Captain Conan
Roger Vercel
New Introduction by Ted Morgan
First published in 1934, Roger Vercel’s novel Captain Conan was awarded the Prix
Goncourt for its unflinching assessment of the toll fierce combat had taken on the
youth of France. Largely autobiographical and told from the perspective of a young
lieutenant, the book follows the exploits of a French commando unit attacking
Bulgarian outposts along the Romanian border. The unit is led by the twenty-threeyear-old Captain Conan, a haberdasher’s son who finds his calling as a fearless killer
ready to crawl through barbed wire and slit the throats of his enemies on midnight
raids. Based on Vercel’s comrade to whom the book is dedicated, Conan is loyal only
to his men, as all notions of patriotism are lost in place of the fraternity and brutality
needed for survival and success in this close, bloody combat.
News of the Armistice is slow to reach the Bulgarian front, and when it comes, it
changes little. Conan and his men are redeployed to Bucharest to maintain the peace,
but they do more harm than good. For them the city is just another battlefield to be
conquered. Conan’s soldiers have become murderers, thieves, and rapists, and Conan
himself is charged with injuring his lover’s husband, a Romanian major. But the
major withdraws the charges, and Conan leaves Bucharest when the French are called
to combat Lenin and Trotsky’s guerrilla forces along the Ukrainian border. Conan
and his men, now facing their former Russian allies, have lost all ideals of honorable
battle and are reduced to serving as mindless weapons to be moved about on the
field. Conan becomes the hero of his final fight, but Vercel shows us that there is no
happy homecoming for a trained killer—only isolation, loneliness, and nostalgia for
battles Conan never fully understood.
Ted Morgan’s introduction to this new edition maps the public reception of
Vercel’s novel and places the book in the larger context of World War I combat literature.
The French novelist Roger Vercel
(1894–1957) wrote numerous books,
including the maritime tales In Sight
of Eden and Tides of Mont St.-Michel.
Ted Morgan is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of
biographies of Winston Churchill,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, William
S. Burroughs, and others. His biography Maugham was a 1982 finalist for
the National Book Award.
The Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Series • Matthew J. Bruccoli, series editor
October 2007, 304 pages
Method of payment:
_____ Check or money order: (payable to USC Press in United States dollars)
Credit Card: _____ Discover _____ Mastercard _____ Visa
Account number: _____________________________________ Exp. Date ________
Signature: ____________________________________________________________
Name (please print): ________________________________ Phone: ____________
Shipping Address: ______________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
Send me ______ copy/copies
(pb, 978-1-57003-713-9, $19.95 each) ______
SC residents add 7% sales tax ______
Shipping and Handling* ______
CODE AUFR
TOTAL ______
*add $6.00 for first book,
$2.00 for each additional book
718 Devine Street, Columbia, South Carolina 29208
800-768-2500 • Fax 800-868-0740 • www.sc.edu/uscpress