Barroux 

Line of Fire, Diary of An Unknown Soldier – in pictures

One winter morning French illustrator Barroux made an incredible discovery in a Paris street: the diary of a solder from the first world war. We have no idea who he was. This gallery contains extracts of the extraordinary book Barroux made from the diaries he found: the incredible graphic novel
  
  


Line of Fire: page 11
Barroux: "I’ll walk, it’s not far… I go at a steady pace from Bastille to République…” are the opening lines of Line of Fire: Diary of an unknown soldier. It was a beautiful winter’s day – freezing cold but not a cloud in the sky. I came across two men in blue overalls clearly emptying out of the contents of a basement in a big, old house onto the pavement. Amongst old furniture, mouldy books and old magazines, a cardboard box caught my eye. I picked it up and shook it. Inside, there was a notebook and a medal (the Cross of War). I opened the notebook and read these lines: "3 August 1914 , Today we’re off. Mobilisation has been declared, and it’s time to go, leaving behind wife, children and family…” Photograph: Barroux
Line of Fire: page 13
Barroux: It was with great emotion that I slipped the diary and the Cross of War into my bag with the feeling of having saved a piece of history from destruction. I took the diary home and showed it to my kids who said "Dad, that’s trash – we don’t want to see that!" Photograph: Barroux
Line of Fire: page 27
Barroux: The diary sat on my shelves for a few months. I was at a book festival in the south of France and I mentioned my find to other illustrators who said that I should consider illustrating the diary and turning it into a book. But I still didn’t know what the diary said, beyond the first two lines, because the handwriting was in a very old-fashioned style and the letters were very small and bunched together. Photograph: Barroux
Line of Fire: page 34b
Barroux: So I had to ask someone else to transcribe the diary. There were two possibilities: either I’d say "Ok, that was an incredible find from the past but it won’t make an interesting story", or the diary would be interesting and have potential for a book. Fortunately, it was the latter. Photograph: Barroux
Line of Fire: page 34
Photograph: Barroux
Line of Fire: page 37
Photograph: Barroux
Line of Fire: page 41
Photograph: Barroux
Line of Fire: page 49
Photograph: Barroux
Line of Fire: page 57
Photograph: Barroux
Line of Fire: page 62
Photograph: Barroux
Line of Fire: page 67
Photograph: Barroux
Line of Fire: page
Photograph: Barroux
Line of Fire: page 78
Photograph: Barroux
Line of Fire: page 82
Photograph: Barroux
Line of Fire: page 84
The diary found by Barroux stopped on Saturday 5 September 1914, just two months after it started, although an accompanying notebook of songs found with the diary carries on until May 1917. We will probably never know why our soldier stopped writing his diary, or what became of him. They provide us with the story of the first months of a war everybody thought would be over by Christmas but which lasted more than four years and killed 16 million people. The Line of Fire: Diary of an Unknown Soldier by Barroux. Photograph: Barroux
 

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