The war that is currently raging at the gates of Europe awakens the ghosts of other conflicts that have marked literature. Both writers and soldiers, they recounted what they saw, wrote about their traumas and their disappointments. These are the writers in the war. For this second text in our “Writers in the Trenches” series, The duty looks at Blaise Cendrars and Maurice Genevoix.
Knowing the baptism of fire and mud is one thing; coming back safe and sound is another. Deaths and traumas – to the body as much as to the soul -, the war generates them without counting.
Some writers, like Charles Péguy, Alain-Fournier, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry or Robert Desnos, never got over it. Others, sometimes severely injured, have become great witnesses.
Swiss citizen born Frédéric Sauser 27 years earlier, recently a father for the first time, the author of Easter in New York and of Prose of the Trans-Siberian and the little Jehanne of France (1912 and 1913) was not obliged to enlist voluntarily for the entire duration of the war in the Foreign Legion.
But on August 2, 1914, following the fatal spiral initiated by two pistol shots fired in Sarajevo, like millions of French and Germans, Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) marched on the warpath, the flower in the gun .
As a game as much as a taste for risk – and “because I hate the Boches”, he said – the poet went to war at “a penny a day”. In his regiment, he said, “no one knew that[’il était] a writer “.
Cendrars, by his own admission “too free of language”, little focused on respect for hierarchy and regulations, will collect troubles as much as marks of bravery. An experience that he will recount, with his legendary humanity and verve, in several of his books.
Trauma
Seriously wounded on the Champagne front on September 28, 1915, victim of a hecatomb in a line of barbed wire, he had to undergo in situ the amputation of the right arm above the elbow—his writing hand. “There was nothing but leaks, cries, screams, moans, complaints everywhere, and my severed arm hurt so much that I bit my tongue to keep from yelling…”
“I braved the torpedo, the cannon, the mines, the fire, the gases, the machine guns, all the anonymous, demonic, systematic, blind machinery”, wrote in February 1918 a Cendrars who had become a penguin, quickly abandoning the articulated prosthesis received by the writer Maurice Barrès, great defender of the cause of war invalids.
Witness to the barbarism of the Great War, the author of Moravagine will not hesitate to stigmatize the incompetence and the inhumanity of the doctors, nor the moral weakness of the officers. He made the connection between writing and waging war: “The profession of a man of war is an abominable thing and full of scars, like poetry”, he wrote in 1946 in The severed hand.
23-year-old Normalien student who joins 106e infantry regiment on August 2, 1914, Second Lieutenant Maurice Genevoix (1890-1980) also saw death up close. After having taken part in the famous Battle of the Marne, it was at Éparges, on the Meuse front, after four months of coming under fire from shells, that he was hit by three German bullets on April 25, 1915.
It was also during the same battle, on the other side of the “Grande Trench”, under the “mew of field shells”, that rifleman Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was wounded for the first time. With a mixture of horror and fascination, the German writer – who will also participate in the Second World War – will recount his experience in steel stormsself-published in 1920, a story that would make him famous.
Written on the spot from the notebooks that Maurice Genevoix filled every day with his sensitive and profound writer’s gaze, the quasi-documentary stories he published between 1916 and 1923 form the living chronicle of his long months at the front.
In 1949, refraining from “any story-telling arrangement” and moral judgment, the future academician brought together the five war stories under the title of Those of 14which is undoubtedly one of the strongest literary testimonies of the First World War.
An “infernal imbecility”
“The war, in short, was everything we didn’t understand”, summarizes Céline in her first novel, journey to the Edge of the Nightwhich the NRF’s reading committee judged, on June 24, 1932, as a “Communist novel containing well-told episodes of war”.
After nurturing the start of journey to the Edge of the Night, the radical experience of her three months at the front during the 1914-1918 war will act as a tremendous revealer for Céline, seriously injured in the arm and head in November 1914 during her service in Flanders. He will reappear in each of the novels that will follow, from Death on credit (1936) until Waran unpublished novel written, in all likelihood, in 1934, the manuscript of which was found in incredible circumstances in the summer of 2021.
From one book to another, Céline will never stop complaining of severe neuralgia. “I caught the war in my head,” says Ferdinand, the wounded narrator of Warwhere we find, more or less, the characters of Princhard at the Val-de-Grâce in journey to the Edge of the Night and that of Raoul at the Hazebrouck hospital in Guignol’s Band. Just like them, the colorful character of Cascade, hospital companion and slightly anarchist mackerel who will bring his “hen”, will end up at the execution post for having voluntarily mutilated himself hoping to escape the “strike”. collective.
Back from the front – and maybe even back from everything – Céline condemns the military and patriotic propaganda in which he believed for a while. In 1914, lies rained down as much as shells. “We lied with rage beyond the imagination, well beyond the ridiculous and the absurd, in the newspapers, on the posters, on foot, on horseback, in the car”, explains Bardamu, the narrator of the Travel.
The same denunciation of war (this “infernal imbecility”) that crosses journey to the Edge of the Nightwe find it in War.
“I had learned in two months almost all the noises of the earth and of men”, writes Céline about this crucial experience, which marks the end of her youth and the birth of a writer.