The Diary of a French Private: War-Imprisonment, 1914-1915

Riou, Gaston, 1883-1958Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.5
Word count
450K words
Chapters
45

Tags

English Originals Documentary LiteratureMilitary War TraumaMilitary StrategyPersonal FatePrisoner DiaryFrench SoldierPsychological InsightBattlefield ReportDocumentary NarrativeWWI MemoryTurbulent Era

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Diary of a French Private: War-Imprisonment, 1914-1915 by Gaston RiouAuthor: Riou, Gaston, 1883-1958,Language: English, Class: D501: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: World War I (1914-1918), Release Date: Jun 7, 2018

Editor's review

This is the war and prison-camp diary kept by an ordinary French soldier, Gaston Riou, in 1914–1915, a firsthand document of the First World War. Its value lies not in strategic analysis or grand narrative but in everyday detail: marches, life at the front, the circumstances of capture, and life in the prison camp. Through this plain first-person record, readers can sense how war compressed an individual's rhythm and state of mind, and understand the gap in information between the home front and the front line. The prose carries the marks of a century ago and is restrained in tone, suited to reading as historical source material rather than as a tightly plotted memoir. Reading it alongside a basic timeline of the war and background on the prisoner-of-war system will make it easier to follow the unexplained names and events in the diary.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read a brief chronology of the Western Front first, then enter the diary to establish spatial and temporal coordinates.
  2. Read in monthly segments and, after each, note changes in living conditions and state of mind before and after capture.
  3. Look up unfamiliar place names, ranks, and institutional terms as you go, reading in an annotated manner.
  4. Read alongside other soldiers' diaries or prisoner-of-war memoirs from the same period, noting differences in narrative perspective.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45

FAQ

What period does this diary cover? According to the title and source information, the diary records war and captivity in 1914–1915, in the early phase of the First World War. Exact start and end dates should be taken from the dates of individual entries; do not extrapolate the author's later experiences.
Do I need prior knowledge of the First World War to read this diary? Not expertise, but it helps to know roughly when the war broke out, the basic situation on the Western Front, and how the prisoner-of-war camp system worked. The diary is a private record and does not systematically explain events; background knowledge reduces obstacles.
Is it suitable to read as literature? It is better treated as a historical diary. Its appeal lies in the firsthand observer's daily observations and plain tone, not in carefully structured plot or rhetoric. Readers expecting literature may find it flat.
How difficult is the English edition? The text is a diary in a century-old English translation style, with somewhat old-fashioned syntax. Vocabulary is mostly everyday, but place names, ranks, and period terms appear. Readers with intermediate English can finish it with a dictionary.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Riou, Gaston, 1883-1958 Author

Gaston Riou (1883–1958) was a French author whose life and educational background are sparsely documented in publicly available sources; what can be confirmed comes chiefly from the war diary he left behind, The Diary of a French Private: War-Imprisonment, 1914–1915. Written in the first person from the perspective of an ordinary soldier, the book records his experiences from the early months of the First World War through his capture, in restrained and concrete prose that combines the authenticity of a private record with the immediacy of frontline observation. Rather than aiming at grand narrative, Riou conveys the wear of war and the conditions of imprisonment through everyday detail, showing a steady concern for the individual caught up in conflict. Works of this kind offer valuable firsthand material for understanding the soldier's experience in the First World War and give him a place among writers of wartime memoir.