Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918

(Yale University Press) Barthas was a French barrelmaker conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of World War I. He spent the next four years in near-ceaseless combat, wherever the French army fought its fiercest battles: Artois, Flanders, Champagne, Verdun, the Somme, and the Argonne. First published in France in 1978, where it was a bestseller, Strauss has translated Barthas’ notebooks into English. This is its first publication in the United States. Strauss is a fundraising director in higher education and former publisher of MHG: The Quarterly Journal of Military History.