The Chief Occupation in War

- By Nil Santiáñez

Last June my wife and I spent a few days in Hony, a quaint Belgian town by the Ourthe River. A very good friend of mine recently moved there, and, knowing that we were at Maria’s mother in Bonn, he invited us to visit him. The trip from Bonn to Hony, which lasted two hours by train, was happily uneventful, except for my sense of Unheimlichkeit the moment we crossed the border between Germany and Belgium: in the fall term of 2014 I taught a course on Great War literature and cinema, and now I could not help thinking of the fateful German invasion of Belgium in August 1914. After a vision of the invading German troops, I pictured von Manstein’s Panzer divisions smashing through the Ardennes in the spring of 1940.

Once in Hony, my friend and his Argentinian wife showed us around. They took us to Esneux, Liège, Leuven, and Bastogne. While we deliberately avoided the usual war tourism, the truth is that war has a pervasive presence in Belgium; it is hard to avoid coming across its traces. War is stamped on the landscape, on the cultural memory of the country, and also on the family histories of its people. I had the chance of meeting a few Belgians, and to my surprise the war of 1914-18 quickly became a topic of conversation.

There’s something disturbing about this presence of military conflicts from the relatively distant past in contemporary social space. At times I felt the same fright that one may experience after observing the bullet marks engraved on the buildings in Berlin that survived the war of 1939-45.  Aware of my interest in the two world wars, my friend took me to Pax—the best bookshop in Liège—where I bought books on the Great War in Belgium and France; I also purchased the original French version of a novel on the Great War that I had read in its English translation last year: Fear (1930), by Gabriel Chevallier. I started re-reading the book in Hony and finished it shortly before we arrived into Bonn back from our trip. Buying Chevallier’s Fear turned out to be a good idea: my re-reading of the novel made me realize that in all my reflections on war during my trip to and stay in Belgium I had omitted a consideration of the essential emotion involved in any war: fear.

Gabriel Chevallier’s novel is the best account of fear that I have ever read. It is true that a remarkable number of novels and short stories on the Great War have portrayed soldiers who feel extreme uneasiness when facing impending danger. In fact, it may very well be that literature had never truly portrayed the psychology of fear until the works produced apropos of the Great War. A.P. Herbert in The Secret Battle (1919), Céline in Journey to the End of the Night (1934), A.D. Gristwood in The Somme and The Coward (both published in 1927), and, most memorably, Ford Madox Ford in A Man Could Stand Up— (1926) have all explored the soldier’s fear in the battlefield. But none of them has represented fear with the depth, sensibility, and perceptiveness deployed by Gabriel Chevallier in this outstanding novel.   

Fear is an intensely realist novel centered on the war history of its main character and first-person narrator, Jean Dartemont. Divided into two parts, the first covers in chronological order, chapter by chapter, the main phases of Dartemont’s early war experience: 1) enlistment right after the war proclamation, 2) training period, 3) arrival at the war zone, 4) baptism of fire, 5) first intense combats, 6) convalescence from war injuries in a hospital, and 7) a furlough spent in Paris. The second part, which comprises six additional chapters, follows a lineal temporality as well and narrates Dartemont’s vicissitudes in different fronts. The last chapter, “Ceasefire!,” establishes a circular structure overlapping the linear story. The narrator himself points this out by relating the anti-climatic ceasefire to the war proclamation of the first chapter: “It is a moment that brings us back to 1914. Life rises up again like the dawn. The future opens before us like a magnificent avenue. But it is an avenue bordered by tombs and cypresses. . . our youth has greatly aged” (296).

Like Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (1916), Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), and other novels on the Great War, Fear is a sharp denunciation of war, an activity portrayed as both murderous and senseless. In its first chapter, young men join the army ignoring the true nature of warfare as well as its political goals; they surrender their freedom, their individuality, and their critical sense, becoming automata and cannon-fodder.

“War!,” exclaims the narrator, “Everyone is getting ready. Everybody is going. What is war? No one has the foggiest idea. . .” (5). The main character and narrator himself volunteered out of a sense of adventure to serve in the army, quite unaware of the consequences. It takes Dartemont a few weeks of intense combat to realize that “War is nothing but a monstrous absurdity” and that “nothing good or great will come from it” (109). Chevallier intersperses in his story passages devoted to the detailed narration of two victims of warfare: the landscape and human beings. These chilling passages on charred, desolate landscape and on repulsive rotting corpses are beautifully written, and they are part and parcel of Fear’s antiwar discourse.

Chevallier is at his best when he describes or analyses the emotion of fear. In fact his treatment of fear is a unique contribution to the otherwise vast literature on the Great War.  According to the narrator of the novel, fear is “the chief occupation in war,” “the only one that matters” (106). Although fear is something one should not be ashamed of because “it is a natural revulsion of the body for something for which it wasn’t made” (110-11), the truth is that it turns men into animals. The first time that Dartemont’s unit is under artillery fire, all men start running away in panic, stepping on corpses, ignoring wounded comrades laying on ditches. Chevallier puts it as follows: “Panic booted us in the arse. Like tigers we leaped over the shells’ smoking craters, rimmed with the wounded, and we leaped over the cries of our brothers, cries that come from the guts and strike at the guts, we leaped over pity, honor, shame, we eliminated all feeling, all that makes us human. . . . We were cowards and we knew it and we could be nothing else. The body was in charge and fear gave the orders” (58-59). Further on in the novel Dartemont points out the “devastating effect on the morale of men in the depths of a shelter” when they are being shelled. Once the frightening “stealthy pounding” stops,

“Going back to the surface requires an effort so great that you cannot force yourself to do it unless you overcome your terror at the start. You have to struggle with fear as soon as you have the first symptoms otherwise it will possess you and then you are lost, dragged into a breakdown that your imagination precipitates with its own, terrifying inventions. Your nerve centers, once they’ve been shattered, sent out the wrong messages; even your instinctual self-preservation can be undermined by their absurd decisions. The greatest horror, aggravating the breakdown, is that fear still leaves men with the capacity to judge themselves. So you see yourself in the depths of ignominy and cannot regain your self-esteem, cannot justify yourself in your own eyes” (210). 

This is precisely fear’s worst dimension: under its power, men become abject beings. Jean Dartemont has no qualms explaining what many soldiers in similar circumstances surely have felt:

“I have fallen to the bottom of the abyss of my self, to the bottom of those dungeons where the soul’s greatest secrets lie hidden, and it is a vile cesspit, a place of viscous darkness.  Here is what I have been without knowing it, what I am: a fellow who is afraid, with an insurmountable fear, a cringing fear, that is crushing him... it would take brute force to drive me out of there. . . . I am so afraid that I have lost my attachment to life.  And I disgust myself” (211).

I’ve copied at length a few passages from Fear to give you a taste of Chevallier’s powerful style. Reading them in French in the Belgian countryside, in an area that in 1914-18 saw heavy fighting not unlike the one described by Chevallier, offered me a unique insight into war and the fear that it triggers. And the splendid English translation by Malcolm Imri, published in 2014 by the New York Review of Books is, as they say, the next best thing to being there.
 

Works Cited

Gabriel Chevallier.  Fear: A Novel of World War I.  Introduction by John Berger.  Trans. Malcolm Imrie.  New York: New York Review of Books, 2014.

Gabriel Chevallier.  La Peur.  Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2010.