There was an old journalist I came to know, whose strands of pomaded hair had whitened a half-century earlier. He wore a bow tie and beret while shuffling around his cottage in a Maryland forest. Sitting with him, the century compressed—I felt the presence of the Great War.

As a 16-year-old, my centenarian friend had enlisted in the U.S. Army with a fudged birth certificate. But his quest for glory had begun too late. The war in the trenches was already coming to an end. Upon arriving in France, he was placed on a boat home. His fresh body was of great use, however. On the rough Atlantic, limbless amputees would regularly roll out of their bunks and thump onto the deck. It was his job to re-shelf the moaning wounded.

If one world war hadn’t been so quickly followed by a second, we would know the horrors of the first more intimately. The combatant countries would have engaged in more sincere introspection to account for the four years that they spent killing on such a massive scale. But instead, the war that birthed modernity seems unapproachably sepia, hardly close enough to imagine that we could have ever sipped tea with its veterans.

Just recently, I thought of my now-deceased friend—and felt the distant war draw close again. The shock of horror came from an old French novel called Fear. The book’s author, Gabriel Chevallier, a gentle satirist of village life in Beaujolais, had suffered his own severe wounds in the fight. Like the infantryman it describes, Fear never had a fair chance. It appeared in 1930, when there was apparently little public appetite for brutal accounts of a recently buried trauma, at least not in France. By the end of the decade, soldiers were returning to a new western front; censors could not abide the existence of such a graphic depiction of combat, and Chevallier volunteered to pull his novel from circulation. All these factors conspired to deny the book its deserved notoriety and to delay its appearance in the United States until this spring, when New York Review Books published an exquisite translation.

Fear hardly feels like an object from the lost-and-found, which is why it has preserved its capacity to gobsmack. Chevallier’s protagonist, Jean Dartemont, a sardonic 19-year-old student from Paris shoved into a uniform and rushed to the trenches, narrates the war with a bracingly modern sensibility. He is confessional, self-deprecatory, and a little bit vulgar. There’s a strong streak of Joseph Heller in his Erich Maria Remarque.