To the slaughterhouse

the long version

A vigorous anti-war novel. Conscription reaches into the hills as the First World War comes to a small Provencial community one blazing August. A committed pacifist, Giono produced one of the most affecting accounts of war ever written, with its horrifying scenes of war and descriptions of harsh, primitive conditions in the trenches. His fiercely realistic novel contrasts the wholesale destruction of men, land, and animals at the front with the moral disintegration of the lonely and anxious people left behind.