called up in his late 30’s to serve in what was a reserve unit.  As the war went on, that reserve unit was called on to enter the front lines on a continual basis and he served in the battles for Artois, Flanders, Verdun, the Somme and the Argonne.  Fortunately for him, his unit was not involved in the bloody offensives but managed to serve in the “quieter” sectors of those famous and terrible battles. He thus managed to escape the murderous infantry attacks against barbed wire and machine guns but was still subjected to the daily filth of the trenches with its rats, bodies in shallow graves and being covered from head to toe in mud for weeks on end. After the war, Barthas set out to complete the notebooks by corresponding with surviving companions via letters and postcards, and re-writing them in new notebooks as the older ones were covered in mud, chewed by rates and subject to all of the indignities of any ordinary soldier. Having achieved that, the manuscript lay untouched until it was finally published in 1978, sixty years after the end of the war and twenty-six years after his death.

His diary is highly unusual for the great classics we have from the first world war were by and large written by officers, such as Siegfried Sassoon, Ernst Junger, Robert Graves and others.  This is one reason why this book is so important; it tells the story of the war from the sharpest end of the bayonet, from the perspective of the average infantryman.  Barthas did manage to attain the rank of corporal (although it was temporarily lost) and it is clear that there was even a noticeable distinction between a corporal and a sergeant let alone the gap with the officers. It is also important as having read literally hundreds of military books covering many nations, I personally have never read a book in which the attitude towards the lowly infantryman was so great as existed in the French army at that time.  If the locations were different, I would have assumed I was reading about the army of the Czar at the time so brutal and calloused was the mindset of the officer corps. 

The lack of care and general attitude that is shown in the pages of the diary are exhibited in so many ways; a lack of leave, poor food, cowardly and inadequate medical care, failure to plan and provide shelter and basic sanitation for troops as they rotate out of the front line, the list goes on and on.  Coupled with the sheer willingness to sacrifice troops in a war of attrition (as General Joffe would say, “nibble at the enemy until there are no more”), there is no wonder that the French army had a mutiny which, had the Germans realized it’s existence, they could have all but walked through entire sections of the French line.  Barthas does not cover the mutiny in any detail, also in his section some soldiers’ councils were set up and he was offered to be elected as the President of his.  Fortunately for him, he refused the “honor” and thus avoided the punishment when the council was dissolved (for more information, read Dare Call it Treason by Richard M. Watt).  It is a miracle that the troops did not turn their guns on their officers.

Barthas makes it clear that the soldiers fought not for glory, honor or the fatherland, but rather for their comrades, the man next to you in the firing line, your mate who would carry your pack as your feet are blistered and you cannot go on, the man who would share the precious parcels that he received from home.  Perhaps after the war, after the pain begins to go away, some of the men will remember what passed as good times, the small victories be they in a fight or in the scramble for a good place to sleep, but Barthas makes a strong argument that at least for the French, the first world war held little to look back on with anything except distain and disgust.

An outstanding book which will make every individual who has not been in the military and especially in a war, look with new respect on those who have given that precious piece of their life for others.  Barthas is in the end no flag waving patriot and he had a different vision of the future; he was against war and we shall never know if he ever came to realize that the human cycle contains that terrible seed that must bloom in order to keep safe the life all man want.