MARCHING TO CAPTIVITY

by Christopher Hill (Translator), Gustave Folcher (Author), Remy Cazals (Editor), Christopher Hill (Translator)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1996

  $3.45

  Originally published in French by Francois Maspero of Paris in 1981, this story begins on 20 August 1939, during the grape-harvest, in the village of Aigues-Vives (Gard). It ends on 12 May 1945 at 1am, in the same place, when Folcher gets out of a lorry in the square. In the meantime, ten disparate notebooks have been filled. Called up into the 12th Zouaves, Gustave Folcher, a gardener by profession, lived all through the war as a private soldier, a simple man of the people, but a peerless chronicler. He serves, he observes, he records. He spent the phoney war near the front-line, in the East, floundering in the mud, the fog and the cold. During the German offensive of May 1940 he was near Sedan. He tells of marches and incomprehensible counter-madness, under the deluge of fire raining down from the Stukas and from the artillery. Tied to the machine-gunner, he was among those who absorbed the shock of the tank attack and who resisted until the end, relying on the Maginot Line. But they were over-run and by-passed without understanding that the front had surrendered and that the debacle was complete. On 15 June, after bloody and relentless fighting, exhausted, he was taken prisoner, and encircled in a large field of corn , which was trampled by the tanks ploughing though it, amid the dead and wounded. His life as a prisoner then began. Taken near to Magdeburg, he witnesses, with his group, all the phases of the Nazi adventure, up to the final apocalypse under bombardment. In the course of the month of April 1945, the prisoners became the occupying troops and took some of the SS prisoners in their turn. During six years away from home, this peasant from the Languedoc saw other regions, landscapes, villages, customs and farming techniques. Christopher Hill is the author of Cabinet Decisions on Foreign Policy: The British Experience October 1938 - June 1941 .