Souain-Perthes-lès-Hurlus is one of the many small settlements of northeastern France where the buried soldiers of World War I outnumber the population of the living. A commemorative stone bears the grim legend “Here lie 429 unknown Frenchmen,” followed by a list of fourteen identified bodies, whom, it tells us, also “died for France.”

Yet the last name on this list rather complicates the story. François Laurent was cut down by the French army’s own bullets, as one of hundreds of soldiers shot “as an example” for supposed indiscipline. This twenty-nine-year-old had not fallen for France but been executed in disgrace; his widow was denied a pension and had to raise their two children destitute and humiliated.

Laurent’s fate was set on October 1, 1914, just eight weeks into hostilities, when he received a bullet wound to the hand while serving in the trenches. Twelve days later — after an order by General Fernand de Langle de Cary decreeing the arrest of any man suspected of wounding himself in order to escape the front line — Laurent was hauled before a military tribunal.