User:Jay D. Easy/sandbox/Louis Barthas

Louis Barthas (14 July 1879 – 4 May 1952) was a French corporal who served in the infantry on the Western Front of World War I. He essentially served for the entire duration of the war and spent a considerable amount of time on the front lines.

He extensively documented his wartime experiences. After the war he set out to compile these into a series of notebooks, forming a single comprehensive manuscript. He did not think to have them published, and the notebooks were kept in the back of a drawer for the next couple of decades. His grandson became a teacher at a secondary school in Carcassonne, and consigned the notebooks to a colleague who taught history. Word spread and this led to its eventual publication exactly sixty years after the war's end as Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914–1918.

Before and after the war he was a politically active socialist and barrelmaker.

Early life
Louis Barthas was born in 1879 on 14 July—Bastille Day—in the town of Homps, Aude. His father, Jean, was a barrelmaker, and his mother, Louise, was a seamstress.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Barthas was a barrelmaker in Peyriac-Minervois, a job he returned to after the Armistice of 11 November 1918. A socialist activist, he participated in the creation of the union of agricultural workers and shared the peaceful ideas of Jean Jaurès.

Mobilization
Barthas was mobilized to the 280th Infantry Regiment of Narbonne in August 1914 with the rank of corporal, a rank he held for the duration of the conflict. In December 1915 he joined the 296th Infantry Regiment. In November 1917 he joined the 248th Infantry Regiment. For four years he fought in the most dangerous sectors of the front: Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, Verdun, the Somme, and the Chemin des Dames. He took part in the French Army mutinies of 1917. His wartime memoir seems to have begun as a diary, which over the years came to fill many volumes.

Later life
Barthas was decommissioned in February 1919 and soon set out to assemble a comprehensive narrative of his wartime years. He transcribed his diaries and letters into nineteen notebooks, pasting in picture postcards, illustrations, and maps clipped from newspapers and magazines. He did not think to have them published, therefore the notebooks remained unpublished in the family armoire for more than sixty years. Eventually discovered by professor Rémy Cazals of the University of Toulouse, they were published in 1978.

"The squad is like a little family, a center of affection where deep feelings prevail, of solidarity, mutual devotion, intimacy, and from which the officer and even the sergeant are excluded. To them, the soldier doesn't open up, is mistrustful, and any officer who will want to try to describe the strange life of the trenches, as I'm doing, will never have known, except by accident, the real sentiments, the true spirit, the clear language and the deepest thoughts of the soldier."