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In 1923, when he was 17 years old, Arnaud de Roquefeuil began his diary. He could not take inspiration from other strip cartoons, because only illustrated papers existed at that time. The Tintin strip cartoon did not make its appearance until 1929. Arnaud drew his everyday life and the things he liked for his own pleasure, with no definite object in view. He could not conceive that in 1939 he would go off to the war and that this chronicle would become an important historical document.
 
From 1939 on, Arnaud experienced and drew the war, the happy times shared with his comrades, the moments of fear, and the interludes of boredom between sporadic bursts of gunfire. But in June 1940, France capitulated and Arnaud de Roquefeuil was taken prisoner. It was the beginning of the German occupation, and soldiers started being sent to Germany to fight. On the day when the discharge board convened, a German major medical officer decided that Arnaud's heart was too weak for him to be a useful prisoner, and signed his release order.
 
At last, he was able to go home to his wife and daughters, but he did not give up the fight. He made use of the only weapon available to him – his pencil – for other purposes than his sketched chronicle. He provided false identity papers for all the young people who refused to go and work in Germany.
 
In 1944, Arnaud and his companions sensed that a landing was imminent, though they did not know where or when. A spy network was set up. Arnaud copied messages from Radio London onto scraps of paper. He recorded information on German positions for Allied parachutists and hid these notes in unusual places. On 6 June 1944, over 156,000 men landed in Normandy. The war was not over. Saint-Lô was destroyed and the Germans, pushed back by the Americans, retreated to the southern zone of the Department, near the Château de Boucéel.

Arnaud and his brother were denounced and the Gestapo searched the chateau and deported the two men to the camp at Compiègne. But even in the camp, he continued to draw, thus bequeathing to us the only graphical archive in existence on the terrible conditions reigning there. After a few months, the deportees entrained again, destination Buchenwald. Suddenly, the train stopped: the bridge over the Somme had been bombed. The deportees were disembarked and locked up in wooden huts. The Germans left the camp on 9 September 1944. Arnaud, liberated, returned home, weak and starved but happy.
 
Bit by bit, he resumed his ordinary life. He continued to draw what he saw until one day, for no definite reason, he stopped. Although it was never the intention of the author, this modest comic strip, begun to record a light-hearted epoch and the joys of youth, has thus become a valuable contribution to the work of memory. Arnaud de Roquefeuil died in 1996, at the age of 90

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