In Meaux, these enthusiasts who replay the Great War

Rifles, cartridge pouches and shell baskets are piled up, tightly packed in a bric-a-brac of bowls and combat uniforms, in a confidential corner of the fort of Cormeilles-en-Parisis (Val-d’Oise). With a confident gesture, Jean-Luc Baty plunges his hand into a jumble of objects and pulls out a rifle. “It’s my Berthier!”exclaims this snow-haired handyman. “The breech and the mouthpiece were found during excavations. I reproduced the whole wooden part”, he adds, stroking the butt, his creation. Other pieces of equipment have taken on colors under his care, from trench bowls to infantry jackets. Jean-Luc Baty is not a second-hand dealer. He is not a costumer either, even if he transforms himself from time to time into an infantryman of WWI with his comrades from the Poilus d’Île-de-France. His hobby? Re-enactor.

From feudal hosts to Napoleonic armies, these enthusiasts have become for thirty years a familiar figure of the old…