Comrades-in-arms

the long version

Comrades-in-Arms is a powerful and passionate account by a French cavalry officer of daily life on the Western Front from January 1915 to August 1916. Mobilized at the age of forty-six, Lecluse commanded an elite cavalry unit during campaigns in Artois, Champagne, and Alsace. He regarded the men who served under him as comrades and heroes, and he wrote the memoir to memorialize those who had fallen in combat. Lecluse's memoir consists of thirty-three individual chapters resembling short stories in form and devoted to descriptions of artillery bombardments, raids on enemy trenches, grisly atrocities, night patrols gone awry, the deaths of beloved comrades, and battlefields strewn with bodies.