SOME REVIEWS OF THE FRENCH EDITION

Emile Faguet in Les Annales Politiques et LittÉraires, March 5, 1916:—

I had the honour … three years ago to write the Preface to M. Gaston Riou’s first book, Aux Écoutes de la France qui vient. It was full of fire, impetus, and passion; it was a heart-beat. I was not always of the same opinion as the author, but I never failed to share his sentiments. I felt in him at once a brother in patriotism and a brother in love of truth and justice. I greeted him affectionately and contradicted him tenderly. You all know the success of the work. The public learned and has remembered a new proper name. M. Gaston Riou now presents us with a very different book, but one painfully entrancing, as its title implies, Journal d’un simple soldat, guerre—captivitÉ, 1914-1915.… M. Riou now shows himself to be an extraordinarily delicate and lively painter of real life, a charming painter of landscape, a vivacious narrator, a thoughtful, conscientious, and penetrating psychologist alike in respect of individuals and of nations. At once artist and thinker, the artist never does injustice to the thinker, while the thinker always gives the artist free play.

Chicago Daily News, May 1916:—

Out of the mass of books, good, bad, and indifferent, which have been written about the great war, there is one, Journal d’un simple soldat, by Gaston Riou, which stands out as a work that will live and pass down to future generations as a masterpiece.

Rev. Father MÉnage, O.P., in La Revue des Jeunes, Feb. 25, 1916:—

The author of these pages is a man of energy and self-command. But he is something more. What gives the work a distinctive character is the profundity of its psychologic sense.

Daily Chronicle, March 24, 1916:—

It has grown out of the war, but it is more than a war book because it has thought, feeling, knowledge, and English readers of French will appreciate its great charm of style.

A. Billy in Paris Midi, Feb. 9, 1916:—

These pages are the diary of the man who, among all the French prisoners, was perhaps best fitted to understand Germany from within.

La Tribuna, Feb. 20, 1916:—

Though not a novel, it is as engrossing as a novel.

Daniel Lesueur in La Renaissance, March 18, 1916:—

Every one should read this record of imprisonment, whose realism—simple, trivial, and at times almost repulsive—is irradiated with a beauty which no work of romantic fiction can ever equal.

Marcel Rouff in Mercure de France, April 1, 1916:—

The book will gain by being read and re-read after the war, when the coming of peace will have restored to us that independence of mind which is necessary for the adequate appreciation of works of art.

Paul Bourget in Echo de Paris, April 28, 1916:—

I consider the Journal d’un simple soldat, one of the best examples of the literature of war impressions which has characterized the conflict now in progress.… The book is as impassioned as a novel and as living as history.