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 first text in our “Writers in the Trenches” series, The duty leans on Stendhal, Tolstoy and Barbuss.
Since the beginning of the world, war and literature have nourished each other,Epic of Gilgameshat The Iliadof Roland’s song to Stories from Sevastopol. Of course, the war also inspired a number of writers who saw the fire with their hearts in their stomachs and weapons in their hands.
They were conscripts or volunteers, officers or “hairy men” wading through the blood and mud of the trenches, war correspondents or propagandists. But when the idea of war – nourished by military glory, patriotic fever inflated by governments and warmongers – and its reality collide, the disillusions can be overwhelming.
On May 7, 1800, without uniform and without function, without even knowing how to ride a horse, but seeking adventure, the young Henri Beyle, who would later become known under the pen name Stendhal (1783-1842), crossed the pass du Grand-Saint-Bernard in the Alps with Napoleon Bonaparte’s 55,000 men for the second Italian campaign. To the sound of Austrian guns, a teenager “crazy with emotion” discovers fire. “It was a kind of virginity that weighed on me as much as the other,” he says in Life of Henry Brulard.
These first and only impressions of the war, as brief as they are chaotic, echo the disappointments of Fabrice Del Dongo in The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). With a head full of ideals, the 17-year-old hero leaves Milan on the sly to join Napoleon’s army at Waterloo. On the day of the battle, June 18, 1815, determined to fight despite his complete inexperience, the runaway became excited when he heard the sound of cannons and the whistle of bullets: “Ah! So here I am on fire! he says to him. I saw the fire! he repeated to himself with satisfaction. »
But a short time later, men from his own camp made him get off his horse and take his mount, carrying away “his beautiful dreams of chivalrous and sublime friendship, like that of the heroes of the Jerusalem Delivered “. Faced with the incredible chaos of the battlefield, his dreams of camaraderie and military glory go up in smoke — like much of his childhood naivete.
Beneath the lies of heroism
It’s a bit the same revelation that will strike Tolstoy during the Crimean War (1853-1856), an almost global conflict that will oppose the Russian Empire to a coalition formed by the Ottoman Empire, the French Empire, of the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Sardinia. On November 7, 1854, inflated with epic ideals and patriotic faith, 27-year-old second-in-command Count Tolstoy arrived in Crimea to defend the city of Sevastopol.
Reality will impose itself on Tolstoy, he who was now plunged for real into the hell of war, after having been posted for three years in the Caucasus not doing much. Tolstoy quickly abandons the writing of the third part of his Memories (Youth) to devote himself instead to describing what he sees and what he feels. Three stories will be published “on the spot” in the magazine The Contemporaryby Nikolaï Nekrassov, and were to have a great effect, including in the Tsar’s entourage.
The rather exalted and patriotic tone of the first of his Stories from Sevastopol, in which Tolstoy sees in the Crimea heroes “worthy of Greece”, despite the horror scenes found there, will give way to doubts and lucidity. A quest for truth with sometimes mystical accents where the future author of War and peace seeks to show what is hidden under the lies of heroism when it is stripped of all sentimentality: stampedes, laziness and cowardice, pettiness and intrigues of the staffs.
“It will not be war in its regular, seductive and brilliant exterior, with music and drums, with flags flying and generals prancing, that you will see, but war in its real form, blood, suffering, death,” he wrote in Sevastopol in May. His experience in the Crimea will mark a turning point in the life and work of Tolstoy.
make war on war
No conflict will perhaps have been more “written” than the First World War. A “butchery” that began on August 3, 1914 and whose toll, all countries combined, is estimated at nearly 19 million dead – half of whom are civilians.
In France alone, this literary inflation is notably attributable to the development of the national school system at the end of the 19th century.e century, which reduced illiteracy, as well as the scale of the mobilization and the rather high average age of the soldiers mobilized (more than 8 million, only for France).
A major witness to the Great War, Henri Barbusse (1873-1935), who had already written two novels, was 41 in December 1914 when he volunteered in the infantry, despite his lung problems. Written in a hurry in six months and serialized in The Work from August 1916, Firesubtitle Squad Log, draws on his personal experience at the front during the 22 months he spent in the trenches. The story will be published in a volume shortly after, and will obtain the Goncourt Prize the same year, while the First World War was still raging.
Barbusse recounts the daily life of a squad made up of about twenty soldiers in the trenches, “hairy men” a thousand miles from the epic heroes of yesteryear, lulled by “the monotonous ticking of gunshots and the hum cannon shots”. A work whose raw realism will shock his contemporaries while wiping off many critics, who will accuse him, among other things, of undermining the morale of the troops.
Barbusse’s experience of the war crystallized his pacifism – and perhaps nourished his militant adherence to the Communist Party – he who would be one of the instigators of the Amsterdam-Pleyel pacifist movement, of which he would become president with the writer Frenchman Romain Rolland, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915.
By denouncing “the thirty million slaves thrown on each other by crime and error, in the war of the mud”, Barbusse intended to “wage war on war”.