The Great War enduringly excites literary imagination, ever growing the abundant library of books with WWI as main stage or décor. Apart from the few history books I read on it, Céline’s
Journey to the End of the Night and Ford Madox Ford’s
Parade's End, both masterpieces inspired by the Great War, significantly colored the ideas and images on it in my mind, as did Tardi’s stunning but gruesome graphic novel
It Was the War of the Trenches.
Although I am well aware I still have to read almost the whole pile of the WWI literary canon (Barbusse, Graves, Remarque, Jünger, And Quiet Flows the Don by Sholokhov…), it is sheer impossible to ignore entirely the flood of more contemporary novels and not to try a few of the most recent ones, cunningly published in the wake of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of WWI in 2014.
From the more contemporary novels,
Grey Souls by Philippe Claudel and
Courrier des tranchées by the Flemish writer Stefan Brijs (recently translated into French) were memorable stories. A recent fairly good, be it rather traditional read was the debut novel
Woesten by Kris van Steenberge (translated into German and Spanish). The graphic novel
Terrorist: Gavrilo Princip, the Assassin Who Ignited World War I by Henrik Rehr was worthwhile too. I missed out the discussion session in my ’real life’ reading group when Stefan Hertmans’s prizewinning WWI novel
War and Turpentine published in 2013, was scheduled.
I frowned at Sebastians Faulks’s
Birdsong .
14 by Jean Echenoz was a nice read, but didn’t really sink in.
Rufin has to be lauded for his luminous idea to stay out of the well-known trenches and moving his war scenes to a lesser known front and a lesser known part of war history. This time, the setting is
not the Western Front - the Somme, the Marne, Verdun or Ypres – which is refreshing. We are thrown into the Salonika Campaign, at the Eastern Front, the Balkan, where the Allies sent French and English troops to assist the Serbs ( together with the Russians, Romanians, Greeks and Italians) to fight the Bulgarians and the other Central powers - an episode of WWI which was of vital importance to the final outcome of the war (fact I was not sufficiently aware of).
Rufin’s novel also encourages to commemorate the suffering of the masses of animals which served in the war, for transport, logistics and communications , which reminded me of a poignant, horrible battlefield scene in Flaubert’s Salammbô [recalling the elephant shrieking all night because a spear got stuck in his eye, while no warrior could get near to the animal to put him out of his misery]. Of the 16 million animal soldiers on both sides, dogs, horses, carrier pigeons, mules, donkeys, camels, 9 million died.
(Coming to the content of the book, a small warning: please do not take a look at the jacket of this short novel if you consider reading it (I do not understand what was eating the publishers giving away such a key element of the plot before one can even open the book)).
Post WW I France, Summer, 1919, the Berry region. The central storyline is about Jacques Morlac, a young decorated war hero, taken in custody. What did he do, and why does he almost insist on his conviction, even risking the death penalty? The nature of his crime and his motives are unraveled in dribs and drabs through the novel, in the careful pace of the investigation by the interrogating judge, Hughes Lantier du Grez, a military officer working on his last case before finally returning home after years of absence due to military service. Both, prisoner and investigator, are demobilized soldiers, returning to what is left of ‘normal’ civilian life in the aftermath of the bloody massacre of WWI. Morlac is an angry and disillusioned man, a farmer who’s political awareness was awakened by reading anarchist and communist books, but mostly by love. Slowly, in the
huis clos atmosphere of the former barracks, lively dialogues between the two veterans reveal their innermost thoughts, their own precious beliefs and observations on their war experiences. And outside there is the scruffy dog, Morlac’s loyal companion, barking incessantly, who had followed Morlac throughout the whole war, eventually treated as a mascot by Morlac’s regiment, injured and furrowed by the battles, but completely disregarded by Morlac.
Jean-Christophe Rufin, a founder of
Médecins sans frontières and former winner of the Goncourt, wrote a charming story, gracefully constructed around a true life anecdote. His limpid, spare prose wonderfully accords with his excellent psychological portraiture of the characters.
A
film adaptation of this novel was released in March 2018 (by the French director Jean Becker).
As a unadulterated cat person, I am fairly sure this novel probably would appeal more to dog lovers, or bipetual persons. Perhaps because of my shortcomings in basic canine psychology, Rufin’s exploration of the parallels in human and animal loyalty, relating this to at times conflicting human values like integrity and fraternity transcending blind obedience of orders, didn’t wholly resonate with me. (And frankly, the old pasionaria in me grumbled at Rufin’s ruthless demystifying of revolutionary zeal, reducing it a little facile to petty personal motives underlying people’s actions and behavior.)