A French soldier's war diary, 1914-1918 - Henri Desagneaux

One cannot imagine what the simple phrase of an official statement like We have recaptured a trench really means. Henri Desagneaux - - A pattern has been given to the history of the events between 1914 and 1918 which are called the Great War. To Henri Desagneaux and to thousands of others, there was no pattern to be seen from the trenches where he executed orders which ensured that dozens of men had to die attempting to achieve impossible objectives worked out at a headquarters in the rear. His diary, one of the classic French accounts of the conflict, gives a vivid insight into what it was like to execute those orders, and to live in the trenches with increasingly demoralized, unruly and mutinous men. In terse unflinching prose he records their experiences as they confronted the acute dangers of the front line. The appalling conditions in which they fought and the sheer intensity of the shellfire and the close-quarter combat have rarely been conveyed with such immediacy. - - Henri Desagneaux was born at Nogent-sur-Marne in 1878. He read law and became head of the legal department of the Eastern Railway Company. On 2 August 1914 he was mobilized as a reserve lieutenant in the Railway Transport Service, but he soon left for command at the front, rising to captain in 1916 and later to major. During the war he was continually at the front except during leaves, when he was hospitalized and during a spell restoring order during the mutinies in the French army in 1917. He was mentioned five times in dispatches and won the Croix de Guerre with palm leaves
a rare achievement for a reservist who had not lost a limb. After the war he returned to local government, remobilizing temporarily as a major in 1940. He died in 1969. His diary was first published in French in 1971.