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.

"We are worms, writhing to escape the spade." Eighty years after it was first published in its original French, Gabriel Chevallier's autobiographical novel about serving in the bombed-out trenches of ...

THE SCANDALS OF CLOCHEMERLE—Gabriel Chevallier—Simon & Schuster ($2.50). Nobody denies that the French know how to cook. And when it comes to turning the raw material of life into a souffle of light ...

Instead, Dartemont huddles in trenches, tries to escape duties and, like any old salt, is always on the lookout for food, drink and a place to sleep undisturbed. There is nothing exactly new in any of ...

THE GREEN MARE (234 pp.)—Marcel Aymé—Harper ($3). THE WICKED VILLAGE (304 pp.)—Gabriel Chevallier—Simon & Schuster ($3.95). A Kinsey litmus would probably show that the average Frenchman is no ...