A Good Idea of Hell: Letters from a Chasseur à Pied (Volume 83)

Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series #83

by Joshua K. Brown, Leonard V. Smith (Foreword)

Echoing from the mountainous Vosges front of World War I come the rare accounts of an elite French foot soldier—a chasseur à pied. Robert Pellissier, born in France in 1882, had grown up in the United States and was teaching at Stanford when the Great War broke out in his homeland. Returning as a volunteer, he saw uninterrupted months of trench warfare in the Vosges mountains of Alsace, the only region where French troops actually captured German territory, a sector largely neglected in World War I literature.

Pellissier’s diary and his letters to relatives in America show a panorama of this ghastly from the horror of being under fire with three thousand German shells falling on the French troops every day to the monotony of long quiet hours spent in cold, wet trenches. He writes of the grinding and indecisive character of the fighting in the Vosges and of the almost ritualistic shelling and limited tactical offensives, such as the attack at Steinbach in December 1914. His later letters were written from the hospital, from officer training school, and from the front at the Somme. He relays news of all the major battlefields—Flanders, Verdun, Russia, Austria, Gallipoli, Italy, Serbia, and the Suez. He also comments on the new technology that changed the nature of the machine gun, new airplanes, Uboats, improved artillery, barbed wire, and poison gases.

Drama and a sympathetic human voice combine to make this account of a littlereported French front a valuable addition to the literature on World War I. Whether visiting the battlefields of Europe, researching the history of the war, or sitting in an armchair at home, readers will find Pellissier a reliable and personable guide.

The greatnephew of Robert Pellissier and a minister by profession,

256 pages, Hardcover

First published April 24, 2003

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highly recommend this book. The realities of World War I seem more real to me through this chronological and well-compiled and edited collection of letters to family, colleagues, friends and fiancée, brilliantly penned by Robert Pellissier, than much of what I know of the war through film and history books. In spite of and because of the serious subject, Pellissier's regularly written first-hand accounts of his experiences in and out of the trenches, in various locations in France from August 1914 to August 1916 - as a soldier and as an officer, healthy in the trenches, wounded and recovering, on a "bat" on furlough, or as an officer in training and at the front - sparkle with life. Pellissier draws out a poignant testimony to humanity in all its manifestations and exposes the disastrous nature of war, simply by writing about his daily experiences and sharing his thoughts and observations. Because he corresponded with many people, sometimes writing of the same circumstances in different ways, depending on the recipient, his descriptions take on a three-dimensional quality. And what descriptions! A brilliant man with a Harvard PhD level understanding of literature (in order to learn English at age fourteen, he translated Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities into French, and by the end of his first year in an American school ranked third in his class in English) he uses language with ease, unpretentious, at times matter-of-fact, at other times funny or philosophical, always warm, and direct. I feel love for the man and real grief at his fate. What a loss.

Joshua Brown did an excellent job with footnotes, maps, translations, and other supporting material that greatly enhance the reading experience.

I read the book slowly, over a period of time, almost as if I were the person back in the USA receiving his intermittent letters from the front.

Some quotes:

On page 47, in a letter written to a school friend Miss H:
"If anything on earth can give a good idea of Hell, it is the region between Steinbach and Uffholz. If this is not the last European war it is because all of us Europeans are stark mad. It is pitiful to ride through the country now. One sees only women and children and old men."

page 70 translated from his diary February 1915:
"Poincaré accompanied by Millerand and staff came in. The president had a curious costume intended to strike exactly halfway between the 'bourgeois' and the military. Fatigue cap of seal or other fur, putties, the rest 'bourgeois.' He looked grumpy and said nothing at all but looked all around. Millerand looked a good deal like a very solid business man. Our surgeon could scarcely keep from jumping out of his skin - he stood like a hundred yard dash runner - hardly touched the floor at all."

On page 104, in a letter to his fiancée May 2 1915:
"This morning I had a hard task. One of the victims of the Great War has a girl - a normal school student who studies English - and to impress her corporal, she casually or rather slips in an English phrase in her correspondence with him. To get vengeance, he asked me to translate his latest letter into English. So I did with a few additions and distortions. It is a really flamboyant love letter. Well, I have no more to say; besides my cigar is all smoked up, and that is about the length of letter one should not exceed."