“‘What is that?' I asked. The Englishman answered calmly: 'It was my best enemy.’”

This is the story of the little books that went to war, and the Frenchman whose ghosts we'll read by their light.

In 1943, a consortium of American publishers began slipping pocket-sized paperbacks into the hands of GIs bound overseas: the Armed Services Editions. More than 120 million of these ASEs were printed by the war’s end, and they turned up everywhere: foxholes, troopships, field hospitals, and more. In fact, we’ll meet one colonel who fondly remembers a soldier reading aloud to their gun crew while German 88s whistled in. The Germans tried to kill them as they laughed and enjoyed good writing.

And among the 1,300-odd titles the program carried to the front were the works of a certain French master of the macabre: Guy de Maupassant. The Armed Services Edition gave GIs Maupassant the realist … but we’ll encounter two tales that reflect the Frenchman’s more ghoulish side.

Happy Halloween.

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