Private Clavel: Patient in War

by Léon Werth

Léon Werth, aged 36, served in the French army from August 1914 to August 1915. He uses Clavel to voice his anti-war position in this novel as well as in the one that immediately preceded it, Private Clavel’s War on War . Both are examples of modernist writing, based on the detailed notes Werth kept every day. Clavel’s war is presented as a character sketches, snatches of conversation, impressionistic notations, polemical arguments and interior monologue. In this follow-up novel, Werth portrays Clavel’s fellow-patients, nurses, and doctors in hospitals and convalescent homes, and his Parisian friends, all of whom have contrasting views on the war. Clavel soon learns he must conceal his anti-war attitude to avoid being informed on by a fellow-patient, nurse or doctor, with the result that he would be returned to the front, irrespective of his physical fitness.

292 pages, Hardcover

Published April 27, 2020

About the author

Léon Werth was a French writer and art critic, a friend of Octave Mirbeau and a close friend and confidant of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Werth wrote critically and with great precision on French society through World War I, colonization, and on French "collaboration" during World War II.