Books: Non-Fiction

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The Hairy One

THE POILUS—Joseph Delteil (translated by Jaques Le Clercq) —Minion, Batch ($3). Author Delteil calls his book, pretentiously, an epic. It is not an epic but it is good writing about the War, the soldiers, the statesmen who gathered to invent peace. The chief interest, as the title hints, is in the poilu, the anonymous helter-skelter soldier who rode to the Marne in a taxi and saw a hundred thousand like himself make a hill near Verdun look like a mountain. "His rifle hangs over his backside, and his backbone heaves about under his muddy topcoat. His pack askew, his knapsacks at sixes and sevens, he hobbles along like a toad. He is filthy with powder, with defeat and with rain. He is noble in eye and heart. Weariness trickles down his cheeks, sweaty and emaciated. His long teeth make holes in his jaws from top to bottom. Mops of his hair are glued to his temples in packets of caked mud. . . . His eyes fill his face. His heart fills his body." Such was the poilu. Other figures are described. Joffre was "the bourgeois of Generals." Ludendorff had "a boiling genius." Foch attacked "like a ferret, like a squirrel." Wilson was a "a gentle, sad Quaker, with glasses and a grimace." "In his old coat of a great shaggy peasant, grumbling, a bulldog, an old man lively with the springs of the heart, half shoulders, half eyebrows, authoritative, self-willed and laconic. . . . Clemenceau made war." Author Delteil knows the trenches, knows all the muddy details which people accept until after peace has been signed and they have time to think, groan and write. Following a rough temporal skeleton, he masses the dramatic moments of the War, makes his book less a survey than a series of dramatic flashlights. Occasionally the comment becomes incoherent rhapsody, wavering at that parlous boundary which lies between prose and poetry.