The Bloody Hand

Cendrars joined the French Foreign Legion in 1914 and led a squad of foreign volunteers — men from Poland, Italy, and elsewhere who had chosen to fight for France. The book describes them one at a time: what they did before the war, how they talked, and what happened to them. It is not a book about battles. Most of it is the daily life of the trenches: mud, rats, wine, and patrols.

In September 1915 Cendrars was wounded at Navarin and his right arm was amputated. It was his writing hand, and he later said that losing it made him the writer he became. He wrote this book thirty years later; Denoël published it in Paris in 1946, and Nina Rootes translated it into English as Lice. It is the second book of his four-volume memoir, and it expands the short account of the war he had published in 1918 as I Have Killed.

Each chapter is a portrait of one man from the squad: who he was before the war, how he behaved in it, and how he died or survived. Between the portraits are chapters about daily life at the front — patrols, rumors, food. Cendrars's own wound appears several times: Navarin, the amputation, and the phantom pain that followed him afterward.

The chapters stand on their own, so the book can be read a portrait at a time.