A Frenchmans Duty A Foot Soldiers Journey Through The First World War J Michael Dumoulin by J. Michael Dumoulin 9780463000847, 0463000846 instant download after payment.

"A Frenchman's Duty," J. Michael Dumoulin's seventh book, is written around his grandfather Arthur's unpublished 200-page hand-written war journal. In October 1914, on his twentieth birthday, Arthur, a butcher living in Roubaix, France, set out with two friends to enlist. Racing around an invading German army being beaten north by French and British forces, Arthur's journal details the chaos and dangers in northern France during the first months of World War I. His journal goes on to record his induction, training, battles, and "permissions" (time off) and continues across the next four years of the war, sometimes offering new information and insights about little-reported skirmishes preceding or mopping up after better known major battles. The book is illustrated with actual colorized propaganda postcards, each chapter beginning with an entry from Arthur's fresh and honest notes followed by carefully-researched historic, geopolitical, social, and technological context.

Arthur survived the war, so this story isn't one of those where the hero dies a sad, sudden death at the very end of the book. For Arthur, the author's grandfather and godfather, there was a life of love and adventure that went on after the war, including a family. His marriage to childhood friend Berthe lasted more than 50 years. Arthur's life was almost unique: so many of his fellow soldiers never had the chance to marry, much less survive France's more than four years of conflict. Of the 8 million French soldiers who fought in that war, 7 million spent time in combat, some in Russia and in Africa, but most along the Western Front where Arthur fought.
Arthur's diary records the unimaginable horror in war, but it also reveals the human sides of poise under fire, of faith, duty to family and country, a sense of place, and the challenge of wrestling with demons and keeping them locked away.