Covered With Mud and Glory: A Machine Gun Company in Action ("Ma Mitrailleuse")

"Covered With Mud and Glory…" is a novel about the First World War as told by a soldier in France at the time. Sergeant-Major Georges Lafond, of the Territorial Hussars, the author, was in South America at the time of mobilization. He returned to France as soon as possible and joined his corps, but asked to be assigned as intelligence officer to the machine-gun sections of the first regiment of Colonial Infantry. With this picked corps, he took part in the engagements in Champagne, on the Somme, at Lihons, Dompierre, Herbécourt, and notably in the days from the first to the fifth of July, where the regiment earned its second citation and received the fourragère. Lafond was discharged after the battles of Maisonnette, and wrote this book of recollections in the hospital at Abbeville, and afterwards at Montpellier, where he had to undergo a severe operation. Sergeant-Major Lafond's narrative makes no claim to literary pretension, but it is simply a collection of actual occurrences. It is a series of short narratives which give the life of a company of machine gunners from the day of its formation to the hour when it was so decimated that it had to be reorganized with men from other corps.