This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 26, Number 1 (January 2015), 13.
Just in time for the centenary of the Great War of 1914-18 (World War I), the publication in English of Gabriel Chevallier’s novel Le Peur (1930) is drawing deserved attention. Translated by Malcolm Imrie as Fear and available in the handsome New York Review of Books Classics series, the novel is clearly infused with Chevallier’s personal experience as an infantryman in the French Army during the Great War. Presenting the life of a soldier through extended passages inscribing equally the physical and the psychological trauma not just of combat but also of waiting for combat, it is a novel of unblinking witness.
Just in time for the centenary of the Great War of 1914-18 (World War I), the publication in English of Gabriel Chevallier’s novel Le Peur (1930) is drawing deserved attention. Translated by Malcolm Imrie as Fear and available in the handsome New York Review of Books Classics series, the novel is clearly infused with Chevallier’s personal experience as an infantryman in the French Army during the Great War. Presenting the life of a soldier through extended passages inscribing equally the physical and the psychological trauma not just of combat but also of waiting for combat, it is a novel of unblinking witness.
Unlike
Chevallier himself, who was “called up” to service, his protagonist, Jean
Dartemont, enlisted in the army “against all my convictions, but still of my
own free will—not to fight but out of curiosity: to see.” Dartemont is an educated young man, an
intellectual for whom war is initially a phenomenon to study. About a third of the way through the novel, however, after
he has been hospitalized with shrapnel wounds, his capacity to contemplate the nature of and the implications of his experience in the
trenches, the dugouts, and the battlefields leads to a public admission that is
also a pivot point for the “meaning” of the overall narrative. At the hospital, he is provoked by the
nurses who insistently ask him what he did
at the front line: “I marched day and night without knowing where I was
going. I did exercises, I had
inspections, I dug trenches, I carried barbed wire, I carried sandbags, did
look-out duty. . . .” When prodded
by the nurses to elaborate, he clarifies: “Yes, that’s all . . . Or rather, no, that’s nothing. Would you like to know the chief
occupation of war, the only one that matters: I WAS AFRAID.”
For the
willfully self-deluding nurses, Dartemont speaks utter blasphemy, but the
patent truthfulness of his admission colors the rest of the novel after he
returns to combat duty. Eventually,
he realizes that the only way to conquer his own cowardice is to expose himself
wantonly to the inevitability of dying in this transparently futile war.
Reading
Chevallier’s novel recently, I inevitably thought of an earlier novel of the
Great War by Donegal-born man-of-letters Patrick MacGill (who happens to be
buried in Fall River, Massachusetts).
MacGill’s most enduring contribution to the literature of the Great War
may well be his three autobiographical narratives—The Amateur Army (1915), The
Red Horizon (1916), and The Great
Push (1916)—written in the very midst of his experience as a Rifleman (that
is, a Private) in the London Irish Rifles regiment. But he also published two Great War-centered novels—The Brown Brethren (1917) and Fear! (1920)—after his military service
ended when he was wounded in the Battle of Loos in September of 1915.
Unlike most of
MacGill’s fiction, Fear! is not an
“Irish” novel per se: the narrator-protagonist
is Henry Ryder, a barber from a nondescript English village who is conscripted
into an unnamed regiment of the British Expeditionary Force and shipped out to
France as the War continues to decimate the population of able-bodied
Englishmen. While the novel obviously
borrows from MacGill’s own experience on the Western Front, it is really much
more generic than specific in its detailed descriptions of night raids and
marches, trenches and dugouts and billets, coarse camaraderie and lonely
despair.
As historian
David Taylor rightly recognizes in Memory,
Narrative and the Great War (2013), MacGill’s autobiographical trilogy traces
an arc of “disillusionment” with war.
This arc continues through Fear!
and the frontispiece to the novel includes a note headed “What This Story is
About”: “Patrick MacGill has been able to write about war as war actually is. .
. . [T]he realism of ‘Fear’ will bring home to all the conviction that such
things must never be allowed to happen again.” While MacGill depicts many aspects of war in the novel, the
exclamatory title foretells that its central subject will involve his extended
revisiting of a motif he had introduced in the opening chapter of The Red Horizon, set on the ship
transporting him and his fellow London Irish Rifles across the English channel
early in 1915: “What will it be like, but above all, how shall I conduct myself
in the trenches? Maybe I shall be afraid—cowardly. But no!” This question becomes an obsession for Private Henry Ryder.
