A Blue Devil of France: Epic figures and stories of the Great War, 1914-1918 — Inside the Classic

The Diary as a Lens on Trench Life

Capart's preface frames the book as a truthful record, yet the diary form itself imposes a particular structure. Entries are dated by month and location—Eparges, Calonne Trench—but lack year headers after the first, creating a sense of suspended time. The prose shifts abruptly from a bombing duel to a luncheon invitation, as when Major X—— offers Turin, whisky, Pernod, and a live lobster. These juxtapositions are not smoothed over; the reader encounters the same tonal whiplash the soldiers lived. The translator's note adds another layer: Drouillard calls himself a literalist, yet admits to leaving French phrases untranslated where needed, signaling that some textures of the original resist transfer.

Recurring Motifs: The Corpse, the Grave, the Mud

Several entries return to the physical presence of death. In "Herman and His Canteen," a German officer's body lies fifty yards away for months, its brass buttons coveted for cigarette lighters, its boots rotting under a bed of mushrooms. The Eparges cemetery is shelled systematically, and poilus mutter, "Again they're murdering our dead." A lost soldier finds his bearings by touching a grave marker. These details are not sentimentalized; they are reported with the same flatness as the mud that can swallow a man up to his hips. The diary records what persists: a corpse that shifts in the rain, a cross that reads "Here lies an unknown soldier," and the practical uses the living make of the dead.

The Officer's Dugout as a Stage for Contrasts

Several entries center on meals and conversations in command dugouts, where the war's violence is held at a distance by ritualized hospitality. Colonel X——, an immense Corsican, dismisses a German torpedo burst by asking for talk of Verdi's music. The major who offers lobster also commands a telephone operator to "set two covers more" as if in a restaurant. These scenes are not ironic; they are presented as ordinary. The diary does not comment on the strangeness of discussing opera while the hill trembles. Instead, it lets the incongruity stand. The effect is to show how the army's hierarchy maintained a semblance of normalcy, even as the board paths outside were churned by shells and the dead lay unburied nearby.

Readers should approach A Blue Devil of France as a collection of fragments, not a unified story. The diary entries reward attention to recurring objects—the board path, the shell hole, the grave marker—and to the tonal shifts between horror and hospitality. Because the excerpts are incomplete, the full range of Capart's observations remains unknown, but the pattern of contrasts visible here offers a specific, unsentimental entry into the poilu's world.

There’s a moment in Capart’s account—lobster under shellfire, the strange civility of men—that stays with me long after closing the book. It makes me think of the other side of that coin, the quieter dread of the sea, which I found again in The German pirate — Reading Companion. Both leave a similar ache, somehow.