The story of a renowned French painter who volunteered for the Army during the First World War paints a vivid picture of the horror at the front in his letters home written before his death in 1915. THE following letters were written by a young French painter who was at the front until the beginning of April, 1915, when he "disappeared" in one of the combats in the Argonne region of France. "Should he be spoken of in the present or in the past?" asks...

The role of an army chaplain in war is an exceptionally difficult job and particularly in the hellish lunar landscape of the trenches of the First World War. Using the pseudonym René Gaëll, the author attempts to give an account of the life of a Catholic priest serving with the French troops in the frontline. He sees the men of his unit blown to pieces, mutilated by shell fire, wounded by gun shots, and all the while he attempts to assuage their...

"Written during the years of France's occupation by the Nazis, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal reveals the inner workings of one of France's great literary minds during the country's darkest hour. A renowned writer and committed pacifist throughout the 1930s and 1940s - a conviction that resulted in his imprisonment before and after the Occupation - Giono spent the war in the town of Manosque in Provence, where he wrote, corresponded with other writers,...

"Jean Guéhenno's Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1945 is the most oft-quoted piece of testimony on life in occupied France. A sharply observed record of day-to-day life under Nazi rule in Paris and a bitter commentary on literary life in those years, it has also been called "a remarkable essay on courage and cowardice" (Caroline Moorehead, Wall Street Journal). Here, David Ball provides not only the first English-translation of this important historical...

"Autobiography addressing the author's childhood experience of inner spiritual vision after becoming blind as a boy, his forming a boys' resistance group in occupied Paris at age seventeen (which later merged with Défense de la France), and his imprisonment in the Buchenwald concentration camp"--

"They were teachers, students, chemists, writers, and housewives; a singer at the Paris Opera; a midwife; a dental surgeon. They distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, printed subversive newspapers, hid resisters, secreted Jews to safety, transported weapons, and conveyed clandestine messages. The youngest was a schoolgirl of sixteen, who scrawled 'V' (for victory) on the walls of her lycée; the eldest, a farmer's wife in her sixties who harbored escaped...

Un des très bons romans inspirés par la dernière guerre à partir d'une expérience de cinq années de captivité à quoi fait allusion le titre. Prix Concourt 1946.

"The complete war memoirs of the resistance leader Charles de Gaulle, who led France out of its darkest hour during the Nazi occupation during World War II. "Faced with the political disaster, I had to become France." This was how Charles de Gaulle answered the call of history. One of the few French battlefield leaders to have distinguished himself in May 1940, he had become the undersecretary of state for national defense. But when the government...