- Title
- Pierre Hédoin: one in (half) a million
- Creator
- Ramsland, Marie
- Relation
- New Zealand Journal of French Studies Vol. 36, Issue 1 & 2, p. 71-88
- Relation
- http://www.victoria.ac.nz/slc/research/publications/nzjfs
- Publisher
- Victoria University of Wellington
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- According to the Petit Larousse illustré, the Battle of Verdun in 1916 was "la plus sanglante bataille de la Première Guerre mondiale, où les Français résistèrent victorieusement [...] aux plus violentes offensives allemandes". The previous year had ended in a military stalement, "sans que l'aube de la victoire se lève encore à l'horizon", as Marshal Joffre put it. The French had lost fifty percent of their officers with a total of 960,000 casualties. Reports from the war zones appeared regularly in the press, included in far-off Australia and New Zealand. They were eagerly awaited by readers anxious to know about distant warfront events in which they had a personal interest. Such reports, especially when reinforced by images like those published in the Sydney Mail, deepened a feeling of shared peril faces daily by Australian, French and other Allied troops. Snapshot and professional photographs of the Front appeared with increasing frequency, adding to the intensity. At the same time, it would have been difficult to think of these battles in terms of the way they were experienced by individual soldiers: this essay traces some of the realities of war and its effects as they were lived by man, Pierre Hédoin, and his family.
- Subject
- Pierre Hédoin; WWI; First World War; warfront events
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1315095
- Identifier
- uon:22892
- Identifier
- ISSN:0110-7380
- Language
- eng
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