Naughty Girl, a true story of a pretty Parisienne. The Great War pulp novel 1918

[ANONYMOUS.] ONE IN KHARKI: Naughty Girl. Consisting of: Suzie: A Parisian Girl at the Front; together with The Pretty Maid of “Pop”. Paris: Librairie des Editions Modernes, [1918-19].

Original pictorial wrappers under the collective title Naughty Girl, 120 x 200 mm. Two separately paginated works, 55 and 58 pp., printed on cheap, toned and irregularly cut paper, the leaves varying noticeably in size. Yapped wrapper edges worn and chipped, covers grubby and marked, with a small contemporary ownership inscription to the front free endpaper. A couple of short splits towards the head of the rear leaves, but remarkably sound for such an ephemeral production. Good. 

An unlikely survivor of cheap First World War reading produced in Paris for British soldiers serving on the Western Front. The volume contains two anonymously written romantic tales, both described as “a true story written for you by one in khaki”: Suzie: A Parisian Girl at the Front and The Pretty Maid of “Pop”. The stories combine sentimental romance, barrack-room humour and lightly bawdy accounts of relations between British soldiers and French or Belgian women.

The wartime setting is explicit. The preface to Suzie opens with the narrator recalling the devastation of a town in the Flanders sector in March 1918, while The Pretty Maid of “Pop” concludes “Septembre 1918”. “Pop” was the familiar British soldiers’ nickname for Poperinghe, the Belgian town behind the Ypres Salient which became a major centre for billets, rest, recreation and leave traffic during the war.

The bibliographical construction is particularly odd. Each work has its own title-page and separate pagination, while advertisements bound with the volume promote Suzie and related titles as individual publications. This suggests that the two stories had an existence as separate cheap pamphlets before being combined here beneath the sensational collective wrapper title Naughty Girl, advertised as “a true, spicy, funny and risky story of a pretty Parisienne”. The wrapper promises considerably more than the text delivers.

I haven't been able to trace another copy of either Suzie: A Parisian Girl at the Front or The Pretty Maid of “Pop”, nor another example of this combined issue. A scarce piece of ephemeral Western Front reading material.