Fear

If you’ll excuse me, dear readers, before I get to the heart of the matter, I must now make another personal reference to my father, who instilled in me the habit of reading. Lorenzo Fernandez Bailiff. A humble civil guard who loves to read, who has to obey even the corporals at work. Given the precarious family financial situation, I wouldn’t say we have a good library, it’s not even big, so I didn’t read Madame Bovary or Pedro Páramo at home. What my father passed on to me more than books were the many hours of demeanor in a chair by the window with a book in hand. He liked the epic, historical events of our glorious past, biographies.

I wouldn’t say I’m a great reader, I know them as a lot more fans than I do, but I’m consistent and I always have a book open, sometimes two, making progress in reading it. And more than just the news, every time I delve deeper into a tradition interpreted by other readers of a certain age, I’ve come back this way for re-reading and the book I quoted above this hot summer.

Although the author has lived through the battle the book is based on, these are not exactly memoirs. Years later, with remarkable strength and style, he pursued a certain literary career, which is confirmed in these pages. It tells the experiences of a young French soldier in the Great War, which we now know as World War I, and there are two aspects that caught my attention when I first read it: War and fear.

Wars, wars in general, have always intrigued me because of my youth career and later work on the subject, which led me to become an officer in the army. Although there are aspects of armed conflict that deserve attention and scrutiny, this war needs much more to be known. Its predecessors, its development, and its end, all of which have been decisive for humanity. I invite you today to search for images in a very simple way. Embarkation of young Frenchmen embarking on trains to go to war. They will be very surprised because most faces are not worried, not fearful, but happy. The moment they announced from schools and homes was expected for them; Now it’s time to take revenge, to clean up the dishonor. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 ended in humiliation: Emperor Wilhelm’s coronation at the head of the Second Reich at the Palace of Versailles. For the Germans, this war was little more than a military parade, and their arrival in Paris was prompted by Emperor III. It was virtually unhindered by Napoleon’s troops. This insult has been recorded for years in the French collective imagination, waiting for the right moment to avenge it. And they believed that the opportunity they were waiting for was the war of 1914. The development of the war was brutal, with deadly devices, machine guns and artillery entering the conflict, which inflicted enormous casualties on both sides. In a trench warfare, which Chevalier so well described, some fronts were almost motionless for nearly the entire competition in skirmishes where the opposing sides could be seen almost face-to-face. And finally, the peace established in the Treaty of Versailles (which should have been signed if it wasn’t) imposed conditions on the vanquished so brutally that they were almost impossible to comply with, and it caused the German leaders to sow seeds of hatred. It will lead to the Second World War, although no one should think that this treaty alone is the cause, this is nonsense.

One of the great virtues of this book is that the author bitterly admits that he is terrified and that he himself is no exception, rather than sweetening the story and putting himself in a certain heroic guise as other writers do. There was panic in the trenches that lasted for hours. And this was a kind of betrayal for the proud French, and they did not welcome these pages. The creation of the myth was more important than the knowledge of the truth.