‘I was alone, I was on horseback, I had on a fine white cloak, a red tunic, a black helmet, pistols and a great sabre’
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a generation of French soldiers found themselves haunted by defeat and disappointment. One of these soldiers was Alfred de Vigny, an aristocratic poet who also served as a garrison officer. The Warrior’s Life consists of his enigmatic reflections, autobiographical anecdotes and philosophical meditations on the nature of war and the strange life of the soldier, vividly conveying the deprivation and discipline of military service, but also its comradeship, stoicism and stern code of duty. Looking back to a lost age of military valour, haunted by dreams of former glory, this is one of the great works of early nineteenth-century Romanticism.
‘The great unsung hero of French romanticism … An immortal depiction - gripping and vivid yet unsparingly unsentimental - of a generation forced to question as never before the place of war and the military values in modern life.’

Mark Mazower

Translated with an introduction and notes by Roger Gard