Le Voyage du centurion

The book takes its title and epigraph from the centurion of Matthew 8 — ‘Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof’ — and casts Psichari’s own experience as the journey of an officer, Maxence, through the Mauritanian desert.

Much of it is landscape: the Adrar, the light, the emptiness, the small colonial posts. Psichari treats the desert as the condition of the conversion rather than its backdrop — the place where a man raised on his grandfather’s certainties finds them thinning out. The military vocation and the religious one are deliberately braided together throughout.

It was published posthumously in 1916, with a preface, and became one of the emblematic books of Catholic France in the war years: the grandson of the great skeptic, converted and then killed in the first weeks of the fighting. The symbolism was almost too convenient, and contemporaries said so.

The French text is free at Project Gutenberg. No public-domain English translation has been located; we have no English edition of this title and do not claim one.

This is a clean reading edition of A Soldier's Pilgrimage, the English translation of Ernest Psichari's Le Voyage du Centurion. Psichari (1883–1914) was the grandson of Ernest Renan, whose Life of Jesus had done more than any other book to unsettle French belief. He was raised without religion, enlisted as a private, served in the Congo and then in the Sahara, and was received into the Catholic Church in 1913. He was killed at Rossignol on 22 August 1914, in the first weeks of the war, aged thirty-one. This book, which he finished before he died and which was published in 1916, is the account of the desert years in which he came to faith. Maxence, its officer, is himself.

A note on the translation. We did not make it. The English here is the 1917 translation by E. M. Walker and Harriet M. Capes, published in London by A. Melrose, and it is in the public domain along with Psichari's French. What we have done is repair the scan of it and set it in readable type.

A note on what we changed. The scanned copy carried the printed book's own furniture through into the text: one hundred and twenty running heads, most of them the book's title standing in the middle of a sentence, because that is where the page turned. Where a page break had split a word we put it back together — glowing, glorification, available — and where it had split a sentence into two paragraphs we rejoined it. The printer's colophon and the lending library's date plate, which the scanner recorded as faithfully as it recorded Psichari, have been removed. Three recognition errors were corrected in thirty-nine thousand words, each read in context: méharistes, then, available.

We did not touch the translators' English. Their word order, their punctuation and their choices — centurion for centurion, Maxence for Maxence — are as they set them down in 1917.

Two free sources sit behind this book, and they are not the same thing. Psichari's French, Le Voyage du Centurion, is the text linked from this book's page, and it is the work itself. The English we have set is the Walker and Capes translation of 1917, scanned by the University of California and free to read at archive.org/details/soldierspilgrima00psiciala. If you want Psichari's own words, follow the first. If you want to check ours, follow the second.