A review by margaret21
Fear by Gabriel Chevallier

5.0

Over the years, I've read a lot of accounts of the common soldiers' lot in WWI, and been both horrified and angry at the suffering and the waste endured. But this novel (surely a thinly-disguised memoir?) of French poilu Jean Dartemond is perhaps the most shocking I have read, and would have seemed especially so when it was published in 1930, when memories of those surviving, and their relatives, were till relatively fresh. No wonder publication was suspended during WWII. The day to day suffering, boredom and indignities, the all-too frequent horrors of witnessing disembowelled bodies, skin, bloated cadavers are described with a freshness that makes the horror very present. Towards the end, he describes how when officers weren't around, some German and French troops made tentative sallies of friendship across the divide, as they recognised how much more they had in common with each other than with their commanding officers, often remote and somewhat protected. This book, as so many others of its kind, is a true indictment of the horror and futility of war.