Gabriel Chevallier: Fear

34 ‘Look, a nice bit of meat!’

35 ‘c… nassa’, of course, is ‘cunt’, and I do not think any reader needs to know Occitan, or this variant of it, to understand the rest.

36 ‘Hey! Barrachini, how are you, my friend?’

‘Son of a whore! What you doing there?’

‘The captain took me for a ride, the son of a bitch!’

‘Come on, my beauty, give us a cigarette!’

‘Ah, you’re a lovely lad!’

37 Compiègne in Picardy was French General Staff HQ for much of the war. It was in a forest outside the town that the armistice was signed in 1918.

38 ‘La Champagne pouilleuse’ (meaning lousy, verminous, miserable…) is the name given to an area of the Champagne region east of Reims with chalky soil, formerly very barren and impoverished. It is contrasted with ‘La Champagne humide’ and sometimes, rather awkwardly, called Dry Champagne in English.

39 The Gascon cadets were the youngest sons of nobles from Gascony in southern France, sent into the service of Louis XIII ( r. 1610–1643). Supposedly romantic and swashbuckling, they were the source for Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac .

40 The reference is to something the future Henri IV is supposed to have shouted to his troops before the Battle of Ivry in 1590: ‘Follow my white plume: you will find it on the path to honour and glory!’

41 ‘ They are at Chateau-Thierry’, that is, only about 90 kilometres from Paris, putting the capital within range of the biggest German guns.

42 Two national heroes. Georges Guynemer, a popular fighter pilot, lionised by the press, missing in action in 1917 at the age of twenty-two. Emile Driant (1855–1916), career soldier, journalist, politician, and prolific writer of war fiction coloured by nationalism and Catholicism. One of the first high-ranking officers to be killed at Verdun.

FOR THEIR VALUABLE ADVICE on some difficulties in this translation, many thanks to Pete Ayrton, Martina Dervis, Donald Nicholson-Smith, Ifor Stoddart and Chris Turner. I am also very grateful to Deborah Lake and Mick Forsyth, two extremely knowledgeable historians of the First World War in general and the French army in particular, for their help with military terminology. My thanks, too, to Andrew Kinross for the kind loan of some useful background reading.