Michael Morpurgo, who wrote the children’s story that was turned into the acclaimed musical Warhorse, which uses horses to depict the universal suffering of war, says in the introduction that even after studying this war, it was only when he met someone who had been there that he really began to understand “the horrors and terrors, the camaraderie, the humour, the sadness and the suffering”. It is perhaps what he doesn’t know as he sets off on that first August day of mobilization that makes his story so poignant. As Barroux, says, part of the appeal of this man’s story is that it is his own story, “uncensored by the military, government or history textbooks”.

The subsequent graphic novel Barroux made of this simple narrative took two more years for him to research so that he could provide a meticulous and haunting visual accompaniment to the story a simple soldier tells of the first days of the war. It was then that the idea of illustrating the diary began to form in my mind.” It was only later, in the quiet of my own studio, I realised that the diary traced the first two months of the First World War, day by day. “It was with great emotion that I slipped the diary and the Cross of War into my bag with the feeling of having saved a piece of history from destruction. In an interview he did with Book Events for Children, Barroux says: Inside was a notebook and a military medal. ( On Les Aura! is the title in the original French, meaning “We will get them!”, a slogan from that war which I believe Barroux uses here with some irony.) The French artist Barroux was walking the streets of Paris when he came across two men clearing out a basement, who told him he could help himself to anything he found there. Luck figured into Line of Fire from its inception. As luck would have it, I came across the perfect book to exemplify the beginning of this conflagration, which everyone at the time thought would be over by Christmas, and instead lasted for four years. July 28 th marked the centenary of the beginning of the First World War, and I thought it would be a good thing to call attention to some book that would mark the occasion.

Translation by Sarah Ardizzone, Introduction by Michael MorpurgoĮditions de Seuil, 2011, Phoenix Yard Books Ltd, 2014 Line of Fire: Diary of an Unknown Soldier-August, September, 1914 by Barroux

Line of Fire by Barroux