Jour: 11 novembre 2022

In honor of the armistice of the end of World War I and Veterans in many countries, we present a fictional piece describing an American soldier's experience in France in 1917 when he and his comrades come across a cheese shop in Rouen. This extract is from the World War I novel One of Ours by Willa Cather, an American writer. The novel won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize. It tells the story of the life of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native who joins the US Army and is sent to France during World War I, just like the step Grandfather I never knew. Extract: At noon that day Claude found himself in a street of little shops, hot and perspiring, utterly confused and turned about. Truck drivers and boys on bell less bicycles shouted at him indignantly, furiously. He got under the shade of a young plane tree and stood close to the trunk, as if it might protect him. His greatest care, at any rate, was off his hands. With the help of Victor Morse he had hired a taxi for forty francs, taken…