En retrouvant le général Bramble

This text, long unpublished, did not appear in print until 2014, when it was included in the reissue of Les Silences du Colonel Bramble in Grasset’s Cahiers Rouges series. The preface noted that in this essay, inspired by his experience as a liaison officer during the First World War, “Maurois explains his love of England and revisits the love-hate relationship between the two countries. The original document is a typescript to which the author added manuscript corrections. We have incorporated them directly (…). This text is dated 1939, with no further detail […] It was probably first delivered as a radio broadcast before being reworked as an article.”

Our typescript is somewhat more precise and allows the text to be dated more accurately and, above all, its original purpose to be established: it was not a radio broadcast, but a lecture given by Maurois on December 11, 1939 — one we have not been able to document further.

“Before I begin, I must thank most warmly the French and British authorities who have kindly allowed an old writer to live once again in the atmosphere of his literary and military beginnings. I should like today first to recall for you that first encounter, twenty-five years ago, with the English army, and then to compare the British army of 1914 with that of 1939 […] My own person and role are entirely without importance, but the picture will stand a better chance of coming alive if I build it from images that I myself recorded…”

Although our version lacks the last page [folio 21], containing the final five paragraphs of the text, the other 20 leaves give the complete text, with numerous autograph corrections — mainly typographical — but one of them is a variant reading, which establishes that our version is indeed the last one revised by André Maurois: he corrects a date, “In March 1918, when the Germans broke through the front of the Fifth Army…” The month of March is struck out at the typewriter, then replaced by May, also at the typewriter, with autograph confirmation in pencil.

Finally, André Maurois places at the head of his introduction the following text: “Mesdames, Mesdemoiselles, Messieurs,” and also adds to the general title [En retrouvant le Général Bramble] the following autograph note: “Conférence d’André Maurois, de l’Académie française, faite le 11 décembre 1939.” All these elements are absent from the version published in 2014.