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The fight for Algerian independence from France began in November 1954. That brutal guerilla war would continue until 1961, when French president Charles de Gaulle gave up Algeria, an African colony France had ruled since 1830.

Among the French, the war was unpopular and misunderstood. Still, they had as many as 450,000 soldiers in Algeria. There is an unforgettable film about that time, “The Battle of Angiers” (1966) but little or no literature, which some blame on a collective wish to forget. Le Permission, a novel by French journalist Daniel Anselme was published in 1957, but found no audience and fell out of print.

Little wonder: this is a beautifully told but uncomfortable read about three soldiers in Paris, home from the front for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. I read the recent English translation, by David Bellos, titled On Leave. (In his introduction, Bellos provides a rich history of the events that led up to the war, and the complications that ensued once the French departed.)

In the literature of war — the “shelf” — this novel takes a place.

Forever changed by the war, the three soldiers find a Paris disinterested in their plight: their friends and family wish the war to be over, of course, but do nothing to rally support for its end.

Most of the story concerns Lachaume, the eldest of the three and a former English professor. He comes home to the apartment he’d shared with his wife, who has left him. (He has been away nearly two years.) He spends a day and a night waiting there, reliving their sunny life, preparing a favorite lunch, remembering her beautiful thighs. Late the second night he ends his delusion and leaves, checking into a hotel.

“‘Let’s suppose she’d agreed to wait for me until the end (but when wlll the end come?…) Suppose she was brave enough…foolish enough, it would still have been a deception, because the boy she loved…is dead, well and truly dead. It might have been different if we’d changed together. But how could I ever have got her to understand what has happened over there…’”

Lachaume spends the week awkwardly meeting old friends and former students. (Also his mother, in one of the trippiest sections of the book.) He won’t pretend to be anything other than he is: a foot soldier with a failed marriage. He is angry, bitter — and very funny.

The three soldiers seamlessly reunite: they are most comfortable with each other. They set off on a drunken odyssey through an unfeeling Paris that leaves them, at last, on a train returning to the front.

There they join other protesting soldiers, hanging from windows, banging the sides of the carriages as trains pull out of the station: “Send us home! Sends us home! Send us home!”