The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque 9780300225006

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The Art of Survival

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The Art of Survival France and the ­Great War Picaresque

Libby Murphy

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College. Copyright © 2016 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in w ­ hole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-­mail sales​.­press@yale​.­edu (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup​.­co​.­uk (U.K. office). Set in Fournier MT type by Westchester Publishing Ser­vices. Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca. Library of Congress Control Number: 2016935620 ISBN: 978-0-300-21751-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) A cata­logue rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 ​9 ​8 ​7 ​6 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1

For my parents

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Prefacexi Acknowl­edgments

xix

Introduction1 1. A Literary War: Irony, Tragedy, and the Return of the Picaresque

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2. Tactics of the Foot Soldier: The Arts and Antics of Le Système D43 3. Georges de la Fouchardière: Oppositional Journalism, Involuntary Heroism, and Bourrage de crâne64 4. The Comedy of In­de­pen­dence: The “Man on the Street” Goes Off to War

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5. Animal Instincts: Lessons from a Trench Rat

113

6. Phlegm Meets Flair: Images of the ­Infantryman in War­time Britain and France

137

7. Le Cafard: Brutalization, Alienation, and Despair

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Contents

8. Charlie Chaplin’s ­Little Tramp: From the Art of Survival to the Survival of Art

198

Notes217 Bibliography249 Index269

Illustrations

1. Bofa’s poilu débrouillard 53 2. Barrès and his famous forelock 74 3. “On November 3rd, Gustave Téry’s L’Œuvre w ­ ill begin Scipion Pégoulade” 79 4. Le Bouif and La Fouch’ at the bistro in Le Bouif tient 97 5. Bairnsfather, “Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it” 138 6. Bairnsfather, “Natu­ral History of the War: The Flanders Sea Lion (Leo Maritimus)” 144 7. Poulbot, “Si on voit pas l’Noël, on verra peut-­être un Zeppelin” 153 8. Les poulbots play at war 160 9. Bofa’s image of the Infantryman 164 10. Charlie the Doughboy in Shoulder Arms 199

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Preface

­There is something about the First World War that holds con­temporary readers, and particularly American readers, at a distance. The optimism and expectations of the socie­t ies that welcomed the war are difficult for us to understand. The elevated diction used to drum up and maintain support for the war seems antiquated and obscure. Meanwhile sarcasm, humor, and satire often go unnoticed, lost in cultural, temporal, and linguistic translation. The Infantrymen of the Western Front can seem frozen in a moment far removed from our own. If we listen beneath the cultural and temporal specificity of texts from the First World War, however, we can hear voices that are remarkably familiar to us. If we dust off t­ hese texts and remove the sepia filter through which we so often remember the First World War, we can be startled by the jarring immediacy of what is portrayed and its frightful similarity to the ways of the world ­today. Albert Kahn’s autochrome color photo­graphs of First World War soldiers provide this kind of shock of recognition. Seeing the trench soldier bathed in sunlight reminds us that for all that the Western Front could be monochromatic in its muddiness, it was a real place occupied by real ­people whose lives ­were as real (and as precious) to them as ours are to us. Listening beneath the flow makes us more sensitive to similarities between the First World War moment and our own. Commonalities emerge between the outlook of the “Gen-­Xers” who fought in Iraq and Af­ghan­i­stan at the dawn of the twenty-­first c­ entury and the “1914 generation” that fought on the Western Front at the dawn of the twentieth. Both lived through a mass media and technological revolution—­the explosion of the mass press at the end of the nineteenth ­century and the dawn of the Internet age at the end of

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the twentieth—­that gave them unpre­ce­dented media outlets for their impressions of war. Consider the case of US Infantryman Colby Buzzell. When Buzzell began his tour of duty in Iraq in 2003, he began reading, journaling, and blogging. What resulted was a spontaneous, fragmented, and hypertextual collection of cyber anecdotes ­later reworked as a memoir entitled My War: Killing Time in Iraq. ­These anecdotes and impressions from the Iraq War are, it turns out, not that dif­fer­ent in tone and content from the anecdotes First World War soldiers sent to the big daily newspapers and ­later published as novels and memoirs. Colby Buzzell’s memoir is an unvarnished look, not only at the army and the war, but also at the motivations and mentality of the modern soldier. In Buzzell’s writing, the excruciating but real thrill of combat, the lure of adventure, and a residual belief in the value of the work being done in Iraq live in uneasy and unresolved tension with a cynical and disabused attitude about the futility of war, the hy­poc­risy of the army, the government, and the media, and the lack of understanding of the civilian population at home. Buzzell refuses to come down clearly for or against the war or the military. His point of view is constantly shifting between a critical distance from the mindset and worldview of his former machine-­gunner self and an ongoing identification with, and pride in, that same mindset and worldview. Martin Hurcombe has seen a similar “messiness” in the writings of French World War I soldiers.1 The novels and memoirs ­these soldiers produced are caught, he suggests, between the two poles that he calls “ideology” and the “absurd”: that is, between a desire to impose some definitive structure and meaning on the war and the radical recognition that structure and meaning ­were precisely what the war in its chaos and vio­lence had destroyed. Soldiers from the First World War w ­ eren’t struggling with t­ hese issues alone, however, and their works ­were not produced in a vacuum. As Paul Fussell has so masterfully shown, they turned to literary and popu­lar culture for tropes and techniques for putting their experiences into words. They drew upon songs, rumors, and ­music hall memories but also upon ­great books— John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Pro­gress and the Oxford Book of En­glish Verse ­were particularly impor­tant. First World War soldiers used the books they had read to write about the war experiences they had lived through. Almost a ­century ­later, Colby Buzzell would do much the same ­thing. Buzzell received boxes of books in the mail, and he used t­ hose books to think

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about the Iraq war. Throughout his memoir, Buzzell makes reference to the films, magazines, m ­ usic, and readings that made up his cognitive and cultural toolkit while in Iraq. He claims literary allegiances and nods to literary and cinematic influences that informed the writing of “[his]” war. Among the books he mentions are Michael Herr’s 1977 Vietnam War memoir Dispatches and a series of books by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Buzzell’s par­tic­u­lar narrative style and stance are aligned with ­t hose of Herr and Thompson—­that is, outside of, and in opposition to, the “brainwashed rhe­t­ oric” of the army, government, and mainstream media. Also on his list is Joseph Heller’s 1961 satirical novel Catch-22, set during the Second World War. The novel chronicles the attempts of the unheroic bombardier John Yossarian to stay alive and sane within and despite a bureaucratic machine bent on sending him to his death. Buzzell does not dwell on his reading of Catch-22 or single it out as having been more impor­tant than the rest of his readings in forging the par­tic­u­lar style and sensibility expressed in his writing. But if we want to understand Buzzell’s work and works like it, it is to Catch-22 that we should turn before moving even further back in time. It is not to the Second World War or the Vietnam War that we should look for the emergence of the kind of writing that would ultimately lead to My War. It is to the First World War, since the critical distance we recognize in Herr and Thompson’s works and the comic tropes we recognize in Catch-22 ­were already in play in 1914–1918. If Buzzell’s memoir is a Catch-22 for the Second Iraq War, Catch-22 itself was a Voyage au bout de la nuit ( Journey to the End of the Night) for the Second World War. Buzzell’s reaction to his first experience of a combat zone recalls that of Yosserian in Catch-22. But it also recalls that of Louis-­Ferdinand Céline’s World War I infantry soldier Bardamu in Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932). The fresh recruit Buzzell is shocked by the brutal crossing of a threshold of vio­lence and ac­cep­tance of vio­lence when he gets to Iraq. “Holy shit!” he remembers thinking, “­People are trying to kill each other!”2 Bardamu’s reaction is similar: “So t­here was no m ­ istake? So t­here was no law against ­people shooting at p­ eople they ­couldn’t even see!”3 Buzzell’s nonchalance and lack of conviction in enlisting in the army also recall that of Bardamu who, seeing a regiment march past the café where he is sitting, suddenly decides to join up, to spite his drinking buddy and to satisfy his own curiosity. For Buzzell, as for Bardamu, t­ hings go downhill from ­there. “Once you sign on that dotted line and raise your hand and swear

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that you’ll uphold the Constitution against enemies both foreign and domestic,” Buzzell explains, “­you’re fucked if you want to back out.”4 Bardamu’s assessment is more laconic—­“When ­you’re in, ­you’re in,”—­but equally vivid—­“We w ­ ere caught like rats.”5 What My War, Catch-22, and Voyage au bout de la nuit share in common, beyond being satirical texts inspired by their authors’ experiences in war, is a mood or an ethos—­the picaresque. The picaresque ­wasn’t born in the trenches of the First World War. It had been around for centuries and was reactivated during the war b­ ecause it was uniquely appropriate for describing the kind of world the trenches represented—­a world that is so violent, so chaotic, and so radically governed by chance that the only pattern of experience that makes any sense is that of basic, animal survival. The picaro is a protagonist with a long literary past who can serve as a model for how to scratch and scramble just to stay alive. When asked by a reader to express his understanding of the meaning of life, what Colby Buzzell came up with was a typically picaresque credo: “The meaning of life for me right now is to make it back in one piece.”6 The immediate survival strategies of soldiers and civilians during the First World War have often been misconstrued or even eclipsed by postwar interpretations of the war. The works I have chosen to share in this study tell a dif­fer­ent tale about the First World War from the one to which we are most accustomed. They provide a ­counter-­narrative to postwar interpretations of the trench soldier as a passive victim or an active resister, focusing instead on the mechanisms through which soldiers and civilians resigned themselves to the war but i­ magined themselves as survivors. They w ­ ere able to do so by reactivating a form of storytelling—­the picaresque—­whose central concern had always been the survival of a non-­heroic protagonist in a harsh and hostile environment. My aim in reading texts from the First World War has been to uncover the attitudes and outlooks of the ­people who lived through that war—­the ­Great War, as they called it—­one hundred years ago. My conclusion is that the same approach, sensibility, and outlook represented in the work of Colby Buzzell or Joseph Heller w ­ ere already pres­ent in novels, cartoons, newspaper articles, and other media produced during and immediately a­ fter the G ­ reat War. That outlook was shared by soldiers and civilians alike, or rather it was mutually constructed through a mediatized dialogue between and among

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t­ hese groups. It is to the long and rich Eu­ro­pean picaresque tradition that we can most productively turn in our effort to understand the attitudes expressed by the p­ eople who lived through the first industrialized total war.7 The picaresque is a literary and cultural framework through which we can understand the spirit of an age—­that of the First World War and its immediate aftermath—­and through which we can interrogate more recent cultural artifacts born in the context of war. As a myth or a mode, the picaresque is a “permanent temptation to the ­human mind.” An archetypal pattern for making sense of experience, the picaresque resurfaces “during days of irony and discouragement.”8 Buzzell’s ambivalence about the army, the war, and the larger society that approved the war is typical of the contradictory and unstable position-­ taking (or lack thereof) of many French ­Great War soldiers writing in the picaresque mode. The often-­comic picaresque everyman that replaced the epic hero of Napoleonic legend was used to articulate a modern, popu­lar, and Republican vision of what it meant to be French in the early twentieth ­century. What emerged during the war years was an ambivalent form of patriotism that was staunchly antimilitarist, but not yet pacifist, highly individualistic, but nationalistic at the same time. It is a patriotism caught between Hurcombe’s alternatives of “ideology” and the “absurd,” between a sense of belonging and a sense of alienation, between the pull of solidarity and the push of solitude. That patriotism was often expressed in a tone that we recognize in Buzzell’s writing. A similar sarcasm is used by Bardamu in Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), for example, but it was already to be found in earlier ­Great War novels like Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu (­Under Fire, 1916) or Roland Dorgelès’s Les Croix de bois (The Wooden Crosses, 1919). Just as Buzzell identifies with the figure of the “smartass,” many G ­ reat War soldier-­novelists chose to include in their narratives the figure of the gouailleur, the cocky, mocking wisecracker who calls t­ hings as he sees them and d­ oesn’t mince words.9 By his own admission, the Colby Buzzell who was recruited into the army was an unambitious slacker who drank too much and worked too l­ ittle, got into trou­ble with the police, ran his mouth and swore a lot, and acted out of a spirit of contradiction. His recruiter was unfazed by Buzzell’s seeming lack of potential as a warrior. The “Army wanted quantity, not quality. They ­didn’t give a fuck how old I was, what shape I was in, or what kind of past I’d

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had,” Buzzell writes, “­they’d take me.”10 Life in the army and a tour of duty in Iraq d­ idn’t reform Colby Buzzell or change his habits or attitude for the better. In fact, when he describes forcing Iraqi civilians through a checkpoint, he expresses disgust at the person he had become: “I felt like the biggest fucking asshole on the planet.”11 War ­doesn’t make you better. The most you can hope for is that it ­doesn’t make you worse. This is a point made over and over again in G ­ reat War texts that showcase unpromising soldiers who are as lacking in discipline, initiative, and re­spect for authority when they are demobilized as they ­were when they w ­ ere called up. The pres­ent study is full of soldier characters who resemble the persona crafted by Buzzell in his memoir. They are jacks-­of-­ all-­trades, small-­time crooks and con artists, cowardly loafers, wine guzzlers, and foul-­mouthed hotheads. It is in their ability to do their jobs as soldiers without being robotized, militarized, or completely brutalized, and not in their courage, self-­sacrifice, or ambition, that their heroism lies. In 2004 as in 1914, ­there was, to borrow from Tim Cook, “space for the hero and the anti-­hero to sit comfortably together within the soldiers’ culture.”12 Throughout the twentieth c­ entury and into the twenty-­first, such tensions and contradictions have been at the heart of soldier self-­imagining and iconography. ­There are many more parallels that can be drawn between Buzzell’s treatment of the Iraq War and the writing of soldiers who fought in the First World War. They share a similar poetics—­a pres­ent-­tense immediacy, a discontinuous and episodic narrative structure, an irreverent and conversational tone, the use of soldier slang and soldier dialogues, and the insertion of intertexts, including newspaper articles and pastiches. They share a similar pacing, alternating between scenes of combat and scenes of daily life. They share a similar thematics of hy­poc­risy, illusions, misinformation, and dissimulation. The soldier is both critical of, and complicit with, government, army, and media brainwashing. They describe a similar rift in experience between ­those who experience the war firsthand, and ­those who do not—­between the soldier ­under fire and the shirker b­ ehind the lines. They also describe a similar ambivalence about soldier friendships—­their importance for keeping up morale but also their fragility and dependence upon context. Henri Barbusse’s soldier-­character Lamuse sums up this ambivalence. When his “buddies are in danger,” he “forgets every­thing” and risks his life to help them. “But other­wise, man, I’m looking out for number one.”13

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In reinventing the modern soldier as picaro, the ­Great War writers and artists in this study created an apt warrior for the modern age, one that would resurface throughout the twentieth ­century and, with Buzzell, into the twenty-­ first. Their insight goes well beyond the theater of war, however. What they understood in 1914, we are still coming to terms with ­today—­that the picaresque is the dominant and perhaps the only ­viable ethos for the modern cultural imagination.

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Acknowl­edgments

The research and writing of this book ­were made pos­si­ble through the support of countless generous souls. I am grateful for the kind assistance of experts in the many archives and libraries in which this proj­ect has allowed me to work: the Hoover Institution Library and Archives in Palo Alto, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine in Nanterre, the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, the Imperial War Museum in London, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at the Ohio State University, and the Chaplin Archives in Montreux, Switzerland. I am indebted to Anthony Langley for his incredible, though sadly no longer available, online archive of texts and images, The ­Great War in a Dif­fer­ent Light. I have been able to consult trea­sures through Gallica, the digital archive of the Bibliothèque Nationale, through the Internet Archive, and through the remarkable site gusbofa​.­com. I am grateful to the staff of the OhioLink network of libraries, of Mudd Library at Oberlin College, and of the Oberlin Interlibrary Loan Office for bringing so many resources right to my door. My thanks also go to Blanche Villar for her constant good cheer and her help with logistical prob­lems big and small. This proj­ect grew out of research and thinking I conducted while writing a doctoral thesis at Stanford University. Many p­ eople helped me get this proj­ect off the ground, and many p­ eople helped me see it through to its completion. I would like to thank Jeffrey Schnapp, Margaret Cohen, and Mary Louise Roberts for their unwavering support and encouragement. I thank Grace An and Pat Day for reading for me and thinking with me in moments when I needed perspective. I am grateful to Lisa Stein Haven, Cecilia Cenciarelli, and Kate Guyonvarch for welcoming me into the congenial world of Charlie Chaplin Studies. I thank every­one involved in the Western Society xix

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for French History for offering such a warm and friendly forum in which to exchange interdisciplinary ideas. In writing this book I have been granted the precious gift of time. I w ­ ill forever be in debt to the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, not just for the time to work on this book, but also for the camaraderie and collective wisdom of a wonderful group of fellows and for memories of the sea that bring me peace and joy. I ­will never be able to repay the debt I owe to Vittorio Hösle, Don Stelluto, Carolyn Sherman, and the inaugural class of fellows at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. I remember that cold spring at Notre Dame as among the most contemplative periods of my ­career to date. I am particularly touched by the generosity of John Morrow and the Department of History at the University of Georgia. You offered me kindness, encouragement, and the perfect space in which to think and write. A particularly productive summer of writing was made pos­si­ble by Joe Pych, CEO of Bionic in Hanover, New Hampshire, who made room for me in his offices. I am grateful for the kindness and camaraderie of the staff ­there. I would not have been able to experience t­hese places and periods of reflection without support from Oberlin College. I am grateful for the time to focus on this book and for the H. H. Powers travel grants that allowed me to conduct research in France. I thank the American Philosophical Society for the Franklin Research Grant that helped fund a particularly fruitful trip to France. My thanks go to Roy Export S. A. S., the Artists Rights Society, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and Le Canard enchaîné for permission to reproduce images and to Palgrave Macmillan, Con­temporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites, and Con­temporary French Civilization for permission to reprint previously published material. I am grateful to Heather Gold, assistant editor at Yale University Press, for taking an interest in this proj­ect and offering patience and guidance as I brought the manuscript to completion. I offer a special thanks to se­nior production editor Ann-­Marie Imbornoni, copyeditor Paul Betz, indexer Nancy Gerth, and the anonymous reviewers who read the manuscript and offered enormously helpful suggestions. I thank my friends for cheering me on throughout this proj­ect. Most of all, I want to thank my husband, Tim, my ­brother, John, and my parents, Gail and Bill Murphy—­for their unconditional love and support and for their sense of decency, humor, and curiosity.

The Art of Survival

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Introduction

The original picaresque novels of the Spanish Golden Age all depicted a world that was “violent and corrupt.”1 The world depicted in the anonymously published Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604), and in Francisco de Quevedo’s Historia de la vida del Buscón (The Swindler) (1626)—is a world in which the protagonist finds himself engaged in “continual combat” with his fellow men just to stay alive. 2 The “hard-­ boiled” Spanish picaro barely manages to scrape by in a state of abject poverty.3 His episodic (mis)adventures chart a progressive hardening of the heart and ac­cep­tance of brutal realities. The picaro is an unheroic and morally pliant everyman who is forced to fend for himself to survive in a chaotic and hostile world governed by chance. The picaresque worldview and the picaresque hero w ­ ere reactivated, repurposed, and re­imagined during the ­Great War within a modern cultural and epistemological context. If the original Spanish picaresque novels of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries registered a crumbling of faith in religion and social hierarchy, the modern picaresque of the G ­ reat War registers a crumbling of faith in science, social equality, and the self-­actualization (as opposed to mere self-­preservation) of the individual. Not all of the war­time works in this study pres­ent ironclad generic traits of the original Spanish picaresque novels. T ­ here is likewise no reason to believe that all or even the majority of ­Great War writers and artists consciously imitated picaresque novels. Influence from the picaresque tradition can be “indirect and remote.” 4 The picaresque can best be understood, not as a fixed 1

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Introduction

genre or set of literary ingredients, but as a mode that posits a par­tic­u­lar kind of world and the response of a par­tic­u­lar kind of protagonist to that world. What the works in this study all share in varying degrees and through vari­ ous narrative and repre­sen­ta­tional strategies is a picaresque emphasis on survival. Developed historically as an anti-­type to chivalric romance and its culture of heroism, the picaresque imagines a par­tic­u­lar way of life. It is a way of life based on self-­preservation through resourceful improvisation, making do, and accepting conditions as they are, rather than trying to change them.

Writing about the War: Then and Now

The writers in this study ­were consciously writing for posterity, but first and foremost they ­were writing for their contemporaries and compatriots. The experiential and emotional terrain war­time writers and artists w ­ ere attempting to negotiate through narrative and to represent in images was continuously shifting. Between 1914 and 1918, e­ very aspect of the war would have felt provisional, contingent, and open-­ended.5 It is crucial that we as twenty-­ first c­ entury readers keep this provisional perspective in mind, if we hope to understand the ­Great War, a war that is becoming increasingly opaque to us. With no veterans and very few civilians left to tell us their stories, we are forced to take a fresh look at the huge body of writing and images t­ hose soldiers and civilians produced, first during the war years themselves, and ­later during the 1920s and 1930s. As twenty-­first c­ entury readers, w ­ ill we know how to read ­these early twentieth-­century sources on their own terms? To do so, we w ­ ill have to peel back the many layers of cultural memory that have accrued to the ­Great War moment, to uncover the attitudes, sensibilities, and worldviews of the men and w ­ omen who lived through the war as it unfolded. We ­will need to recover some of the finer detail and cultural references that made up the context in which and through which t­ hese texts w ­ ere created. The imaginative difficulties of such an act of recovery are formidable. ­Today historians are calling for a recognition of the vast gaps in our knowledge of certain aspects of the war—­the impact of the war in the colonies, for example, or the post-­armistice continuation of hostilities on the Eastern front, the experiences of w ­ omen and c­ hildren during the war, the difficult return to normalcy a­ fter the conflict, or the atrocities committed by belligerents on both sides. As we shift our attention to consider the wider territorial and chrono-

Introduction

3

logical scope of this “greater” and “longer” war, we may sacrifice sensitivity to nuance in tone, register, and vocabulary, and lose our ability to recognize tropes and references that would enable us to make an accurate assessment of individual texts or bodies of texts.6 Both perspectives are necessary—­the macro and the micro—­which means that greater collaboration among scholars working in specialized areas ­will be necessary. Literary scholars and cultural historians have an impor­tant contribution to make to any fresh assessment of soldier and civilian writing about the war. They are particularly well placed to identify the vari­ous narrative and repre­sen­ta­tional strategies ­people drew upon to put their war experiences into words. Lit­er­a­ture has long been a vector of memory of the First World War. In the United States, British trench poetry is widely taught in schools, as is Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The fact that Remarque published All Quiet a full de­cade ­after the end of the war is rarely stressed. The take-­home point from the literary treatments of the war that are taught in schools is not soldier ac­cep­tance of the war but soldier disillusionment. Historian Leonard Smith offers a compelling explanation for our current emphasis on the soldier’s disillusionment with the war rather than his resignation to its necessity. The messy, provisional, and inconclusive aspects of the G ­ reat War as it was experienced by t­ hose who lived through it w ­ ere written out of the ­Great War story soon ­after the war’s end. In the 1930s a definitive but distorted “metanarrative” of the ­Great War emerged, a story on which every­one would come to agree. “The war of 1914–18,” Smith argues, “became construed as a tragedy, and the hero in it, the soldier in the trenches, a tragic victim.” 7

War and the Picaresque Tradition

The picaresque provides an alternative imaginative framework to tragedy and victimization—­a framework for surviving conditions as they are. The picaresque gets down to the practical business of reacting to situations as they arise, rather than dwelling on ­things as they once ­were, as they could be in the f­ uture, or as they should be. Picaresque narratives are loosely episodic and follow the down-­and-­out logic of “one damn ­thing a­ fter another.”8 The picaresque attaches practical value to the truth and a practical incentive to seeing through the corruption, illusions, and hy­poc­risy of mainstream society and the mass media. High abstractions and lofty ideals are the currency

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of ­people with no practical experience of war vio­lence. Believing in abstractions like honor, glory, or heroism w ­ ill get a soldier into serious trou­ble. Only clear-­eyed realism ­w ill keep him alive. The picaresque teaches that optimism and pessimism are likewise not helpful stances to adopt in life, while fatalism and resignation are. By giving up on any notion that he is in control, the picaro economizes psychic energy, focusing on what is pos­si­ble in the ­here-­and-­now and figuring out how to survive by adapting opportunistically to the contingencies thrown his way. In the picaresque perspective war is not a tragedy—it is simply the way of the world. It ­doesn’t fulfill the soldier’s destiny or restore order to the universe. It is not the g­ reat character-­building adventure of epic and romance. War ­doesn’t make the soldier a better person—­chances are it makes him worse. In the picaresque perspective, just retaining the most basic “kernel of selfhood” amid the chaos of war is the greatest moral victory one can hope for.9 The picaresque warrior is neither a courageous, proactive hero nor a passive victim. He is simply a survivor. In war in the picaresque mode ­there is no personal payoff at the end of the soldiers’ wanderings—no grail to find or earthly longing to sublimate. The only positive outcome t­ hese protagonists can hope for is that they d­ on’t get blown to smithereens along the way. The challenges the soldier as picaro ­faces are so completely outside his control that he can only momentarily and provisionally overcome them, relying not on some innate strength of character, but on intelligence, resilience, self-­reliance, and dumb luck. The picaresque has traditionally been associated with warfare on a more literal level. Harry Sieber traces one pos­si­ble etymology of the term “picaresque” to sixteenth-­century Spanish military recruits called “pike-­ men” or “piqueros secos,” derived from the Spanish verb “picar,” meaning to stab or to strike. Sieber points to the soldier’s legendary brutality, marauding, and mischief-­making as typical of the rogu­ish and delinquent be­hav­ior the picaro is often forced to adopt to make his way in the world— in peace, as in war.10 Military episodes are common in the picaresque tradition, as the picaro as jack-­of-­all-­trades often finds himself taking up the life of the mercenary soldier. “The association between war and the picaresque should,” David McNeil argues, “come as no surprise since the picaresque portrays a violent and corrupt world in which the hero must make his way by ­either becoming ruthless himself or developing survival tactics.”11 “War is so often the setting for

Introduction

5

picaresque novels,” Joseph Meeker concurs, “­because its conditions intensify the prob­lems to which the picaro must always adapt himself: rapid change, social disorder, irrationality, and constant threat of injury or death.”12 For Meeker, the picaresque approach to life in war­time is fundamentally the same as that in peacetime: “adapt to circumstances and take evasive action.”13 It was during the Thirty Years War (1618–48) that the picaresque mode was first used for depicting a large-­scale historical war and the deep physical and emotional traumas it produced.14 The Thirty Years War inspired three influential picaresque novels, published within twenty years of the 1648 signing of the Peace of Westphalia. Many of the themes and motifs developed in such novels as the anonymously published La Vida y hechos de Estebanillo González, hombre de buen humor (The Life and Deeds of Estebanillo González, Man of Good Humor) (Antwerp 1646, Madrid 1652) and Johann Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (The Adventurous Simplicissimus) (1668) and Die Landstörtzerin Courasche (The Runagate Courage) (1670) resurface in ­future picaresque depictions of warfare. The first of the three novels, Estebanillo, provides a “worm’s-­eye view of life” set against the backdrop of war and its devastation.15 Caught up in the chaos and brutality of the war, Estebanillo accepts the role of “professional ‘fool,’ ”16 sacrificing his dignity for a job that ­will exempt him from any obligation to “fight bravely in the defense of patriotic ideals.”17 As Richard Bjornson puts it, Estebanillo values “wine, good food, and wit above heroism, and he feels no qualms parodying ‘pious Aeneas’ or boasting that ‘mi gusto es mi honra’ (‘my plea­sure is my honor’).”18 The literary Infantryman of the First World War is not a mercenary like Estebanillo. He does not accept the soldier’s life as a stopgap mea­sure, a last resort, or a job among ­others in an intrinsically profession-­less and wandering existence. Rather, it is the war that turns him into a picaro and his life into an endless series of journeys. But echoes of Estebanillo’s picaresque ethos resonate across the vast body of war writing produced by soldiers and civilians during the First World War. The words of a cook from Marseilles in soldier-­novelist Léon Werth’s 1919 Clavel soldat are the early-­twentieth-­ century’s reply to Estebanillo’s mantra “my plea­sure is my honor.” The cook happens upon two soldiers invoking duty to the homeland as their reason for continuing to fight in the war. Such abstractions—­duty as a modern corollary of honor—­hold no sway for the pragmatic and self-­reliant cook. “­Idiots,” he scoffs, “my homeland is my hide.”19

6

Introduction

Like Estebanillo, Grimmelshausen’s naïve young picaro Simplicissimus takes on the role of court jester and camp follower during the Thirty Years War. Simplicissimus is born into a world at war, and one of his first memories is that of seeing soldiers destroy his f­ ather’s farm and kill the inhabitants of his village. The tactic developed by Simplicissimus—­that of feigning innocence, indeed idiocy, long ­after he has wised up to the harsh realities of the world—is one that resurfaces as a thematics of insanity in picaresque depictions of warfare throughout the twentieth c­ entury, from Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War (1921–1923) to Louis-­ Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932), from Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959) to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), or from the tele­vi­ sion series M*A*S*H to the Hollywood blockbuster Forrest Gump (1994). German dramatist Bertolt Brecht’s ­great antiwar play ­Mother Courage and Her ­Children (1939) is based on Grimmelshausen’s second picaresque novel of the Thirty Years War, The Runagate Courage (1670). The novel traces Courage’s downward spiral during the war into poverty, (venereal) disease, degradation, and ruthlessness. Courage’s story culminates in no ­great conversion or reformed life path, as in Guzmán or Simplicissimus. Instead, Courage remains impenitent and cynical to the end. Body and soul, she is damaged by the brutality of war. Her sanguine ac­cep­tance of her fate reflects a keen understanding of what First World War historian George Mosse has called “brutalization,” the dangerous moral and psychological consequences of war vio­lence on both perpetrators and victims. 20 “I should have liked to slip on a dif­fer­ent skin,” Courage explains ­after her time in the army is over, “but neither habit nor my daily society would allow me any improvement.” Courage sees her case as typical. “Most ­people,” she explains, “grow worse rather than better in times of war.”21 Like Courage before them, many of the most memorable characters from novels of the First World War “grow worse rather than better” during and ­after the war. One of the most striking examples is that of Remarque’s Paul Bäumer, who becomes a “dead soul” long before his a­ ctual death at the front. This sensitive young man becomes hardened by the war, though not sufficiently so to protect himself from its traumas and disillusionment. Over the course of Léon Werth’s Clavel soldat, we likewise see the protagonist André Clavel almost literally come undone from his experiences in the war, developing a hatred of his comrades and slowly losing his grip on real­ity. A de­cade ­later, Céline’s Ferdinand Bardamu ­will share Courage’s cynicism, al-

Introduction

7

though he ­will never go quite as far in ruthless self-­preservation as his “Pied ­Piper” doppelgänger Léon Robinson.22 The Runagate Courage thus announces forms of picaresque deterioration in war­time that w ­ ill resurface over two hundred and fifty years ­later in what Charles de Gaulle would call the “Modern Thirty Years War.”23 From the first Thirty Years War to the Modern Thirty Years War, then, the picaresque remained a recognizable narrative pattern that might be expressed or repressed according to the material, social, cultural, ideological, and historical realities of the times. If the picaresque resurfaced during the First World War, it was in part ­because it provided solutions to the narrative and repre­sen­ta­tional prob­lems posed by the new realities of industrialized warfare: its destabilization of the concept of selfhood, its disruption of temporality, and its drastic reduction of h­ uman agency. Echoes of the picaresque ethos reverberate across Eu­ro­pean culture during the First World War, but it was the French who w ­ ere the most explic­itly invested in imagining themselves as picaresque survivors. It makes sense that at a time of unpre­ce­dented vio­lence and destruction on their own soil, French soldiers and civilians would be drawn consciously or unconsciously to the picaresque tradition. The picaro is able to “absorb an incredible degree of phys­ ical and ­mental abuse and still emerge relatively unscathed.”24 Robert Alter calls this resilience “picaresque immunity.” “Despite all the trou­bles he gets himself into,” Alter insists, the picaro “is never seriously hurt and never perceptibly tainted.”25 We must take caution, of course, when judging a par­tic­ u­lar character’s form of “survival” and re­sis­tance to “being tainted.” As we have seen, some picaros fare better than ­others on a psychic level—­that is, some picaros manage to save their skins only at the expense of their souls. The picaresque inheritance was a diverse one representing over three centuries of development and adaptation. French ­Great War texts reactivate the full richness of the Eu­ro­pean picaresque tradition, drawing upon both the original, bleak, “hard-­boiled” Spanish picaresque ethos of Lazarillo de Tormes and El Buscón and upon l­ater, often lighter Eu­ro­pean adaptations, including French ones.

