One of 200 numbered copies on deluxe vélin Omnia.
Presentation copy inscribed by the author to Maurice Genevoix: “À mon ancien camarade du front, Maurice Genevoix — au soldat de Verdun et des Éparges, au grand écrivain des jours de gloire et de misère — en amical hommage, Jules Ninet, 25/7/38.”
Maurice Genevoix’s own copy, with a fine presentation inscription explicitly evoking Verdun and Les Éparges.
Jules Ninet, a soldier in the 89th Infantry Regiment, recounts his experience of 1917–1918 through the lens of comradeship in arms, focusing on a squad of the 9th company. He sketches portraits of his fellow soldiers, describes their relationships and living conditions at the front, from the Chemin des Dames to the Somme, in a lively and humane style. His account, centered on daily life, “can sometimes seem rather smooth, which would have made it suspect to Jean Norton Cru: no conflicts (all these comrades, as well as the officers, are “decent fellows”), no coarse swearing (at most some dialect), no sex (the protagonists experience only chaste adolescent flirtations), and above all no serious opinions […]. The book’s preface, written by a senior officer, is the only indication of the author’s acceptance of the context of the time […]. He curses the war only at the end of his account, upon seeing the dying in his hospital in 1918” (Sébastien Chatillon, doctoral candidate at Université Lyon 2).
Commandant Mermod’s preface confirms the book’s moderate, consensual tone; the author does not condemn the war until the very end, in the wards of a hospital.
The title on the cover has been discreetly enhanced by hand by Genevoix, as he sometimes did on his working or reading copies.