The narrator is a young French man who shares many biographical details with the author. Importantly, both men served in the French infantry during World War I, fighting in the Battle of Verdun, one of the longest and deadliest battles in human history. The author was so traumatized by the horrors he witnessed in the war that he became a lifelong pacifist. And while the narrator does not explicitly claim any pacifist leanings, the World War II seems to pass him by with little comment on his part, except his observation that the wartime demand for wood briefly threatens Bouffier’s forest. In truth, he does not comment on much of anything except the glory of Bouffier’s one-man reforestation project; his wartime trauma manifests less through conscious imagery and more through an overall mood of despondency, haunting him as he revisits the Provence uplands.

To the narrator, Bouffier and his reforestation efforts represent a beacon of hope during a period of European history unmatched as a theater for human cruelty and destruction. His immediate personal trauma from World War I is healed as he walks with Bouffier among the young oaks in 1920.