The Gallic Picaresque

­ here are historical ­factors unique to the French experience in the nineteenth T ­century that suggest why the picaresque would exert such a strong influence

8

Introduction

over the French cultural imaginary. No other Eu­ro­pean country had experienced on such a deep and pervasive level and in such a rapid period of time the transition from a culture of military heroism and victory—­carried throughout the nineteenth ­century in the my­thol­ogy of the “Soldiers of the Year II” and the Napoleonic legend—to a culture of defeat, in the wake of the Franco-­Prussian war. 26 No other Eu­ro­pean power had been invaded and occupied twice in just over forty years. French schoolchildren growing up in the wake of the Franco-­ Prussian War—­children who would ­later be called upon to fight in the trenches—­were taught geography lessons using maps of France with the two annexed provinces of Alsace and Lorraine shaded in purple, the color of mourning. France’s capital city, which was and remains the geo­graph­i­cal hub and cultural, po­liti­cal, and intellectual nerve center of the entire nation, had been besieged and then occupied by the Prus­sian army in 1870–1871. In 1914, the German army was stopped just forty miles from the capital. The German advance happened so fast that omnibuses and taxis from Paris ­were requisitioned to get French soldiers out to the Marne River to stop the invasion. The Western Front, which reached from the North Sea to the Franco-­Swiss border, cut right through northern France, r­ unning within sixty miles of Paris. Ten northern French departments ­were partially or totally occupied by the German army, including rich industrial territory along the Belgian border. For twenty-­first-­century readers, the hardships and repression experienced by civilians in occupied France during the First World War have been totally eclipsed by stories from the Second World War. But they would have been on the minds of the French soldiers and civilians who lived through the First World War as it was unfolding. As historians Leonard Smith and Jay Winter remind us, France was the only republic among the Eu­ro­pean powers in World War I. French soldiers ­were not passively obeying some distant authoritarian power—­they w ­ ere defending a nation of which they understood themselves to be the very embodiment. They had been brought up by a centralized Republican educational system to think of themselves as citizen-­soldiers. This understanding of themselves was fundamental, not only to their motivation for continuing the fight, but also to their very sense of masculinity and identity. 27 If “narratives about the futility of the war” do not “suit French audiences,” Jay Winter reminds us, it is in part ­because “the war was fought on French soil, and several million uninvited German guests w ­ ere fi­nally and

Introduction

9

a­ fter enormous effort, thrown out of the country.”28 Leonard Smith sees the unique position of France in the First World War this way: “For practical purposes, all of the French agreed that France would no longer be France if it failed to prevail. This was precisely what made the w ­ hole question of a negotiated peace so intractable. France and the French had nothing they could negotiate.”29 And yet consensus over an appropriate framework for talking about the war has been difficult to reach in France where, in Winter’s words, “when you touch the First World War . . . ​you are playing with fire.” Winter goes on to explain that scholars are far less divided in their way of thinking about the war in Britain than they are in France. “In Britain,” he argues, “to write about the G ­ reat War is an entirely dif­fer­ent m ­ atter” [from writing about the war in France]. “Elegy,” Winter explains, “displaces anger, touches of the sacred are always at hand, even when the author’s purpose is to show the terrible waste of life and hope in the war. When irony dominates the account, it provides a natu­ral distancing device, a way of looking at the war with detached sadness.”30 No such consensus has been reached in France where, for the past de­ cade or so, scholars have tended to gravitate ­toward two radically dif­fer­ent conceptual paradigms, represented by two rival research groups. On the one hand, historians of the Historial group, centered around the international museum and research center L’Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, have rallied ­behind the concept of “consent,” understood as the deep commitment French soldiers felt to the war effort by virtue of their identification with the Republic and with themselves as citizen-­soldiers. Historians of the CRID or Collectif de Recherche International et de Débat sur la Guerre de 1914–1918 (­Great War International Research and Debate Collective), on the other hand, have developed a ­counter-­paradigm to the “consent” model, arguing that if soldiers continued to fight for four long years in the trenches, it was not b­ ecause they w ­ ere committed to the war effort, but b­ ecause they w ­ ere victims of coercion and constraint. For CRID historians, soldiers committed to the fight ­because they had no choice; they ­were subject to strict army discipline and had internalized a “culture of obedience,” which placed them at just one remove from passive victimization.31 The picaresque framework opens a m ­ iddle ground between coercion and consent and allows us to see general resignation to the war as compatible with gestures of irreverence, insubordination, and even refusal. If the

10

Introduction

British paradigm is one of sadness, the French paradigm is one of sarcasm and satire, a way of pushing back against authority without actually overthrowing it, of registering discontent about the war, without denouncing it or deserting from it. In the picaresque worldview, the return of French soldiers to the trenches ­after the mutinies of 1917 begins to make more sense. The law of the picaresque world is that of the status quo. Picaros do not aspire to overturn the world order, only to make it more bearable. The soldier mutinies of 1917 w ­ ere carried out for very specific and practical purposes. Soldiers put pressure on the general staff to better manage its ­human resources and to put a higher premium on ­human life. They forced the officers ­behind the lines to accept more input from the soldiers in the trenches, who ­were the ones risking their lives. They did not, however, surrender or call for a total cessation of hostilities or a negotiated peace. The mutineers w ­ ere not pacifists, deserters, or conscientious objectors. They ­were realists, calling for reform within the system, not for revolution.32 But soldiers w ­ ere not the only ones keeping up the fight. Culture-­makers of all kinds w ­ ere instrumental in reflecting and shaping both soldier and civilian attitudes ­toward the war. If the French w ­ ere to remain French, they ­were ­going to have to articulate a unified and consensus-­building set of beliefs, values, and be­hav­iors that would be readily identifiable as French. It is unhelpful to dismiss such constructions as merely propaganda or knee-­jerk nationalism. Such constructions give us insight into the values that many French p­ eople held most dear in the early twentieth c­ entury. The First World War, historian Pierre Purseigle and ­others have argued, “was ultimately waged to preserve everyday values.”33 Or, as Jacques Rivière wrote in 1915, “One makes war for a certain way of seeing the world. E ­ very war is a war of 34 religion.” The picaresque was a very par­tic­u­lar kind of storytelling based on a par­tic­u­lar way of seeing the world and of understanding one’s place in that world. The French expressed their unique national worldview in actions and commitments, but also in stories—in the stories they told during the war and in the stories they wanted to hear. As Leonard Smith argues, French “citizens construed ‘France’ ” in many dif­fer­ent and highly personal ways, harboring “dif­fer­ent conceptions of the national community” depending upon their par­tic­u­lar circumstances—­including regional identities, class, gender, and race.35 Nationalism was, Pierre Purseigle likewise points out, built on a

Introduction

11

“complex set of concomitant senses of belonging” in which “infranational solidarities . . . ​ultimately reinforced national resilience.”36 What held together the “multi-­layered fabric” that “tied individuals to the i­magined national community”?37 The answer I propose in this book is culture—­both the long and rich French literary and cultural inheritance and the reassertion during the war of French cultural values in an updated form. France, to return to Smith’s definition, was not only an “emotional and geographic space.” It was also a cultural space, one that could be lost if not aggressively asserted and fiercely protected. At stake in the G ­ reat War was France’s cultural survival, and it was in cultural terms that writers, critics, and artists often framed the confrontation between French and German values—­between French civilisation and German Kultur. In committing to the war effort, the French committed to a certain po­liti­cal identity as citizens of the French Republic, but they also committed to a certain cultural identity that they believed was fundamentally opposed to the cultural identity of their German “aggressors.” The fight for national survival was a fight for Frenchness, conceived of as an attitude, a style, a language, a set of tastes, and a sense of humor, among many other ­things. The fact that many of ­these same cultural values are affirmed in only slightly dif­fer­ent forms by other national groups at the time is beside the point. What m ­ atters is that the French claimed such values as uniquely their own. The picaresque framework helps us decipher the texts and images through which everyday soldiers and civilians affirmed their identification with a specifically French “habitus,” one that helped them hold on and imagine—­even as the bombs fell—­that they could somehow make it out of the war experience still alive and still French. Many soldiers and civilians elected to depict the poilu (French infantry soldier—­literally “hairy one”) not as a larger than life superman, but as a modern picaro—an Everyman and underdog forced to scratch and scramble to stay alive among the deadly traps of industrial warfare, armed only with his quick wit and ready resourcefulness—­the famous G ­ reat War Système D. During the war, this slang term for coping, managing, or muddling through was elevated to the status of a national mantra. Le Système D implied a new kind of heroism based on the everyday qualities of the French common man: self-­reliance, resourcefulness, and resilience. Individual survival and national survival converged in the concept of Le Système D, which gave writers, artists, and cultural critics a way to imagine the poilu’s par­tic­u­lar

12

Introduction

strategies of survival as being part and parcel of and continuous with the nation’s survival, understood on the deepest level as cultural survival.

From Sentiment to Cynicism

If, with some notable exceptions—­mostly Rus­sian and American—­the picaresque novel went underground in the nineteenth ­century, many scholars agree that it resurfaced in the mid-­twentieth ­century in the wake of the Second World War. Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth (1944), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1947–1952), Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Thomas Mann’s The Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence Man (1954), J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955), Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) ­were all published within twenty years of the end of the Second World War. This overwhelming resurgence of the picaresque is not, however, as abrupt as it might seem. It is with the First World War and during the war years themselves that we see the dim outlines of the picaresque worldview reemerge from its slumbers and find expression throughout the cultural fabric of the era. Two well-­known postwar novels about the First World War—­Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War (Czecho­ slo­va­kia, 1921–1923) and Louis-­Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit ( Journey to the End of the Night; France, 1932) give clear expression to tendencies and motifs that w ­ ere pres­ent—in latent or partial form—in a g­ reat deal of French lit­er­a­ture and culture from the war years. The works of Hašek and Céline can be seen as generically picaresque, while the novels of Henri Barbusse (Le Feu), Roland Dorgelès (Les Croix de bois, Le Cabaret de la belle femme), Pierre Chaine (Les Mémoires d’un rat), and Léon Werth (Clavel soldat), the journalism and serial fiction of Georges de la Fouchardière, the cartoons of Francisque Poulbot, Bruce Bairnsfather, and Gus Bofa, and the films of Charlie Chaplin can be seen as modally picaresque. The picaresque mode takes its place between the modes of satire and comedy. Picaresque satire is aimed at exposing the lies, illusions, and hypocrisies upon which a corrupt and death-­dealing society is based. In the picaresque, the point of calling out society’s vices and follies is not necessarily to correct them. It is to show how the industrious and adaptable picaro can use this knowledge to his advantage. Picaresque comedy, on the other hand, is aimed at celebrating life at its most boisterous and hedonistic and at finding

Introduction

13

some form of equilibrium, however precarious and temporary, even a­ fter the most extraordinary shocks and dislocations.38 The works in The Art of Survival follow a downward path along the picaresque spectrum, beginning with texts written in the life-­affirming “comic” picaresque mode and ending with texts written in a darkly cynical picaresque mode, in which the picaro experiences nihilism and contempt for his fellow man. Each chapter in this book addresses a new challenge posed by the ­Great War and explores the ways in which the reactivation of the picaresque tradition functioned to sustain a sense of integrity and equilibrium in the face of such challenges. The first chapter places the picaresque within a series of narrative solutions scholars have identified for putting the radical vio­lence of the trench experience into words. The next chapter develops the French war­ time concept of Le Système D as an imaginative framework for finding stability amid the chaos of war. Le Système D provided an overarching narrative framework within which the threat to poilu integrity (both physical and psychic) depicted in scenes of combat could be offset in scenes of rest b­ ehind the lines. H ­ ere the poilu is shown putting himself back together again psychically through forms of creativity and play. In chapter 2 (Tactics of the Foot Soldier: The Arts and Antics of Le Système D) I take a closer look at the specific soldier be­hav­iors and personality traits associated with Le Système D. Soldier-­novelists Henri Barbusse and Roland Dorgelès and civilian humorists at the popu­lar magazine La Baïonnette showcased be­hav­iors long associated with the picaro but updated for a modern context. Depictions of soldier thieving and trickery, craftsmanship, bricolage, and evasive tactics reveal a new picaresque imagination at play. They meet the challenge posed by the war for a new kind of protagonist, one skilled in the arts of survival. Among the tactics of the trench soldier touched upon in chapter 2 is the ability to see through patriotic bombast and blustering of all types, to approach the war through a form of patriotism that is quietly pragmatic. Chapter 3 (Georges de la Fouchardière: Oppositional Journalism, Involuntary Heroism, and Bourrage de crâne) explores the uniquely modern, mass-­media phenomenon of bourrage de crâne (skull-­stuffing) through a study of the oppositional journalism and new patriotism of the now largely forgotten humorist Georges de la Fouchardière. A popu­lar war­time journalist and serial novelist, La Fouch’, as he was affectionately called, was crowned by war­time readers of the satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné as one of the “most courageous

14

Introduction

con­temporary thinkers.” Like Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk, La Fouchar­ dière’s characters occupied the position of dissenters within the dominant war culture, embodying opposition through humor, not so much to the way the war was being conducted as to the way it was being depicted in the mass media. Chapter 4 (The Comedy of In­de­pen­dence: The “Man on the Street” Goes Off to War) continues this exploration of the works of La Fouchardière and Hašek and reminds us of the picaresque hero’s longstanding role in exposing, through his pragmatism and intellectual in­de­pen­dence, the hypocrisies and illusions of the dominant society whose margins he occupies. By remaining his eccentric and inscrutable self, the man on the street resists the soul-­crushing forces of militarization and bureaucratization, disrupting the machine of war. Chapter 5 (Animal Instincts: Lessons from a Trench Rat) examines the instinct of self-­preservation at the heart of Le Système D. The recourse during the First World War to analogies between soldiers and animals signals not only an attempt on the part of writers to initiate readers into the debased world of the trench, but also a valorization on their part of forms of survival based on instinct. Like La Fouchardière’s works, Pierre Chaine’s 1917 novel Les Mémoires d’un rat (The Memoirs of a Rat) grapples with questions of patriotism and propaganda through a radically new approach to soldier characterization. Les Mémoires d’un rat, the autobiography of the trench rat Ferdinand, recounts Ferdinand’s adventures with his master, the poilu Juvenet. Chaine’s novel builds upon the uniquely French twist that was put on the picaresque tradition by Alain-­René Lesage in the eigh­teenth ­century. As Alexander Parker observes, “optimism about life in general is more marked” in the French picaresque tradition [of Gil Blas] in which “first the translators and then Lesage conjured away the serious moral and religious interest in delinquency that the Spanish genre had contained.”39 Chaine’s narrator Ferdinand uses a light and playful tone for talking about the most serious of topics, and the portrait he pres­ents of his master Juvenet’s re­sis­tance to brutalization and dehumanization suggests the possibility of a reassuring ­return to some sort of moral and emotional equilibrium even amid the horrors of war. Chapter 6 (Phlegm Meets Flair: Images of the Infantryman in War­time Britain and France) moves from the narrativization of picaresque arts of survival to a discussion of the pictorial picaresque. What did the modern picaro look like? How did cartoon artists imagine the soldier in the trenches and the

Introduction

15

civilian population back home? To answer t­ hese questions I turn to the cartoons of Bruce Bairnsfather (Britain) and Francisque Poulbot (France), which ­were as iconic in ­Great War Britain and France respectively as Bill Mauldin’s cartoons of Willie and Joe ­were in the United States during the Second World War. Like Mauldin, Bairnsfather and Poulbot created archetypal characters that embodied national responses to industrialized warfare. With Poulbot, the popu­lar nineteenth-­century type of the gamin de Paris (street kid) transcended his original working-­class Pa­ri­sian context to become a ­house­hold word and symbol of French national character. Les poulbots inhabited a privileged place in the French cultural imaginary, embodying the same picaresque character traits—­resourcefulness, irreverence, and courage—­attributed to French soldiers in the trenches. As a complement to the British soldier’s legendary phlegm—­his imperturbability, evenness of temper, self-­possession, and strength of character—­the French child and the French soldier offered their legendary flair, understood as wit, vigor, and panache. The British Tommy and the French poilu ­were held up in allied propaganda as a sort of picaresque odd ­couple—­dramatically dif­fer­ent in temperament but excellent partners in war. Leaving ­behind the buoyancy and resiliency of the more successful pi­ caros as artists of survival, I move in chapter 7 (Le Cafard: Brutalization, Alienation, and Despair) to an examination of picaros who succumb to the new war­time phenomenon of le cafard or trench depression. The much darker and more pessimistic works studied in this chapter move us away from the comic picaresque to the cynically satirical picaresque. The chapter begins with a discussion of an impor­tant French graphic artist and illustrator whose war­ time work is only now being rediscovered. Gus Bofa explored the limits of picaresque moral and physical resiliency, countering Poulbot’s sentimental, nationalistic visual idiom through his uniquely satirical and universalist one. Meanwhile Léon Werth’s Clavel soldat (1919) anticipates by more than a de­cade key themes in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Louis-­Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), providing a glimpse into the psychological dark side of the picaresque. In Clavel soldat, the narrator’s jaundiced gaze progressively distorts and exaggerates the weaknesses and vices of the soldiers and civilians around him, leading to an alienated vision of the self, the other, and the world. ­Here we see the alienation and cynicism the poilu-­picaro experiences when his rebellious wit turns to black bile, and the unified self required for a full deployment of Le

16

Introduction

Système D has come undone. As this chapter reminds us, the picaresque worldview can lead to moral pathology. At its darkest, the picaresque tale has always been one of character deformation.40 I end with a chapter (Charlie Chaplin’s ­Little Tramp: From the Art of Survival to the Survival of Art) that recontextualizes the single most impor­ tant picaresque character of the twentieth c­ entury: Charlie Chaplin’s L ­ ittle Tramp. In the war­time picaresque, unheroic, everyday soldiers are e­ ither ground up by the infernal machine of the war, like Bofa’s poilus and Werth’s Clavel, or they serve as monkey wrenches that temporarily stop the gears of the machine. Long before he filmed The ­Great Dictator, Chaplin disrupted the destruction of war by sending his “­little fellow” to the front lines in Shoulder Arms (1918). Charlot, as the French called him, is skilled in the arts of Le Système D. Indeed, his débrouillardise (resourcefulness), his joviality, and his expertise in bricolage ­were traits that French critics admired in Charlot and to which they pointed in their efforts to nationalize him. The L ­ ittle Tramp resembles a long line of fictional and cartoon poilus in G ­ reat War culture—­ heroes “in spite of themselves” who never fail to do their duty, even if they do so despite their better judgment or their best attempts to save their precious hides. The Tramp as reluctant infantryman in Shoulder Arms (Charlot soldat in France) celebrates life and asserts his limited personal freedom through the tremendous vitality of his gags. In Chaplin’s films the picaresque arts of survival are depicted at their most whimsical and creative, suggesting a re-­enchantment of the war-­weary modern world through the new medium of cinema. Through comparisons with other national traditions, this book shows that the French did not have a mono­poly on picaresque qualities of improvisation, resourcefulness, and resilience. The international success of Chaplin’s ­Little Tramp, the cockney humor of Bruce Bairnsfather’s Old Bill, and the comic misadventures of the Good Soldier Švejk confirm the resonance across Eu­rope of this renewed picaresque vision of the world and of the place of the “­little guy” in that world. The French did, however, make a literary, cultural, and intellectual investment in imagining ­those values to be uniquely French. This faith in an enduring Gallic spirit in the face of cataclysmic world events would have a long and contested afterlife in the twentieth ­century.

1. A Literary War

Irony, Tragedy, and the Return of the Picaresque

The First World War revealed the limitations of traditional narratives and languages of heroism, placing emphasis on pragmatism over idealism and survival over self-­sacrifice. The war also posed a series of unique narrative and repre­sen­ta­tional prob­lems. The mobilization of millions of citizen-­soldiers created a seemingly unbridgeable rift in experience and understanding between soldiers and civilians. At the same time, combatants themselves strug­gled to construct a coherent narrative out of their own conflicting experiences. T ­ hese prob­lems would not be solved in a void. Eu­ro­pe­ans would turn to the literary past and tap into the rich cultural and literary heritage of war narratives and repre­sen­ta­tions of soldiers. They would turn to e­ very mode on the literary spectrum: epic, romance, tragedy, elegy, pastoral, but also, and most importantly, the picaresque. Like romance and tragedy, epics teach the ultimate value and meaning of death over life and prioritize the survival of the community over that of the individual. Epics are stories about g­ reat men and g­ reat, foundational moments. Many writers and critics chose to write about the First World War as a meaningful adventure, one affording opportunities for personal growth and moral and physical regeneration. Fantasies of warfare as an opportunity for spectacular feats of courage and skill ­were fed by accounts of the air war depicting “knights of the sky” like fighter aces George Guynemer and René Fonck.1 A similarly heroic ethos was echoed in the many images circulating in war culture of forward-­lurching Infantrymen rallying their comrades with

17

18

A Literary War

bayonets affixed, best exemplified in Jules-­Abel Faivre’s famous “On les aura!” (­We’ll get them!) war-­loan poster. No author worked harder to make an epic out of the war than politician and academician Maurice Barrès. A classic example is his virtual canonization of Charles Péguy as the ­great martyr of the 1914 war of movement. Barrès described the catholic, left-­leaning, Republican Péguy as a con­temporary of Jeanne d’Arc, baptizing him “le Français de la France éternelle” (the Frenchman of Eternal France) and celebrating his death as “la plus belle des morts” (the most beautiful of deaths). 2 In his prefaces, lectures, and almost daily articles in the conservative bourgeois newspaper L’Écho de Paris, Barrès rewrote the anonymity of industrialized warfare as heroic face-­to-­face combat, celebrating the bayonet as a noble weapon or arme blanche, long associated in the French heroic tradition with personal combat and duels.3 As the war of movement ground down into a war of attrition, attitudes began to catch up with realities. Many ­people came to see ­these aggressive postures and heroicized visions of the soldier as delusional and irresponsible, anachronistic and inappropriate for capturing the real­ity of modern warfare. The wise-­cracking poilu and his British ally, the unflappable Tommy, ­were no less nationalistic or propagandistic imaginative constructs than the heroic Infantrymen who lunged across war bonds posters or sang La Marseillaise in kitschy ­music hall numbers. The poilu and the Tommy ­were collectively constructed, composite, and constantly evolving heroes for a demo­cratic age, embodying a set of values and enacting a set of survival strategies that ­were seen as appropriate for trench warfare. T ­ hose values and characteristics ­were couched in terms of national character, but they transcended national and cultural bound­aries. Heroism became the prerogative of the masses and of the common man, not the hallmark of the officer class or of the exceptional individual. The Infantryman was recast as a modern picaro, an ordinary guy who recognizes that he is caught up in world-­historical events that are in their scope, their complexity, and their vio­lence out of proportion with the power of the individual to effect any kind of positive change, but who nevertheless continues to fight and ­doesn’t despair. It was not just picaresque characterization that was compelling for writers attempting to describe the war experience. The picaresque also afforded possibilities for capturing the contradictory temporalities of industrialized warfare. The picaresque bears the traces of an original parodic encounter with epic and romance. A hybrid form, the picaresque had always mingled the ex-

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traordinary and incongruous events of what critic Mikhail Bakhtin calls “adventure time,” common in epic and romance, with the ordinariness and routine of the “everyday time” of comedy, social satire, and chronicles of the pres­ent.4 In the original Spanish picaresque, the chance encounters of the open road alternate with scenes of the barest subsistence living. In trench warfare, the forces that threaten the Infantryman’s physical and emotional survival are seemingly diametrically opposed. On the one hand, he ­faces physical obliteration by mortar shells, grenades, and bullets—­ impersonal, random happenings over which he has absolutely no control. On the other hand, he f­ aces the emotional drain of daily life in the trenches, on long marches, and in billets b­ ehind the lines. Picaresque time is, Bakhtin tells us, “chopped up into separate segments,” and “deprived of [the] unity and w ­ holeness” common to epic time.5 ­Great War picaresque narratives are made up of such “separate segments,” including mobilization, the baptism of fire, the attack, the artillery barrage, convalescent leave, permission (R&R leave), and reintegration into civilian life. ­These episodes, like the fragments of everyday-­adventure time, often appear to be “deprived of essential connections” other than that of loss of life over time.6 By the end of Le Feu, for example, only a handful of Bertrand’s original squad, minus Bertrand himself, survive. The trench world is an extreme subset of the picaresque spatio-­temporal nexus, or “chronotope,” of the road described by Bakhtin. ­Great War scholar Martin Hurcombe uses the corollary term “chronotope of the absurd” for the unique space-­time soldiers describe in their accounts of the front lines.7 The trench is the road turned labyrinth—­a claustrophobically enclosed space in which life and death are governed by chance. It is an “alien”—­Paul Fussell would say “demonic”—­world of absolute contingency. 8 The trench is also a treacherous world in which adventure—in the form of death—­becomes the everyday. As soldier-­novelist Pierre Chaine’s narrator, the trench rat Ferdinand, puts it, life at the front is a “long tête à tête with death.”9 The trench becomes a place of forced cohabitation and appalling promiscuity between living, breathing p­ eople and decomposing corpses. Body parts lie scattered among the detritus of the trench world that becomes the Infantryman’s temporary home. War­time is radically polarized. It is experienced as alternately dilated and contracted. Long stretches of mind-­numbing boredom, monotony, and waiting are interrupted by the terror of a bombardment or the chaos of an

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attack. The narrator of Le Feu describes ­these two rhythms of life at war, comparing his vision of the war to the traditional, epic one. War, he insists, is an “infinite monotony of miseries, interrupted by acute crises,” not “bayonets gleaming like silver or the cockcrow of the bugle at dawn!”10

The Appeal of the Picaresque

­ reat War writers who chose prose fiction as a means of telling the story of G the war had a number of nineteenth-­century models to which they could turn—­War and Peace (1869), The Red Badge of Courage (1895), and La Débâcle (1892), to name just a few. Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charter­ house of Parma) (1839) had been particularly influential. Stendhal’s postwar account of the Napoleonic wars contains a famous and often-­cited scene in which the protagonist, Fabrice del Dongo, experiences his baptism of fire on the battlefield at Waterloo. So chaotic is the combat experience that Fabrice is never ­really sure if he participates in Waterloo or not. Most of t­ hese works had been composed well a­ fter the events they depicted. With the outcome of war well established, the major war writers of the nineteenth c­ entury had been f­ ree to fold military conflict into the life story of a set of protagonists and to situate war within a biographical narrative arc and the thematics of character development. In t­ hese works, war could be depicted as a transformative experience in the lives of individual characters and in the historical development of nations.11 Some writers would take this approach a­ fter the war. The 1920s and 1930s saw the publication of a ­whole series of French romans-­fleuves that folded the war moment into a sweeping, often multi-­generational narrative: Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927), Jules Romains’s Les Hommes de bonne volonté (Men of Good ­Will, 1932–1946), and Roger Martin du Gard’s Les Thibault (The Thibaults, 1920–1939) are examples, as is Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), which devotes the first hundred pages to the war before describing the postwar existence of veterans Bardamu and Robinson. Few ­Great War writers used this approach while the war was still ­going on. Instead of the unifying w ­ holeness of “biographical” time, common in the prewar bildungsroman or postwar roman-­fleuve, ­these writers chose the string of episodes or collage of slices of life common in the picaresque.12 They made literary choices on the fly, drawing upon some aspects of the picaresque tra-

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dition and modifying o­ thers in their attempts to pro­cess world-­historical events in the making. The ­great picaros of the Spanish and Eu­ro­pean traditions—­Lazarillo, Simplicissimus, Courage, or Gil Blas—­all tell their stories from their unique and unified, b­ ecause retrospective, point of view. G ­ reat War picaresque narratives do not adopt the generic convention of the retrospective autobiography, at least not with any consistency. Dorgelès’s narrator Jacques Larcher comes closest to giving the reader access to his perspective on war experiences framed as having already been consigned to the past. He reflects at the end of Les Croix de bois about the narrative choices he has made in telling the story of his squad. More typical is another device used by Dorgelès t­oward the end of the novel, that of inserting into the narrative a soldier-­character like Sulphart, who has been invalided out of the war and now has some critical distance from his experiences. The soldier-­on-­leave character common to ­Great War narratives serves a similar function, providing a distanced perspective of both the front and the home front. In Le Feu, we are given access to the perspectives of many dif­fer­ent soldiers, primarily through dialogue, but we also see ­these soldiers die and hear their voices go ­silent. Rather than a unified voice looking back on the past, most of t­hese novels pres­ent a confusion of voices from a collective protagonist, often from an entire squad or from complementary pairs of soldiers. Taken together, the bourgeois Demachy and the working-­class Sulphart from Les Croix de bois, for example, give us a composite picture of the soldier at war—we see the fresh recruit and the seasoned veteran. The use of such odd c­ ouples is common in G ­ reat War texts. We find them used by Pierre Chaine in the trench rat and his poilu master, by Georges de la Fouchardière in his blunderbuss alcoholic poilu Bicard and his trench buddy, the phlegmatic millionaire baron, and in cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather’s Old Bill and his younger sidekicks Alf and Bert. T ­ hese c­ ouples anticipate Hašek’s odd ­couple of Švejk and Lukás, and the more pathological Bardamu-­Robinson doppelgänger ­couple developed by Céline in Voyage au bout de la nuit. The war­time picaresque trades the unity of the individual life as organ­izing princi­ple for a series of recognizable and complementary characters—­the fresh recruit, the educated bourgeois, the cocky working-­ class funny man, the would-be shirker, the incompetent cook, the loyal corporal, the annoying NCO, the married man, the single man with no letters

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from home. ­These characters connote raw, unpro­cessed experience through dialogues, storytelling, and actions observed and related by a fairly unobtrusive narrator, who only periodically reveals himself through the pronouns “I” or “we.” Narrators in ­these texts are meant to seem like recording devices—­giving the reader the impression of unfiltered and au­then­tic access to the men in the trenches. In Le Feu and Les Croix de bois, for example, we do get the sense that ­there is an organ­izing subjectivity ­behind the “I” that occasionally reveals himself and comments upon the action or dialogues. This “I” brings to the recounting of events a distinct perspective developed in civilian life, but this perspective fades in and out of focus and does not constitute the primary center of interest. The suggestion is that the war experience is too vast, too contradictory, and too fragmented to be told from the point of view of a single protagonist. No one person is capable of telling the tale. The men in Le Feu comment upon their limitations in taking in the war, discussing in par­tic­u­lar their inability to hold on to all of their impressions. Both memories of the exhausting physical and emotional toll of trench life and memories of the worst horrors of warfare inevitably fade with time, if they are ever registered in the first place. As one man puts it, “We’ve seen too much!” Another agrees, “And each ­thing we saw was too much. W ­ e’re not made to contain all of this . . . ​It seeps out in all directions; ­we’re too small.”13 Giving up on the notion that any one character’s experience of the war could be unified and stable enough to be authoritative, writers in the picaresque mode show that the best that can be hoped for is a collage of experiences cobbled together from dif­fer­ent perspectives.

