Six men, six destinies sacrificed in the machinery of war…
In August 1944, at the Liberation of Paris, Jean-Louis Rondy enlists in the 2e DB. A few days later, Jean Guêtre lands in Provence as part of a shock troop unit. Pierre Latanne still remembers the arrest of his father by the Gestapo a year earlier and takes heart in the knowledge that his father managed to escape, even though he has had to live in hiding ever since.
At the same time, Heinrich Bauer is pursuing his studies in Germany, at a Napola — an elite institution reserved for the future cadres of the Nazi party. As for Bernard Ledogar and Jean Carpentier, they are living an itinerant childhood, at the mercy of the vicissitudes of war. Who could imagine the road these men have already travelled? And who could imagine the circumstances that, nearly ten years later, would bring them to fight together against the Viet Minh?
Jean-Louis Rondy serves as a medical officer with the 1er BEP, Pierre Latanne as a young officer with the 5e BPVN. Heinrich Bauer has become a sergeant in the 2e BEP, Bernard Ledogar a paratrooper in the 6e BPC and Jean Carpentier a second-class navigator within the 28F naval air squadron. They have all been thrust into the furnace of Diên Biên Phu, with the exception of Jean Guêtre, who serves with the North Vietnam commandos and operates in the Tonkin delta, where the situation is likewise deteriorating day by day.
Through the account of individual tragedies, the author paints a striking portrait of France at war in the 1940s and 1950s.
EXTRACT:
But even more than Diên Biên Phu — a battle which, however bloody and savage, still left room for heroism and panache — it was above all the Viet Minh prisoner-of-war camps that marked the survivors for the rest of their days. While many works evoke this battle through the personal journey of one man and his unit, or in a more impersonal manner through the movements of a given division against a given battalion, and while a number of works highlight the ordeal endured by Viet Minh prisoners, it seemed important to offer the reader a more human and more complete vision of what the journey of those who were deployed at Diên Biên Phu — and who, much later and in far smaller numbers, returned — truly was: a more or less brutal passage from youth to war, and then from war to horror and the most absolute abjection.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
As the pages turn, profiles sharpen, characters assert themselves. Recounted are the values, events, formative encounters, injunctions and family curses that would drive these very young men — farm hand, war orphan, unloved child, exploited apprentice or son of a good family — into a conflict at the ends of the earth. - Sabine Syfuss-Arnaud, Challenges
These are 576 pages of accounts of combat, hopes and disillusions, through the ordeals one has heard of but which are here described in the detail of lived experience, with that sensation of progressive suffocation, of helplessness in the face of orders and counter-orders, of incomprehension before the logic of the manoeuvre that never once undermines an unwavering loyalty to the orders received. - Pierre Bayle, Pensées sur la planète
THE AUTHORS: Franck Mirmont, Heinrich Bauer, Jean Carpentier, Jean Guêtre, Pierre Latanne, Bernard Ledogar and Jean-Louis Rondy.
