Interview with Elizabeth Letts

This remarkable novel explores, within the context of World War I, several issues that have so far received little or no attention, including the often-ignored involvement of cavalry forces, especially early in the war, as well as colonialism, in this case French, and its effect on both colonized and colonizers. The action in Fallen for France centers on a horse—a particularly beautiful Arabian mare born in the stable of the Sultan of Morocco in 1905—and the various people who claim ownership of her over the years. Find out more from this interview with the author.

You explain the origins of this story in your author’s note, so I’d like to take a different angle here. What would you like readers to know about the horse—we’ll call her Tassa, although she has several names throughout the book—that is the center of your story?

The Arabian mare, Tassa, is in some ways the central character of this novel. Born in the Sultan’s palace, she is brought into a changing world, as the independent Sultanate of Morocco collapses and becomes a Protectorate of France. Tassa will witness all of it.  The groom who cares for her reflects that “the soul of Morocco dances on four hooves …” I often write about horses because I have found that horses act as our moral mirrors, inspiring us to drop enmity and division and to look for common ground. As Tassa weaves her way through different lives, each character finds their reflection in her.

The novel actually begins with Beddou, though, and in 1899, six years before Tassa’s birth. Why start with him?

The novel begins on a mountaintop with a woman giving birth alone. Beddou is born at the turn of the twentieth century, but he could have been born a century earlier and nothing would have been different. He was born in a part of Morocco that was not completely under the Moroccan Sultan’s rule—it was a semi-autonomous region controlled by confederations of indigenous Berber tribes. On the day of his birth, Beddou’s life was entirely self-contained. He could have been born, lived, and died without ever venturing out of this country within a country. But he was sent away to apprentice as a shepherd, which started a journey that took him always farther away from home. On the day he was born, you would have thought that what was going on in France, Spain, and Germany would never touch his life—and yet it did.

And how does Beddou encounter Tassa? What does she mean to him?

Beddou has left home and is working in Meknes, a city in Morocco that is rapidly changing with the arrival of French colonialism. Beddou encounters Tassa when she is being ill-treated by a Moroccan soldier serving in the French Army.  When Beddou’s mentor, Hassan, plays a ruse on the unsuspecting soldier and steals the mare, he immediately gifts her to Beddou. Not only does Beddou adore her and spend time taming and training her, but he’s certain the mare will carry him home to his mother. But the mare is torn away from him, and Beddou sets out to find her.

Hassan plays an important role in moving the story along. How would you describe him and his interactions with both Beddou and Tassa? What takes Hassan to France?

Hassan is a complex character—he rescues Beddou from a difficult situation as an indentured shepherd and takes him to Meknes to work in a saddle shop. He’s the chief procurer for a wealthy saddle merchant and is able to take Beddou all around the great city, widening Beddou’s world. The city of Meknes at that moment in time is a fascinating place. It’s a major military garrison where the French have installed large numbers of troops, and alongside the traditional old city of Meknes, they’ve built a new city. Hassan dips in and out of these worlds with ease—he’s fluent in many languages and easily adopts the habits and mores of Meknes’s diverse inhabitants. He’s silver-tongued and endlessly charming, a man of many virtues and plenty of vice. Hassan has gotten himself into trouble by gambling with the French citizens of Meknes, and so he flees the city, planning to evade the law by heading into the mountain areas where Berber tribes are not under the Sultan’s control. But then he gets the idea that maybe life would be easier if he enlisted in the French Army for a while—lay low. Unfortunately for him, within weeks World War I starts, and the large French colonial army—made up of troops from France proper as well as its African colonies—is quickly shipped off to France.

In France (northeast France, to be more precise), we meet Estelle Maillot. What should we know about her personal life when we first meet her, and how does she encounter Tassa?

Estelle begins the war in a situation of total vulnerability. Her mother died in childbirth many years before. Her father died suddenly just a few weeks before the onset of the war, leaving her the head of a household that contains herself and her handicapped brother. To Estelle, even the coming war seems trivial in comparison to the domestic upheaval that came with the death of her father. She wants to care for her vulnerable brother, but she will soon learn that the war is greater than all of them, and that its force will change her life.

Why did you decide to include Jean-Baptiste Thibault? What does he contribute to the novel?

Jean-Baptiste Thibault is a parallel character to Hassan. Like Hassan, he is a solider in the French Army. Thibault is a French citizen born into the conundrum that was French colonial society. Thibault is French. In fact, his parents hailed from northeast France, the region most affected in World War I. But Thibault was born in Algeria when Algeria was a colony of France.  And since most Americans are not deeply familiar with this history, Algeria is directly east of Morocco along the northern coast of Africa, just across the Mediterranean from France. But for 120 years, Algeria was part of France. I was fascinated by the predicament of someone like Jean-Baptiste. French by nationality, born in Algeria, he had never set foot in France. So, when called to serve in France, in many ways he was more similar to Hassan than different. Both of their stories were perverted by colonialism.

Last but not least, please introduce us to Thomas Bellows, his role in the story and especially with Tassa.

The original inspiration for this story was an account written by a real veterinarian who served in the British Veterinary Corps on the Western Front during World War I. He wrote that they treated a wide variety of breeds—including, he mentioned, a Moroccan Arabian. That got my mind spinning. How would a Moroccan Arabian end up in France, and what became of it? Did the horse ever return home? Both Thomas and Estelle are caregivers, and while their paths diverge during most of the war, both of them are forced to deal daily with what industrial weapons do to living flesh. We think a lot about the soldiers in war, but the caregivers endure a parallel burden, perhaps in some ways even worse. In this story, the characters begin with separate lives until the war pulls all of them into its vortex and their lives intertwine.

And what of you? Are you already working on a new book?

Indeed I am. Back to nonfiction and working on a true story about a very singular woman, her reject horse, and their longshot quest set against the backdrop of the 1960s and 1970s in California.

Elizabeth Letts is the no. 1 New York Times bestselling author of six novels and three works of narrative nonfiction. Fallen for France is her latest book. Find out more about her and her work at https://www.elizabethletts.com.