<p>Jean Giono’s Le Grand troupeau (1931) is considered by many to be if not one of the greatest, then certainly one of the most unforgettable of the French World War I novels written by former combatants. Having spent four years on the Western Front and seeing first-hand the inhumanity of war, Giono was an outspoken pacifist for the rest of his life. Giono renounces the conventional, glorified depictions of war, focusing on the heroic sacrifice of the protagonists. Giono was one of the French writers of the interwar period who aimed to reinvigorate realism. To that end, he added sensorial details based on his own experiences and memories of war, that are often lacking in nineteenth-century French realist novels. Making use of recent scholarship into acoustics and olfaction, I examine how Giono’s references to the sense of hearing and the sense of smell work together in Le Grand Troupeau to form the work’s anti-war message. </p>