Also by Joshua Brown:
 

 

A Good Idea of Hell:
Letters from a Chasseur à Pied
Edited by Joshua Brown
Foreword by Leonard Smith, professor of history at Oberlin College

(Published by Texas A&M University Press)

Winner of the 2004 Distinguished Book Award
for Best Memoir from the Society for Military History

220 pages (hardbound)

ISBN 1-58544-210-0

 

 

 

 This book is a collection of letters from Brown’s great-great-uncle, Robert Pellissier, who spent most of the war stationed in the Vosges Mountains in Alsace, overlooking the Rhine river. Robert Pellissier was born in France and came to the U.S. as a boy of 14 to live with his sister. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught at Stanford from 1911 to 1914 as Assistant Professor of Romance Languages.

When the First World War broke out, he returned to France and volunteered as an enlisted man in the elite mountain troops, the "chasseurs à pied" (literally, "hunters on foot.") He wrote letters to his family in Brooklyn, to his fiancee, and to friends and colleagues for two years, until he was killed at the battle of the Somme. The letters are interspersed with selections from his diary, which give his own unglossed, private version of events, in contrast to the more cheerful letters he sent home to his family and friends. Maps, notes and illustrations make the letters thoroughly accessible to the  modern reader.