Between Solitude and Solidarity

Scholars of the picaresque like Alexander Blackburn would take issue with the notion that the Infantryman in a modern army could be depicted as a picaro. “One of the sure clues to the absence of a picaro in a novel,” he insists, “is the repre­sen­ta­tion of a fellowship.” “Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and Roderick Random do not fully portray picaros,” he goes on to explain, “­because in them the wandering hero is accompanied, the ‘I’ becoming a ‘we.’ ”14 While it is true that the traditional picaro tends to operate alone, the picaresque tradition also includes marginalized groups of picaros who live together in a band or fellowship. In Francisco de Quevedo’s El Buscón (1626), for example, the central character Don Pablos briefly finds fellow-

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ship and mutual aid with a band of swindlers who are destitute but struggling to keep up appearances. They help each other find banquets to crash, and they alter each other’s clothes so that when their pants seats wear out, their coattails ­will at least cover their backsides. Only the most hardened picaros are incapable of forging friendships or building rudimentary relationships. Indeed, relationships can be seen as part of the arsenal of survival tactics ­adopted by the picaro. The “have-­nots” must sometimes band together to eke out an existence at the expense of the “haves.” What is more, picaros tend to feel a murmur of compassion for p­ eople like themselves: the poor, the marginalized, and the destitute. That compassion, however, does not translate into an altruistic spirit or an ability to fully integrate oneself with the rest of mankind. The literary Infantryman is like Pablos among the swindlers in El Buscón—he belongs to a marginalized group, in this case that of other enlisted men, who see themselves as an underclass—­even if civilians and army and government officials persist in calling them heroes. The members of a squad forge friendships based on mutual aid and shared suffering. They develop their own language, such as the famous trench slang that civilians tried so hard to imitate. They share knowledge, experiences, and forms of sociability that set them apart from the civilian population. The literary and cartoon poilu is rarely depicted tricking or exploiting a trench mate—at least not in any serious or harmful way. A soldier might be shown grousing about another’s cushy post, but he is not shown actively trying to take that post away from him. Instead, he bides his time, waiting for the spot to be liberated and pouncing on the opportunity as soon as it pres­ents itself. Soldiers are depicted taking advantage of civilians or getting the better of profiteering peasants while by and large respecting each other’s property. What­ever ­else might separate them—­age, social class, geo­graph­i­ cal origins, individual sensibilities—­the poilus are i­ magined as bound together by a common e­ nemy: the outsider. That means the Germans, of course, but also civilians—­one’s own countrymen who ­don’t share the knowledge and experience of the soldier. ­These outsiders, and not the ordinary soldier, are overwhelmingly depicted as the dupes of poilu cunning. Paul Bäumer, the narrator of All Quiet on the Western Front, describes the paradox of soldier solitude within civilian society this way: “We w ­ ere all at once terribly alone; and 15 alone we must see it through.” In the ­Great War picaresque, the individual foot soldier or groups of foot soldiers are alienated and distanced—­physically,

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experientially, emotionally—­from civilian society, but they are also symbolically situated at civilian society’s very core, as representatives of the nation at arms. The Infantryman’s position with re­spect to civilian society is one of dissonance, dissidence, and social and generational conflict. ­These conflicts are acted out in the many scenes in war narratives in which the protagonists leave one alien world—­the trench—­only to find themselves in an equally alien, if less dangerous, world ­behind the lines. The billet towns where the soldiers go for rest are depicted as teeming with tricksters and charlatans out to drain the soldier of his last ounce of dignity and his last fistful of cash. The big cities where he goes on leave are dens of elegant shirkers and frivolous plea­sure seekers in whose midst the soldier is completely out of place.

Panoramic Vision

In the course of a single narrative, soldier-­protagonists move through radically dif­fer­ent fictional worlds—­the front lines, the home front, and the countless billet towns, barracks, depots, train stations, and military hospitals in between. The hundreds of secondary characters encountered in ­these texts serve to establish the world of hy­poc­risy and illusions through which the soldier-­picaro must make his way once he leaves the trenches and attempts to function in a civilian-­dominated world. The picaresque tale is structured around what Bakhtin calls the chronotope of the “high road winding through one’s native land.”16 The high road is a space of random encounters with charlatans, tricksters, and thieves, encounters that reveal the true nature of a society that d­ oesn’t live by the values and be­hav­iors it trumpets. The picaro ­will not hesitate to employ the same trickery to beat the conmen at their game. On his travels on the “high winding road” between the front and the home front, the Infantryman encounters a panoramic array of social types embodying a variety of h­ uman vices: tight-­fisted peasants, ruthless profiteers, frivolous socialites, well-­connected shirkers, petty noncommissioned officers, and de­cadent generals and politicians. Civilians are often depicted regarding soldiers with the disdainful eye reflected back at picaros as orphans, outcasts, and illegitimate ­children. Like the traditional picaro, the average foot soldier is treated like a social nobody. The literary Infantryman is typically a member of the working and peasant classes and speaks with a socially and regionally marked accent.17 While such depictions are faithful to the ­actual social

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makeup of Eu­ro­pean armies during the war, they also feed bourgeois fantasies about a supposed worker and peasant underclass in much the same way that the original Spanish picaresque texts did. The picaresque foot soldier is boisterous and loud, uncouth and unkempt, dirty, lice-­infested, always hungry, and prone to excessive drinking and cursing. He is hopelessly unseductive in his ill-­fitting, mud-­caked uniform. In novels and cartoons depicting the soldier on leave attempting to enter places of civilian respectability, civilians are shown losing their patience with the “heroes” they claim to adore. In such scenes, the soldier as icon is brutally stripped of his laurels and spared no insult. Soldiers are depicted being called “dirty pigs” and “bastards”18 by civilians or being described by them as “disgusting” and “degenerate.”19 The ­Great War soldier-character’s only recourse to gain f­ avor among civilians is to parrot the jargon they expect from him and to assume the heroic postures they want to see. Yet it is ultimately the p­ eople in positions of power, however derisory that power may be—­the noncommissioned officers, the war profiteers, the shirkers, the socialites—­who are satirized by the G ­ reat War picaresque mode, not the common soldiers. Even the least dignified tactics of the Infantryman win him the sympathetic identification of the reader or viewer—­Gaspard (Gaspard), Barque (Le Feu), and Kat (All Quiet on the Western Front) scavenging for food and stealing from civilians, Sulphart (Les Croix de bois) parroting jingoistic drivel he ­doesn’t believe to make a good impression on his nurses, Švejk feigning idiocy, Bardamu (Voyage au bout de la nuit) singing the praises of cowardice, Charlot (Shoulder Arms) politely ceding his place at the front of an assault to the soldier b­ ehind him. Readers who found such be­hav­ior reprehensible ­were precisely the kinds of readers such texts ­were out to ridicule and reprimand. Both soldier and civilian writers called attention to such social hy­poc­risy and recalibrated expectations about “heroism” at the front.

Reading the Soldiers’ War

In highlighting the rift between the front and the home front, ­these texts initiated a trend that would intensify in the postwar period, that of privileging soldier testimony over all other sources of information about the war. The 1930s marked an impor­tant moment in the French literary and cultural memory of the G ­ reat War. In 1929 the French veteran and academic Jean Norton

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Cru published his monumental survey of French ­Great War writing, Témoins. In it he considered as au­then­tic only firsthand accounts of the front lines written by eyewitnesses or témoins, effectively discrediting any work written by civilians. The soldier, and l­ ater, the war veteran, w ­ ere construed as the only v­ iable sources of knowledge about the war. And that knowledge was taken to be largely unproblematic. Reading works of soldier testimony, it was suggested, could give one unmediated access to the truth of the trench experience, undistorted by memory or literary and cultural conventions. Indeed, in some French schools, t­ here is a long tradition, Martin Hurcombe reminds us, of treating Barbusse’s novel Le Feu and Dorgelès’s Les Croix de bois as “historical testimonies rather than as literary repre­sen­ta­tions.”20 As ­Great War historian Leonard Smith has argued, t­ here emerged in the 1930s, alongside the imperative to construe the soldier as the only person authorized to talk about the war, the imperative to construe him as a victim. In the very first pages of A War ­Imagined, Samuel Hynes lays out for the reader in a succinct and colloquial style the “myth” of World War I in Britain—­a “metanarrative,” Smith would argue, of “tragedy” and victimization. According to Hynes, the stock story of World War I in Britain goes as follows: A generation of innocent young men, their heads full of high abstractions like Honor, Glory, and E ­ ng­land, went off to war to make the world safe for democracy. They w ­ ere slaughtered in stupid ­battles planned by stupid generals. T ­ hose who survived w ­ ere shocked, disillusioned and embittered by their war experiences, and saw that their real enemies ­were not the Germans, but the old men at home who had lied to them. They rejected the values of the society that had sent them to war, and in d­ oing so separated their own generation from the past and from their cultural inheritance. 21

Hynes goes on to study this “myth” of a gap in history as it is articulated in imaginative lit­er­a­ture of the interwar period. What interests me ­here is not so much Hynes’s par­tic­u­lar study of the British First World War story, but the fact that he is able to reduce over four years of war and its cultural legacy to a familiar, satisfying tale immediately recognizable to the average reader. From our vantage point as jaded inheritors of the bloody legacy of the twentieth c­ entury, summaries like the one Hynes gives us seem applicable to all the belligerents of the First World War. The stories might vary slightly from

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country to country, but the point is that over the years the cultural work has been done that allows us to distill a unified “metanarrative” from an experience that was anything but unified. Over the years France’s own G ­ reat War story of lost innocence coalesced, made more colorful by the fleur au fusil trope pres­ent in many postwar mobilization tales. As the story goes, smiling, enthusiastic citizen-­ soldiers, having waited years for the chance to avenge the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, marched excitedly off to war to the cheers of a civilian population thirsty for revenge. On the way to train stations, they picked up flowers thrown by adoring crowds and put them in the barrels of their guns. But then came the baptême du feu, the horrors of war, the mud, the shrapnel, the gas attacks. The flower of youth was decimated at Verdun and Le Chemin des Dames, leaving a generation of old, tired men, ready to accept anything but another war. This tidy metanarrative of the war came together ­under the historical pressures of the 1930s and through pro­cesses of selective memory that held sway for several de­cades. Instrumental in forging this metanarrative was a wave of new French writing about the war in the wake of the huge popu­lar response to a German novel, Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929). Jean Norton Cru was distrustful not just of civilian war narratives but also of soldier narratives that relied too heavi­ly for his taste upon literary tropes and conventions. Despite the attempts of Cru to discredit the war novel (as distinct from the firsthand account or témoignage)—­even the documentary-­style war novel of Henri Barbusse—­ the genre would see a resurgence in the 1930s. A w ­ hole wave of war novels ­were published in the 1930s, including works by Gabriel Chevallier (La Peur, 1930), Jean Giono (Le ­Grand troupeau, 1931), Louis-­Ferdinand Céline (Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932), Roger Vercel (Capitaine Conan, 1934), Louis Guilloux (Le Sang noir, 1935), Pierre Drieu la Rochelle (Gilles, 1939), Roger Martin du Gard (Les Thibault, 1920–1939), and Jules Romains (Les Hommes de bonne volonté, 1932–1946). Leonard Smith sees this period of publication, charting a general trend from “consent to rejection” of the war, as giving rise to the image of the soldier as victim. 22 The metanarrative of tragedy and victimization has never been entirely satisfactory. Jean-­Jacques Becker was prob­ably the first French historian to start the work of calling that story into question. In his 1977 book 1914: Comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre, he characterized the outbreak of

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war in France as a moment of resignation, not of enthusiasm soon to be deflated. If some flowers did get thrown on the boulevards of Paris, the rural majority of the French population marched to war with a calm sense of duty tinged with consternation. The fleur au fusil trope was only one among many ways that mobilization was i­magined by contemporaries. The trope was favored as the authoritative repre­sen­ta­tion in postwar, pacifist France, b­ ecause it emphasizes the youth and naïveté of the average soldier and de-­emphasizes his sustained commitment to the war. It rewrites the soldier as a victim of his own illusions and of the callousness of civilians and corrupt generals and politicians who sent him off to the slaughter. The fleur au fusil story is not adequate to account for the fact that the French ­Great War soldier continued to fight for fifty-­two long months. Nor can it explain why the poilu mutinies of 1917 w ­ ere relatively contained and did not result in a long-­term refusal to fight. The disillusionment of the fleur au fusil story helps account for interwar pacifism, but it does not explain the fact that ­there was no widespread resistance—­social, po­liti­cal, or ­intellectual—to the war in France while it was g­ oing on, even though unpre­ce­dented numbers of soldiers ­were losing life and limb. The figures ­were certainly not reported in the national press, but the ­human cost of the war was all too obvious to any ­family.

Modern Memory, Ideology, and Mastery of the Absurd

The assumption of the documentary accuracy and unmediated “truth” of trench accounts that was established by Jean Norton Cru gave way in time to more nuanced understandings of how war narratives actually work. Patterns like the fleur au fusil narrative take shape through rumors, partial memories, and contamination from media, but also through deeper cognitive patterns, such as the pattern of irony. Paul Fussell was among the first scholars to acknowledge the difficulty soldiers experienced in writing about the war and to probe the question of how soldier-­witnesses managed to put the experience of mass, industrialized warfare into words. Masterfully researched, beautifully written, The ­Great War and Modern Memory (1975) is arguably one of the most impor­tant works of literary scholarship about the First World War ever produced. Reissued in 2000 and 2013, the book has not only stood the test of time, but it has also inspired countless studies of ­Great War culture, including my own.

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As Leonard Smith points out, however, Fussell’s book fully participates in the anachronistic “metanarrative” of the war as tragedy. 23 In the opening chapter of the book, Fussell establishes the credentials of the typical British soldier as an “utterly unsuspecting victim,” caught completely off-­guard by a war that w ­ ill shatter his life, taking with his health and his happiness any faith he may once have had in pro­gress, beauty, love, or goodness. 24 This “collision” between unsuspecting “innocence” and brutal “awareness” established the pattern of irony through which British soldiers would remember their war experiences and put them into words. 25 Fussell identifies many patterns of irony in soldier poetry and memoirs. Literary tropes and devices from the past gave writers a way to create lit­er­a­ ture out of the raw experience of war, producing a memorably ironic clash between old form and new content. Another common pattern of irony was expecting one ­thing and living through something entirely dif­fer­ent. Hoping for the best and living through the worst was another. Living through extreme vio­lence while the p­ eople back home live in peace, or reading about a war that in no way resembles the one you are fighting ­were ­others. Not only did such patterns of irony help First World War soldiers write about the war, Fussell argues, but they also—­and more importantly—­established a blueprint for remembering war and writing about war throughout the twentieth ­century. The pattern of irony that Fussell identifies is a compelling and productive one. It gives us a framework through which to read a body of lit­er­ a­t ure that is somewhat difficult to place on the spectrum of “isms” through which literary history is so often written. As Fussell points out, t­ hese texts drew upon inherited forms but registered their distance from them, thereby setting war writing on the path to modernism that many literary historians see as the teleology (and primary interest) of early twentieth-­century lit­er­a­ ture. They forged a definitively “modern” form of memory. Following Fussell, literary scholar Evelyn Cobley charted the distance separating the “documentary war narrative” (her term) from the high modernist novel. In Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (1993) she argued that even the most experimental literary forms, ­because they aim to impose legibility and coherence onto the radical incoherence of the war experience, end up complicit with what she sees as the Enlightenment proj­ect that led to the war in the first place. Cobley’s adherence to the “metanarrative” of the war as tragedy is most evident in the

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way in which she construes the use in documentary war narratives of generic features of the chronicle and picaresque tale. Cobley’s analy­sis of picaresque ele­ments in First World War narratives relies upon a very par­tic­u­lar and limited reading both of the war narratives themselves and of the picaresque tradition. The picaresque novels Cobley cites—­Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and El Buscón (The Swindler, 1626)—­ are of the original, “hard-­boiled” Spanish Golden Age variety. The primary scholarship on the picaresque Cobley cites is that of Stuart Miller, who is among t­ hose scholars who call for a historically bound definition of the picaresque genre, as opposed to a more expansive definition of the picaresque as a recurring literary and cultural mode. 26 This genre-­based conception of the picaresque places emphasis on a few “ingredients” common to early picaresque narratives, such as flat characters and an episodic plot structure, but it does not draw from the full richness of the picaresque tradition or adequately acknowledge the fundamental worldview it posits. One of the primary limitations of Cobley’s approach is that, following Miller and Fussell, she associates the undeniable conformity of the soldier as picaro—­his ac­cep­tance of ­things as they are and his renunciation of any attempt to change the fundamental order of t­hings—­with victimization. She downplays the presence of comic ele­ments in the French and Eu­ro­pean picaresque tradition and dismisses as ideologically suspect the role that traits like cleverness, creativity, and inventiveness play in the portrayal of the picaro’s physical and psychic survival. Cobley reads First World War narratives as “paint[ing] a picture of powerless individuals being reduced to a demeaning state of brutalization.”27 Foot soldiers in Cobley’s analy­sis can be understood only as passive victims, not as freethinking, self-­asserting individuals. “Neither ingenuity nor courage,” Cobley insists, “help characters in war narratives overcome obstacles.”28 Yet my reading of French ­Great War texts ­will show that a ­great deal of narrative space is occupied precisely with the depiction of the poilu-­picaro’s clever tricks and tactics for outwitting his superior officers and avoiding combat duty. 29 If Cobley understates the role in soldier narratives of displays of courage and ingenuity, she also overstates the role of top-­down military discipline in keeping soldiers in line. “Since virtually all infractions of rules and regulations ­were severely punished,” Cobley argues, “soldiers ­were rarely tempted

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to test authority or to indulge in any kind of deviant be­hav­ior.”30 ­Whether or not such be­hav­iors ­were actually tolerated in army life is a question to be answered in the military archives. What m ­ atters for our study is that French soldier-­writers chose to depict their protagonists engaging in picaresque forms of tricksterism, roguishness, and play. They are ­imagined testing and critiquing authority and indulging in be­hav­iors that are, if not “deviant,” certainly irreverent, sometimes insubordinate, and often bordering on delinquent. Again, this is not to say that we should take scenes of soldier insubordination and irreverence as evidence that real, historical soldiers ­were insubordinate. Instead we should ask what cultural and psychological work soldier and civilian writers and artists w ­ ere performing in choosing to imagine such scenes of insubordination and irreverence. For the French, irreverence denoted intellectual in­de­pen­dence and re­sis­tance to the militarized dehumanization and brutalization that characterized, in the French imagination at least, the German boche, but not the cocky French poilu or the cockney British Tommy. Cobley argues against the notion that war writers might have had as a narrative goal anything but “informing” readers of the realities of war and indicting the socie­ties that made war pos­si­ble. “The picaresque features in First World War narratives,” she insists, “are meant to inform and accuse rather than to entertain.”31 In Cobley’s view, soldier-­writers would necessarily have rejected the picaresque’s comedic or entertainment potential, its display of the picaro’s creativity, imagination, and play, its satiric exaggeration of h­ uman vices and follies. Embracing the comic or satiric potential of the picaresque would have been seen by soldier-­writers, Cobley suggests, as “a sacrilegious distortion of the horrors they had witnessed.”32 And so, Cobley, following Fussell, can point only to Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That as a true ­Great War satire whose “ ‘brilliance and compelling energy reside in . . . ​ imposing the patterns of farce and comedy onto the blank horrors . . . ​of experience.’ ”33 Cobley makes no mention of Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk, and if she lists Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit as part of a picaresque revival in the twentieth c­ entury, she makes no mention of the place that the First World War occupies in that novel. Cobley looks beyond the First World War to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) for the only war narrative to “fully exploi[t]” the potential of the picaresque, and even then she implies that the only conceivable aim of such a full deployment of picaresque conventions would have

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been that of “highlighting the absurd sides of war,” not of “regaling the reader with the protagonist’s ability to outwit society through ingenious tricks.”34

Episodic Plots and Flat Characters

In her focus on scenes of extreme combat vio­lence and her refusal to take seriously displays of soldier ingenuity, Cobley overlooks the importance of the many episodes of rest in ­Great War narratives. Literary scholar Martin Hurcombe hints at the role that ­these scenes play in “countering alienation,” but like Cobley, he d­ oesn’t explore their full potential.35 ­These episodes are crucial to the overall narrative insofar as it is through ­these scenes of rest that soldier-­writers stage a kind of imaginative recuperation from the forces of brutalization, alienation, and despair they describe in scenes of combat. Rather than seeing the episodes in picaresque war narratives as entirely “reversible, rearrangeable, expendable, and infinitely expandable,” as Cobley suggests, we should consider the ways in which noncombat episodes allow for the depiction of a return to some state of equilibrium for the protagonists and the reconstitution of some sort of enduring personality or “indestructible kernel of selfhood.”36 In scenes of everyday life in the ­Great War picaresque, soldiers are depicted delousing themselves, playing cards, scrounging for food, telling stories, even sitting in the latrines. It is in periods of rest in billet towns away from immediate danger that the Infantryman as picaro recovers some contact with his prewar identity, expresses his unique personality, jockeys for a more protected post, or cobbles together some creature comforts. Moments of rest in ­these texts and images are not just faithful to rhythms of life at the front and, in some cases, to the rhythms of an original serialized publication. They also do the work of putting back together the literary soldier and demonstrating his ability to endure as a person and a personality despite the trauma of war. This brings us to another limitation of Cobley’s analy­sis. For Cobley, the options for growth and development open to protagonists of G ­ reat War narratives are limited to two possibilities—­the protagonist can ­either “maintain the same attitude throughout” or “become more and more disillusioned.”37 The implication in Cobley’s study is that the mostly “flat” and “static” characters of the picaresque tradition offered nothing productive to the writing of the ­Great War. Picaros are, in this view, primitive character

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prototypes compared to the ambitious and aspiring protagonists from the bildungsroman tradition or the complexly fractured protagonists of high modernism. Given the extreme constraint placed upon the protagonist by war vio­lence and military discipline, Cobley’s analy­sis suggests, the only appropriate and responsible option for the writer was to describe the protagonist’s descent into bitterness and disillusionment. It is in the practice of picaresque arts of survival that we can see a ­middle ground absent from Cobley’s analy­sis, which finds no third position between the “display of passive ­human endurance” and the “assertion of active ­human triumph.”38 It is in the acquisition and deployment of ­these picaresque arts of survival that we can see character development, on however limited a scale, taking place in G ­ reat War narratives. In his analy­sis of artilleryman Paul Lintier’s combat diary, Leonard Smith provides an impor­tant complement to Cobley’s identification of static characters in war narratives. The initiation to combat under­gone by Lintier and his comrades, Smith insists, taught them “not irony and bitterness so much as a love of life in its very fragility.” Lintier’s diary expresses, Smith explains, “his optimistic, enduring love of life and country in extreme circumstances.”39 More impor­tant to an understanding of the picaresque mode than generic features such as “flat characters” or “episodic plot” is the central picaresque affirmation of the value of life over death and the unflagging ­will of the picaro to survive. “Témoins,” or soldier-­writers as witnesses, Smith argues, “wanted to believe that the individual . . . ​could continue to exist in the extreme conditions of the trenches.” 40 Continuing to exist meant physically staying alive, of course, but it also meant staying psychologically intact. In this context, endowing the soldier-protagonist with the flatness and stability of a picaresque character should be seen, not as a narrative failure, but as a narrative success. Smith goes on to explore the ways in which Lintier’s affirmation of life is undermined, near the end of his narrative, by an irrepressible sadness about death. Smith does not see the two positions as mutually exclusive—­the one replacing or negating the other—­but as locked in a tenuous and perhaps temporary equilibrium. In Cobley’s analy­sis, the suggestion of survival of the picaresque sort would be reckless and unrealistic. Cobley resists a full identification between the Infantryman and the picaro on the grounds that such an identification is out of place in the depiction of industrialized warfare. The “picaro’s exploits are reassuring ­because he always survives,” she points out, “and they are

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entertaining ­because he saves himself by depending on his wits.” 41 For Cobley, the ­whole point of documentary war narratives is to inform and condemn, not to reassure. Rather than dismissing the reassuring message of picaresque survival as only unrealistic and distorting of the horrors of war, we should consider the value that even the most clear-­eyed realists like Henri Barbusse attached to depicting forms of soldier endurance alongside forms of brutalization and despair. The two poles ­were not mutually exclusive. The literary and cartoon poilu inhabits both psychological positions si­mul­ta­neously or shifts rapidly back and forth between the two. His is a tenuous equilibrium between resilient, reassuring survivor, on the one hand, and, on the other, damaged, defeated soul, hardened into homicidal thoughts or tempted by suicide. In the picaresque tradition, this tightwire act over the abyss of starvation, insanity, hatred, and hopelessness is what characterizes the ­human condition. ­Here we come to another crucial insight of Leonard Smith and other scholars who suggest we pay attention to the mechanics of soldier endurance as an active, rather than a purely passive, pro­cess.42 Something has to lie beyond the moment of disillusionment Cobley identifies in the soldier’s baptism of fire. What lies beyond may not be character development or learning of the kind we find in the bildungsroman, but this something cannot be reduced to sheer irony, disillusionment, and alienation. If we follow the reasoning of Cobley and Fussell, we w ­ ill see all First World War narratives primarily as extended comments upon the outrage and despair of the trench experience. While our con­temporary sensibilities may be at ease with such a vision of the war, that vision would have been intolerable for ­people attempting to endure the war for four long years. We ­shouldn’t discount outright ­those war narratives that employ humor, satire, or farce or that do not depict the war as only an absurd and utterly alienating experience. It is true that comic, optimistic, and light-­hearted treatments of the war by civilians w ­ ere explic­itly discredited by soldier-­ novelists. This does not mean, however, that soldier-­novelists themselves did not include comic, optimistic, or light-­hearted scenes in their own narratives. It is impor­tant to resist the temptation to disregard entertaining or comic features of war writing as the naïveté of the armchair patriot or, worse, the willful deception of the propagandist or “skull-­stuffer.” We need to remain sensitive to the subtle nuances in soldiers’ and civilians’ repre­ sen­ta­t ions of soldier humor, wit, and sarcasm. The picaresque prepares us

