Correspondence from a World War I soldier

Memories of a soldier in the trenches during the First World War, in Verdun, France.

• 39 letters and drawings by French army captain Léon Rohlfs De Sussex recounting his daily life as a soldier in the trenches during the First World War, in northeastern France, near Verdun.
• 1914-1915.
• Excellent condition.
• Unique set.

The recipient is his sister, Marie. The general condition of the documents is good, only some letters are undated or difficult to decipher because the soldier wrote in very small letters.

The lot also includes Léon's birth announcement written by his parents in 1875, and two letters he wrote as a student at the prestigious Saint Cyr military school. In French. Good state. Unique set.

Translated extracts

1895 - Léon explains the discipline imposed by the military school: "I have been in this new type of boarding house for fifteen days (...). We must make the bed very well, to give it the shape of a rectangular parallelepiped, then shine the boots , clean the top of your closet, tidy it well so that we don't see any wrinkles in the clothes (...). Then we go to training or to classes (topography, fortifications, literature, law) depending on the week."

09/02/1914 - Léon thinks victory won't take long: "The Bavaria have been decimated."

09/21/1914 - Léon ponders: "I'm fine, but my battalion suffered a lot of losses."

11/16/1914 - Léon recounts the routine and the fighting: "Our men are up to their necks in the trenches during the day and work at night, digging, to advance. It's positional warfare; we bomb the German camps and they fight back. Yesterday afternoon, their first bombs knocked down the bell tower of the northernmost village (Malancourt) and killed 3 men from battalion 173."

11/21/1914, night - Léon suffers from the cold: "My dear Marie, I thank you very much for the balaclava you sent me. (...) But it's my feet that I can't keep warm, until someone invents heated shoes. I I freeze when I don't do anything, even though I dress like an Eskimo. You must have seen in the newspapers that the Germans blew up the St Michel barracks and killed 1683 men."

11/25/1914 - Léon explains, with a drawing, a mission he undertook: "Yesterday I went with General Berg to the Béthancourt trenches which had been attacked during the night. Dead Germans were still on the ground."

12/26/1914 - On his birthday, Léon thanks Marie for the letter of congratulations and writes that he is very busy: "My job is to fire 6 guns at once, by a single man, at certain points, intersections, water points, etc... This is called piles of weapons and attracts me criticism and little consideration: the world is no better in war than in peace."

01/13/1915 - Léon's morale is low: "The environment in which I live is not friendly, with a few exceptions. I am physically well, my mood is not (...). The war is now not very interesting, things are We are stopped and we are discouraged. There is a lot of friction between us, the conversations are stupid or ill-intentioned; there are few calamities like this."

02/13/1915 - Léon's morale does not improve: "The general discouragement affects me more than the fights, I am depressed."

05/25/1915 - Wounded, Léon writes a last letter: "I have suffered so much since you saw me; this is beyond anything I could imagine. The doctors say my leg is fine, but I still have a fever . The continuous pain I feel in my wound makes me scream in front of anyone."

The First World War (1914 - 1918) is the most important tragic moment in European history. Its result - the humiliation of Germany - partly motivated the Second World War and, finally, the construction of the European Union to put a definitive end to the Franco-German rivalry. The Battle of Verdun is particularly emblematic of this horrific war that killed millions of terrified soldiers and innocent civilians on both sides.

The famous Brazilian philosopher Antonio Candido was a student in 1929 of Marie Rohlfs De Sussex, sister and main recipient of the soldier's letters. I then contacted one of the scholar's daughters, Marina, a professor at USP, who got back to me:

Hello Mathias, I called my father just now and he was amazed! He said that Madame de Sussex was very important in his life, someone he reveres. She was his teacher in 1929 and had a brother, a lawyer, who was heavily wounded in war, as they were called then. He doesn't remember exactly, but he believes he didn't have an arm or a leg. What a coincidence ! A hug, Marina.

This exchange of letters between Léon, the captain, and Marie, his sister, is moving and educational. Many human feelings are expressed by the hand of this soldier: fear, pride, anger, sadness, love, longing, friendship, contempt, optimism, pessimism, loneliness, solidarity, suffering, compassion, etc. When reading these lines of Léon in the trenches, we try to imagine the hell that this young, brilliant man lived through. He feels like a man who is completely powerless in the face of climate, history and human nature.