He went into the artillery, and was stationed at Nîmes. He became Second Lieutenant Guillaume Apollinaire. There were dull months upon months in the barracks. There was also active fighting. He was three times wounded in the head, and trepanned. In the Fall of 1915, he lay in a hospital in Paris, recovering from a successful operation. It was at this time that he assembled the fragments of a novel over which he had been working for a period of years, _The Poet Assassinated._ The poet, Croniamantal, is one of the few frankly epic figures of modern literature. Apollinaire had never really outlived the poet's age of twenty-five, and the preposterous life of his hero is drawn against the artistic and social foibles of his age. By no means mere satire in the 18th century sense. Apollinaire grows positively hilarious and intoxicated over his characters so that at times he is beside himself with sheer fun. Results: humor of extraordinary eloquence and sonority, and a form that is complete unrepresentative, with perpetual digressions and asides. There have been so many tired men in France who wrote like flagellants. Flaubert made his waking hours a nightmare; Gautier was much too corseted; to Stendhal writing was a torturesome but resistless destiny; Villiers was a devout artisan; Mallarmé goaded himself into obscuracy and speechlessness. We must go back to Stendhal to find such extreme opposition to naturalism. It is enemy of all that was Ibsen. Distortion or under-emphasis are employed to fantastic ends; when a puppet is uninteresting or wrung dry he is dismissed or killed. Here is the destructive side of it: Apollinaire runs all the risks, obeys no rules, and writes for fun. In the following year he was dismissed from the army and pronounced unfit for anything but censorship service.