Albert Severin Roche

Albert was born in Reauville, Drôme Department, in south-eastern France, on 5 March 1895. He was the third son of a modest family of farmers. His father was Séverin Roche, and his mother was Louise Savel.[1]

In 1913, Albert was rejected by an assessment board of the French Army, because it considered him too puny to serve. This apparently delighted his father who stated, “We need arms to run the farm." In August 1914 Albert, however, wanted to fight and in opposition to his father took his bag and ran away. Albert reported in another district at the Allan training camp, which assigned him to the 30th Battalion of Chasseurs. His military training did not go well since he was badly assessed and not respected. His temper finally got the better of him, and he walked off the camp, but he was immediately caught and arrested for desertion. His defence on these charges was that he was not a deserter. He said, "Bad soldiers are sent up there, but I want to go where we fight.”

Albert was assigned on 3 July 1915 to the 27th Battalion of Chasseurs Alpins, engaged in Aisne, in today's Hauts-de-France region, a northern region of France. This battalion was nicknamed the "blue devils" by the Germans.[2][3] Albert volunteered to destroy a German blockhouse. Creeping up to the enemy's trenches, Albert noticed that the Germans were pressed against a stove in the block house for heat and threw a handful of grenades down the stove chimney. The position was neutralized, with several deaths and the surrender of the survivors, who believed that they had been attacked by a large force. Albert returned to his base with the captured machine guns and eight prisoners.

In another instance, Albert found himself one day the only survivor of his position, a trench in Sudel in Alsace. He then positioned along the trench, used the weapons of his dead comrades and alternatively firing them. That made the enemy believe that the resistance of the garrison was still resolute, and the Germans eventually gave up the attack. Albert volunteered regularly for reconnaissance missions, but on one occasion, he was captured with his wounded lieutenant. Isolated in a bunker during an interrogation, he managed to overwhelm and kill his interrogator and to steal his pistol. He returned to the French lines with 42 new prisoners while wearing his wounded lieutenant on his back.[4]

During the Second Battle of the Aisne, Albert's captain was seriously wounded and fell between the lines. Albert crawled under fire for six hours to reach him and then another four hours to finally hand him over to stretcher-bearers. Exhausted, he fell asleep in a guard hole, but was awakened by a patrol who mistook him for sleeping on duty. Abandoning a post under fire was punishable by being shot within 24 hours. In spite of his denials, Albert had no witnesses and he was sent to a detention barracks to await execution. Albert wrote to his father: "In an hour I shall be shot, but I assure you that I am innocent." As Albert was taken in front of a firing squad, a messenger arrived interrupting them. Albert's captain had just awoken from his coma and brought his favorable testimony.[5] By the end of the war, Albert had been wounded nine times and had personally captured 1,180 prisoners. At the end of the conflict, at 23, he was still a second-class soldier. On November 27, 1918, on the balcony of the City Hall of Strasbourg, Albert was presented to General Ferdinand Foch in front of a huge crowd with these words: "Alsatians, I present to you your liberator Albert Roche. He is the first soldier of France!" Shortly before, Foch had surprisingly discovered Albert's service record and exclaimed, "He has done all this, and he has no rank."

Albert returned home to Valréas, in the Vaucluse, where he worked modestly as a municipal labourer and married a woman from Colonzelle, in the neighboring Drôme. They had two children, Magali and Marie-Pierre.[6] Albert eventually became a firefighter in the powder magazine of Sorgues, in the Vaucluse.

In April 1939, Albert was involved in an accident with a car as he was departing from a bus that took him to work. The car once belonged to the former President of the Republic, Emile Loubet. He was transferred to the Sainte-Marthe hospital in Avignon, where he died on 14 April (at "five o'clock" according to his death certificate) at the age of 44. As the historian Pierre Miquel writes in La Grande Guerre day-to-day, Editions Pluriel: "This man had gone through four years of war, he had been wounded nine times, he had been close to death a thousand times, Almost unjustly shot as a mutineer. He had escaped all dangers, all accidents. [...] All of this to be killed twenty years later, on his way home, on the descent of the bus."[7]

Albert was awarded the cross of the Legion of Honour from the commander of the Army of the Vosges, General de Maud'huy. He was also invited to dine with General Mangin. Albert also held twelve further citations, including four from the order of the Army:

• 
  Officier de la Légion d'honneur.
• 
  Médaille Militaire.
• 
  Croix du combattant volontaire.
• 
  Croix de Guerre.

In 1920, with seven of his comrades, he carried the coffin of the Unknown Soldier at the ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe. Albert was a member of the French delegation to London in 1925 with General Henri Gouraud to attend the funeral of Field Marshall John French. He and five representatives of the army were also invited to dine with King George V.

Édouard Daladier, the prime minister of France, requested for full military honours be given to him at his funeral. In 1971, Réauville erected a cenotaph to his memory in front of his family's house. Originally buried in Sorgues, Roche's body was transferred on September 22, 1967 to Saint-Véran Cemetery, in Avignon, in Vaucluse, where it still lies (square 40, north row, grave 15). A stela in his memory was inaugurated in Réauville in 1971 by Mayor Gabriel Jarniac.[8] In 2018, La Poste issued a stamp in his memory.[9] In 2023 the Swedish metal band Sabaton released the album 'Heroes Of The Great War' in which the song 'The First Soldier' was dedicated to him.[10]