My Seventy-Five: The Journal of a French Gunner, August-September 1914

Despite the huge contribution of the French Army towards the Allied war effort during the Great War, curiously little has been published in English concerning it. Thus, Helion are pleased to bring back into print one of the finest Great War memoirs by a soldier of any army, the journal of French gunner Paul Lintier, covering the tumultuous events of August and September 1914. A talented young writer (he had already had three small books published before the outbreak of war), Lintier served in the French 44th Artillery Regiment from 1913 until his death at the front in 1916. His account covers the outbreak of war, mobilisation, his unit’s first clash with the Germans at Virton on 22 August, the subsequent British and French withdrawal culminating in the ‘miracle of the Marne’, and the Battle of the Aisne, ending with his wounding during the latter battle on 22 September. Beautifully written, his account conveys, amongst other things, the little-known French experience of the discouraging and exhausting retreat from the advancing Germans, as well as the strains experienced by men and horses at the limits of their endurance. The fact that Lintier wrote it as a daily journal provides a fresh immediacy missing in many later accounts. A further posthumous volume of memoirs covering his service during 1915 and 1916 (until his death in action) was also published in French, and Helion hope to issue a translation of this in due course.