Wandering Canadians (“Boréal compact”, 2024, 312 pages), the only work by Jean Vaillancourt, is not an ordinary novel. Our literature, in fact, has few war novels, and this one, according to Professor Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge, who signs the preface to this reissue, has the rare characteristic of essentially evoking “a Quebec experience of the front during the World War II “.
Born in Montreal in 1923 into a cultured family, Vaillancourt began his classical course without completing it. In 1942, at the age of 19, he became a volunteer and participated, in July 1944, in the Battle of Normandy, of which we highlight the 80e birthday this year.
He subsequently took part in combat in the Netherlands and Germany, where he was seriously injured in one leg in April 1945, before being treated in England and repatriated to Montreal.
Wandering Canadians is obviously inspired by his experience. Machine gunner Richard Lanoue, the novel’s protagonist, resembles Vaillancourt in many ways, but the real hero of the story remains the French-Canadian regiment of which he is a part.
When the novel appeared in 1954, Gilles Marcotte, then a critic at Dutyisn’t totally thrilled, but notes the “tone of desperate honesty [de l’oeuvre] reminiscent of Camus. In 1961, at the time of the novelist’s death by suicide, Marcotte returned to the work, in The Press, with poignant words. He describes Wandering Canadians as an “austere and serious novel, of which every page, every sentence, speaks to us of man facing death, his own death”. Having “experienced the war intensely”, Marcotte continues, the novelist “had found his path to truth” there.
During a rare moment of calm in the German forest, Corporal Lanoue meditates: “Life was a great mystery. The war, a mystery no less considerable, for those who leaned into it and who came to seek the meaning of life. »
The soldier “would have wanted to question God […] but he did not know God.” All her attempts to communicate with him had failed. He then drew the conclusion that, if God existed, we could not know him. “Those who claimed to explain the conduct of God towards men deserved the whip,” thought Lanoue. “There was the man alone with his destiny”, and his courage, sometimes.
A specialist in the work, Nardout-Lafarge rightly emphasizes that “ Wandering Canadians rejects any epic vision of the war” and does not really offer “ideological discourses on the conflict or on the reasons for the commitment of volunteers”.
Lanoue and his brothers in arms, most of whom were anti-conscriptionists, valued the freedom which governed their commitment, defining themselves as “tramps”, marginals attracted by adventure, even by “the dangerous life”.
Lanoue, for example, and different from his creator, is an orphan and is looking for his place in the world. His friend Gagnon mocks those who see the Allied soldiers as defenders of the Christian religion against Nazi paganism. “‘Christianity,’ he said to Lanoue, ‘I care about it as much as you do, moé. » Born into a poor family, he is not one of those “who come to Europe to see the monuments”. His commitment, even if it leads to his death, will at least have allowed him to see “something, in [sa] damned life.”
These guys refuse martyr status. Their adventure, they believe, will have made them experience “businesses that the millionaires of Canada could not afford with their fortune”.
These cases, however, are frightening. Almost without lyricism, but with virulent energy, Vaillancourt describes the German assaults which fell on the French-Canadian regiment in Normandy and in the Reichswald forest. He reaches peaks of intensity during the narration of an episode of escape during which several of the heroes of the novel fall under enemy fire. We say to ourselves, reading these pages, that there would be a great film to be made with this work.
When lyricism rears its ugly head a little, it is immediately covered by the shadow of dismay. In one scene, the protagonist gazes into that of the dying Sergeant Lanthier. “Lanoue remained leaning for a moment longer, trying to peer into the abyss of death,” writes Vaillancourt. If he saw something, he understood nothing. »
Elegant and mastered, the style of narration becomes raw in the dialogues in which the restless fighters engage, whose “chalices” are sometimes even, according to the narrator, philosophical.
This makes for a true, striking and moving novel. A great novel, indeed. War, writes Vaillancourt, is a “thing of the devil”, painfully real and incomprehensible.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.