Nous-Autres

June 1916. Lucien Prudhomme is twenty-one and works a lugger named for his dead mother on Lake Pontchartrain with his father, who talks to the boat and hardly at all to anybody else. A French submarine sinks the Chesapeake off Ireland, the Realm goes to war a fortnight later, and his best friend goes into the First Louisiane in the rush. Lucien stays on the lake, reads the letters aloud to a man who cannot read them, and watches the city argue a measure against its own language. In the spring of 1917 the draw takes him, and his father lays the boat up.

Nous-Autres follows him to a camp on the Kansas prairie built that year, where a farm boy from Nebraska who has never seen the sea calls him Lucky; across in convoy to a quay at Ostend; into the drowned fields of the coastal sector with a battalion of Guards who held the ground where the King's son was killed; and out at night to a ruined pump house, where what he hears across forty yards of water is ordinary men. In December the division is sent, to be seen, at a casino on the dunes with cellars under it. The General, who has looked at their boots each time he has inspected them, comes to the dressing station the day after, and Lucien hears what he says.