FALGSConaut [comrade/them]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: May 17th, 2021

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  • Anyone interested in WW1 history should read Poilu: The World War 1 Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas Barrelmaker 1914—1918. It’s a first hand account by a French socialist who spent almost the entire war in the trenches. He basically spends the entire book criticising rampant militarism, the jingoistic newspapers, and bloodthirsty officers.

    Here’s one of my favourite passages:

    Here and there appeared other shadowy figures, fugitives like ourselves seeking the road to safety. All of a sudden an imperious voice behind us called on us to halt. And at just the right time! In the middle of a salvo of shellfire, a minute lost could be fatal, so we played deaf. After a second summons which we also ignored, we heard the jumble of footsteps coming toward us and suddenly someone jammed the barrel of a big revolver right under my nose, crying out in a terrible voice that if I took one more step I’d be a dead man. Another stranger was shaking Chiffre by the collar as if to strangle him.

    Christ, had we run into a couple of madmen? There were plenty of examples of those who had lost their wits altogether in places like Cote 304.

    But I soon recognized that I had in front of me the young Sublieutenant Roques of the 23rd Company—that of “the brute,” the terrible Captain Barbier.

    Outraged by this highly impolite way of stopping people, I hoisted my Lebel rifle and replied to him, “You’ve got your revolver, I’ve got my rifle, so what do you want to do now?”