Ceux de 14

Ceux de 14 brings together Maurice Genevoix’s war narratives. As a young student at the École normale supérieure, Genevoix joined the 106th Infantry Regiment in September 1914 and fought in the Argonne, notably at the Tranchée de Calonne, where he was gravely wounded six months later, on 25 April 1915, by three bullets, two in the arm and one in the chest. After seven months of treatment, he returned to Paris, to the rue d’Ulm, and, encouraged by Paul Dupuy, the secretary general of the École normale supérieure, with whom he had corresponded at length throughout that six-month ordeal, he agreed to recount his experience at the front and published Sous Verdun in April 1916. This was followed by Nuits de guerre in May 1917, Au seuil des guitounes in September 1918, La Boue in February 1921, and finally Les Éparges in September 1921: a body of work at once historical and literary, ranking among the foremost accounts published on the Great War.

An interesting working copy, extensively annotated, in preparation both for a public reading and for the new Flammarion edition, issued in hardcover in 1965. The text was read for the section narrating the assault on the Butte des Éparges.

Of Ceux de 14, Maurice Genevoix had kept the original manuscript (now at the BnF), two working copies and several copies of the first edition in the library of his study at “Les Vernelles,” his home on the banks of the Loire near Orléans.

“Mille” statement on the wrapper.

From the library of Maurice Genevoix at “Les Vernelles,” with bookplate.