The 100-year-old opiate had lost none of its potency

Our neighbour Michael is a keen and knowledgable attender of vides-greniers, the equivalent of our car-boot sales. His focus is on old bottles, full or empty, and old china, but he’ll pick up anything that piques his fancy.

Some months ago, for example, he bought for €1 a glass tube of opium tablets issued to the French infantry during the Great War. Last week he reissued me with three of these little brown pills knowing that I had an abiding interest in the first world war and was using a modern version – white crystals of morphine sulphate in a red gelatine pill – to mask the pain I was experiencing due to the metastases in my bones. Perhaps the kindly impulse was that I could pretend I was a heroically wounded poilu for an afternoon instead of a nitwit English expat costing the French state a fortune on taxi fares alone.

As it happened I was rereading Sir Edward Spears’s second volume of Great War memoirs, Prelude to Victory. Sir Edward was the chief liaison officer between ours and the French armies and this second volume details the negotiations between the French and British generals and politicians prior to the tragic so-called Nivelle offensive in 1917, in which General Nivelle was given command of the entire Allied force in France, bet the farm on a single, overwhelming British and French attack, and lost. The British section of that joint offensive was the Battle of Arras and the successful assault on Vimy Ridge. Calculated by the day, British casualties were greater at Arras even than on the Somme. The French attacks on the Aisne heights were so costly that the army mutinied and for several months the British continued the struggle alone.