Before the Silence of the Forests, Lilyane Beauquel

"I am merely rekindling a desire for happiness long abandoned; we are one and we are a thousand, and millions; we are one and all and alone. Nothing allows us to communicate with those we have left behind anymore. Always, in this hole made for us, our silence will remain." Otto, Simon, Heinrich, and Nathan, four twenty-year-old Germans, set out to discover the world, carried by the train of history. When they leave the Bavarian village where they were born, their desires are barely budding, and all they know of life is their beautiful friendship. Upon their arrival, they quickly understand what they have been sent into. It is 1915, in Lorraine. After the terrifying charges on the front line, they must somehow adapt to the catastrophe. Simon, in a soft voice, chooses to record in his notebooks what remains of life in the trenches. At the turn of a trench, each dreams of what he left behind: Anke, the young girl who stayed home, the unborn child, the mothers in pain. And the vestiges of childhood, the scents of joyful pastries, and the landscape that saw them grow up, now replaced by the carpet of bombs.