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to see what Robert Alter calls “the flash of the fang” in the Infantryman’s smile and the forms of dissent latent in his legendary good humor, his slang and his jokes, and his refusal to take things too seriously.43 Fussell’s insistence upon irony and “hope abridged” and Cobley’s insistence upon outrage and despair can explain some phenomena of early twentieth-­century culture but not ­others.44 In The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the G ­ reat War, Leonard Smith states the prob­lem this way: “­Every soldier u­ nder fire in 1914 must have noted irony in Fussell’s sense, and yet the survivors continued to fight the war for more than four more years.” Smith turns our attention to what lies beyond irony and invites us to think about the narrative structures and kinds of narrators soldier-­writers ­imagined to “fill the experiential vacuum created by irony.” 45 Even the s­ imple act of writing implied the perhaps not fully articulated hope that raw experience could be wrestled into some sort of shape, if not meaning—­that it could, as Smith puts it, be “mastered.” For Smith, writers of firsthand accounts ­imagined their war experiences in terms of a rite of passage ­after which could emerge a relatively “stable” identity or narrator capable of telling a story that he conceived of as his own.46 The “definitive” self that Smith sees forged through narrative might be a “warrior” or a stoic or a “lover of life.” 47 He might be a humane caregiver. This narrator might be an “embattled” or fractured self who negotiates fear and despair on a daily basis but nevertheless remains “himself” to the very end.48 Smith uses the example of amputee Blaise Cendrars to describe a narrator whose ability to “imagine survival” remains intact, even if his body does not.49 In terms of plot structures, the rite of passage could give way to that of reincorporation, rebirth, or redemption. Even when irony and awareness brought despair, Smith shows, this did not necessarily lead to a rejection of the war, but could instead lead to recommitment. None of t­hese texts fully achieved “mastery,” Smith concludes, but they did provide a stabilizing force against the alienation of what Martin Hurcombe calls the “absurd.” Rather than seeing the soldier’s desire for “mastery” over experience as ideologically suspect, as Cobley does, Smith and Hurcombe see it as pragmatically necessary. In his extensive survey of French combatant writing, Novelists in Conflict: Ideology and the Absurd in the French Combat Novel of the ­Great War, Hurcombe shows that socie­ties at war ­were in fact capable of a radical reassessment of the assumptions upon which much of Eu­ro­pean society in the nineteenth ­century had been built. But such a recognition needs to

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be placed back into its original historical context, which includes an acknowl­ edgment of the very real emotional and intellectual needs of the ­people who lived through the war. Shattering the Enlightenment frame of reference is an ambition of the post-­structuralist proj­ect that Cobley’s work participates in, but it is too much to ask of the literary and cultural production of the ­Great War moment. Within the context of the war and its aftermath, radical skepticism about Enlightenment values would have been experienced as excruciatingly painful and destabilizing, not as liberating or po­liti­cally or aesthetically productive. Hurcombe describes the ways in which combat novelists sought to both describe and imaginatively overcome the “absurd” of the combat experience—­ the “temporal and spatial alienation” and disorientation of the soldier, his awareness of his limited perspective and fragmented identity, his confrontation with the randomness and omnipresence of death, and his desperate search for meaning. Like Cobley and Fussell, Hurcombe places his corpus within the chronology of modernism, seeing the new genre born of the war, the “combat novel,” as a precursor to the “committed novel” of the interwar period and to existentialism and postwar theories of the Absurd. Hurcombe places par­tic­u­lar emphasis on the importance of soldier communities in overcoming the alienation that comes with recognition of the “absurd.” For Hurcombe, we can see in the French combat novel both a nostalgic sense of irony of the kind Fussell perceives, and an attempt to ­counter that sense of irony with some kind of constructive (and constructed) “meaning” or “message.” The combat novel registers the “absurd,” Hurcombe argues, but also revolts against it by formulating a series of “ideologies”—­“socialism, nationalism,” and “non-­aligned humanism”—­ that promise to fold the alienated individual back into some sort of community and continuity with the past and the f­uture.50 ­These “ideologies,” Hurcombe argues, are collectively constructed through soldier dialogue. The point of view of the individual soldier contributes to the formation of the collective point of view of the group, and that point of view restores meaning to the soldier’s world. In the postwar period, Hurcombe shows, this meaning would be developed as po­liti­cal praxis in the “committed novel” of writers like André Malraux or Jean-­Paul Sartre. While the war was still in pro­gress, ­these constructions of meaning gave soldiers a reason, however incoherently formulated, to continue the fight. Soldier testimonies reveal what Smith calls the

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“paradox” of an “ever-­deepening commitment” to the war effort locked in place with the deepening of “despair.” 51 This is b­ ecause, Smith argues, beyond the vari­ous narrative devices used in ­these texts ­there loomed, at least in the French case, an overarching framework or “narrative pattern” (Hurcombe might call it an “ideology”). That framework is what Smith and ­others call “consent”—­the soldier’s affective and intellectual identification with the Republic and with himself as its representative and defender. Consent as commitment to the war ­didn’t have to be flashy or articulate. In some cases, Smith argues, it presented itself merely as a “logic of necessity” or as a sense of “accountability” to one’s comrades in arms.52

Existential Homelessness and a Return to the Picaresque

Hurcombe’s “ideology” and Smith’s “mastery” place emphasis on the desire of writers to produce “meaning,” “closure,” or a “moral to the story” of the war.53 Hurcombe in par­tic­u­lar sees the combat novel as stuck between literary and philosophical moments—­between nineteenth-­century naturalism and twentieth-­century modernism, and between comforting moral certainties and the anguish of the absurd. Like Fussell, he places emphasis on the combatant novelist’s nostalgia for a “lost idyll” and a world “open to ­human understanding.”54 For Hurcombe, the combatant novelist is overcome with a proto-­ Heideggerian sense of the unheimlich. Exiled from the familiar, he wanders an alien world. At the same time, he experiences a “sense of entrapment and of the impossibility of progression.”55 Soldier writers felt an imperative, Hurcombe argues, to “establish an ideological response to the war,” one that would ­free them from “the stasis and alienation of the pres­ent.”56 We ­don’t need to wait for the theories of Heidegger and Camus or even for the experience of the First World War to see the emergence of a literary protagonist who feels trapped in a world “deprived of any inherent meaning.”57 Existential homelessness has always been the condition of the hapless, wandering picaro, and the endless pres­ent in which he is stuck has often been compared to a trap. In picaresque stories, any nostalgia the protagonist may feel is quickly overcome. Nostalgia is a luxury that the down-­and-­out picaro simply cannot afford. It is a distraction from the ­matter at hand, which is not a ­matter of returning to a lost home, but of making oneself at home in homelessness. It is not a m ­ atter of creating meaning, but of surviving despite the absence of meaning. Or rather, survival itself is the meaning of life in the

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picaresque world. The meaning of survival is forged and reinforced in the daily strug­gle of the picaro to stay alive and more or less emotionally intact. In this regard, we can see one of the hallmarks of Hurcombe’s “absurd,” the consciousness of a new relationship between man and nature, in a somewhat dif­fer­ent light. Hurcombe points out the “incongruity” the combatant novelist registers between the “precariousness of his individual presence and the constancy of nature.”58 For Hurcombe, this “schism between man and the natu­ral world” can be closed only with the painful recognition of the combatant’s own “bestialisation,” his identification with “primarily animal qualities,” such as “passivity.”59 In the picaresque tradition, animal qualities are not viewed from the point of view of ­humans as animals’ superiors, but of ­humans as animals in their own right. The animal qualities the picaresque sees are not passivity, but activity. The picaro d­ oesn’t allow himself to be daunted by the antagonism of the natu­ral world. Like other animals, he simply adapts to it. Neither does the constant threat of death shut down in the picaro any “belief in the individual subject as central to the world around” him, as Hurcombe says it does for the combatant novelist.60 “Given the realization of the collective nature of history,” Hurcombe argues, “the individual can no longer claim to be the centre of meaning.” 61 The picaresque response to this prob­lem is s­ imple. If basic survival is the only meaning the individual can possibly seek, then the individual ­will always be at the center of the only meaning he knows—­a meaning that begins and ends with the suffering and surviving physical body. The community may be impor­tant for the individual, but only inasmuch as it can support him in survival. In the logic of survival and the instability of the picaresque pres­ent, the creation of meaning is simply too high and too impractical an ambition for any picaro to pursue. As Ulrich Wicks puts it, “Picaresque fiction, ­because it does not give a structured vision of life, tends to be basically antiphilosophical and antithematic ­because it focuses on details, on surfaces, on fragments, and on discontinuous and fleeting experiences and reactions.” 62 Hurcombe’s case for the combat novel as the precursor of the twentieth ­century committed novel is convincing. But the combat novel is also—­ and at the same time—­a reinvention of the picaresque novel of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eigh­teenth centuries. Even the formal characteristics that Hurcombe and Cobley identify in the combat novel can be located in a picaresque understanding of time and space. Rather than looking to the nineteenth-­

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century short story or the war­time anecdote or diary for the formal characteristics of the combat novel and its successors, as Hurcombe does, I would point, as Cobley does, to the episodic plot structures of the picaresque tradition. The sense that time is fragmented and directionless is central to “modernist thinking,” but it is also central to picaresque thinking.63 Rather than seeing the early twentieth-­century novel as a radical break from the time-­ tested pattern of the nineteenth-­century novel, we might see the nineteenth-­ century novel as a radical break from the time-­tested pattern (or lack thereof) of the picaresque. The combat novel simply jumps over the nineteenth-­century novel to reconnect with its precursors in the picaresque. I d­ on’t see the “absurd” of the Western Front as a uniquely “modernist” understanding of the world, ­because I ­don’t see the prewar world as the rosy age of innocence and nonviolence that Fussell implies in his description of Victorian ­Eng­land. Certain social categories might have experienced the nineteenth ­century as idyllic, but ­others surely did not. A vision of the world as violent and irrational is, to me, a picaresque vision of the world. That vision of the world might have gone underground for some p­ eople in the nineteenth c­ entury, but it was never fully destroyed by science or faith in pro­gress. Paul Fussell argues that soldiers w ­ ere sad that the Victorian past and its values w ­ ere killed by the war. I would argue that they w ­ ere sad that the picaresque past and its values had been brought back to life. Fussell cites soldier-writer Philip Gibbs’s assessment of the “trick” played on humanity by “an ironical fate.” It’s not so much that the law of pro­gress, decorum, and faith in moral absolutes had died, Gibbs suggests. It’s that the “primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax” had never actually been “killed.” 64 This was, indeed, sad. But at least the picaresque had a lesson for how to deal with that sadness—to shake it off and get on with the business of surviving. Instead of longing for a worldview that the war had killed, soldiers and civilians ­were forced to pick back up with a worldview they thought the world had outgrown. The picaresque worldview may have been dormant, but it was available to be reactivated, repurposed, and re­imagined for the war years and their aftermath. Irony, alienation, disillusionment, and tragedy are of central importance to our understanding of the ­Great War moment, but they tell only part of the story. They d­ on’t do justice to the complexity and contradictions of the texts that ­were produced during this period. More impor­tant, they d­ on’t correspond

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with the emotional requirements of a society attempting to survive an unpre­ ce­dented moment of crisis. In his book Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The ­Great War in Eu­ro­ pean Cultural History, historian Jay Winter gives us another way to think about irony and the “modernist” approach to G ­ reat War writing initiated by Fussell and continued by Cobley. If we leave aside a concern for the march of literary history ­toward modernism or existentialism and consider one of the most pressing concerns of Eu­ro­pean socie­ties during and immediately a­ fter the war—­that of dealing with suffering and loss—we ­will read texts from the First World War somewhat differently. We w ­ ill be attentive to the consolatory power of “older motifs” that writers reworked in their attempts to pro­ cess and express bereavement. T ­ hese “older motifs,” which Winter describes as “an eclectic set of classical, romantic, or religious images and ideas,” ­were not discredited, discarded, or used for ironic effect, but instead w ­ ere actively 65 sought out for their power to aid in the mourning pro­cess. One of the ­things I most admire in the work of Winter, Hurcombe, and Smith is precisely their commitment to reckoning with the “untidiness” of texts from this period and grappling with their “stubbornly vis­i­ble incompatibilities.” 66 Hurcombe’s tension between “ideology” and the “absurd” is, for example, enormously productive in uncovering “structural resemblance between texts and the functional similarity of differing ideological responses to the war.” 67 My aim in this study is to remain open to convergences across “ideologies,” but also across media and genres, across social groups—­soldiers and civilians—­and across national bound­aries. The picaresque is a messy mode for a messy, shifting, chaotic set of realities that w ­ ere experienced differently by dif­fer­ent p­ eople at dif­fer­ent moments and u­ nder dif­fer­ent pressures. What I offer is one more framework to add to the rich mosaic of literary devices, motifs, and structures that we get from reading Smith, Hurcombe, Winter, Fussell, and Cobley. The framework of the picaresque complements, rather than contradicts, ­these other frameworks. Collectively ­these works make us attentive to the richness of literary and cultural patterns reworked in war­time and postwar writing and offer a robust set of tools for understanding the stakes and strategies of repre­sen­ta­ tion during the ­Great War moment. My study is based on a se­lection of texts that coheres around a preoccupation with survival broadly construed. I follow Jay Winter’s lead in examining a wide variety of cultural productions from the war. I am interested

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in war poetry and novels, but also in journalism, dime novels, popu­lar images, and film. I draw heavi­ly from soldier accounts and images of the war, but I put soldier and civilian cultural productions back into dialogue with one another. Soldier and civilian repre­sen­ta­tions inhabited a shared, mutually transformative cultural space during the war, and I think we lose a significant piece of the ­Great War story when we read them in isolation from one another. It is my hope that the framework of the picaresque, rather than imposing one voice on t­ hese texts, can amplify voices that w ­ ere already in a kind of harmony but that are rarely heard together. Part of the work I have tried to accomplish is to give the reader a sense of the tone and texture of G ­ reat War works that have e­ ither been forgotten or only partially remembered. In his afterword to the twenty-­fifth-­anniversary edition of The ­Great War and Modern Memory (2000), Paul Fussell insists that he was writing about the British experience of World War I as a means of better understanding his own experience as an infantry officer in World War II.68 Fussell explains that The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory was “the work of an essayist,” and that it should not be read as a “history” but as “an elegiac commentary.” He admits that he provided “historical data” in the book with a purpose in mind: “to enhance the elegiac effect.” 69 I find Fussell’s argument for an “emotional” and humanistic, as opposed to a scientific or “objective,” approach to history both attractive and problematic. It is attractive b­ ecause it makes room for scholars as h­ uman beings to acknowledge openly the obscenity of or­ga­nized ­human suffering, trauma, and death and invites readers to empathize with the real ­people whose lives are subsumed within the abstract concept we call War. It sensitizes readers to their own complicity with, and indifference to, the vio­lence, displacement, and death that war propagates. The “emotional” approach to the First World War is problematic in that it risks anachronism. It imposes upon the chaos and contingency of the war knowledge and attitudes that w ­ ere not available to the very p­ eople whose experience we are trying to understand. For French p­ eople living through the ­Great War, mourning and loss w ­ ere a gut-­wrenching daily real­ity. Even stronger than the urgency to honor the dead was the overwhelming, unremitting, irrepressible urgency to stay alive and to stay French. The elegiac framework and the metanarrative of tragedy can tell us a g­ reat deal about how p­ eople remembered the war once it was over, how they mourned the dead, and how they i­magined the f­ uture.70 But it ­will not unlock the greatest mystery, how

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soldiers and civilians managed to ­settle into and live with the daily chaos and horror of the first fully industrialized total war. It ­will not tell us how they managed to endure the unimaginable vio­lence and loss without giving themselves over to despondency and despair. For front-­line soldiers in par­tic­u­lar, despair was simply not an option: it could get a man killed. As historian William Keylor puts it, “the ironic sensibility [identified by Fussell] is not a stance that fits comfortably with the practical requirements of combat,” such as “ac­cep­tance of hierarchical authority in the chain of command” or “intense concentration on the immediate mission at the expense of personal reflection about the larger meaning of the war.”71 If we are to understand the dynamics that allowed the First World War to continue for four long years, we are g­ oing to have to acknowledge t­ hese practical requirements of combat, so central to soldiers’ experiences of the war. We are ­going to have to pay closer attention than we have before to the terms by which soldiers and civilians articulated their understanding of the moment they ­were living through. In the next chapter I take a closer look at one of the most power­ful imaginative constructs that French soldiers and civilians created together as a means of articulating their understanding of both the war and themselves as Frenchmen. The picaresque arts of survival took on a par­t ic­u ­lar name in France: Le Système D, understood variously as “coping,” “managing,” or “muddling through.” ­These arts (and antics) ­were performed in cartoons, magazine articles, and novels by a par­tic­u­lar kind of picaro—­the ever resourceful, never daunted, always adaptive, wisecracking slacker and con man, the poilu débrouillard.

2. Tactics of the Foot Soldier The Arts and Antics of Le Système D Le Système D solves all prob­lems by improvised means: it is le système français. —­François Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus (1918)

If bravery, self-­sacrifice, honor, and duty ­were no longer the defining attributes of the modern warrior, what w ­ ere? How did the modern “hero” behave? The First World War did not give rise to the modern Achilles so many cultural critics had heralded in the early weeks of the war. Instead, a kind of “diminished” or everyday Ulysses—as craftsman, trickster, and master manipulator—­replaced the discredited and anachronistic figure of Achilles.1 The modern Ulysses, “archetype of the survivor,” emerged from the First World War as a legitimate and enduring hero for the twentieth ­century. 2

The Foot Soldier as Common Hero

The picaresque Infantryman takes his place in the long line of “common heroes” whose “tactics” are celebrated by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life. The room for maneuver of the individual u­ nder military discipline in war­time is decidedly small, and the range and richness of “tactics pos­si­ble” within the par­tic­u­lar social “system” of the military hierarchy are necessarily limited. Yet, the “space of a tactic” is, De Certeau insists, by definition limited. The tactic “seize[s] on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves in any given moment,” however limited t­ hose possibilities might be.3 The “common hero” as De Certeau understands him is skilled at summing up the situation or system at hand and deploying ­those tactics that are feasible within that situation. The common hero “insinuate[s]” into the 43

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system “to be served”—in this case the military machine—­“styles of social exchange, technical invention, and moral re­sis­tance” that preserve the dignity and integrity of the individual and prevent the total assimilation of the weak within the systems of the strong.4 The “tactics” of the Infantryman as common hero are often comic—in the sense of life affirming and hedonistically celebratory of the s­ imple, animal pleasures in life. As Robert Torrance argues, the comic hero “celebrates and embodies” values of “biological life and imaginative freedom.”5 The tactics of the foot soldier may be humorous or entertaining to the reader, but they need not always be funny. Comedy does not always lead to a happy ending. It often leads only to the return to some state of equilibrium, even if that equilibrium is not pleasant or desirable, but merely bearable.6 It is in the exercise of the ­will and of the imagination that such an equilibrium is achieved and that plea­sure in some modest mea­sure is experienced. In the exercise of the tactic, De Certeau reminds us, “even the field of misfortune is refashioned by this combination of manipulation and enjoyment.”7 For Robert Alter, the picaro is an “artist” and “a man of imagination.”8 The picaro as “ingenious rogue” operates in the same way as the artist: he “selects ele­ments from experience as it pres­ents itself to him and reconstitutes them in a new order that suits his own purposes.”9 Like the ­imagined Infantryman in G ­ reat War literary and visual culture, the picaro-­as-­artist makes a “conscious resolution . . . ​not to let life break him.”10 The picaro at war keeps despair at bay and maintains a sense of his unique individuality through the exercise of his many artistic and imaginative talents.

The Birth of Le Système D

During the war, French commentators elevated the expression se débrouiller (to get by through resourceful improvisation) and its more vulgar equivalent se démerder (to get oneself out of the shit) to the level of a national credo. The French soldier as expert débrouillard or démerdard was celebrated as a national hero, and the arts of le système débrouille (Système D) ­were celebrated as the national habitus of the French ­people. The term la débrouille, like the now defunct le débrouillage, had been coined by the French army in North Africa in the mid-1850s.11 The concept of la débrouille would take on vari­ous connotations including getting out of a mess or getting out of trou­ble, making do, cultivating the art of expedients,

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living by one’s wits, or even fending for oneself using unscrupulous means. Over time, the term la débrouille gave rise to a number of derivatives, including le système débrouille and Le Système D. By the time the nominal and adjectival form débrouillard entered the lexicon in 1872, it had spread outside of its original military context and was available to describe any person who is clever, crafty, dodgy, creative, and skilled in improvisation.12 It is surely not by accident that the term débrouillard became popu­lar just ­after the French defeat in the Franco-­Prussian War. If the French could no longer reasonably represent themselves as unmatched military victors, they would begin to refashion themselves as unparalleled survivors. If they could no longer claim unrivaled military strength, they would claim unrivaled resilience, resourcefulness, and ingenuity. The term débrouillard grew in frequency of use in the period leading up to the First World War as the French undertook a revision of heroic and military values in the wake of defeat. In launching in 1902 a military preparedness program aimed at adolescents, Olympic games reviver Pierre de Coubertin recognized the importance of la débrouillardise (adaptability and resourcefulness) in the modern era. His Diplôme des débrouillards was awarded to young men who, through a series of physical challenges, demonstrated an ability to adapt easily to the “changes in location, profession, situation, habits, and ideas” made necessary by the “productive instability of modern socie­ties.”13 “Our era needs such ­people,” De Coubertin wrote, “who cope with any situation.”14 The débrouillard was skilled in “the art and practice of getting himself out of trou­ble.”15 By the turn of the ­century, the idea of getting out of trou­ ble (la débrouille) had taken on the more vulgar connotation of getting out of the shit in the derivatives la démerde, se démerder, démerdard, and le système démerde.16 It would be during the First World War, however, that se débrouiller and its more earthy equivalent se démerder would enter common parlance, thanks in part to the use of t­ hese terms in soldier narratives, trench news­ papers, satirical magazines, and dictionaries of soldier slang, which ­were popu­lar with soldiers and civilians. Lazare Sainéan’s definition of the démerdard in his 1915 soldier slang dictionary is suggestive of the range of skills and tactics attributed to the poilu. A démerdard was, for Sainéan, a resourceful, resilient person, who could “make something out of nothing.”17 The démerdard could also be more generally described as “an unscrupulous man.”18 Many of the attributes of the

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débrouillard or démerdard—­craftiness, cunning, dodginess—if connotative of superior wit and intelligence, are also associated with the moral pliancy of the rogue and the picaro. In the picaresque tradition, the central protagonist is often depicted quite literally getting himself out of the shit. A common trope of picaresque narratives is the often violent and brutal initiation of a young, naïve protagonist to a harsh and unpredictable world. In the picaresque world, danger and ­unpleasantness—in the form of random encounters and freak accidents—­ lie at ­every turn.19 When Francisco de Quevedo’s Pablos (El Buscón, 1626) is elected boy king during a Carnival pro­cession, for example, he is quickly dethroned in the most humiliating way. His ­horse takes a bite of a vegetable seller’s wares, provoking a street riot that culminates in Pablos’s falling off his ­horse into a pile of manure. Pablos extracts himself from one pile of shit only to find himself rolling in another a few episodes l­ater, when one of his bunkmates defecates in his bed and blames the mess on him. In other picaresque texts danger (in the form of shit) rains down from the sky. Lesage’s barber Diego, a secondary character in Gil Blas (1715, 1724, 1735), gets himself into the shit while making his way to an amorous rendezvous. Groping in the dark as he searches for the meeting spot, he suddenly receives the contents of a chamber pot on his head. If shit raining down from the sky is a favored meta­phor for the bad luck of the picaresque world, the challenge for the picaro is to learn how to recover from such accidents, if he cannot avoid them altogether. Every­one sooner or l­ater gets himself deep in the shit, understood as trou­ble, danger, embarrassment, or a seemingly intractable situation. Where the picaro excels is in getting himself out of such predicaments, in knowing how to se démerder using any means at his disposal. ­There was more to war­time Système D, however, than getting oneself out of a mess. Indeed ­there w ­ ere some messes that a poilu could not get out of but could only cope with as best he could. It was in the improvisation and ingenuity of the coping that Le Système D acquired its most genial (and nationalist) connotations. Le Système D placed an emphasis on brains over brawn, constructing the Frenchman as a skilled bricoleur able to make do even in the harshest circumstances, relying on his superior intelligence and ingenuity. In his 1918 dictionary of soldier slang, François Déchelette defined Le Système D this way: “The ‘système Dé . . . ​brouille’ consists in making something out of nothing, in seizing ­every opportunity or bit of good luck when

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it arises, in taking advantage of circumstances, the terrain, men and anything you can get your hands on to accomplish your goal.”20 “Every­one knows,” Déchelette continued, “how the French excel at this in big tasks as in small.”21 The Boches (Germans), t­ hose plodding, discipline-­loving masters of planning and organ­ization, Déchelette insisted, had no aptitude whatsoever for such a system. In the years leading up to the war, the big German militarist “ogre,” poring over his books and concocting a “formidable war machine,” had, he explained, looked with pity over the border at the l­ ittle French “Poucet” striving for peace. What a surprise for the plodding ogre to discover the remarkable resilience of le petit Poucet, armed with Le Système D. Petit Poucet’s diminutive stature ­matters l­ ittle. ­After all, “a bit of gravel is all it takes to . . . ​ cause the enormous German [war] machine to break down.” The “système D,” Déchelette continues, “adapts instantly to all situations and always frustrates the dull-­witted Boche, who needs his plans to be prepared well in advance.”22 The French soldier is nimble, Déchelette suggests, while the “Boche is as incapable of resourcefulness as he is of prompt action.”23 The “Boches,” he concludes, “­will never be anything but big clumsy oafs, while the French are born débrouillards.”24 Allied propaganda perpetuated the ste­reo­type of the German soldier as disciplined and methodical and of the German army as a well-­oiled machine, engineered through espionage and other prewar préparatifs as part of a master plan of conquest dating back to the Franco-­Prussian War. Jean Cocteau echoed this sentiment when he wrote in 1919 that French “préparation” could never have matched that of the Germans. In some sense, he argued, France was lucky to have been caught unprepared by the war. Since the French w ­ ere not “ready” in 1914, they had been forced to “call on their most fundamental qualities: élan and improvisation.”25 What the allies ­were not quick to point out is that German soldiers had their own notion of Le Système D, captured in the term Notbehelfe, meaning “makeshifts.”26 The distance between French débrouillardise, British muddling through, and German Notbehelfe was not nearly as ­g reat as war­t ime propagandists suggested. Each term captured a frustration—­shared by frontline soldiers from all nations—­with perceived inadequacies in infrastructure and ineptitude in planning by their respective General Staffs. The point is that the French, both during the war and a­ fter it, continued to hold dear the notion that they ­were the most accomplished débrouillards of all. La débrouillardise had become a fundamental part of French self-­imagining. Déchelette pushed

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this logic even further, arguing that nothing less than national survival was at stake in the successful deployment of Le Système D. If the French had won ­battles at the Marne, in Champagne, at Verdun, and in the Somme, Déchelette suggested, it was not b­ ecause of generals or artillery, God’s intervention, or the poilu’s fierce fighting—or not only ­because of ­those f­ actors. The real magic bullet was Le Système D.27 Le Système D was a model of poilu ingenuity that involved the picaresque ability to adapt to circumstances presented by chance and to make do in a world of scarcity. All of the diverse “tactics” used by the poilu to stay alive at the front and to eke out as much comfort and psychological well-­being as pos­si­ble can be subsumed u­ nder the general practice and mind-­set of Le Système D. In ­Great War novels, cartoons, magazine articles, and trench newspapers, the poilu was shown deploying the “thousand and one ­recipes of the famous système D.”28 The arts of survival included forms of bricolage and repurposing of materials, forms of acting and role-­playing, truth-­stretching, story­telling, artful dodging, and the summoning up when needed of gaîté or cheerfulness.

The Démerdard: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier . . . ​Shirker

The illustrated humor magazine La Baïonnette, a favorite of soldiers at the front, devoted the entire February 24, 1916 special issue to the subject of Le Système D. Across sixteen pages of cartoons, illustrations, and short texts, the Baïonnette’s contributors depicted poilus démerdards at work. ­These prac­ti­tion­ers of the arts of Le Système D engage in forms of accidental heroism, acts of trickery, deception, role-­playing, evasive tactics, stealing, and scavenging, as well as in the creative artistry of makeshift construction and bricolage. T ­ hese same practices appear over and over again in French ­Great War narratives and in British depictions of the French soldier. ­Under the logic of Le Système D, acts of soldier “heroism” would be attributed to cleverness and ingenuity, rather than to the traditional military values of aggression, physical prowess, ambition, or thirst for glory. One poilu débrouillard in La Baïonnette’s special issue, for example, puts his health before heroism. He volunteers to leave the trench and throw grenades into the German trenches, not to defeat the ­enemy, but to keep his feet from freezing from standing still in the trench. 29 Another example involves the story of a group of soldiers charged with cutting barbed wire in front of an ­enemy

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trench. A fresh snowfall has made such an attempt perilous if not suicidal. Managing to find a white sheet, the men crawl across no-man’s-land “immunized by the whiteness of the cloth which ma[kes] them invisible.”30 The encouragement of individual soldier initiative in the form of Le Système D, one article argues, distinguishes “our marvelous privates” from the “dim-­ witted German soldiers” and illustrates perfectly the French national spirit, “rebellious but ingenious and spontaneous.”31 In another article, two soldiers describe typical feats of poilu heroism understood as Le Système D. One of the soldiers catches an ­enemy grenade in flight and tosses it back over to the German lines. Together the two French soldiers capture twelve drunk German soldiers by “sausaging” them—­that is, corralling them and binding them together with a piece of cord.32 Such far-­ fetched acts of poilu adroitness and quick wits are worthy of slapstick comedy. We see similar tactics employed by Sulphart in Les Croix de bois, when he lobs a dirty sock full of rocks into ­enemy lines, or by Charlot in Shoulder Arms, when he discards a piece of Limburger cheese, tossing it over the parapet into the German trench, giving the scrawny l­ ittle dictatorial officer a “pie in the face.”33 Charlot likewise singlehandedly manages to capture thirteen German soldiers. The punch line h­ ere is not that he “sausaged” them but—­ even more preposterous—­that he “surrounded” them. Many of the themes developed in the cartoons of La Baïonnette’s special issue w ­ ere laid out in a short introductory text called “Un débrouillard,” which tells the story of a young recruit’s initiation into life at the front from a soldier named Cabillot, a seasoned veteran and expert in Le Système D.34 This is the same picaresque structure used by Roland Dorgelès in Les Croix de bois, in which the more experienced, working-­class Sulphart initiates the young, naïve, bourgeois recruit Gilbert Demachy into the “princi­ples of shrewdness and bad faith necessary to the soldier in the field.”35 Sulphart has developed his own somewhat malleable moral code for war­time, a “treaty of the rights and duties of the soldier,” known only to him, and that authorizes, in his mind, the taking of certain liberties. When Sulphart goes on supply duty, for example, he treats himself to an extra ration of wine for his trou­bles and encourages his protégé Gilbert to do the same. Many of the forms of débrouillardise proposed by Cabillot in La Baïonnette’s short text are likewise of a “contestable morality.”36 Cabillot suggests that by bribing his corporal, the débrouillard can secure a coat that fits and equipment that is not too worn out. By cozying up to the cook, he can enjoy

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coffee of a higher quality than the everyday fare. When one of the young recruit’s pieces of equipment goes missing the day before inspection, Cabillot explains that the recruit need only replace the missing piece with a piece from a comrade’s knapsack. This comrade w ­ ill, in turn, steal from another comrade, and so forth down the line. The practical objective is to pass inspection and keep up with appearances, so a ­little sleight of hand is within the soldiers’ unspoken moral code and does no serious harm.

