Presentation copy inscribed by the author to Maurice Genevoix: “à Monsieur Maurice Genevoix, ce petit exercice littéraire, en hommage très confraternel, Henry Poulaille.”
First edition. Cover illustrated with a woodcut by Tcherkessoff.
Review copy, stamped as such.
Presentation copy inscribed by the author to Maurice Genevoix: “à Maurice Genevoix, en hommage amical, Henry Poulaille.”
Mobilized in May 1916, Henry Poulaille was sent to the front that August. Wounded by shell fragments at the Chemin des Dames on 23 October 1917, he would later recount his wartime experience in Pain de soldat. It was only after the war that he published these two novels: Ils étaient quatre, in 1925, and L’Enfantement de la paix, in 1926, both of which announce the humanitarian, pacifist and antimilitarist commitment that would characterize his life and work.
In the epigraph to Les Rescapés, published in 1938, his position is unequivocal: “To those who were the pseudo-victors of the ‘last war’; to those, too, who will be in the next one. Let them know that war can produce nothing but the defeated.” Poulaille was convinced that the carnage of 1914–1918 had already begun to fade from memory, and it is hard to fault him. This constant position of his reflects a determination to awaken consciences and fight against the collective amnesia surrounding that carnage.
Edition statement on the cover.