Excerpt from Campaign Diary of a French Officer, 1917
A Campaign Diary, do you say, Reader? If the original were before you, you would not find it, like these printed pages, clean and whole. On it are the marks of war - blood-stains and smears of mud, and, from cover to cover, a hole made by a tiny piece of steel. These you may not see, but for the rest no change has been made. The author is presenting to you his notes just as he set them down at the front. The facts are true, though the form is brief, almost impersonal, and entirely without the literary flourishes that it would have been so easy to add apres coup.
He is very young, this French officer. When the war broke out he was still at the university, a member of that inner circle of the Ecole Normale Superieure, where he was completing his studies in literature. After the mobilization, he qualified rapidly for an officer"s commission and started for the front. His first months there were spent in the mud and desolation of that barren plain known as la Champagne Pouilleuse.
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