Sartorial Système D

This concern with keeping up appearances recalls the clever tricks used by Don Toribio and his band of shoddily clothed bandits in El Buscón (The Swindler). When Pablos meets the fallen aristocrat Don Toribio, he is quickly given a demonstration in the art of “cheap living.” One of Toribio’s friends removes his cape to reveal a masterwork of sartorial bricolage lying beneath. The man has “two cylinder-­shaped pieces of cardboard tied to his waist and fixed round his thighs so as to stick out u­ nder his cloak, b­ ecause he [­doesn’t] have any leggings or a shirt.”37 Another wears a cloak over a jacket patched together from respectable fabric in front and cheap, soiled linen in back. The thieves in El Buscón go to g­ reat imaginative lengths to keep up the outward appearance of gentlemanly nobility. The poilu débrouillard ­will likewise find a way to keep himself outfitted with proper—­that is, practical—­attire. The front cover of the Baïonnette’s special issue features a full-­page cartoon by Francisque Poulbot of two poilus near the front lines. One says to the other “Nice pants,” gesturing to the non-­army-­issued pants and rope b­ elt the soldier is wearing. The soldier with the eccentric pants replies: “Système D . . . !”38 Another cartoon, by artist Jean Villemont, features two soldiers in a dugout. One soldier is seated with his legs stretched out in front of the stove, revealing his homemade puttees or leg bands. The second soldier remarks: “I’ll tell you somebody who has some beautiful puttees, old boy, it’s Trulot, from the 11th com­pany: in Liberty fabric with big red flowers. That must have been one nice dining room rug . . .”39 Not only has the débrouillard Trulot stolen a rug, but he has also transformed it into something both eminently practical and outrageously original. This assertion of one’s individuality through sartorial bricolage is a theme developed in both Le Feu and Les Croix de bois. One of the men in Le

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Feu, Pépin, “has fixed a square of oilcloth at his back with a big red-­and-­white checkered pattern on it, which he found in the dining room of some overnight stopping place.” 40 Tirette has made puttees out of “some strips of grey linen taken off a pair of civilian trousers hanging goodness knows where at the outbreak of the war.” 41 The men’s legs pres­ent a colorful and creative spectacle of repurposed materials. “­There are legs wrapped in cloths and even newspapers,” the narrator observes, “held on by spiraling lengths of string or, more effectively, telephone wire.” 42 Dorgelès’s narrator, Jacques Larcher, describes his comrades’ clothing from the point of view of three new recruits who, upon their arrival in the billets, observe the men’s “disparate attire.” Each veteran soldier is “rigged out in his own way.” Among the more creative garments are Lagny’s cape, with its “astrakhan collar sewn onto a zouave’s hood,” or Brouke’s puttees, cut from “green repped curtains.” 43 The soldiers compensate for the inadequate and ill-­fitting army-­issued clothing they receive by fashioning their own unique garments designed for maximum protection from the ele­ments. The homemade garments worn by poilu-­picaros are a source of subtle pride for the men as an assertion of their intellectual superiority over the military institution, which has so incompetently equipped them for war.

Creature Comforts

Civilians, Cabillot suggests in “Un débrouillard,” are also fair targets of the soldiers’ petty larceny ­under Le Système D, which legitimates the practice of stealing hens from a farm or of poaching on civilian property. It is only natu­ ral, Cabillot insists, that soldiers should use their “ingenuity” and “resourcefulness” to “make the rigorous life in the trenches more bearable” and to “improvise a relative degree of comfort” for themselves.44 La Baïonnette’s cartoons feature débrouillards who, with no “hunting or fishing permit,” still manage to add a “­little something” to their army rations.45 The figure of the poaching poilu débrouillard is parodied in Dorgelès’s Le Cabaret de la belle femme. Boucard, the self-­proclaimed poacher, smuggler, and débrouillard, owes his reputation to his far-­fetched tales of débrouillardise and to his bodily per­for­mance of that trait. He performs his débrouillardise in the “way he would wink” and walk softly, neck tensed, as if he ­were constantly tracking a hare.46 Lousteau, the true débrouillard of the group, has no

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need to inflate his claims or act out his skill. He catches “as many rabbits as he want[s].” Lousteau sees through Boucard’s imposture and, unlike the new recruits, is not fooled by his “mysterious ways” and “laconic lies.” 47 In humorist illustrator Gus Bofa’s depiction of Le Système D in La Baïonnette, the débrouillard is the soldier who is first to find a bed, wood for a fire, and cooking utensils when all the other soldiers are still searching (fig. 1).48 The implication is that he gets his hands on such items by pilfering from the local villa­gers. Gus Bofa’s débrouillard in La Baïonnette brags about the comfort of his “guitoune”—­from the Arabic for tent. Guitoune signified a makeshift shack that was half dugout, half hut. Not only does Bofa’s débrouillard have a “real door and a real win­dow,” to his guitoune, but he has also cobbled together a “real stove Système D . . . ​, 1915 model.” 49 A similar cartoon by the artist Henriot features a poilu huddled at the entrance of his dugout, reading a paper beside a fully functioning stove, complete with exhaust pipe. “Robinson Crusoe,” the caption reads, “is no match for our poilus for building a h­ ouse with central heating.”50 The next image shows the poilu on a scavenging expedition, collecting boards and other scraps of material. The poilu combines the attributes of “primitive man,” the caption explains, with the skills of a “mason, roofer, electrician, and telephone operator.”51 Modern war, one article from La Baïonnette insisted, had created “unceasingly renewed difficulties” for the soldier, but the poilu had “overcome such difficulties” with the perfectly adapted “stroke of inspiration.”52 Novelists, cartoonists, and critics placed par­tic­u­lar emphasis on the material difficulties soldiers encountered in the harsh physical conditions of the trench. Rumors circulated widely about the superior construction of the German trench system, with newspaper articles depicting solidly built and semipermanent German trenches complete with ­r unning ­water and electricity. Some critics attempted to argue in the early stages of the war that French trenches ­were just as comfortable and secure as German ones. With time the strategy shifted to celebrating the inventiveness with which French soldiers improved their trenches with sal­vaged (or pilfered) materials at hand. The theme of the plundering poilu is developed in greater detail in Les Croix de bois, when the men are stationed in the basement of the bombed-­out Café de la Marine. The soldiers have scavenged furniture from the village, so that “­there is a l­ ittle of every­thing” in their temporary shelter: “chairs, beds, ­tables, crates that serve as armoires, mattresses, and even a rocking-­chair that Bouffioux has his eyes on for lighting his fire.”53 All of the basement shelters

Figure 1. Gus Bofa’s poilu débrouillard from La Baïonnette’s special issue on Le Système D, February 24, 1916. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris; Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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in the village are equipped in this way, as are some of the dugouts in the trenches. ­Little by l­ittle they have practically moved the entire village into their shelters, and even out in the trenches one can find “strange shacks” such as the one with a door taken from a “Re­nais­sance chest,” complete with its “awful ­little sculpted Bretons playing bagpipes.”54 Second Lieutenant Berthier has a sofa and a large cracked mirror in his shelter, and a lone piano is stationed along the road, abandoned by the men who ­were dragging it out to the front lines.55 The men “savor their happiness” in ­these comfortable, well-­equipped shelters. This ability to take advantage of and revel in the most basic ­human comforts is yet another aspect of Le Système D. “Happiness” for t­ hese men “is the shack that d­ oesn’t leak, hot soup, dry hay to sleep on, a funny story a comrade tells, a night without work duty.” Just like “poor ­children, who build themselves palaces with a few old boards,” the poilu débrouillard builds his happiness “out of what­ever materials happen to be lying around.”56 Allied propagandist Captain A. J. Dawson, a journalist recruited by the British Military Intelligence Section responsible for propaganda and censorship, made a tour of the French front in 1916 and 1917.57 In his report For France: Some En­glish Impressions of the French Front, Dawson noted that “in ­every sector of the French line,” the trenches “­were full of ingenious contrivances to mitigate the discomfort of trench life.” 58 “One not only sees no gross waste in the French trenches,” Dawson observed, “but one sees no waste of opportunities.” The “typical French soldier,” Dawson marveled, “­will find opportunities, possibilities of usefulness, in a broken board, a derelict shovel-­ handle, a strand of wire, or a heap of shell-­splintered bricks and rubble, which are a source of continual won­der and admiring plea­sure to the observer from outside.”59 The poilu as seen by this allied propaganda maker was indeed a modern Robinson Crusoe. “Cut him off utterly from all the ordinary resources of civilisation,” Dawson insisted, “and in a few hours, if ­there is no very violent fighting ­toward, he w ­ ill produce you a series of ser­viceable ­little makeshifts for the customary amenities and accessories, the ingenuity of which, combined with their essentially thrifty simplicity, is not less than amazing.” 60 Of course, “broken boards” and “derelict shovel-­handle[s]” might be rigged up to keep out the rain, but they could provide no protection from heavy artillery shells or machine-­gun fire. Yet, soldier bricolage could at times be i­magined as holding almost miraculous powers. In Dorgelès’s Le Cabaret

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de la belle femme, bricolage represents a power­ful De Certeauian “tactic” for confounding the implacable “system” of war. “On both sides,” the narrator writes, “we have nailed up, at night, tall lattice-­work walls to block hand grenades, and we no longer have to fear anything, enclosed as we are in this hen­house.” The men have even hung curtains at each slit in the trench wall to keep themselves out of sight of e­ nemy snipers. This, the narrator concludes, is how the common man gets back at the “co­ali­tion of the sciences” that conspires against him. “Some lattice work, a piece of old rag, and the war is over . . .” 61 Army engineering is no match for soldier bricolage.

Morbid Makeshifts: The Tortured Psy­chol­ogy of Bricolage

This emphasis placed on poilu ingenuity in overcoming the material hardships of trench life can be seen as a kind of textual screen b­ ehind which writers hid the more urgent psychological and emotional hardship of living in constant fear of death and bodily mutilation. This is a point that Pierre Chaine makes quite forcefully in his 1917 Mémoires d’un rat when his trench rat Ferdinand calls life at the front “a long tête-­à-­tête with death.” 62 “One should,” Ferdinand concludes, “not exaggerate the suffering that comes from hardships” such as lack of creature comforts at the front. What captures the attention of “­women and ­mothers,” Ferdinand explains, are stories of “nights without sweaters, frozen feet, discomfort and bad weather.” “The soldier himself encourages this conception of the war,” Ferdinand insists, “­because material hardships are the only trou­bles that he can decently admit.” 63 Physical discomfort could be described using a shared vocabulary and a shared set of experiences. The material hardships of life at the front could be communicated to ­those who had not experienced them firsthand. No such vocabulary or culturally accepted set of conventions existed for talking about the extreme psychological fragility of the soldier at the front, his paralyzing fear and sometimes lack of control over his bodily functions, his forced promiscuity with dead and dismembered bodies, his sexual frustration, or his thoughts of suicide. Alongside the customary depictions of soldier ingenuity in trench construction, one can occasionally find suggestions of more morbid and gruesome examples of bricolage that reveal what lies ­behind this textual screen. In Les Croix de bois, for example, Gilbert is forced to build a parapet out of cadavers and Sulphart hangs his haversack on an improvised hook in the trench wall that is actually a dead soldier’s foot.64 In such scenes the

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coldly pragmatic domestication and trivialization of death by soldier-­ protagonists points beyond any optimistic notion of soldier resourcefulness and creativity to the real­ity of soldier brutalization—­the ac­cep­tance of extreme vio­lence and its assimilation into a person’s worldview. The cele­bration in the popu­lar press, cartoons, and soldier narratives of trench arts and crafts is likewise not without a sobering subtext. The handicrafts of real, historical soldiers in the trenches are well documented. Con­temporary photo­graphs show the vari­ous trinkets, talismans, gadgets, sculptures, and graffiti soldiers crafted in the long periods of waiting between moments of active combat. Soldiers made crucifixes out of bullets and statuettes out of moistened and manipulated bread loaves. They made pens, lamps, pipes, musical instruments, cigarette lighters, cane ­handles, and any number of other trinkets out of sal­vaged materials. They managed to write letters and diary entries on mud-­splattered scraps of paper and to publish small-­distribution, illustrated trench newspapers reproduced with carbon paper or stencil-­based duplicating machines.65 ­Great War narratives are full of soldiers like Dorgelès’s Bourland, who crafts a violin out of “a cigar box and some cords he ordered from Paris” or Barbusse’s Old Blaire, who makes rings out of the aluminum bands on shell casings.66 The allied press insisted upon the “proverbial” “ingenuity” 67 of French soldier-­artisans. As Captain Dawson insisted, “The joy of the creative artist, instead of being the rare mono­poly of the few, would r­ eally seem to be the shared possession of nine-­tenths of Frenchmen, and a rather larger proportion of French soldiers.” 68 In fact, trench newspapers and objects of trench art ­were made by soldiers in all of the armies stationed on the Western Front. Trench handicrafts w ­ ere a way to pass the time. They could also be used to make extra spending money, as some soldiers developed a cottage industry of selling trench art to civilians back home.69 Trench handicrafts gave soldiers an outlet for the expression of their enduring humanity and individuality amid and despite the horrors of war.70 The inscription of precise names and dates on many of ­these texts and trinkets also suggests a recognition on the part of soldiers that the objects they ­were crafting ­were destined to become battlefield artifacts. ­Human bodies could be literally eviscerated by a direct artillery hit, and corpses could be thrown into the air, ripped apart, and buried in the soil upturned from a shell blast. Trench trinkets and objects would represent the only material traces left b­ ehind by some soldiers whose remains would be scattered across no man’s

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land. It is no won­der that in the aftermath of the war, families made quasi-­ religious pilgrimages to b­ attle sites in hopes of finding some material trace of a loved one.

The Art of Evasion

Even more widespread in soldier narratives than the theme of bricolage was that of le filon, the lucky break or protected post that would keep the soldier out of the direct line of fire. Like bricolage, the pursuit of the filon provided opportunities for the exercise of the imagination. But the stakes w ­ ere much higher. A well-­chosen filon could mean the difference between life and death. Lazare Sainéan’s slang dictionary defined the filon as anything “that is agreeable, that brings rest, exempts the soldier from work duty, lands him extra rations, [or] puts him out of harm’s way.” 71 François Déchelette ­defined the filon as “the cushy post, where one can rest easy.”72 The filon was an evasive tactic by which the soldier attempted to stay alive and to eke out the most safety and physical comfort pos­si­ble. The filon could be a less exposed spot in the trench, a less onerous work detail, or the relative security offered by one of the many specialized roles such as telephone operator, driver, or cook, that exempted soldiers from participating in attacks or holding the line in the trenches. A corollary of the filon was the embuscade, which in the soldier slang of the time did not mean an ambush, as it does t­ oday, but rather the cushy, safe post occupied by the often civilian embusqué or shirker. Like le filon, l’embuscade had an entirely relative value, as opposed to an absolute one, depending on the degree of exposure to danger. For the soldier on patrol near e­ nemy lines, for example, “every­body is an embusqué.”73 Only the dead, Déchelette argued, could not be accused of being shirkers. Dorgelès’s Gilbert Demachy echoes this sentiment, arguing that the accusation of shirking is leveled against the factory worker by the auxiliary soldier barracked at Vincennes, by the truck driver against the sentry, by the poilu in the trench against the military postman, and by the soldier on patrol against the soldier sleeping in the dugout. The dead zouave in no-man’s-land, Gilbert concludes, had found “the ultimate shirker’s post,” the one that cannot be taken over by an opportunistic comrade.74 Half of the soldiers call the other half shirkers, Déchelette explained, echoing a sentiment pronounced by Barbusse’s Corporal Bertrand: “­You’re

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always a shirker to someone.”75 Leveled against a civilian, the epithet of embusqué was a devastating insult. This same expression, when bandied about among soldiers, was a begrudgingly offered compliment or congratulations. However much the other soldiers might insult or ridicule the embusqué as holder of the filon, they envied him and would not hesitate to take his place at the first opportunity. As Joseph Meeker reminds us, “the poor and the enslaved know comic techniques of evasive action and misdirection to save their skins and get what they need for survival.” 76 The situations in which the enlisted man deploys his “comic techniques of evasive action” are deadly serious—­their success or failure may mean the difference between life and death.77 ­There remains nevertheless a surplus value to the successful deployment of an evasive tactic or filon, beyond the s­ imple fact of survival—­what De Certeau calls the “enjoyment” that comes from the exercise of the imagination.78 The war­t ime picaresque celebrates the “small victories” of the foot soldier as picaro, ­because the world of conscription, military ser­vice, and trench warfare is one in which only “small victories” and temporary ones—­such as le filon—­were pos­si­ble.79 This distinction implicit in ­Great War texts between honest and ­dishonest forms of débrouillardise—­honest if performed at the expense of outsiders, dishonest, even shameful, if directed at one’s primary group—is one that anthropologist Deborah Reed-­Danahay has observed in the distinction made by villa­gers in the Auvergne in the 1980s and 1990s between being débrouillard and being rusé (cunning). As Reed-­Danahay explains, ­“there is no hard and fast rule for when a be­hav­ior” ­will be viewed negatively and labeled as dishonest (rusé) or viewed positively and labeled as fair (débrouillard)—­“ it depends upon ­whether or not the speaker admires or feels threatened by the action.” The distinction between “getting by” and “getting one over” on someone, or between “making do” and “making out” at the expense of somebody ­else depends upon the context in which the act of débrouillardise is performed. 80 A 1915 dictionary of soldier slang had defined the démerdard as a man having “few scruples.”81 From the start, the attributes of the débrouillard had implied superior intelligence, resourcefulness, and inventiveness, but they also recalled the moral pliancy of the trickster, rogue, or con man. The line between cleverness and cunning, between the artist and the con artist, was a tenuous and shifting one. It is impor­tant to recognize ­these two valences to

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Le Système D: a very positive kind of creative artistry—­“mak[ing] something out of nothing” 82 —­and the potential for a ruthless e­ very-­man-­for-­himself kind of attitude. This line was rarely crossed in early ­Great War texts, in which la débrouillardise was seen as overwhelmingly positive and in which any ethically ambiguous be­hav­ior was viewed as cheeky and clever instead of threatening. As we ­will see l­ ater in this study, this would not necessarily be the case in the après-­guerre. A more ruthless imagining of Le Système D begins to emerge in the 1930s and to take hold during the Second World War.

Finding the Filon: Deception, Disobedience, and Delusion

The men covet each other’s filons, and as much as they might badmouth shirkers, they would trade places with a well-­connected embusqué in a heartbeat and w ­ ouldn’t hesitate to stretch the truth to get themselves out of harm’s way. The soldier’s ambition where the filon is concerned is limitless. As Déchelette explains, even the soldier who enjoys a lucky break or a cushy post ­will “[want] a better filon” and “cook up plans” to “exploit” that filon to the fullest.83 Déchelette proposes one filon that is far superior to all ­others: being the ­father of six ­children and thus being exempt from ser­vice. He even suggests a shady plan for achieving this filon: “put a [personals] ad in the paper [seeking] a w ­ idow with six ­children.”84 Déchelette’s suggestion for landing a filon by hook or by crook recalls the strategy employed by one cartoon débrouillard in La Baïonnette’s special issue. One soldier congratulates the other on having had the “good idea” to convince his ­father to write him a letter announcing his death, so that the poilu can get an extra leave home to attend the funeral. 85 Like the picaro, the skilled exploiter of the filon does not hesitate to resort to forms of acting and role-­playing. In Le Cabaret de la belle femme, for example, the narrator seizes an opportunity to be pampered by the local village ­women. Having continued to shave his face ­after mobilization, he stands out from his fellow soldiers, and the villa­gers take him for a priest. When he stumbles into a bakery one day and the old w ­ oman b­ ehind the ­counter m ­ istakes him for a priest, the narrator decides on the spot not to “disabuse” her. And when the ­woman’s ­little grand­daughter walks in, he flashes a “benevolent, almost celestial smile” of which “a cinema actor playing Saint Francis would be envious” and “pat[s] the kid’s freckled cheeks” before launching into a ­ oman is so honored by the fake priest’s lesson from the catechism. 86 The w attentions that she offers him his own room on the first floor of her h­ ouse

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and sets about preparing him a hot meal. This filon is, however, short-­lived. When the loud-­mouthed, wisecracking Lousteau finds out about the fake priest’s imposture, he blows the narrator’s cover. The hot meal is retracted, and the two soldiers end up billeted in a barn, eating cold food from a mess tin. In another episode, the narrator recounts the misadventures of the Toulousain cyclist Roufignac, called “Garlic Clove” by the men, who arrives to replace the regiment’s wounded col­o­nel. Following ­orders from the general staff, Garlic Clove attempts to get the men to eat rice. Since none of the men knows how to cook rice, Garlic Clove appoints a “black soldier” to be the next cook—­offering him, thus, an excellent filon. Garlic Clove assumes that the soldier is from Africa, when in fact he was born and raised in Normandy. When confronted with the supposition from Garlic Clove, “in your homeland, you like rice. You eat a lot of it,” the “black Norman” seizes the filon and responds in the affirmative in a feigned pidgin French, “miraculously recovering the jargon of his ancestors.” From his cushy post, the “black Norman” of Martiniquan ancestry can avoid combat duty while taking his revenge on his “colonist” comrades, serving them “the worst slop” he can concoct.87 The filon could come in all sorts of guises, so it was impor­tant for the poilu as picaro to remain nimble and ready to adapt to any situation. Dorgelès’s character Bouffioux from Les Croix de bois shows himself to be a direct descendant of earlier literary picaros as servants to many masters and jacks of all trades. “Since the war broke out,” the narrator affirms, Bouffioux “had done all sorts of jobs.” He “would do anything to avoid ­going to the trenches.”88 Bouffioux volunteers for e­ very conceivable job, including ­those for which he has absolutely no aptitude. He volunteers as a cyclist, even though he can barely r­ ide a bike, and he would not hesitate to sign up as a secretary, though he can barely read, or to volunteer as a tailor, though he cannot sew.89 Like Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk, Bouffioux is a bit of a con man in civilian life and is thus already initiated into the picaresque arts of duplicity. Before the war, we see the fake dog-­breeder Švejk rounding up mutts in the streets and selling them as pure-­breeds. The former ­horse dealer Bouffioux, meanwhile, manages to dodge front-­line duty by using in the war “as many ruses as before, at the fair, to sell a bad-­tempered h­ orse.”90 Bouffioux fi­nally lands the job of cuistot by claiming to have been a cook in civilian life.91 Bouffioux’s lack of experience leaves him open to the men’s insults and practical jokes as revenge for his good fortune. When his luck runs out and he rejoins the men in the trenches in a particularly dangerous sector, he muses

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aloud: “If only you could be sure that POWs are treated well . . . ,” weighing the arguments for and against desertion as the next potential filon.92 Like convalescence in a military hospital, incarceration for insubordination or other offenses to military hierarchy could be valorized as a filon. Dorgelès’s Lousteau refuses to follow military protocol and to have his hair cut short. By employing a series of “surprising ruses,” including getting himself thrown into military prison, he manages to keep his long hair for months ­after the other soldiers have had theirs cut. What begins as the pure “plea­ sure of disobeying” ends as a personal mission on Lousteau’s part to defy his NCO (noncommissioned officer) and assert his “dignity as a man.” 93 The NCO fi­nally catches up with Lousteau and forces him to have his head shaved, but Lousteau takes his revenge during the next review. Standing “impeccably at attention” before the general and giving himself the airs of the model soldier, Lousteau responds to the general’s questions about his bald head by “launch[ing] into a cleverly reworked story” of his trou­bles with his NCO, casting himself in the sympathetic role of the upstanding soldier who has been unjustly persecuted.94 The general punishes Lousteau’s superiors, who in turn punish Lousteau by throwing him in prison ­until his hair grows out. Thus, Lousteau spends two leisurely weeks, far from combat, ­doing nothing. The military prison as filon is a trope developed in a number of ­Great War texts, including All Quiet on the Western Front. Remarque’s Tjaden observes, for example, that “five-­days clink are five days rest.” Even if he is sent to “the Fortress,” he insists, it w ­ ill be an improvement over his current situation: “Well, for the time being the war ­will be over so far as I am concerned.”95 The Good Soldier Švejk’s entire demeanor is calculated to frustrate and offend his superior officers and to land him as much jail time as pos­si­ble. We cannot help but cheer for Švejk when he pretends to agree with his superior officers. He does so in a way that is so saturated with irony and ambiguity—­ prefaced by his signature, mock-­ceremonial “Humbly report, sir”—­that his superior officer invariably gets befuddled, sending Švejk off to some prison cell for punishment. We laugh ­because we know that it is thanks to this clever picaresque posturing that Švejk manages to r­ ide out the G ­ reat War without ever having to go to the front. Švejk’s feigned idiocy keeps his superior officers continually off balance. In Le Cabaret de la belle femme, Dorgelès likewise explores the theme of feigned ­mental illness as filon. The soldier Despré offers a cautionary tale on the importance of knowing how to exploit a filon to the fullest when

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the opportunity pres­ents itself. ­After spending three months in convalescence for meningitis, Despré pres­ents himself for officer’s training, only to discover that his medical rec­ords declare him mentally fragile and advise that he not be upset. As a result, he is exempted from ser­vice for a month. Rather than keeping his good fortune to himself, Despré brags about his filon to his fellow soldiers and ends up being returned to active duty. Only when it is too late does Despré realize how he should have managed his filon. If he had it to do over again, he explains that he would exploit his supposed insanity to the fullest. He would “get up in the ­middle of the night screaming” or “walk around naked,” or “kiss the col­o­nel in the barracks square,” so that ­there would be no way “they would find anybody more nuts than [he].” 96 This is what Švejk or Yossarian (Catch-22) or Corporal Klinger (M*A*S*H), skilled picaros a­ fter him, w ­ ill do. The notion of the filon is taken to perverse and pathological lengths when soldiers are depicted fantasizing about “the nice ­little wound” they might receive in combat.97 The coveted belle blessure or good wound would render the soldier incapable of fighting and send him, if not home permanently, at least on convalescent leave ­behind the lines. Vari­ous degrees of incapacitation due to the belle blessure ­were ­imagined in soldier-­narratives. In Les Croix de bois, Bouffioux tries to injure himself by staging an “accidental” fall from the loft of a barn.98 Fouillard, the cook whose filon had been taken over by Bouffioux, employs a similar tactic, walking close b­ ehind a mule, hoping to receive a strong kick and a broken leg.99 In one scene, the soldiers discuss the sacrifices they would be willing to make to avoid g­ oing over the top. They talk over the vari­ous scenarios, each one “offering up a body part,” describing which “part of their flesh” they would be ready to “sacrifice” if it would save them from death on the battlefield. Each man declares the body part he would be willing to give up: “an eye, a hand, a leg.”100 The soldier from the north, the Ch’timi Brouke, is ready to give up his left foot. “Better to come home hopping,” he explains, “than not to come home at all.” And so the men imaginatively “cut into their live flesh,” calmly “chopping up their bodies limb by limb.”101 If each man is able to imagine himself physically torn apart as a filon to avoid combat, it is ­because he is held together psychically by a vision of himself as a clever and capable débrouillard driven by an unshakeable ­will to live, a ­will that is expressed as an obsession with food, drink, creature comforts, and security. The arts and

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tactics of Le Système D put the material realities of trench life and the corporeal grounding of soldier ambition at the center of the war experience. Soldiers also know how to engage in storytelling and role-­playing when it is in their best interest. The men in Le Cabaret de la belle femme pose for a group of officers and civilians who come to inspect the mineshaft they are digging. In exchange for cigarettes and the odd coin or two, the men entertain the visitors with wildly embellished stories of their last attack. Sometimes they even allow themselves to be photographed in “memorable poses of heroes ready for action.” Usually Lousteau and Landry get the most attention, since Lousteau has the burly physique of a fur trapper, and Landry is the dirtiest.102 The theme of soldier storytelling and truth-­stretching is developed in a darker, more serious vein in Les Croix de bois, when, from his hospital bed, Sulphart begins to tell tall tales of his experiences at the front. His bunkmates detest him for his lies, but the nurses and civilian visitors shower him with attention and encourage his duplicity.103 This is a common trope both of traditional picaresque narratives and of First World War narratives—­that of the picaro who accepts the role of clown or entertainer, telling his audience anything they want to hear in exchange for a good meal or a moment of respite from society’s usual hostility. The role of fake hero, like that of the buffoon, was just one of many pos­si­ble filons.104 In the next chapter, we ­will take a closer look at the figure of the fake hero within the context of the mass-­media web of discourses and repre­sen­ta­ tions making up what historians call “war culture.” The climate of lies and illusions exploited by the soldier in search of a filon could also be manipulated by the civilian shirker desperate to keep up appearances. At a time when not g­ oing to the front was a cause for shame and social exclusion, one literary shirker manages to rise to fame and glory thanks to the gullibility and willful self-­deception of a war­time society e­ ager to be comforted in its preconceived notions and protected from all knowledge of the harsh realities of war.

