The Man Who Planted Trees

When the narrator returns to Provence after World War I, he is a deeply haunted young man. Although the grisly details of his wartime experience are left unsaid, he offers numerous hints of the horrors he witnessed and their traumatic effect on him. He is initially drawn back to that spot of dry desolation to breathe “fresh air” (16) again, an implicit acknowledgement of the chlorine gas used on French troops at Verdun—to say nothing of the stench of rotting bodies, which made soldiers huddled in the trenches almost as sick as the poison gas. The mere mention of the year 1915 briefly brings the narrator back to those trenches, and when he remembers Bouffier and his reforestation efforts, he immediately assumes the man is dead. Even more disturbingly, the thought of one more dead body hardly fazes him, given the tens of millions of corpses produced by World War I.

Yet within minutes of seeing the fruits of Bouffier’s tireless labor, the narrator is healed. It is more than just the trees that soothe his tortured spirit; it is the ecological explosion that occurs due to the trees’ presence. The narrator says, “Seeds were carried on the wind, too, so as the water reappeared, so did willows, reeds, meadows, gardens, flowers and some reason for living” (19).