Roland Dorgelès is usually associated with his first novel, Les Croix de bois (Wooden Crosses), written during World War I and published shortly thereafter, in 1919. Its portrait of desperate but essentially patriotic and courageous men facing an almost hopeless situation in the trenches made it an immediate and overwhelming success. For the past sixty years the book has been republished from time to time, and it remains to this day, of the more than thirty books that Dorgelès wrote, his major achievement.

Dorgelès, who signed all of his published works with that pseudonym, was born Roland Lécavelé in Amiens, the ancient provincial capital of Picardy, on 15 June 1886. As a youth he received a traditional petit bourgeois Catholic upbringing but set out in a new direction when, in late adolescence, he moved to Paris, hoping to become a painter, and...