When the War began in September 1939, Jean Delpech was on the Italian border. He was doing his military service with the 15^th Alpine Hunters Battalion in Barcelonnette. From October to the end of December, he trained in Ambly-Fleury in the Ardennes before being sent to patrol the Maginot line. As far as he was concerned, the first weeks of the war consised entirely of long marches in cold, makeshift camps. The retreat in June 1940 put him in a particularly difficult situation. He lost his battalion and was left to fend for himself: “I have confused, fragmented memories, a kaleidoscope of simultaneous or successive images, but I don’t know in what order, as the exhaustion caused by all the marching and fighting soon made me only half conscious of the passage of time”, he writes. He managed to get to Mirepoix in Ariège, where he was demobilised. Delpech recreated his daily life as a soldier during the 1940 campaign. From his arrival at the camp to the first battles and defeat, he evoked his own experience of the war, marked by debacle and death.