When the body takes charge
Translated by Malcolm Imrie
307pp. Serpent’s Tail. £14.99.br/>978 1 84 668726 6
A s the last of the poilus, the French veterans of the First World War, have died, a resurgence of literary testaments to “La Der des Ders” has taken their place. Maurice Genevoix’s essay La Mort de près (1972) was recently republished to great acclaim. Similarly, Gabriel Chevallier’s “lost classic”, Fear, returns some eighty years after its interwar suppression.
Chevallier is best known for the village society caricatures of Clochemerle (1934), but his first satirical target was the French army, with special barbs reserved for the officer class.
Fear is an excoriating work: a veteran’s retrospective dismantling of tactical incompetence and defunct notions of duty. The narrative follows the precociously independentminded nineteen-year-old, Jean Dartemont, as he leads us through the outbreak of war, his conscription and inadequate training, the journey to the front in 1914, his subsequent injury and convalescence in 1915, and his inescapable return to the carnage.
Dartemont begins by examining the sleight of hand needed to convince millions of men to interrupt their lives and start slaughtering the citizens of another nation. Conscription has a carnival atmosphere, with talk of “a holiday from dull routine”. With authorial hindsight, Dartemont sees the coming disaster: it has been more than forty years since the last war, and the nature of war has changed. His journey to the front is unbearably tense. Discovering a bloated corpse, Dartemont experiences a terrible realization that if he dies now, he’ll have accomplished nothing: “I compare someone who dies young to a player who has just been dealt his cards and then forbidden to play”.
The narrator’s default position is contempt for rank: generals are derided as “specialists” playing an “intellectual game”; one officer, the cruelly inept Captain Bovin, becomes the troops’ worst enemy. Meanwhile, the public abide by outdated notions of heroism and duty, which the young soldier constantly shatters: “We were cowards and we knew it and we could be nothing else. The body was in charge and fear gave the orders”. Dartemont shows the infantrymen enduring the horror of the trenches with gallows humour, so that their sacrifice comes down to a sense of camaraderie.
When Dartemont is hospitalized, this tragic antipathy reaches its climacteric. A nurse asks him what he did at the front, expecting tales of derring-do. His reply is typically blunt: “I was afraid”. She is unable to countenance such heresy, while he stubbornly refuses to back down, stating that fear is “a natural revulsion of the body to something for which it wasn’t made”.
With his lucid analysis, the preternaturally detached Dartemont documents the foetid stasis of trench warfare, its boredom and lice. He seeks out other poilus to receive firsthand accounts of the Nivelle Offensive and Verdun. The narrative is often punctuated with his skewed perspective on the war, and Dartemont is always good company. Here he is weighing up his chances as a bomber early on:
“Considering these objects with my customary, gloomy reasoning, I told myself that a worker assembling the things was sooner or later bound to misjudge the length of the fuse to the detonator, and that I was equally bound to pay the price of his distraction. And I was a bad thrower.”
At times, reading Fear feels like being led through the damnation panel of Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, the front line “blazing like some infernal factory where monstrous crucibles melted human flesh into a bloody lava”. There are wince-inducing close-ups of mutilated men and corpses. Chevallier’s turn of phrase, brilliantly rendered in Malcolm Imrie’s translation, makes this distant war feel horrifying and close. Dartemont’s ultimate triumph, beside surviving, is in never having allowed himself to become dehumanized.
In the preface to the 1951 edition, the author stated: “I would not write this book in exactly the same way”, but he refused to alter it. He is referring, I think, to the huge risk he took in betraying the army’s credo. Fear remains a bravura work, fearless from start to finish, pitiless in its targets, passionate in its empathy.
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