Jean-Pierre Verney

If you read only one single book, in your whole life, about World War One, let it be this book. The first portion follows the story of one French soldier, stoically disgusted from the beginning with the role he is expected - forced - to play. The book ends with a score of pages encapsulating the dreary geopolitical events and battles that took place in 1914 through 1919, giving the American reader a sobering look at three years of trench warfare that was not part of the American experience.

Graphic, heartbreaking, maddening. Painfully immediate, yet just beyond our grasp of the horror -- and the sheer scale of senseless destruction.… (altro)