3. Georges de la Fouchardière

Oppositional Journalism, Involuntary Heroism, and Bourrage de crâne The prevailing opinion in the trenches was that anything might be true, except what was printed. —­Anon., cited in Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 1954 —­They’re journalists . . . ​­those fellas that turn out newspapers. —­So, ­they’re the ones that stuff our skulls? —­Henri Barbusse, Le Feu, 1916

In the picaresque world, t­ hings are not as they appear to be and p­ eople are not who they say they are.1 The picaresque world is one in which a society’s professed values and belief systems do not hold up in the face of lived experience. The picaro needs all his wits about him to negotiate a world marked by such a commingling of real­ity and illusion. In the original Golden Age texts, the picaro discovers the world of outward social appearances, of honor and social status, to be based, not upon some intrinsic moral value or superiority, but upon pretense, empty clichés, and illusions. Just as Golden Age conversos ­were forced to pretend to be Christian believers, even if they ­were not, ­Great War civilians and citizen-soldiers had to pretend to be heroes, even if they ­were not. The picaresque teaches the value of pretending, but it also posits the liberating powers of the truth—­even if the moment of losing one’s illusions and wising up to real­ity is painful. Picaresque poetics resist abstractions and mythologizing, recognizing that abstractions and euphemisms are used by t­ hose in power to camouflage the harsh realities of this world. Long before the poilu, the Tommy, the Frontschwein, or the Doughboy discovered the horror of the Western Front, Grimmelshausen’s Infantryman 64

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of the Thirty Years War, Simplicius Simplicissimus, reminded his reader of the dark deeds lurking ­behind words like “glory” and “heroism”: “The glorious deeds of heroism would indeed be praiseworthy if they had not been accomplished with the injury and death of many o­ thers.”2 The picaro unwillingly comes to see the truth of the world as it ­really is. He is not tricked by the illusions that cloud the judgment of ­those around him, and he ­will not hesitate to turn ­these illusions to his own advantage. This helps him to see what is truly in his self-­interest. It helps him read his environment, adapt opportunistically to it, and maintain some degree of intellectual freedom. Many ­Great War writers chose to expose the hy­poc­risy they perceived in the posturing of jingoistic armchair patriots—­journalists, academicians, illustrators, poster artists—­who, from the safety of the home front, called for extraordinary sacrifices from the Infantryman. ­These armchair patriots depicted the poilu as a larger-­than-­life superhero rather than as an ordinary, vulnerable ­human being. In taking on the mainstream media and its perceived tendency t­oward bourrage de crâne (skull-­stuffing), dissident G ­ reat War writers grappled with a fundamental epistemological prob­lem of the new, mass-­media war—­the muddied line between fact and fiction, real­ity and illusions. This epistemological prob­lem had always been a central preoccupation of the picaresque ­tradition.

Skull-­Stuffing for Dummies

When you “impose a ready-­made opinion on someone,” François Déchelette argues in his 1918 dictionary of soldier slang, you “stuff his skull.”3 The potential for skull-­stuffing reached epidemic proportions during the war by virtue of the sheer number of media outlets and of self-­professed experts who used them to promote their ideas. At the same time, Déchelette assured his readers, the practice of skull-­stuffing was “as old as time.” “­Great conquerors” have always “fanaticized” their soldiers, just as ­great poets have always composed rousing “­battle songs” to “fire up” their listeners.4 “The h­ uman mind,” Déchelette explained, “is a delicate mechanism that breaks down easily.” It is no won­der that “this g­ reat catastrophe that is war deprives men of their intelligence at precisely the moment when the gravity of events makes it more difficult for them to exercise sound judgment.”5 “It is therefore necessary,” Déchelette continued, not without a certain sarcasm, “that men be provided with ready-­made opinions in the same way that they are provided

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with uniforms, bread, and tobacco.” That, Déchelette explains, “is what we call skull-­stuffing,” or rather, “official skull-­stuffing.” “In critical moments of history,” Déchelette reasoned, when p­ eople are overwhelmed by events and “incapable of grasping” the meaning of history-­in-­the-­making, a “minority” steps in to do that work for the rest of society. What results, Déchelette concluded, is “a state of siege of ­human reason.” 6 Submitting to skull-­stuffing may be humiliating, but in times of crisis it is sometimes necessary to suspend individual intellectual freedom in the name of collective survival. The oversimplification involved in official skull-­stuffing serves a practical purpose. But government officials and army generals are not the only ­people stuffing skulls. As Déchelette explains, the term “skull-­stuffing” can be applied to “a thousand circumstances” in the “daily life” of the poilu. Whenever a soldier tells war stories to his marraine (war godmother), he “stuffs her skull.” Soldiers are always stretching the truth, “embellishing” the war stories they share with ­people back home and telling tall tales to their comrades at the front. Skull-­ stuffing was, it seems, a war­time epidemic. The expression for skull-­stuffing, bourrage de crâne, had been around since the 1870s, but it was during the First World War that it entered common parlance.7 A related slang term from the turn-­of-­the-­century, bobard, also gained popularity for describing fibs, lies, or tall tales.8 Meanwhile, a slang term for newspaper, canard, which had been around since the mid-nineteenth ­century, came back into vogue, as did an older meaning attached to the term, that of a false news story published to mislead or deceive the public.9 ­There w ­ ere many shades of bourrage de crâne, from s­ imple “persuasion” to “exaggeration” to seducing or deceiving with “fine-­sounding language”10 or “hype”; from “sugar-­coating”11 to “bluffing” to “fibbing” and outright ­ ere also many dif­fer­ent reactions to bourrage de crâne. “lying.”12 ­There w Writer Georges Duhamel, an army surgeon during the war, suggested that by describing lies with the colorful slang term bourrage de crâne, ­people had rendered the practice of lying “benign and laughable.”13 Meanwhile, in her memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir remembered her generation’s being so “disgusted” by the “skull-­stuffing they had been submitted to during the war,” that they “called for the right to see t­ hings as they r­ eally are and to call them by their real names.”14 On July 19, 1916, a mock how-to article entitled “Some Kitchen R ­ ecipes” appeared in the pages of the satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné (The Chained Duck/Newspaper). 15 The author, Le Canard’s star humorist-­

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polemicist Georges de la Fouchardière, proposed that “since all the journalists are off at war, it is natu­ral, fair, and salutary that all newspapers are now being written by retired police captains, hardware shop ­owners on reserve duty, laid-­off milliner’s apprentices and out of work academicians.” He then set out to give ­these new amateur journalists some tricks of the trade. His “­recipes” w ­ ere framed as advice for the average Joe with no experience in journalism who is looking to ­ride out the war by writing for the papers. “Some Kitchen ­Recipes” (Quelques recettes de cuisine) provided the precise formula for writing academic-­style articles, military analy­sis, German prisoner of war letters, soldiers’ firsthand accounts, and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal ads. The most common and easiest formula to copy, the author insisted, was that perfected in the pages of a Pa­ri­sian daily newspaper, L’Écho de Paris, by French Acad­emy members such as René Bazin, Frédéric Masson, and Maurice Barrès.16 Copying the prose in L’Écho de Paris was as easy as pie. All one had to do was follow a series of “felicitous formula[s].” First, one could oppose “ ‘teuton barbarity’ ” to “ ‘the brilliant French spirit, nourished for several centuries on the milk of the virgin from Lorraine’.” Next, one could list all the “positive qualities” of the French “race,” including, for good mea­sure, ­those of France’s allies: “our friends the En­glish, our heroic tirailleurs sénégalais (colonial soldiers) and the admirable Don Cossacks.” Next one could show how Goethe is a “nitwit” compared to traditionalist Catholic writers like Henry Bordeaux or cloak-­and-­dagger serial novelists like Michel Zévaco and Pierre Decourcelles. One could “sprinkle” this dish with a ­little “Attic salt,” copying the many jokes in the press about Kaiser Wilhelm’s poor health or the Kronprinz’s alcoholism. It was impor­tant to end any article on a serious note, with some “superb flight of lyricism.” A typical closing sentence would begin with a formula like “Thus, in the days of trial, we ­will arm our hearts . . . ​­etc. . . . ​, ­etc. . . .” When it came to military analy­sis, one needed no par­tic­u­lar sense of geography, just some basic “truisms” and “sensational” but entirely self-­evident “aphorisms” like an “army that retreats immediately ceases to advance.” And of course, one should begin each day’s article, the author insisted, with the phrase “Just as I predicted . . .” As for “Récits de Combattants” or soldier eyewitness accounts from the front, one foolproof formula was that of the “ ‘Pomeranian brute’ ” and the “­little zouave.” As the brute advances, La Fouchardière argued, one should have his “­little zouave” run through the “Pomeranian brute” with his bayonet while uttering a “jovial saying intended to prove the indestructible good

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cheer of our poilus.” “Take that to Berlin!” or “Now I’ve earned my liter of pinard (cheap wine)” would do nicely. Another option was to model one’s story on that peddled in L’Écho de Paris about a valiant poilu who, having been blinded in both eyes by a massive German shell, was said to have told a reporter that he would “regret just one ­thing; not having a third eye to give to France.” Fi­nally, one must not forget to have his German soldiers execute the universal sign of German servility—­holding their hands up in surrender. This visual cliché was ­imagined and recycled in texts from postcards to personal accounts to press reports. The German soldiers should, La Fouchardière concluded, be shown executing “a vertical movement of the arms,” announcing their surrender by yelling “ ‘Kamarade! Kamarade!’ ” This article provides a glimpse into the main editorial strategies and key themes that would be developed throughout the war in the fledgling weekly Maurice Maréchal had founded in 1915. Le Canard enchaîné used its own set of catch phrases, ­running jokes, and ste­reo­types to combat the facile clichés and aphorisms peddled in the national press. In par­tic­u­lar, it made fun of the style of reporting in the big Pa­ri­sian dailies—­Le Matin, Le Journal, Le Petit Journal, and Le Petit Parisien. It mocked the high diction and “superb flights of lyricism,” but also the blatant lies and delusions—­German bombs that ­don’t explode, wounded soldiers who refuse to be evacuated, frontline combat that feels like a vacation to its participants.

War Culture and the Rise of Oppositional Journalism

A legion of armchair patriots, including La Fouchardière and the staff at Le Canard enchaîné, worked tirelessly during the war years to create strong, emotionally charged and readily recognizable images and themes through which ordinary ­people might make sense of the war. They produced discourses designed to provoke feelings of belonging, identification, cohesion, and consent. Sometimes t­ hese discourses differed in impor­tant ways from soldier discourses, but neither group worked in a vacuum. Soldier and civilian repre­ sen­ta­tions of the war and its actors ­were in a constant dialogue during the war and w ­ ere mutually informative and transformative. Disparate soldier and civilian groups, working in­de­pen­dently, but not without awareness of the larger field of repre­sen­ta­tions in circulation, produced la culture de guerre or war culture.

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Historian Leonard Smith defines “war culture” as “the sum total of the means through which contemporaries understood the conflict and persuaded themselves to continue fighting it.”17 War culture can be understood as an aggregation of all of the images, narratives, and discourses through which ­people i­magined the war and its participants. War culture was varied, shifting, and dialogic, not monolithic. But as a body of cultural work including newspaper articles, cartoons, postcards, posters, songs, plays, essays, articles, novels, diaries, and firsthand accounts that reworked common themes, tropes, and oppositions, war culture did cohere around a set of assumptions about France. War culture took France to be a unique nation, worth defending at all costs from destruction and annexation to Germany. It assumed that adherence to, or identification with France’s traditions and deepest cultural and po­liti­cal priorities w ­ ere what made a person French and what implicated French men and ­women in the war and in its successful prosecution. War culture was a way for p­ eople to imagine the war and their role in it. It reflected ­people’s attitudes about the war, the nation, and the ­enemy and influenced ­those attitudes at the same time. The outbreak of the war saw a rhetorical explosion of a very traditional kind of patriotic discourse, a discourse that would be a persuasive and prevalent aspect of war culture. The mass press was used as a platform for dithyrambic cele­brations of French civilisation and condemnations of German Kultur. The advent of modern wireless telecommunications at the turn of the ­century meant that in this war, news could, theoretically, travel the globe at an unpre­ce­dented speed. The techniques and infrastructure of modern war reporting had, however, yet to be perfected. Meanwhile, army and government censorship meant that not all war news could be reported. Writers filled in the blanks in information about the war with analy­sis and opinion based as much on memories of past wars as on the emerging realities of the current one. Given the disruption of the press at the outbreak of the war—­the mobilization of journalists, the disruption of distribution networks and supply lines—­and given the chaos and confusion during the initial war of movement, it is no won­der that ­people turned to trusted prewar authorities for “news” about the war and help making sense of events. Maurice Maréchal and Le Canard enchaîné’s staff regretted that readers ­were getting a daily dose of bombast and bourrage de crâne (skull-­ stuffing) from newspapers like L’Écho de Paris and from armchair patriots

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like academician Maurice Barrès. Le Canard saw itself as a patriotic paper in its own right, one dedicated to teaching ­people how to read between the lines of mainstream “journalism” to separate fact from fiction and illusion from real­ity.18 If its ­sister publication L’Œuvre boasted that “Imbeciles ­don’t read L’Œuvre,” Le Canard famously insisted that it was “the only newspaper that publishes only fake news.”19 Modern information media like large circulation newspapers, Le Canard had set out to show, ­were no more accurate, no more reliable, no more true, and no less based on hy­poc­risy and illusions than old-­ fashioned forms of misinformation like myths, legends, rumors, and euphemisms. The mass press produced illusions for a newly intensified mass media age in which the individual’s room for intellectual maneuver was being severely curtailed. The oppositional press found a grateful and enthusiastic readership. Prewar humor and satirical magazines like Le Rire rouge and Le Sourire flourished during the war, alongside the “leading humor magazine,” La Baïonnette.20 The world of satirical journalism, associated with Montmartre bohemian culture, had been a prewar incubator for budding talent among the 1914 generation. Soldier-­writers like Roland Dorgelès and illustrators like Gus Bofa had all been associated with the prewar and war­time satirical ­press. 21 Soldier-­authored and -­illustrated trench newspapers began appearing as early as 1915, and soon crossover papers like Le Crapouillot (1915) and Le Canard enchaîné (1915/1916) began to appear. Le Crapouillot was a trench newspaper launched in 1915 at the front by soldier-­writer Jean Galtier-­Boissière and produced in Paris. Le Canard enchaîné was a trench-­newspaper-­style satirical paper launched and directed by civilian Maurice Maréchal and also printed in Paris, on the presses of L’Œuvre.22 Le Canard enchaîné took its name from an ­actual trench newspaper and retained much of the playfulness and a similar aesthetic to that of the original makeshift soldier newspapers, including bold, ­simple line drawings by illustrator H. P. Gassier. Le Crapouillot and Le Canard enchaîné23 ­were not among the major papers authorized for circulation at the front. Only the four big Pa­r i­sian dailies and L’Écho de Paris, the preferred paper of the General Staff, ­were authorized for distribution at the front. Oppositional papers like Le Crapouillot, Le Canard enchaîné, or L’Œuvre ­were not banned, but they could reach the front only if mailed directly to a soldier by his ­family or friends. 24

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Le Canard enchaîné reached a circulation of forty thousand copies by 1918, with 40 ­percent of its readership being civilians and 20 ­percent soldiers at the front. 25 It is true that this figure represents just one-­tenth of the readership of Le Canard’s arch nemesis L’Écho de Paris.26 But for a small, start-up paper with a highly unconventional visual and verbal style and an often shockingly irreverent tone, this figure is significant. Le Canard enchaîné, still in circulation ­today, would prove to be, as Allen Douglas has argued, “the most durable textual institution to come out of World War I.”27 In many ways it was the Comedy Central of its day. Its star “reporters,” La Fouchar­ dière chief among them, w ­ ere the Jon Stewarts and Stephen Colberts of the First World War. 28 The parodies that Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver engage in are recognized as satire, and the reporting of their favorite punching bag, Fox and Friends, is seen by many as opinion journalism. We are beyond the golden age of information journalism and investigative journalism. Many ­people t­oday perceive an ambient degeneration of traditional news media into entertainment journalism and opinion journalism, and some even take more stock in satirical journalism and group-­sourced, social media journalism than in traditional sources. Early twentieth-­century readers ­were living through a media revolution as significant as our own. The trend, however, was dif­fer­ent. Many ­people w ­ ere just beginning to read newspapers, which had seen a huge expansion in the last de­cades of the nineteenth ­century alongside expanding literacy rates. By 1914, the big Pa­ri­sian dailies had circulation figures at or above one million copies a day. 29 At the time, readers ­were still more accustomed to opinion journalism than to “objective” reporting of facts. Gustave Téry at L’Œuvre and Maurice Maréchal at Le Canard enchaîné ­were not equipped to provide modern, “objective” war reporting. Instead, they aimed to recalibrate reader expectations about what constituted “news.”

Serialized Skull-­Stuffing

Le Canard made fun of both the tone and the content of the large-­circulation daily newspapers. It took par­tic­u­lar aim at the far-­flung adventure plots of the serial novels the dailies continued to publish during the war and at the crime plots in the new cinematic serials like Le Matin’s Les Mystères de New

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York (The Mysteries of New York). Both Le Canard enchaîné and its ­sister publication, the much larger daily L’Œuvre, ran their own serial novels, which spoofed the heroic adventures peddled in the big Pa­r i­sian dailies. Maurice Maréchal at Le Canard enchaîné published parodies like Les Mystères qui ne sont pas de New York (The Mysteries That A ­ ren’t of New York) and L’Hémorroïde qui tue (The Hemorrhoid That Kills), a spoof on La Main qui étreint (The Hand That Grips), the band of wrongdoers from Les Mystères de New York. During the war it was common for papers to devote an entire fourth of a page, the rez-­de-­chaussée, to serial novels, despite the fact that they ­were forced to cut back to a four-­and sometimes two-­page format. Adventure and sentimental fiction remained an integral part of the war­time newspaper despite, or perhaps b­ ecause of, the pressing need readers felt for information about the war and the limitations the press faced in meeting that need. Stars of the prewar serial novel would continue to churn out far-­flung fictions from ­behind the lines, reworking time-­tested plotlines and enlisting prewar heroes for the epic strug­gle of civilisation against Kultur. Arsène Lupin, Maurice Leblanc’s gentleman burglar; Joseph Rouletabille, Gaston Leroux’s globe-­trotting reporter; and the vari­ous officers of Jules Mary’s patriotic military novels ­were all heroes from prewar popu­lar fiction mobilized during the war in serial novels designed to sell readers fantasies of revenge and retribution. The frustrations of industrial warfare—­anonymity, alienation, and emasculation—­are kept at bay in ­these and many other texts like them that depict the war as a series of adventures in which h­ uman agency, energy, and w ­ ill dominate. What Le Canard’s editors thought should replace epic war poetry and tales of derring-do was not immediately clear. The paper’s attitude t­oward the war was likewise not unequivocal. It cannot be said, for example, that Le Canard enchaîné was a pacifist paper. It did not advocate for the cessation of hostilities or a negotiated peace. Its critique was less of the war itself than of the way the war was being depicted in the mass press. Unlike L’Œuvre, which undertook a reform of the serial novel genre, promoting the work of soldiernovelists Henri Barbusse and Pierre Chaine, Le Canard enchaîné’s approach would be to parody the work of the big dailies, not providing new information about the war, but helping its readers learn how to parse through the conflicting and inflated claims being made about it in the mainstream media. They ­were engaged in their own form of propaganda, pushing an oppositional

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form of patriotism. They w ­ ere no less invested in propagating a certain Republican idea and ideal of France than their favorite target, Maurice Barrès, was in propagating a pre-­Republican, traditionalist, organicist one.

The G ­ rand Master of Skull-­Stuffing

If La Fouchardière and Le Canard enchaîné singled out the journalist, novelist, deputy, and academician Maurice Barrès for par­tic­u­lar ridicule, it is in part ­because Barrès was instrumental in introducing and reinforcing many key ele­ments of mainstream war culture that they w ­ ere out to revise or discredit. ­These ele­ments, drawn from the past and adapted to fit the current conflict, had tenacious staying power during the war despite the efforts of writers such as La Fouchardière to discredit them as anachronistic, death-­driven, and delusional. L’Écho de Paris provided Barrès with a national platform from which to frame the war as a proof and fulfillment of his prewar organicist theories of ethnic nationalism. President of Paul Déroulède’s League of Patriots, Barrès (1862–1923) had, in the de­cade leading up to the war, been an out­spoken revanchard campaigning for the restitution of the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine annexed to Germany a­ fter the Franco-­Prussian War (1870–1871). Barrès called for an emotional relationship of the individual to the nation through a new conception of selfhood, a revision of nineteenth-­century radical individualism in f­ avor of a communitarian understanding of identity and belonging. The Barrèsian individual would derive his unique sense of self from a constant awareness of his racialized rootedness in the blood and soil of France. When the war broke out, Barrès announced his decision not to follow the government to safety in Bordeaux, but to remain instead in Paris.30 An out­spoken advocate of the notion of the “­union sacrée” or sacred u­ nion in the war effort of all of the French ­people, Barrès argued that combatants and noncombatants w ­ ere united by the unique qualities of the French race. Frenchmen should put aside their prewar po­liti­cal differences and devote themselves entirely to the salvation of la patrie. To this end, Barrès dutifully vowed to remain at his “post” throughout the war and to write an article a day for the duration of the conflict. Written in a high, poetic diction and relying on constant comparisons between the con­temporary French soldier and his warrior ancestors, Barrès’s

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Figure 2. Maurice Barrès and his famous forelock, as depicted in the pages of Le Canard enchaîné. H. P. Gassier, Le Canard enchaîné, all rights reserved.

articles celebrated the regenerative powers of war as a “resurrection” and called for a return to the au­then­tic values of prerevolutionary France—­“the cult of honor, truth, and beauty”—­that would place France firmly back in her preordained position as beacon of civilization.31 For Barrès, the French soldiers of 1914 ­were the direct descendants of the knights of Charlemagne, equal in spirit, valor, courage, and physical prowess. “­These soldiers of France” remain, he argued, “what they [have been] across the centuries, masters of the sword (armes blanches).”32 To charge on the ­enemy with bayonets blazing in the sun was ­imagined by theorists like Barrès as the quintessentially heroic battlefield stance of the ­Great War infantry soldier. One widely disseminated example of the virile, heroic poilu from visual culture would be Abel Faivre’s 1915 war bonds poster. This image, entitled “On les aura,” features a rugged, physically imposing, fearless, and utterly self-­sacrificing poilu lurching forward with one hand ­toward the sky and the other clutching a ­rifle with bayonet affixed. To die at close contact with the ­enemy, run through by a bayonet, was the ultimate sign that one had fought valiantly to the ­bitter end, just as to die with a bullet to the head was a sign that one had not crouched or prostrated oneself

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for safety, but had stood tall and looked bravely t­oward e­ nemy lines. Such a posture was, of course, hopelessly anachronistic in the age of heavy artillery shelling and machine-­g un fire. However rousing such a gesture might be aesthetically, it was from a practical point of view completely foolhardy and suicidal. It was for his cele­bration of such deadly and outdated postures and for his intransigent bellicosity that Barrès would earn the title of rossignol du carnage (nightingale of bloodshed) and be rejected by the generation that had once considered him their intellectual leader.33 Long before the Dadaists famously put him on trial for “attentat à la sûreté de l’esprit” (offense against intellectual security) in May 1921, Le Canard enchaîné had elected him, along with the once antimilitarist but now bellicist journalist and politician Gustave Hervé, one of the chiefs of a “tribe” of war­time “skull-­stuffers” (bourreurs de crâne).34 Maurice Barrès would be a bête noire of La Fouchardière and Le Canard enchaîné throughout the war. He was routinely lampooned by the Canard’s chief illustrator H. P. Gassier, who drew him with an exaggeratedly long and floppy forelock (fig. 2). La Fouchardière called attention to this famous “mèche” in his many articles mocking the high priest of conventional patriotism.

Georges de la Fouchardière: A “Courageous Con­temporary Thinker”

Of the staff recruited by Maurice Maréchal for Le Canard enchaîné, Georges de la Fouchardière (1874–1946)—­a ffectionately called La Fouch’ by colleagues and readers—­was among the most sought a­ fter and best known. La Fouchardière’s name may be largely forgotten ­today, but in the literary and journalistic milieu of early twentieth-­century Paris, La Fouch’ was a ­house­hold name. In his postwar survey of the preceding twenty-­five years of French lit­er­a­ture, Eugène Montfort included a chapter on journalists and journalism in which he argued that Georges de la Fouchardière was “perhaps the most original journalist to have appeared between 1910 and 1920.”35 Another con­ temporary remembered him as the “wittiest” journalist of his time. 36 As Allen Douglas has argued, La Fouchardière was in sensibility a kind of “lesser Anatole France.” La Fouchardière shared Anatole France’s skepticism about belle époque society and values and advocated a similar, if less elegantly expressed, antimilitarism and anticlericalism. La Fouch’ was one of Le Canard’s most popu­lar columnists, and his work appeared in two out of

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three issues of the paper, often as the lead article.37 In fact, when in late 1916 Le Canard enchaîné asked its readers to vote for the “most courageous con­temporary thinkers,” readers ranked La Fouchardière in the top four, just ­behind Henri Barbusse, whose novel Le Feu had just been awarded the Prix Goncourt.38 Clearly La Fouchardière was perceived by Le Canard’s staff and readership as a new and dif­fer­ent kind of armchair patriot, one worthy of emulation. In addition to producing serial novels for L’Œuvre, La Fouch’ wrote a regular column in its pages entitled “Hors d’Œuvre.” He also continued writing stories about the prewar character Alfred Bicard, a henpecked, alcoholic, chronically unemployed habitué of the racetracks. Bicard appeared in two dime novels during the war and in regular columns in Le Canard enchaîné and L’Heure, another left-­leaning oppositional newspaper. An acerbic pamphleteer with anarchist sensibilities, La Fouchardière called for an attitude of constant skepticism t­oward officialdom and authority of all sorts, while remaining quietly committed to democracy and to Republican forms of government. No institution, tradition, or authority of prewar or war­time culture was spared by his pen—­from police officers to priests, from politicians to academicians, from the army to “our dear poilus.” La Fouchardière’s skepticism about tradition and authority, his mistrust of high abstractions, and his antimilitarism ­were all tenets of what the oppositional press saw as a new, more reasoned, and more reasonable form of patriotism. La Fouchardière projected the products of the mass media through his own idiosyncratically parodic and ironic filter, recalibrating reader expectations about the “truth” and objectivity of the press itself. His characters provided a ­counter-­model of heroism and patriotism to the paragon portrayed in papers like L’Écho de Paris, opening the way for a more nuanced reflection on the range of meanings and expressions of patriotism that are pos­si­ble during war­time. La Fouchardière and Barrès ­were both armchair patriots writing from the comfort of the home front about a war they w ­ ere not fighting themselves. Both ­were propagandists writing in support of a certain idea of France. Yet neither writer was working directly for the government or the army. Instead, each was reacting spontaneously and in­de­pen­dently to the perceived need of a war­time readership for reasons to remain committed to the war effort. This is one of the ways in which propaganda worked during the First World War—­

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not as a well-­oiled, top-­down machine run by officers and bureaucrats, but as a random assemblage of initiatives taken by private citizens and associations and even by soldiers themselves.

Involuntary Heroism: Scipion Pégoulade or the “Hero in Spite of Himself”

In late 1916, the editor-­in-­chief of L’Œuvre, Gustave Téry, suspended the very last installments of Henri Barbusse’s serial novel of the trenches, Le Feu, to give full priority to the launching of Georges de la Fouchardière’s mock-­ adventure serial, Scipion Pégoulade. Though both writers ­were in their early forties at the start of the war, La Fouch’ wrote about the war from the comfort of the home front; Barbusse from the trenches. If Barbusse wrote with the authority of the enlisted man, La Fouchardière wrote with the authority of an iconoclast and freethinker. La Fouch’ chose to depict the war through the comic misadventures of singular and larger-­(or smaller)-­than-­life protagonists; Barbusse through the horror of trench warfare and through the sarcasm and stoicism of the collective protagonist of the squad. ­These two approaches ­were linked, however, by a similar antimilitarist ethos and a similar suspicion of the mass press. Both writers took aim at the pretense, lies, and illusions driving mainstream war culture, adopting a similar strategy of using one kind of fiction to combat another. In Le Feu, Barbusse included an episode in which soldiers in the trenches encounter journalists and dignitaries being given a tour of the front lines. In this scene, he put to comic use an experience he had documented in May of 1915 in a letter home to his wife. “Yesterday, in the trenches,” he had written, they had had a visit from “some journalists led by officers of the general staff.” “It is with a certain irony and even a certain contempt,” Barbusse added, “that we [soldiers] look upon t­ hese tourists of the trenches.”39 In Le Feu, Barbusse takes his revenge on “these tourists,” having his soldier-­protagonists react to a similar frontline visit. As a group of visitors approaches, the soldier Barque mutters ­under his breath, “It’s the tourists of the trenches,” before hamming it up for his comrades crowded around him: “This way, ladies and gentlemen!” One of the visitors approaches the group “rather timidly, as [one would] at the zoo,” a­ fter exclaiming with a hint of disbelief, “Oh! Oh! . . . ​it’s poilus . . . ​ Real-­live poilus.” As the “tourists” move out of sight, the soldiers overhear the officer turned tour guide address some of the visitors as “messieurs les

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journalistes.” ­After Marthereau asks if ­these journalists are the ones who “stuff our skulls,” Barque returns to his antics, parodying a far-­fetched newspaper article in a pastiche that delights his fellow soldiers.40 It makes sense, given Gustave Téry’s ambition to “reform” the serial novel genre and the newspaper more broadly, that he would publish both Barbusse and La Fouchardière in the pages of L’Œuvre. Indeed, it had been to La Fouchardière that Téry had turned for the first serial novel of L’Œuvre’s relaunch as a daily on September 10, 1915. L’Araignée du Kaiser had poked fun at the paranoia of the prewar spy novel and at the spy fever that swept the country at the outbreak of the war. In 1914, any able-­bodied man not at the front could be taken for a spy. ­After the spy, the most reviled figure in ­Great War culture was the embusqué or shirker, whose cowardice and connections kept him safe at home, far from the carnage on the Western Front. Men suspected of being embusqués ­were shamed and vilified. Charlie Chaplin famously received white feathers in the mail from critics who thought he should be in the trenches. La Fouchardière’s second serial novel of the war, Scipion Pégoulade, was a lighthearted mock-­adventure story about a lovable embusqué and small-­time skull-­stuffer.41 In it La Fouch’ pokes fun at war­time journalism, the cult of heroism and conventional patriotism, and the lies, illusions, and hypocrisies of the civilian population. La Fouchardière takes aim not only at civilian hysteria about embusqués but also at the “most respectable traditions” of the serial novel genre itself.42 La Fouch’ hijacks narrative form, putting it in the ser­vice of a larger critique of the mass-­mediatized illusions produced by—­ and at the same time producing—­the G ­ reat War. Scipion Pégoulade, one of many collaborations between La Fouchardière and Canard enchaîné humorist Rodolphe Bringer, was published in installments in L’Œuvre in November and December 1916 (fig. 3). It was subtitled “Le Héros malgré lui” (The Hero in Spite of Himself), in reference to Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui (The Doctor in Spite of Himself ). An ad in L’Œuvre in late October announced the “­grand roman drôlatique” (­great comic novel) to follow. This was in ironic contradistinction to the commonly advertised “­grand roman national” (­great national novel) published in the mainstream Pa­ri­sian dailies. In the spring of 1917, Scipion Pégoulade was published as a freestanding volume advertised in both Le Canard enchaîné and L’Heure. Le Canard recommended Scipion Pégoulade as “healthy reading” for Canard faithfuls “­eager to spend a few joyful hours at the expense of skull-­stuffers.” 43

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Figure 3. “On November 3rd, Gustave Téry’s L’Œuvre w ­ ill begin Scipion Pégoulade or ‘The Hero in Spite of Himself ’ by G de la Fouchardière & Rodolphe Bringer.” Poster by Georges Hautot (1916). Library of Congress, Prints & Photo­graphs Division, WWI Posters [LC-­USZC2-4090].

