THE DIARY OF A FRENCH PRIVATE

SOME REVIEWS OF THE FRENCH EDITION

Emile Faguet in Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires, March 5, 1916:—

I had the honour … three years ago to write the Preface to M. Gaston Riou’s first book, Aux écoutes de la France qui vient. It was full of fire, impetus, and passion; it was a heart-beat. I was not always of the same opinion as the author, but I never failed to share his sentiments. I felt in him at once a brother in patriotism and a brother in love of truth and justice. I greeted him affectionately and contradicted him tenderly. You all know the success of the work. The public learned and has remembered a new proper name. M. Gaston Riou now presents us with a very different book, but one painfully entrancing, as its title implies, Journal d’un simple soldat, guerre—captivité, 1914-1915.… M. Riou now shows himself to be an extraordinarily delicate and lively painter of real life, a charming painter of landscape, a vivacious narrator, a thoughtful, conscientious, and penetrating psychologist alike in respect of individuals and of nations. At once artist and thinker, the artist never does injustice to the thinker, while the thinker always gives the artist free play.

Chicago Daily News, May 1916:—

Out of the mass of books, good, bad, and indifferent, which have been written about the great war, there is one, Journal d’un simple soldat, by Gaston Riou, which stands out as a work that will live and pass down to future generations as a masterpiece.

Rev. Father Ménage, O.P., in La Revue des Jeunes, Feb. 25, 1916:—

The author of these pages is a man of energy and self-command. But he is something more. What gives the work a distinctive character is the profundity of its psychologic sense.

Daily Chronicle, March 24, 1916:—

It has grown out of the war, but it is more than a war book because it has thought, feeling, knowledge, and English readers of French will appreciate its great charm of style.

A. Billy in Paris Midi, Feb. 9, 1916:—

These pages are the diary of the man who, among all the French prisoners, was perhaps best fitted to understand Germany from within.

La Tribuna, Feb. 20, 1916:—

Though not a novel, it is as engrossing as a novel.

Daniel Lesueur in La Renaissance, March 18, 1916:—

Every one should read this record of imprisonment, whose realism—simple, trivial, and at times almost repulsive—is irradiated with a beauty which no work of romantic fiction can ever equal.

Marcel Rouff in Mercure de France, April 1, 1916:—

The book will gain by being read and re-read after the war, when the coming of peace will have restored to us that independence of mind which is necessary for the adequate appreciation of works of art.

Paul Bourget in Echo de Paris, April 28, 1916:—

I consider the Journal d’un simple soldat, one of the best examples of the literature of war impressions which has characterized the conflict now in progress.… The book is as impassioned as a novel and as living as history.

THE DIARY OF A
FRENCH PRIVATE

WAR—IMPRISONMENT
1914-1915

BY
GASTON RIOU

Translated from the French
by
EDEN AND CEDAR PAUL

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.

First published in 1916

(All rights reserved)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Gaston Riou was born on January 7, 1883. He is a native of the Cévennes, the region from which are derived three of the most distinguished among modern French psychologists, Melchior de Vogüé, Auguste Sabatier, and Paul Bourget. The Cévenole family from which he springs played an active part in the wars of religion. On the mother’s side he is related to Jacques de Vaucanson, the leading French mechanical engineer of the eighteenth century, and also to Majal Désubas, the last Huguenot martyr, executed at Montpellier in 1747. Thus by family tradition he is liberal, nonconformist, and republican.

Propagandist by temperament, he devoted himself at an early age to the study of Christian origins. In 1905, at the Sorbonne, he wrote a thesis upon the De unitate of St. Cyprian. His first published writings dealt with the modernist movement of Loisy, Murri, and Tyrrell, and they attracted considerable attention in Italy and in Germany. The ardour which inspired them was very different from the rabies theologica. The young author, though Calvinist by conviction, adopted an attitude remote from partisanship, his view being, “Whatever is Christian, is ours.” He insisted upon the need for a new synthesis, embracing at once the ancient faith and the actual conditions and the social life and thought of our day. He contended that the non-Roman churches scattered throughout the world might well constitute the embryo of a new Catholicism. But above all, in this writer simultaneously republican and Christian believer, was manifest the earnest desire to reconcile the France of ’89 with the Christian ideal and the longing to witness and to assist in the renovation of his country. Writing of him at this period, M. Emile Faguet, a noted French critic, declared: “His ardour, his fire, his impetus, the rush of his blood, are all instinct with the passion of patriotism.”

