His diary, one of the classic French accounts of the conflict, gives a vivid insight into what it was like to execute those orders, and to live in the trenches with increasingly demoralized, unruly, and mutinous men. In terse, unflinching prose he records their experiences as they confronted the acute dangers of the front line. The appalling conditions in which they fought—and the sheer intensity of the shellfire and the close-quarter combat—have rarely been conveyed with such immediacy.