In July of 1914, the Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez found himself on a boat traveling from Buenos Aires to Paris. The first signs of the upcoming war slowly became apparent. While the war unfolded, Blasco Ibáñez spent time in Paris. Around the time of the First Battle of the Marne, he received an assignment from Raymond Poincaré, then president of France. Poincaré complimented Blasco Ibáñez with his writing from the front and asked him to return to it, not as a journalist but as a novelist. His task was not to inform but to transform the narrative of the war in favor of France. Thus he wrote