Deprived of his inheritance to land like many youngest-born sons of peasant descent, Martin Bertrand (1915-2008) eventually fled life as a seminarian in the French High-Alps by enlisting in the Mobile Guard. Drafted at the outbreak of World War II, he was stationed in Casablanca where he led a Moroccan colonial recruit unit of tirailleurs in 1943, before participating in the Battle of Rome, the Provence landing, the liberation of Alsace, and the occupation of Germany. A few years after his return to Morocco, and before the ultimate disbanding of the tirailleur regiment, his unit would deploy to Tourane, Indochina. During each one of his long absences, my grandfather wrote almost daily to his wife Hélène, a “Pied-Noir” from a Spanish settler family in Algeria. Through a reading of these letters and the help of testimonies from relatives, I propose to integrate Bertrand’s experiences into a broader imperial story, one in which France led her armies through her last colonial wars and unhinged both metropolitan and colonial communities in the process. Furthermore, comparing Bertrand’s private words with more official sources like troop morale reports allows for an exploration of the complex social and ethnic hierarchies between French non-commissioned officers and “indigenous” troops. This analysis offers then a glimpse of the configurations of class and identity that military solidarities made possible. By the end of 1944, 9/10th of France’s mobilised soldiers were from North Africa’s contingents. Notwithstanding, Charles de Gaulle and the interior Resistance would showcase the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) in order to convince the Allies of France’s capacity to free herself, keeping the colonial troops out of final operations and victory parades. The frustration and bitterness vis-à-vis the metropolitans, amplified by particularly murderous times in France, translated into Bertrand’s principled refusal to join the FFI, his anxious evocations of his responsibility towards his troops as well as with his frequent and affectionate mentions of his helpful but child-like orderly, Mohammed. To what extent were such paternalistic expressions of loyalty towards “his” tirailleurs the harbingers of a sense of deeper political alienation, or even of “unimagined communities”? Can family pasts, as seen through the lens of micro-history, help historians contribute an approach that is at once more complex and humble towards national, imperial and/or global history?