![]() ![]() And the sights, sounds and smell of conflict – the wounded, the gunfire and the smell of smoking shells – pervade the writing, communicating the brutal, relentless and wearying reality of war. We follow him on long marches through France we read about the painful blisters on his feet, the endless digging of trenches, the many marches to the next village and about finding somewhere, anywhere, to sleep and march again. His account begins with him leaving his wife and family to join his unit just before war is declared. Here we have the experience of one soldier, written in a straightforward manner with, as Michael Morpugo puts it in his introduction, ‘no high flown poetry or prose’. The diary reflects what must have been the day to day experience of tens if not hundreds of thousands of men. The text is the soldier’s own but the illustrations are Barroux’s. ![]() The jottings in the notebook relate the soldier’s experience of the first two months of the war, August and September 1914. Author-illustrator Barroux rescued the notebook of an unknown French soldier of the First World War from rubbish cleared from the basement of a house in Paris. This striking graphic novel came about in an interesting way. Line of Fire: Diary of an Unknown Soldier Author: Barroux ![]()
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