As a novel, Fear! contains a lot of filler. Chapters and long passages detailing
basic training at Salisbury Plain, sketching the various “characters” who
populate the rank and file of Ryder’s company and section, dramatizing life
behind the lines in estaminets and
billets, and inscribing the abrupt shift from enervating tedium to frenetic
action read more like vignettes than as contributing elements to a distilled
storyline. What emerges from the
baggy plot, however, is a compelling meditation—Henry Ryder’s, but really
Patrick MacGill’s—on fear.
Not surprisingly,
MacGill’s Ryder experiences an “epiphany” strikingly similar to that of
Chevallier’s Dartemont regarding the short odds of dying in combat. But Ryder’s perspective is complicated
by a story told by one of his seasoned section mates of the execution by firing
squad of a deserter: “I felt as if I were the guilty man myself, that I was
guilty of the failing for which L___ died.” For all of their similarities—and there are many, underscoring the universality of the
experience of the Great War not just for British and French soldiers but,
implicitly, for those on the other side of the barbed wire divide as well, the
Germans—MacGill’s and Chevallier’s novels diverge on the basis of this incident,
resulting in very different narrative resolutions.
Chevallier’s
Dartemont actually survives his wanton rush to combat and he survives the War
altogether, which allows him by way of his memoiresque narrative to bear
unvarnished witness to the brutal reality of war. The final chapter of Henry Ryder’s story is “Written by
Another Hand”—a coda-like conclusion by which MacGill allows the reader to
infer Ryder’s fate after, as he puts it matter-of-factly, “I have run away from
the battle.” Earlier, Ryder had parsed
fear into three categories. The
first is “jelly fear,” which “slackens the guts, numbs the brain and takes the
stuffing from the spine.” The
second is “reckless fear”: “What the devil does it matter now? You don’t care! You stop at nothing! Forward! and let me get at them! Six inches cold steel, six feet cold
clay! Bullets fly, shells
burst! Let them!” The third category is “calculating
fear”: “you are quite calm, a normal being, weighing the pros and cons of the
occasion. Able to fit your
movements to your mood, you advance, consider, take cover, study your
environment and obey orders. But
this moment is not lasting.”
Clearly, Ryder has succumbed to that first fear in the manner
foreshadowed by his section mate’s story of the executed deserter.
Yet, finding
himself in the ruins of an old church, Ryder looks to a damaged crucifix for
guidance to resolve his dilemma. Left
at a loss—Christ at least had a mission “to die for the sins of men”—he arrives
at a simple understanding of how his cowardice relates to the overall devaluing
of life and humanity that, as an increasingly transparent “war of attrition,”
the Great War clearly amounted to: “It matters not—nothing matters. I’ll die, anyway. Who fires the bullet doesn’t
matter. I’m going back to the
firing line. . . . I’m going back.”
Ultimately, that
devaluing—or its implied opposite, a revaluing
of life and humanity—is at the heart of both Patrick MacGill’s Fear! and Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear: “such things must never be allowed
to happen again,” indeed. In the
midst of reading these two relentlessly bleak novels, I happened also to pick
up The Missing of the Somme (1994), a
meditation on remembrance by Geoff Dyer.
He too engages with the issues of fear and cowardice, musing that
“Perhaps the real heroes of 1914-18 . . . are those who refused to obey and to
fight, who actively rejected the passivity forced upon them by the war, who
reasserted their right not to suffer, not to have things done to them.” He then goes on to describe how the
family of one Private A. Ingham of the Manchester Regiment, who died on 1st
December 1916, had believed for years that he had simply “died of wounds.” But when his father was finally
informed that he had been executed for desertion or cowardice, he insisted on
this inscription being added to the military headstone marking his grave in the
French village of Bailleulmont:
SHOT
AT DAWN
ONE
OF THE FIRST TO ENLIST
A
WORTHY SON
OF
HIS FATHER
I believe that both MacGill and Chevallier would salute that
gesture.