In the year 1913 this admixture of religious uneasiness and nationalist hope found expression in a volume entitled Aux écoutes de la France qui vient, which from the first attracted widespread attention. Above all, this work embodies faith in France, and the leaders among the younger men of the country rallied round him who had ventured to proclaim this faith. M. Jean Finot, editor of the Revue des Revues, bestowed upon Gaston Riou the title of princeps juventutis. Since then, with the coming of the war, all France has regarded the Ecoutes as a work of prophecy. We read in it the phrase: “Silently and studiously an élite is in process of formation. The members of this élite are united, as it were, in heroic friendship, for they are all animated by a single passion, the desire to renovate their country, and they are all inspired by the same faith, simple and strong. When others despaired, they did not despair. They are confident that a splendid morrow, worthy of the finest epochs of our history, is now germinating in the furrows of our motherland.”

Nor was it in France alone that Aux écoutes de la France qui vient attracted attention. In Germany, Karl Lamprecht, the great pangermanist historian, devoted two lectures to it at the royal court of Dresden. In Zukunft Maximilian Harden exclaimed: “The publication of such a work suffices to prove that je-m’enfichisme [the Gallio spirit] is dead in France, and that young France is turning away from the scepticism of the masters of French literature.”

Riou collaborated with Bergson, Henri Poincaré, and Charles Gide in the publication of a historical study, Le matérialisme actuel, an attempt to summarize the tendencies of contemporary thought. Of this volume a critic declared: “For France it celebrates the close of the age of negativism, and heralds the opening of an epoch of lyrical effort, of affirmation, and of activity.”

When war broke out, Gaston Riou had just returned from a journey in England, Scotland, and Wales. He went to the front among the first, took part in the fighting in Lorraine, and was mentioned in dispatches. He was wounded in the battle of Dieuze, was taken prisoner, and passed eleven months in a Bavarian fortress. This was not his first visit to Germany. A year earlier he had been sent there on an official mission, and he is personally acquainted with many Germans of note.

The fruit of his imprisonment is Journal d’un simple soldat, which we are now publishing as The Diary of a French Private. In its native land the success of the book has been extraordinary, and the sternest of French critics have with one voice declared it to be a permanent addition to literature. Paul Bourget, Emile Faguet, Camille Mauclair, and Maurice Donnay all speak of it as a masterpiece.

TO GUGLIELMO FERRERO

WE. Had we laid their hearts bare, we should have found there, not so much war, as justice and humanity.

Michelet.

THEY. I begin by seizing what I want; there are plenty of pedants in my realm who can prove my right to it.

Frederick II.

CONTENTS

PAGE
REMINISCENCES OF A PREVIOUS JOURNEY[11]
FEVER AND LOW SPIRITS[59]
DINNER[66]
FONTAINEBLEAU[71]
AN OLD CAMPAIGNER[73]
I HAVE A TABLE[79]
WE KILL THEIR HOPES[85]
SUNDAY[98]
THE VICTORY OF THE MARNE[103]
A BREAKFAST[117]
THE FIRST LETTER[123]
STILL SHORT COMMONS[130]
I HAVE A PALLIASSE[145]
THE REVOLT OF THE HUNGRY[151]
A CHANCE CATERER[175]
OUR GAOLER[196]
THE SLOPES ARE FORBIDDEN[214]
A BLACK MOOD[220]
A FRANCONIAN QUARTERMASTER[226]
DAWN[250]
HE GOES AWAY[255]
DISAPPOINTMENT[265]
OH, DEAR![267]
THE RUSSIANS[271]
VASSILI[289]
THE COMMON PEOPLE OF GERMANY AND THE WAR[291]
CROSSING SWITZERLAND[312]