L’Heure called it the “most cheerful, the most action-­packed, the most disrespectful of all war novels.” 44 The motor driving the plot of Scipion Pégoulade is a familiar one in war lit­er­a­ture: anabasis. Marching off to war, heading off to join one’s regiment—­ this is the princi­ple that sets off Scipion’s burlesque romp across France. It anticipates the Good Soldier Švejk’s hopelessly bungled but cleverly evasive march across the Austro-­Hungarian Empire. The precise literary inspiration for the story is easy to locate. Scipion Pégoulade is a fairly faithful rewriting and revision for ­Great War times and sensibilities of Alphonse Daudet’s wildly popu­lar 1872 novel Les Aventures prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon.45 In La Fouchardière and Bringer’s text, the “idol of Chantepie” is referred to as “Scipion l’Africain” ­because he has convinced the townspeople that he is a seasoned veteran of France’s colonial wars, an officer who has seen action in “all the African campaigns” (9). Of course, nobody knows Scipion’s exact rank or the number of his regiment. His friends think it is his “modesty” that prevents him from talking about his exploits in any but the vaguest

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and most approximate of terms. As the reader soon learns, it is actually Scipion’s lack of experience that prevents him from regaling the townspeople with war stories. Scipion Pégoulade has been unfit for military ser­vice since the age of twenty, when he lost an eye in a freak accident. Scipion’s march off to war is, thus, a completely staged and fictitious one, and his war­time “heroism” is fabricated out of thin air and sold as fact in the local newspapers. La Fouchardière and Bringer’s novel chronicles the misadventures of the most lovable—­perhaps the only lovable—­embusqué (shirker) of all of ­Great War fiction. Scipion is a shirker in spite of himself who becomes a fake war hero in spite of himself. ­Behind the mask of “Scipion the African” lies an anonymous shop clerk who has never fired a ­rifle, let alone captured “a caravan of Touaregs” (17). This tall, muscular fellow had appeared out of nowhere one day in the small southern town of Chantepie (9). Forever strutting about with head held high and chest thrust out—­this “musketeer” with the handlebar mustache, military jacket, riding pants, trusty revolver always at his side—­this remarkable creature seemed the embodiment of French military masculinity (9, 15). In his role as self-­appointed civic leader and president of the local veteran’s society, Scipion has been an out­spoken champion of military preparedness (13). When he announces to the townspeople the news of mobilization, they look at him with the same adoring eyes that the G ­ rand Army had for Napoleon, seeing in him the embodiment of “invincible force” and “certain victory” (21). Scipion’s private, spontaneous reaction to the news that war has been declared is, meanwhile, anything but “triumphant” (21). Before he struts up to make the announcement to his adoring fans, he composes himself, so that only the reader sees this “doleful, staggering” Scipion, a “haggard and pale” Scipion, whose “hat had lost its Three Musketeer elegance, whose moustache seemed humiliated,” and whose beard seemed “discouraged.” He is, the narrators assure readers, the least “African” Scipion imaginable (19). The premise of the novel is set. How can Scipion—­who has always been unfit for military service—­ride out the ­Great War with his reputation as a war hero intact? How can he keep up the illusion of his heroic past without being labeled an embusqué in the pres­ent conflict? Scipion’s adventures begin as he boldly departs to join a regiment that d­ oesn’t exist on a train bound for nowhere. What emerges across the narrative arc of the book is a series of farcical situations based on Scipion’s lies and impersonations in his “frantic flight”

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across the French home front (80). In his desperate attempt to locate a place to hide out for the rest of the war, Scipion finds himself posing in vari­ous provincial towns first as a counterespionage agent, next as academician and pundit Maurice Barrès (Boris Marrès in the text), ­later as a Belgian refugee, and fi­nally as a military doctor inspecting field hospitals. A car wreck fi­nally lands Scipion back in Chantepie, where he is welcomed home as a war hero, his fake “exploits” in the war having been in­ven­ted and chronicled in the ­local paper while he was away. Scipion is able to move from imposture to imposture b­ ecause, the narrator tells us, he is endowed with a “rich imagination” that allows him to figure a way out of any predicament in which he finds himself (108). “Our hero,” the narrator insists, “is an exceedingly intelligent chap,” adaptable, and highly resilient (267). As the narrator repeats throughout the novel, Scipion is “not a man to allow himself to be knocked down long by adversity” (108, 136). His “picaresque immunity” springs from an ability to “adapt to circumstances with marvelous speed” (188, 271). In a split second, Scipion is capable of surveying the terrain and “getting into the skin” of what­ever character is called for in the moment or foisted upon him through the misunderstanding of o­ thers (39, 132, 189). The same imagination that tricks Scipion into believing in his illusions of grandeur proves to be a “double-­ edged sword” (41). It ­will help him wriggle out of the many tight spots he ­will get himself into in the course of the novel, but it ­will also throttle him into new precarious situations requiring more lies and posturing. Scipion begins the novel a quixotic figure, a “victim” of his own “imagination.” He is a man who succumbs to heroic illusions and eventually comes to believe his own lies (38, 40). And he is not alone. ­There are self-­in­ven­ted “­great men” like Scipion all over war­time France, the authors imply. Throughout the novel, Scipion is helped along in his lies and imposture by ­people who are covering up their own lies and tall tales. T ­ here is the worldly and cosmopolitan “Pa­ri­sian” who has actually only spent three weeks in Paris, or the pharmacist who puts an old drain pipe in his shop win­dow, passing it off as a gigantic tapeworm for which he has the cure, or the one real poilu of the novel who is forced to collude with his arch e­ nemy Scipion to cover up his own dereliction of duty. War­time France is a picaresque world, and Scipion is just one more con man among a nation of con men. His lies work ­because ­people are ready to believe what they want to believe and reluctant to put their preconceived ideas to the test of real­ity.

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Scipion is a rogue and a con man, but an often clumsy one. He is motivated, not by cynicism or a desire to deceive, but by a desire to escape the stigma of being an ordinary guy living at an extraordinary time among civilians who expect extraordinary feats of courage and heroism from all able-­ bodied men. Scipion sometimes acts before he thinks,46 and his cowardice often gets the best of him, as when he barricades himself in a ­hotel room out of fear of the fake spy he claims to be on a government mission to capture. Leaning hard against his door, which he d­ oesn’t realize opens outward, Scipion is sent lunging into the supposed spy’s adjoining room, and is caught with his pants down, or rather, in nothing but his nightshirt. This is just one of many Chaplinesque scenes in which Scipion’s best attempts at propping up his inflated dignity are foiled. The irony is that in this situation, as in all the ­others of the novel, Scipion Pégoulade’s life is never ­really in danger—­even if he often (over)reacts as if it ­were. If his life is not in danger, his sense of honor is. Scipion, the narrator tells us, “values” his honor—­even fake, fabricated honor—­“more than his life” (89). Or at least he thinks he does. In his endlessly bungled attempts to keep up appearances and save his supposed honor, Scipion unwittingly reveals just how hollow the concept of honor r­ eally is. By the end of the novel, he ­will have wised up and gotten his priorities straight. Fabricated honor and glory, he w ­ ill discover, are simply too much work to sustain. “How many stories, my God, and what a tiring existence!” the narrator concludes. “Scipion now recognizes what a ­mistake it was to tell the Chantepicois that initial lie about his campaigns in Africa. That is what set off this ­whole endless series of misadventures . . .” (267). The plot of Scipion Pégoulade runs on an adventure-­time of unfortunate coincidences and unwelcome encounters. Rather than riding out the war in relative comfort and anonymity, Scipion finds himself forever getting caught in sticky situations and bad patches, ­running into characters who know his true identity and see through his disguises.47 Any respite he finds from the traps of fate and bad luck is always only provisional—­thus Scipion’s refrain “Let’s hope this lasts” (174, 268). Scipion lives in constant fear of being kicked out of his next hiding spot and forced, like Chaplin’s L ­ ittle Tramp, to take to the road again. At one point, when Scipion is forced to leave a particularly cushy spot, the narrator uses a familiar picaresque motif, comparing him to the rat from La Fontaine’s fable who is “expelled from his Dutch cheese” (165).

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No sooner is Scipion forced to abandon one role, however, than he stumbles into another one. The ultimate conmen in this world of impostors and illusions, the novel argues, are journalists. When Scipion is forced to flee his first safe haven at Saint-­Martin-­du-­Palamart, he takes refuge in the nearby town of Ribérou, where he wakes up to the sound of a newspaper boy shouting Scipion’s name from the headlines of the local paper. The Alouette de Ribérou (The Ribérou Lark) has gotten wind of Scipion’s supposed rescue of a French soldier attacked by a band of Bavarian spies back in Saint-­Martin. H ­ ere Scipion gets his first intoxicating taste of fake war­time fame. The Alouette’s bombastic article would be utterly nonsensical to a reader with any critical or common sense, but Scipion and the ­people of Ribérou are completely seduced. The article begins with a description of Scipion nabbing four spies, two with each hand. With each successive sentence, the number of spies multiplies ­until by the end of the article, Scipion is reported to have captured forty-­five spies all by himself (99–104). He has also managed to save the ambushed poilu Joseph Boudènfle from certain drowning, the paper reports, pulling him out of the “grim abyss” of the same rushing river in which, the article reminds readers, a three-­week-­old puppy had lost “life and property” that same year (102). The novel’s readers know what the Alouette’s readers ­don’t, that the “abyss” in question was actually just sixty centimeters deep. Fearful that this article ­will reveal to the folks back in Chantepie his real whereabouts, Scipion first tries to buy up all of the copies of L’Alouette, before realizing that newspaper readership has skyrocketed since the war and that ­he’ll never be able to round up all the copies on his own. When he goes to the Alouette’s offices to attempt to broker a deal to stop publication, he lands upon the brilliant idea of passing himself off as Boris Marrès—­a thinly disguised version of Maurice Barrès, the favorite columnist and national hero of the Alouette’s readership: royalists and faithful members of the local Joan of Arc Circle. His quick imagination has offered him the ideal cover in Marrès, one perfectly adapted to the royalist, Catholic, right-­thinking milieu he has stumbled into (125–26). Scipion claims to be Boris Marrès, traveling incognito u­ nder the name Scipion Pégoulade and fleeing the unwanted advances of the popu­lar Pa­ri­sian ­music hall performer Mistinguett (in real­ity his jilted m ­ iddle-­aged ex-­lover Irma Foutriquet). He has abandoned his post in Paris to flee Mistinguette and

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is seeking a provincial newspaper where he can continue his sacred mission. “Oh, my dear colleague,” he tells the paper’s director, “how heavy is the crushing weight of glory, and what a terrible situation my celebrity puts me in now! I’ve had to flee Paris, I’ve had to desert my post at the very moment when the country needs me so much, when Eu­rope is asking ‘What does he think? What is he g­ oing to say?’ ” Since all of the paper’s journalists are at the front or soon w ­ ill be, the director of the Alouette, a toothless, toupee-­ wearing, illiterate straw-­hat-­factory owner, hires the fake Marrès to be his new editor-­in-­chief (113). This role fits Scipion like a glove. Having already learned the ropes of journalism back in Chantepie as a correspondent for the Phare de Montélimar (The Montélimar Beacon), Scipion has long since figured out that it’s ­really pretty easy writing for the newspapers and requires no ­great intellect. “What retired grocery store owner ­isn’t writing for a newspaper ­these days,” Scipion reasons to himself (120).48 If he runs out of ideas, Scipion supposes he can simply copy passages from books and sign his name to them. Spelling and good grammar are of no concern, since the writing of French Academicians like Marrès does not concern itself with such trifles (132). Thank goodness the p­ eople of Chantepie c­ an’t see him now, Scipion shudders. He would hate for them to find out that instead of serving at the front, he was “taking it easy in Ribérou, pampered at the expense of the Circle of Joan of Arc and renouncing his Republican past” (136). Lest the reader be “disgusted” by the be­hav­ior of this “usurper” and “impostor,” the narrator reminds the reader that Scipion “is d­ oing nobody any harm” (129). Besides, as Scipion reminds Irma, who has discovered his scam, “All of the [country’s] heroes are not at the front,” echoing a skull-­stuffing cliché used by shirkers to justify their cushy “war work” far from the frontlines (137). In fact, Scipion feeds Irma yet another lie, claiming to be posing as Marrès only to foil a royalist plot to blow up the local sub-­prefecture. La Fouchardière and Bringer use Scipion’s imposture of Boris Marrès to caricature and deflate the bombast that the real-­life pundit and master skull-­stuffer Barrès represented at the time. Among the many “impassioned” lines Scipion has written to stir the enthusiasm of the Joan of Arc Circle are the following, which recall ­those in the “Kitchen ­Recipes” article and are worthy, the narrators tell us, of Boris Marrès himself: “In ­these days of trial, we gird our throbbing hearts with a ­triple armor of bronze, with which, on the day of victory, we ­will make laurel crowns for the heads

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of our triumphant sons, and a marble pedestal for the erection of their youthful glory.” Or, elsewhere, “The barbarian invader, whose incendiary tide in vain threatens to reduce to ashes the most pleasant plains of France, ­w ill find standing, like a wall of living bayonets, the generations that Joan of Arc has nourished with the heroic milk of her virgin martyr breast” (130–31). Scipion has another chance to demonstrate his powers of patriotic persuasion when the notables of Ribérou decide to hold a benefit concert to solidify the “sacred ­union” of the rival po­liti­cal factions in the town—­the Voltaire Club and the Joan of Arc Circle—­and to raise funds for the “Straw Hats for the Poilus” fund. This charity gala turns out to be nothing more than a series of tired café-concert per­for­mances complete with comic songs and monologues.49 The “noble cause” is less about providing lightweight (but completely non-­protective) headgear for “our dear ­little soldiers” than it is about landing the town’s straw-­hat manufacturer a hefty government contract (152–53). It is during the “Straw Hats for the Poilus” benefit concert that Scipion’s imposture and that of his unwanted companion Irma, disguised as Mis­ tinguett, is discovered by the one au­then­tic (if pitiful) poilu of the novel, the short, fat, bald line guard Joseph Boudènfle (87). Scipion and Irma cut a burlesque pair. Scipion is wearing a rented costume from the 1830s, which the townspeople take to be the official dress of the French Acad­emy. Irma is wearing a low-­cut eve­ning dress. When Joseph Boudènfle recognizes Irma on stage, the ­couple makes a frantic exit stage left. They have no idea where to go next. “­We’re headed nowhere,” Scipion tells the panicking Irma, “­we’re leaving . . . ​that’s it! . . . ​Besides, it’s pretty s­ imple, that’s all I’ve been up to since the beginning of the war: I’m buggering off! (je f . . . ​le camp). This time, I’m bringing you with me” (166). We next see Scipion and Irma as, penniless and exhausted, they stumble off a train in the village of Bedigas-­sur-­Dourge, where they are immediately taken for a ­couple of Belgian refugees, their outlandish costumes viewed by the townspeople as Belgian national dress. It w ­ ill be easy to keep up the charade ­because the residents of the village are particularly susceptible to empty spectacles and illusions. T ­ hese p­ eople are so hungry for new distractions that the authorities have petitioned to have Belgian refugees sent to the town so the townspeople can amuse themselves with parades, concerts, feast days, and other patriotic pageantry.

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The entire town has come out to greet the refugees. The pharmacist has even closed down his shop, posting a sign admonishing ­those clients “seeking a purgative” to “have patience out of patriotism” (183). The character of the pharmacist allows Bringer and La Fouchardière to import a long-­running joke from Le Canard enchaîné about the unabashed advertisements in the big Pa­r i­sian dailies for “Les Pilules Pink” (“Pilules Trink” in the novel) and other remedies for indigestion and gastric distress (160). The Ribérou pharmacist has a small arsenal of stomach remedies in his shop, the ads for which tout their ability to cure the “cramps, belching, heartburn, and flatulence” that make “martyrs” out of some ­people (210–11). An inoffensive meta­phor in peacetime became obscenely insensitive and inappropriate at a time when so many of the articles in the papers described the real “martyrdom” of “fallen soldiers.” In harsh contrast to the sober, lofty discourses in the pages of the big newspapers stood the basest commercial advertising for the least dignified of all physical ailments. For Le Canard’s writers, the contrast should be striking—­and offensive—to any reader with a modicum of critical spirit. It was as if at a time when soldiers w ­ ere d­ ying, all civilians could think about ­were their own bowels. The townspeople of Bedigas, meanwhile, are concerned only about partying. Every­one is decked out in party clothes, except for the young girls of the town, who are dressed all in white. The town’s bards have come in force to recite patriotic poetry, and the town band plays three allied national anthems at once, throwing in for good mea­sure the melody of the bawdy popu­lar m ­ usic hall ditty “Viens Poupoule.” A town notable reads a patriotic speech, ­whole passages of which have been recycled from a speech given six months earlier for the inauguration of the town’s bathroom. With his “marvelous imagination,” Scipion immediately “gets into the part” of the hapless wandering refugee, giving the most “original” and “detailed” description of German atrocities in Belgium—­details lifted directly from the Alouette de Ribérou (189–90). He goes on to tell tall tales of his exploits in Liège—­where he claims to have single-­handedly kept the entire German army at bay for three days. He is so moved by the lies he is telling that his emotions get the better of him, and his l­ ittle speech is choked off in a “sob” (190). Once again Scipion’s imposture is proven to be no dif­fer­ent from that of the ­people around him. The townspeople’s concern for Belgian refugees is a total sham. While they fight over who w ­ ill extend the most hospitality to

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Scipion and Irma, the fake Belgians who seem so distinguished in their national costumes, they make life miserable for the real Belgian refugees who have been sent to their town for hospitality. An old Belgian c­ ouple who arrived on the same train as Scipion and Irma d­ oesn’t fit the tragic picture the sensation-­seeking residents of Bedigas-­sur-­Dourge have formed in their minds of “poor Belgians” (197). The real Belgians are “not impressive” ­because they are so prosaic and “ordinary” in appearance, so common, so “similar to every­body ­else” (196, 194, 241). The c­ ouple’s refugee status should be obvious to every­one, but the townspeople treat them like “fake Belgians,” and the police constantly ask them to authenticate themselves by producing papers they c­ an’t possibly have on their person given the haste with which they ­were forced to leave their village (204). Throughout the episode, the townspeople are shown willfully mistaking fiction for fact and fact for fiction. The novel ends when, to get himself out of yet another scrape, Scipion steals the clothes of a military doctor. He thinks he has fi­nally found the perfect hideout for the rest of the war: traveling the country inspecting Red Cross auxiliary hospitals. He eats well, rides in a fancy car, and is treated everywhere he goes with the deference due to an officer. Circumstances conspire, however, to send Scipion right back to his starting point when his car goes off the road near Chantepie. ­Here he discovers that nothing has changed since his departure at the beginning of the war. The same p­ eople are sitting on the same chairs on the same rival café terraces. “That’s what war is,” the narrator explains, “some ­people travel while o­ thers remain seated” (286–87). Actually, one ­thing has changed during the war. Scipion’s legend as a war hero has grown. His fake past has not been exposed. Instead, it has inspired a ­whole series of articles in the local newspaper, the Montélimar Beacon. Scipion has benefited from the dubious journalistic practices of the paper’s editor-­in-­chief, who has established a regular column called “Our Compatriots ­under Fire.” Having no doubt that Scipion would distinguish himself as a hero on the battlefield, the editor has taken the liberty of inventing a ­whole series of exploits and publishing t­ hese fake “dispatches” in the paper. Meanwhile, Scipion’s imposture is doubly safe from discovery, since the townspeople have already found an embusqué to ostracize. Placide Rascasse has been deemed unfit for active ser­vice, but that d­ oesn’t stop the townspeople from labeling him an embusqué and a pessimist and banning him from the local cafés. When Joseph Boudènfle, the only real soldier in the novel, attempts

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to out Scipion as a shirker, nobody believes him. They have read of Scipion’s exploits in the papers, and the papers d­ on’t lie. It is, therefore, to the cheers of “Long Live Major Pégoulade” that Scipion marches triumphantly through Chantepie, where he can retire in all dignity. He d­ oesn’t even have to hide his glass eye anymore. Every­one believes he has received this and other “glorious injuries” on the battlefields of Champagne (299). And so the novel closes with Scipion Pégoulade employed once more by the Montélimar Beacon, serving as the official and authoritative voice of the war, signing his new column of military commentary u­ nder the inflated title given to him by the townspeople: General P. And, the narrators insist in the novel’s closing line, the “nonsense” he writes is no more egregious than what is being published everywhere e­ lse (300). Scipion’s comic predicaments allow La Fouchardière and Bringer to comment on the hollowness of heroism and honor as they are traditionally defined. They expose the hy­poc­risy of the mass press that peddles false heroism and of civilians who, out of naïveté or bad faith, choose to believe fake stories of fake heroism. Along the way, La Fouchardière and Bringer parody and comment upon the conventions of the mass press, including ­those of the serial novel. To do so, the authors continuously break the narrative frame with comments like “this might surprise our readers,” or “We owe them an explanation” (143). With feigned earnestness, they offer unnecessary signposts and explanations, having perfectly telegraphed the plot and removed any possibility for mystery or suspense. At other times, they make fun of their own interventions, acknowledging the uselessness of such prompts, since they pride themselves on “writing t­ oday for intelligent ­people,” not “ordinary readers” (78). The reader is invited to blush at his or her own adherence to the sloppy conventions of adventure and crime fiction. What is more, readers are encouraged to identify with Scipion and to share the same indulgence with his weaknesses as the authors. “Put yourself in his shoes,” they admonish the reader, “You would have done the same ­thing as Scipion,” even—or especially—­when what Scipion has just done is “un peu canaille” or “a bit shady” (89, 140).

Extraordinary Ordinariness and Involuntary Heroism

La Fouchardière’s was a voice of irreverence, dissidence, and in­de­pen­dence critiquing war culture from within the very institutions and media that prop-

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agated it. In depicting the misadventures of a Quixotic, unheroic, and unremarkable protagonist, La Fouchardière put in motion and showcased on a narrative level the same kinds of stark contrasts being developed in the oppositional press in general. ­These contrasts ­were between extraordinary world events and ordinary ­human beings, between inflated, poetic language and the mundane material realities that language was used to camouflage. Scipion’s “real” heroism—­that illustrated in the many tight spots he is shown wiggling his way out of—is an unstable and often undignified series of impostures, improvisations, and serendipitous sparks of imagination. This is the involuntary heroism of the bricoleur or débrouillard, figures with whom readers are invited to identify as they reject the “fake” heroism engineered out of ­whole cloth by the modern mainstream media. Scipion’s heroism is nothing more than a series of misunderstandings. But in taking advantage of the climate of hy­poc­risy and illusions around him, he manages to rewrite his inglorious life story—­however exhausting that proves to be. La Fouchardière’s depiction of the elevation of a fake shirker to the level of fake hero shows up the willful self-­delusion of a society seduced by sensational stories and beautiful abstractions. Scipion Pégoulade is a serial novel that makes fun of the serial novel, an adventure story that makes fun of adventure stories, and a journalist’s harsh indictment of journalists and war­time journalism. Scipion Pégoulade was, however, just one part of La Fouchardière’s prodigious war­time production. He used his unique position as star columnist of Le Canard enchaîné and his growing popularity as one of the ­great war­ time “unstuffers” of skulls to bring the poilu himself out of the ethereal spheres of high diction and beautiful abstractions—­“felicitous formulas” and “superb flights of lyricism”—­and down to the level of everyday speech and earthy details.50 Like many soldier-­writers working at the same time, this civilian helped to codify a new kind of soldier heroism—­one that was popu­lar, not aristocratic, banal, not extraordinary. To do so, he turned to a character he had developed before the war in a dime novel called Le Crime du Bouif (The Cobbler’s Crime).51 La Fouchar­ dière’s favorite character, Alfred Bicard, marched off to war in two more dime novels published during the war, Bicard dit le Bouif: Poilu de deuxième classe (Private Bicard: aka the Cobbler, 1917) and Le Bouif tient (The Cobbler Hangs On, 1918).52 In t­ hese stories, Bicard interacts with an unnamed friend and interlocutor identifiable from illustrations as a fictionalized version of La Fouchardière himself. This same strategy—­the pairing of a fictionalized La

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Fouchardière as straight man with Alfred Bicard as funny man—­was ­exploited to comic effect in the numerous semi-­editorial columns starring Bicard that appeared in Le Canard enchaîné and l­ater in L’Heure from 1916 ­until well into the interwar period. ­These columns, ­under the heading “Les Propos du Bouif” (The Cobbler’s Ramblings or Cobbler Talk) showcased Alfred Bicard’s stubborn and often ill-­informed argumentativeness and linguistic inventiveness, balanced by La Fouchardière’s eloquence and even temper. In one such article, La Fouchardière returned to one of his favorite gimmicks (and favorite punching bags), staging an encounter in the Chamber of Deputies between the ­imagined Deputy Bicard and Boris Marrès, which culminates in Bicard’s insulting the lampooned Maurice Barrès in the following signature terms: “Ta gueule, ch, crème d’andouille!” “Shut your trap, ch, cream of sausage” puts a Bicardian twist on the common insult espèce d’andouille, meaning “you dummy” or “you bastard.”53 La Fouchardière’s ­Great War characters, like La Fouchardière himself, occupied the position of dissenters within the dominant culture of the First World War. In his depiction of the comic misadventures of characters like the lovable shirker Scipion Pégoulade or the henpecked, alcoholic infantryman Alfred Bicard, La Fouchardière placed emphasis on a ­will to survive that was ­imagined as both distinctly French and universally applicable in the modern age. As we ­will see, many of the themes developed in La Fouchar­ dière’s fiction appear in a very dif­fer­ent national context in Jaroslav Hašek’s ­great picaresque novel The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War (1921–1923) as well as in the film comedies of Charlie Chaplin, which made their way to France during the ­Great War.

4. The Comedy of In­de­pen­dence The “Man on the Street” Goes Off to War The Cobbler exists in life as in lit­er­a­ture, and . . . ​if you pay attention, you’ll find him on e­ very street corner. —­Georges de la Fouchardière, “Présentation du Bouif,” Le Canard enchaîné (1921) ­Today you can meet in the streets of Prague a shabbily dressed man who is not even himself aware of his significance in the history of the ­great new era. —­Jaroslav Hašek, “Preface,” The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War (1921–1923)

One of the fundamental premises La Fouchardière set out to discredit was that of the value of re­spect—­re­spect for tradition, for convention, for authority, and for pathologies that disguise themselves as virtues. La Fouchardière’s war­time characters are comic heroes—­intellectual “bohemians” operating at the margins of respectable society and living by their own rules.1 “What characterizes the individual,” La Fouchardière wrote a few years a­ fter the war, “is above all a complete lack of any sense of re­spect, a necessary contempt for propriety and social conventions.” In this article published in 1921, La Fouchardière expressed explic­itly what his fictional characters had demonstrated implicitly during the war. “Res­pect . . . ​Res­pect, France nearly died from re­spect.” Worse, France had nearly died from re­spect for ­things that ­weren’t even truly respectable. “We re­spect a ton of t­ hings [just] b­ ecause they shine,” La Fouchardière warned, “and ­because they are very old and very moth-­eaten.”2 “We prostrate ourselves before idols,” he continued, but “all we’d need to do is to look them in the face and lift our noses to start laughing 91

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[at them].” Instead of bowing down to portraits of “royal brutes,” p­ eople now bowed down before the high abstractions of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” One would do better to approach life in a more down-­to-­earth manner, relying on instinct and common sense and trusting in one’s unique and idiosyncratic way of getting through life. This is what La Fouchar­ dière’s most famous fictional character, Alfred Bicard, had always done. Irreverence, disrespect, and individualism all connoted a keen critical spirit and a stance of intellectual in­de­pen­dence, characteristics that many writers aggressively posited as distinctly French. Even when no mention was made of ste­reo­typical Germanic attributes—­the boche as a discipline-­loving, militarized brute—­such ste­reo­types ­were a largely consensual set of assumptions shared and disseminated throughout war culture. ­These implicitly understood negative German attributes shored up, by opposition, ­those positive character traits, values, and be­hav­iors ­imagined as French. Disobedience and disrespect became celebrated national character traits when compared to the supposed blind obedience of Germans to hierarchy and authority. An attitude of in­de­pen­dence was especially impor­tant for imagining the French soldier. To depict the French soldier as a grousing, work-­evading trickster was to suggest that he was impervious to regimentation, mechanization, and military brainwashing. It was to suggest that army discipline was no threat to f­ ree thinking (even obtuse, willfully ignorant, or flawed thinking like Bicard’s) and that in bending to the needs of the community, the citizen-­soldier could not be forced to abdicate his unique personality. A person’s character could resonate with national character without being totally subsumed within it in some one-­size-­fits-­all kind of way. Feelings of belonging to the nation, La Fouchardière’s characters demonstrated, could exist outside the dominant discourses sanctioned by the mainstream media. La Fouch’ and o­ thers sought to demonstrate—by what­ever means necessary, including comic means—­that one could remain true to the ideals and values of the French Revolution without poeticizing ­those ideals or removing them from the sphere of the everyday and the everyman. ­These values rang as more true when expressed through be­hav­iors and attitudes instead of abstractions. By the same token, the ­whole concept of heroism became more meaningful when it was ­imagined through the ­actual kinds of experiences in which ­people w ­ ere asked to be heroic. What seemed like heroic acts performed in combat might actually be the result of sheer dumb luck, performed by unheroic ­people thinking unhe-

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roic thoughts and focused on nothing but saving their own skin. Such a clear-­ eyed assessment of the dynamics at play in battlefield actions did not diminish the dignity of the soldier. On the contrary, it showed that the war could be won by ordinary ­people whose primary concern was with staying alive.

