Albert Severin Roche was born in 1895 in Réauville, a small farming village in southeastern France, the third son of a peasant family. When war came in 1914, the army's medical board looked him over and sent him home.
He was five feet two inches tall and weighed almost nothing. His father was quietly relieved, telling people they needed arms to work the farm.
Roche ran away the following month, reported to a different district's training camp, and was accepted.
He was sent to the 30th Battalion of Chasseurs, performed so badly in training that his officers barely noticed him, grew frustrated, walked off the base, was immediately arrested for desertion, and responded to the charges by telling his superiors that bad soldiers were sent up there but he wanted to go where the fighting was.
The army took this at face value and assigned him to the 27th Battalion of Alpine Chasseurs, known by the Germans as the Blue Devils, in July He crawled alone up to a German blockhouse, noticed the garrison huddled around a stove for warmth, and dropped grenades down the chimney.
He came back with eight prisoners and two captured machine guns. He found himself the sole survivor of a trench position, held it alone, and came back from that too.
The list of actions accumulated over three years until, in 1917, during the catastrophic Nivelle Offensive at Chemin des Dames, a shell landed near Roche's captain and buried him in mud, badly wounded and barely alive.
Roche went flat and started crawling. He moved six hours across open ground under continuous fire to reach his captain, then spent four more hours dragging the man back through the same terrain until he could hand him to stretcher-bearers. He collapsed into a shell crater and fell asleep.
A patrol found him there and arrested him for sleeping on duty. Abandoning a post during combat was a capital offense, executable