The Man on the Street: Picaros from Paris to Prague

La Fouchardière’s public persona and favorite fictional character pres­ent striking parallels with t­hose of another oppositional journalist, humorist, and novelist working in a radically dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal and cultural context during the First World War. Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923) was the author of one of the finest examples of G ­ reat War picaresque lit­er­a­t ure: The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War. La Fouchardière was older than Hašek, but their prewar trajectories nevertheless pres­ent impor­tant similarities. Both men began their ­careers as journalists. Each developed a prewar reputation as a prankster and hoaxer. Each was said to have a compulsion for making up stories for the newspapers and passing them off as factual.3 The two journalists exhibited remarkably similar anarchist sensibilities and be­hav­iors, although Hašek engaged far more actively and directly than La Fouchardière in politics. Both writers w ­ ere staunchly antimilitarist and anticlerical. Both came of professional age during a flourishing across Eu­rope of the mass press and—­more to the point—­t he satirical press, an outlet for prewar antimilitarist satire. Hašek was an avid reader of Simplicissimus (launched in 1896),4 a German satirical magazine much like the humor magazines being developed in France at the same time. It is surely no coincidence that German satirists would take the title of their magazine from the greatest picaresque novel in the German tradition or that in France, Augustin-­ Alexandre Dumont would name his 1879 satirical magazine Gil Blas ­after France’s g­ reat eighteenth-­century picaro. ­These are magazines that La Fouch’ and Hašek would have been familiar with and whose irreverent tone and attitude they would display in their own works. Fi­nally, both writers are said to have frequented public spaces—­Parisian cafés in the case of La Fouch’ and Prague pubs in the case of Hašek—to soak in and ­later reproduce in their writings the atmosphere, popu­lar speech, conversations, stories, and songs of the working-­class p­ eople who frequented ­these spaces.5 Most impor­tant for the pres­ent study, in 1911 both writers produced a colorful, working-­class, “man on the street” character whom they then

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deci­ded to send off to war in a series of comic misadventures first published in 1917 and continuing ­after the war.6 Private Alfred Bicard’s adventures in the war ­were related in two dime novels published in Paris in 1917 and 1918, and Private Joseph Švejk’s ­were first published in Kiev in 1917 as The Good Soldier Švejk in Captivity.7 Interestingly enough, in ­these early stories, Švejk is by profession a cobbler, the same line of work from which La Fouchar­ dière’s Bicard derives his nickname, Le Bouif.8 Both writers’ central characters—­A lfred Bicard and Joseph Švejk—­ were i­magined by their respective illustrators as having similar physical characteristics. The French illustrator Hautot’s images of Alfred Bicard even bear a striking resemblance to the images of the Good Soldier Švejk l­ater produced by Joseph Lada.9 Both characters are depicted as short, stocky, balding, m ­ iddle-­aged fellows with wide eyes, double chins, rounded f­aces and noses, and innocent, contented smiles—­Bicard’s framed by a shaggy mustache, and Švejk’s by a five-­o’clock shadow. In both cases, few textual indications about the characters’ physical appearance are given, although Hašek insists upon Švejk’s penetrating, “good-­natured,” “blue eyes” and his “gaze of the pure and innocent lamb,”10 and La Fouchardière upon Bicard’s “blue eyes” that express “total candor” and “utter sincerity.”11 Both characters are described as having holes in their trousers as civilians and ill-­fitting uniforms as soldiers.12 ­There is reason to believe that La Fouchardière might have been known to readers outside of France. His 1909 novel La Machine à galoper was said to have been plagiarized and published in Germany before the war. 13 Could Hašek have known about La Fouchardière?14 Could he have taken some of the French writer’s raw material and crafted it into the masterpiece that is The Good Soldier Švejk? As tempting as this hypothesis is, it is prob­ably unlikely. A more plausible explanation for the similarities between La Fouchardière’s approach and Hašek’s lies in a common Eu­ro­pean cultural heritage. Both Bicard and Švejk combine the ribaldry and earthy humor of Rabelais’ Panurge, the mock-­heroics of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the practicality of Sancho Panza, and the verbal inventiveness of Dickens’ Sam Weller from the peripatetic, if not strictly speaking picaresque, Pickwick Papers. ­These are all sources that La Fouchardière openly acknowledged as influential, and they are references that scholars turn to repeatedly in accounting for the remarkable character that is the Good Soldier Švejk.15

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Both characters are of low social status and dubious moral fiber. Bicard is a chronic gambler and drunk who cheats at cards. The dog broker Švejk is a con man and camouflage artist who takes “mongrel monstrosities” off the street and sells them as purebred.16 In Scipion, Bicard, and Švejk, low status and petty amorality are flaunted and turned to authenticity in the face of so many respected charlatans, particularly t­ hose in positions of authority. La Fouchardière and Hašek satirize the same social types, chief among them politicians, journalists, clergymen, military officers, and the police.17 Bicard and Švejk are both hedonistic, childlike, rogu­ish, and sometimes cowardly characters whose vibrant language recalls that of certain of P. G. Wode­house’s characters, described by Barbara Bowen as “demolish[ing] the conventional world around them, and the conventional language used in that world.”18 What is “demolished” by Bicard and Švejk is the myth of conventional heroism and the elevated, abstracted language of traditional, militarist patriotism. The “virtue” that readers appreciated the most in Le Bouif, La Fouchardière insisted, was “irreverence, s­ ister of in­de­pen­dence and ­daughter of a generous nature.”19 La Fouchardière’s work provides us with a valuable glimpse into the picaresque spirit of the times and reminds us of the ubiquity—­ across a variety of genres and media but also cultures—of this worldview reborn during the First World War and dominating the twentieth c­ entury.

Alfred Bicard: Babbling Our Way to Victory

In Le Crime du Bouif (The Cobbler’s Crime, 1911), La Fouchardière introduced the most unlikely of sleuths. We first see Alfred Bicard when he is about to stumble upon a dead body at his favorite haunt, the racetracks. At first glance, ­little about Bicard is remarkable. A “man about twenty-­five to forty years old,” Bicard could be any old Joe. An examination of his wardrobe tells a dif­ fer­ent tale: “the ends of his shoes, yawning like the jaws of an alligator, made vis­i­ble two socks that w ­ ere themselves not hermetically sealed; and through the holes in his faded green pants, an observer could deduce an absence of underwear.”20 The deposition Bicard gives at the police station enables La Fouchar­ dière to establish Le Bouif’s état civil (social status) through his humorous, ­because not-­so-­helpful, interaction with the authorities. We witness what ­will be Bicard’s signature traits. He demonstrates an implacable re­sis­tance to

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authority, coupled with verbal and gestural tics that reveal a desire to maintain his sense of dignity—­through wit, irreverence, and insults—­even when he finds himself in the most undignified of situations. The deposition scene forces Bicard to reveal a series of embarrassing details about his status in society. Bicard is obviously not a cobbler, as his nickname suggests. “Uh, I’ve done a ­little of every­thing,” Bicard stalls for time, “I was once an elector, but now they ­don’t want to give me my card back. I was a nougat salesman at the racetracks . . . ​I was in advertising . . . ​yeah, I would walk along the boulevards wearing two big boards mounted with theater posters.”21 The truth is that Bicard is a chronically unemployed, unskilled worker who has cobbled together an income d­ oing odd jobs and selling tips at the racetracks. Le Bouif is completely unmoved and unintimidated by outward signs of authority or decorum. As La Fouch’ put it, Le Bouif just “­doesn’t give a damn.”22 Bicard thumbs his nose at the priest at the altar with the same ­couldn’t-­care-­less attitude with which he insults the cop on the beat or, as an enlisted man, he grouses at his superior officer. He has a talent for taking ­things as they come. As a habitué of the racetracks, he is used to the twists and turns of fortune and the power of blind luck. He has no time for or­ga­ nized religion, although he does have a very personal, idiosyncratic relationship with God as the eternal bringer of misfortune. As the narrator in Private Bicard explains, Bicard’s anticlericalism, like many of the stands he takes in life, is less a deeply held convention than an “attitude”—­“the attitude of a chap who is missing the re­spect gene [la bosse du re­spect], and who shows off in front of super­natu­ral authority just as he grouses at the authority of the policeman” (59, 62). In civilian life, as in the army, Bicard conducts himself according to his own rules, which are dictated by his senses, not by common sense, by his gut and not by his head. Bicard is, however, not entirely without affectation. He loves to hold court—­with his concierge, in his beloved bistro, in the streets, at lampposts, or in the trenches—­delivering impassioned speeches to anyone who w ­ ill listen about any and ­every conceivable topic (fig. 4). He attempts to compensate for his disheveled and unheroic appearance—­his potbelly, short, stubby physique, and balding head—by using fancy vocabulary from high up on his soapbox. The oratorical stance he adopts is undermined by his outlandish malapropisms and by his constant state of inebriation. Lacking self-­awareness, never pausing to reflect, and rarely letting his listener get a

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Figure 4. Le Bouif and La Fouch’ at the bistro in Le Bouif tient (1918). Illustration by Georges Hautot. Author’s photo­graph.

word in edgewise, Bicard is oblivious to the absurdity of his ramblings and unconcerned about his verbal aggressiveness. He has managed, for example, to inspire in his concierge a “respectful terror” by his amazing ability to hold her hostage with his loquaciousness (8). Most often it is the fictional La Fouchardière whose frustration heightens the comic effect of the Bouif’s ramblings. A completely undisciplined storyteller, Bicard inserts endless asides and embarks on endless digressions, wandering off topic to touch on the most trivial of details. His speech reveals the inner workings of a mind that operates by ­free association. It is this cognitive comfort with the random and the contingent that makes Bicard so resilient (­because often oblivious) during the chaos of the war. When the war breaks out, Bicard, chronically henpecked, inebriated, unemployed, and in trou­ble with the police, abandons his beloved bistro and his antimilitarist posturing to head for the trenches. The conversion from antimilitarist to jingoistic patriot happens seemingly overnight. When we first meet up with Le Bouif he is railing against war as a racket that benefits only profiteers. Bicard is not about to risk “catching bullets in [his] anatomy” or disfigurement of his “physiolomie sympathique” (he means “physiognomy”), or “contracting rheumatisms, bronchitises, and other constitutionary infirmaries” (constitutional infirmities) just so “wooden leg makers” and “canon salesmen” can get rich (5). It’s not that Bicard ­isn’t patriotic. His patriotism is simply a bit idiosyncratic. His self-­worth and dignity are propped up by his

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feelings of superiority as a Pa­ri­sian. Bicard’s Pa­ri­sianism provides a comic critique of traditional nationalism based on hatred of the e­ nemy. He heaps scorn upon anyone born outside of his Batignolles neighborhood and has food-­derived epithets for all non-­Parisians—­allied and e­ nemy alike. In Bicardian patriotic discourse, the En­glish are “roast beefs,” the Italians “macaronis,” the Germans “sauerkrauts” and “pigs.” But Bretons, Auvergnats, and Franc-­Comptois are also considered “foreigners” and are lumped together as “patates,” meaning “potatoes” but also “chumps” (7). It ­doesn’t take long, however, for Bicard to develop a par­tic­u­lar aversion to the boches, and as his adventures pro­gress, he w ­ ill prove to be a formidable (though unwitting) force against them. At the start of the war, the Germans give enough “proof of their ‘Kultur’ for Bicard to reconsider his humanitarian and antimilitarist theories” (7). ­Here La Fouchardière references the rumored atrocities committed by the German army during its initial invasion of Belgium and France. In response to ­these acts of barbarism, Bicard begins his “patriotic work,” which takes place, not in the trenches, but in the bistro. He drinks to the destruction, first of the German Kaiser, then of the Austrian Emperor, then of the Zeppelins, then of all the members of the German and Austrian armies in order of descending rank, taking a drink for each grade in the hierarchy. He ends the eve­ning in the local jail, arrested for public intoxication. H ­ ere he overhears a group of German spies plotting to bomb the Batignolles tunnel and destroy a military supply train. Upon release the following morning, Bicard heads to the police station to denounce the spies, only to find that the line is far too long; Paris is overcome with spy fever. So Bicard decides to investigate on his own, setting off a series of plot twists worthy, Le Bouif believes, of famed serial novelist Michel Zévaco (16). The spy episode culminates in Bicard’s being apprehended by the police and mistaken, b­ ecause of an earlier identity theft, for one of the spies he was out to capture. The spy ringleader, Adolphe, who had been posing as a waiter at Bicard’s favorite watering hole, finds that fortune takes a turn in Bicard’s ­favor. “Adolphe suddenly understood,” the narrator tells us, “that ­things w ­ ere ­going to work themselves out (se débrouiller) for the Cobbler and get all in a tangle (s’embrouiller) for himself” (18). This is no thanks to Bicard himself, who is “completely out of it” (abruti) and ­can’t think of a word to offer in his own defense (18). It is the arrival of Bicard’s nemesis, the police officer Balloche, who knows Bicard all too well from having thrown him in jail for public

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drunkenness many times, that exonerates Le Bouif. In the end, it is Bicard’s rec­ord with the police that saves him, not his own wits, which are, we have seen, not so quick. By the time Bicard fi­nally makes it to his regimental depot, he has acquired a reputation for being “brave.” The men have heard about his success in c­ ounter-­espionage and expect more “glorious feats” from him (19). “An occasion,” the narrator tells us, is “not slow to pres­ent itself,” as stifling heat and poor sanitary conditions soon oblige Bicard’s commanding officer to order his men to take daily baths in a nearby river. When volunteer lifeguards are sought, Bicard enthusiastically volunteers. The narrator sets up the irony of this “courageous” act by reiterating a ­running joke about how the alcohol-­ loving Bouif ­doesn’t like w ­ ater. “Le Bouif had a profound horror of w ­ ater for internal use,” the narrator reminds us, but “he was scared stiff when it came to its external use.” The “idea of a cold bath” petrifies him (19). This time, the “observant” Bicard has his wits about him (19). Experience having taught him that lifeguards spend most of their time out of the ­water, not in it, he volunteers in full confidence that this cushy post w ­ ill keep him sitting pretty (and dry) on the riverbank. He adopts the role with gusto, pretending to be an expert lifeguard and swim coach, “encouraging his [pupils] with words and gestures,” and “sparing no bit of advice or exhortation” (19–20). As usual, Bicard’s speech is colorful and irreverent: “Bloody hell, ­don’t stick your head ­under the ­water, hey! dipshit!” Le Bouif shouts from the shore, “What a dumb ass, no r­ eally, what a dumb ass! What are you ­going to do if you have to swim across the Rhine to Bocheland?” “­Great,” he scoffs, “now he’s buggered off u­ nder the ­water! . . .” (20). Bicard has a ­great week of lifeguard duty, mocking and insulting his pupils for their poor swimming from the comfort and safety of land. Every­ one seems happy with the job Bicard is ­doing, especially the soldiers who bribe him with apéritifs to go easy on them. Bicard’s luck changes when a “wise guy” comes up b­ ehind him one day and shoves him into the river. Since “Le Bouif lacks the most elementary knowledge of the science he is teaching,” he nearly drowns and has to be hauled out of the ­water by one of his pupils (20). But the facts of the rescue get all mixed up. The next day’s regimental report cites Bicard for bravery for “having saved, at the risk of his own life, one of his comrades who was drowning” (20). Rather than correct the ­mistake, Bicard takes the honor as a well-­earned “homage.” ­After all, if his pupil was able to pull him out of the w ­ ater, he reasons, he, Bicard, should get the credit. He is

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the one who, as far as appearances go, had taught the pupil to swim in the first place. In the wake of his citation for bravery, Bicard asks to be sent to the front, not ­because he is ­eager to fight, but b­ ecause he is terrified of the ­water and d­ oesn’t want to risk playing lifeguard anymore. His captain accepts his request, shaking his hand and congratulating him in all sincerity, saying, “I know you are a brave man” (21).

Pathos and Pantomime

Once at the front, Bicard makes friends with his squad mates and even helps hatch a scheme to comfort a comrade who has le cafard (trench depression) ­because he has gone weeks without a letter from his wife. First Bicard tries to reason with Aurioux, the depressed soldier. Unself-­consciously parroting civilian clichés from the mass press, Bicard argues that soldiers “­don’t have the right to have the blues in the trenches.” That may be OK in civilian life, but ­here in the trenches, he insists, “­you’re supposed to have fun!” (26). ­There is no need for long ­faces, Bicard asserts. The men have every­thing they could possibly need. It’s “la vie de château” (a life of luxury) at the front. Combining worn-­out clichés about the healthful benefits of “the open-­air life” with his own idiosyncratic, working-­class take on the paradoxical freedoms of military life, Bicard explains that at the front, “­you’re fed and lodged for ­free. No landlord, no concierge, no boss, no wife, kids, or cops to poison your existence” (25). What is more, the always intellectually curious Bicard insists, at the front you meet all kinds of p­ eople and pick up tricks from them. Bicard offers to teach Aurioux to cheat at cards, for example, but his efforts are futile. Aurioux suffers from le cafard, that affliction of all “orphaned and deprived” soldiers who ­aren’t receiving letters from home (22). ­Here La Fouchar­ dière touches on a recurring theme in G ­ reat War narratives, one that ­will be treated with pathos and humor by Charlie Chaplin in the famous letter-­reading scene in Shoulder Arms (1918). In this scene, Charlie, who has received no letters of his own, reads over a comrade’s shoulder, reacting to ­every piece of news from “home.” We read the contents of the letter through the shifting facial expressions of Charlot—­from smiles to frowns to tears—as his face moves from left to right with each new line. Unlike the lonely but plucky ­Little Tramp, the soldier in La Fouchardière’s tale has given himself over to despair. At a loss for how to help the desperate Aurioux, Bicard turns to his unlikely

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trench buddy, the always resourceful (and exquisitely lazy) “millionaire” known only as “the baron.” The baron suggests they imitate Cyrano and write a love letter for the homesick soldier. When they ­can’t agree about what to write, Bicard decides it would be simpler to borrow a letter from another poilu whose wife has the same name as Aurioux’s. He first offers one of his own letters, but then realizes his m ­ istake. Not only is his wife’s name Eugénie, not Marie, but the content of his letters w ­ ill surely cheer no one up. The henpecked Bicard explains that his wife uses her letters to “bawl him out” (28). The Baron-­Bouif odd c­ ouple fi­nally finds an appropriate letter for Aurioux, but his renewed good cheer is short lived. Aurioux is killed that night, his body lying exposed in no-man’s-land. ­Here we see Bicard’s one true act of bravery and his softer side. Le Bouif sheds his one tear of the war a­ fter crawling out of the trench to reclaim the borrowed letter, only to find it still clutched in the hands of the dead soldier. The baron ­later confirms having seen that night “a single tear” roll down Le Bouif ’s plump cheek and dis­appear into “his bushy red mustache” (29). ­There are rare moments, like the tear down the cheek moment, when Le Bouif is uncharacteristically s­ ilent. Most of the time this silence is turned to comic effect. The pantomime, gags, and comic business of s­ ilent film comedy make their way into La Fouchardière’s repertoire. Private Bicard contains a scene, for example, in which we see Bicard, self-­conscious about his shabby uniform, feeling out of place in a fancy restaurant. This ­doesn’t stop him from making eyes at an elegant lady at the ­table beside him, expressing “by a g­ reat variety of facial expressions the admiration that the lady’s charms inspired in him and addressing to her dining companion, through a comical expression, his most distinguished congratulations.” Le Bouif ’s verbal idiosyncrasies held g­ reat potential for translation into visual gags. It is no won­der that the Bouif franchise made its way onto the big screen in the 1920s. Richard Abel points to the interest shown in this character who—­like Max (Linder) and Charlot (Chaplin)—­could appeal to French audiences, with their insatiable appetite for s­ ilent comedy.23

War Heroism and French Honor

When next we see Le Bouif, he is “glorieusement assis” (gloriously seated) on his bed in a military hospital b­ ehind the lines (29). His wife is preparing

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him a hot toddy, and his son is picking his nose while “contemplating” his war-­wounded f­ ather. Bicard greets La Fouchardière by saying, “You see, they still h­ aven’t had my hide this time” (29). He continues, oblivious to the absurdity of his statement, “I would have been mad at myself my ­whole life if I had died from such a small ­thing” (29). When asked where and how he had been wounded, Le Bouif is at first offended that the facts are not common knowledge and complains that ­there had been no account of his injury in the papers. The always literal-­minded Bouif then rears up on one side to show his visitor “where” his wound had taken place—in the “coccygeal region” or tailbone. Bicard insists that if he survived his brush with death, “heroically receiv[ing] a bullet in the coccygeal vertebrae,” or rear end, it was thanks to good bone structure and good manners (29). He explains that having received in rapid succession three pairs of underwear knitted by ­women from the home front, he thought it the polite ­thing to do to honor each ­woman by wearing her knitted creation. Since ­there w ­ ere three ­women to honor and three pairs of underpants, he ended up wearing all three pairs at the same time, giving him the appearance and padding of Bibendum (the Michelin Man). This thick layer of protection slowed the German bullet that found its way into Bicard’s backside. This act of politeness was only normal, Bicard insists, catching his son’s attention as he delivers a “lesson of high moral significance” (30). If a friend offered him four drinks at the bistro, he would drink ­those one right ­after the other, too. Le Bouif ’s pride and dignity are not the least bit diminished by the particulars of his war wound. Indeed, he is ­eager to relate the fact that the army major treating him had congratulated him on the extraordinary hardness of his tailbone. He is completely unconcerned that it was his hindquarters, and not his heroism, that gave him his “glorious wound” and saved his precious hide (29, 47). 24 Madame Bicard chimes in that even if Bicard ­wasn’t cited in the papers for his heroic wound to the backside, he did make it into the dispatches for another act of bravery. As she scans the newspaper page looking for the citation about Bicard, she lands first on a patriotic piece written, Bicard tells us, by “an academician” (30). La Fouchardière uses this newspaper reading scene to parody press bombast. “We gird our palpitating hearts with thrice forged bronze,” Madame Bicard reads aloud, “with which we w ­ ill make laurel crowns for our triumphant sons and a marble pedestal for the monument erected to their glory” (30). We’ve seen this article before.

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At first reading, the article about Bicard is no less bombastic than the academician’s. “Bicard, private, second class,” the article reads, “advanced on an e­ nemy trench and singlehandedly captured seventeen prisoners” (30). Surely only a superhero could pull off such a glorious military feat. Bicard recounts the backstory to this dispatch in his unique narratorial style. One day in the trenches, with German soldiers stationed within earshot, our “hero” had been bored and edgy. He asked his Alsatian lance corporal, a cook in civilian life, to teach him some insults in German. With the written list of insults in hand, Bicard climbed out of the trench and began to “engueuler les Boches dans leur langue matricule”: to “bawl out the Boches in their ­mother tongue” (31). The substitution of matricule, or regimental number, for maternelle, or m ­ other, is just one of hundreds of examples of Bicard’s approximate command of vocabulary. At the sound of ­these insults, the Germans left their trench and began heading ­toward Bicard, who was, himself, still advancing on ­enemy lines. When Bicard administered a Chaplinesque slap in the face to the first German he encountered, the entire squad surrendered and followed him back to French lines. And what is the explanation for this “heroic,” single-­handed capture of seventeen German soldiers? Bicard himself still ­hasn’t figured out that the “insults” he had been hurling across no-man’s-land w ­ ere actually the names of popu­lar German dishes. The soldiers had mistaken Bicard’s aggression for an invitation to dinner. Still unable to fully comprehend his m ­ istake, Bicard attributes the ­whole affair, not to his own gullibility in falling for the trick played on him by his lance corporal, but to German stupidity. This is just one example of how, although Bicard himself may not be the sharpest tack in the box, he somehow manages to muddle his way through the war, getting himself into and out of the most absurd situations, and accidentally besting the boches along the way. Le Bouif may spout clichés about German barbarity or the joys of trench life. He may turn on a dime and abandon his antimilitarist beliefs and support the war effort. But he always maintains a critical distance from the high abstractions of traditional patriotic discourse. When Bicard is back in Paris on leave, for example, he asks the narrator to take him out for an eve­ning of fun at a café-concert. The two are not prepared, however, for the sickly sweet patriotic show on offer. They suffer through a seemingly endless parade of unimaginative and sentimental military songs, all rehearsing the same tired

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tropes about d­ ying soldiers, and all sung by w ­ omen in “low-­cut dresses” and shirkers in “eve­ning suits.” The routine culminates in a variation of the Marseillaise, complete with tricolor flag. La Fouchardière takes the opportunity to deflate this kind of patriotic display and gesture t­ oward a simpler sort of patriotism. The café-concert spectacle is, the fictional La Fouchardière observes, a “doctored-up, color-­lithography deformation, a stupidly sentimental parody of the s­ imple, joyful, and mocking heroism of our valiant poilus.” Le Bouif agrees, launching into a long speech about “how he sees French honor” (47). French honor, Bicard explains, is not a song-­and-­dance routine in red, white, and blue. It’s not a series of abstractions. It’s about making do. For Le Bouif, French honor is “laughing when ­you’ve had your feet in ­water for six hours and nothing in your belly for three days.” It’s “keeping your mind on your job when y­ ou’re in the trench,” not “crying over a bouquet of violets” like the sappy soldiers on the stage. It’s “keeping moving when y­ ou’re beat up, not sitting down if you can still stand, not lying down if you can sit up.” French honor, Le Bouif continues, before being interrupted by a stage soldier making fake cannon noises, is “continuing to smoke when your pipe is empty,” and above all “clinging to life and not kicking the bucket when every­body around you says y­ ou’re done for” (48). Clearly Bicard values his own “anatomy” over any abstract sense of honor or duty and understands what the rest of society d­ oesn’t seem to get—­that true heroism is not flashy or sanctimonious. It is s­ ilent and stoic. It defies sensationalization. True heroism is about the basic h­ uman capacity for endurance. In war, the most heroic t­ hing you can do, Le Bouif suggests, is to hold on to life as the one and only “abstraction” that has any real value or meaning. It makes perfect sense, then, that the next installment in the war­time “adventures” of Bicard would be entitled simply Le Bouif tient, or “The Cobbler Holds On.” The story picks back up in the bistro, where La Fouch’ and the convalescing Bicard are discussing the recent trend of civilians using poilu slang. La Fouch’ has picked up a few slang terms in “the serial novels” and in “trench stories published in the newspapers” (5). Le Bouif responds with a pastiche of how academicians, including, of course, Maurice Barrès, ­will soon be writing if the trend continues. We next learn, from a series of letters sent from Bicard to his wife, about the five-­month hiatus from the war Bicard and his nurse Boulot had taken ­after his evacuation from the front lines. Like Josef Švejk a­ fter them, Bicard

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and Boulot board a series of trains that take them away from their intended destination, in this case a coastal military hospital located in the “station vulnéraire” (he means balnéaire) of Saint-­Aubin (45). 25 ­After an initial missed connection, the men find themselves zigzagging across the country. Along the way they lose all interest in trying to find the right train and give themselves over to the joys of travel, exploring ­every train station they pass through, particularly its lavatories, bars, and vending machines. With Bicard, bodily preoccupations and the calls of the lower ­orders trump just about every­thing ­else, except gambling, of course. Bicard gains confidence with experience, a sentiment he conveys to Eugénie with his characteristic word-­play, this time in a rhymed couplet: “Depuis le temps que je roule,” he writes, “je commence à être un peu à la coule” (Since I’ve been riding the rails, I’ve gotten to know the tricks of the trade) (44). For one t­ hing, Bicard and Boulot have discovered a clever trick of the hobo trade: an act of Le Système D that allows them to have train compartments all to themselves. Taking off their smelly shoes to repel the other passengers, they keep the ­others away by scratching themselves and complaining of scabies (44). Technically Bicard and Boulot are AWOL. But their gesture can hardly be interpreted as an act of defiance or an intention to desert. They are not taking a heroic stand against the war, but merely having a good time. Bicard and Boulot give up on the idea of reaching Saint-­Aubin before the end of the war, and although technically Bicard is still convalescing from his wound to the rear end, he has no trou­ble sitting for hours on trains. What follows are a series of comic episodes worthy of Scipion Pégoulade, each based on cases of miscommunication, mistaken identity, or mutual misunderstanding. As Allen Douglas points out, Bicard is La Fouchardière’s “working-­ class alter ego.”26 We see him through La Fouchardière’s eyes and, occasionally, through ­those of other characters he encounters. La Fouchardière seems to be slightly off balance where Bicard is concerned, and the reader shares this inability to determine if Bicard is merely ignorant or a total idiot. We see one pos­si­ble reaction to this inscrutable character in a scene in which a complete stranger encounters Le Bouif and is convinced he is a total nut. When Bicard fi­nally makes it to the hospital by the coast, he is the only patient on the premises. To occupy his time, he seeks employment at the seaside resort. He explains in all earnestness to La Fouch’ that he was hired as maître d’ in the resort’s restaurant b­ ecause they needed someone to “watch

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the guests eat” (52). When an army health inspector eats at the restaurant, he ­can’t help but notice, and puzzle over, Bicard. The inspector approaches Bicard’s boss and comments “You have t­ here a maître d’ who is not normal” (55–56). Bicard takes this as a compliment, when in fact the inspector is concerned that Bicard might be mentally deficient or unstable. The next day, the inspector is very upset to find that Bicard is not in his hospital bed. Bicard’s attempt to put him at ease only confirms the inspector’s suspicions about Bicard’s sanity. “And I approached the four-­stripe with an excessively jovial expression” (56). The inspector takes Bicard’s beaming expression as a sign of lunacy and determines that the sea air is not working. Bicard finds himself transferred to a convalescent hospital in a spa town in the mountains. The inspector hopes that by taking the ­waters, Bicard ­will come to his senses. The presence of civilian patients in this spa town gives La Fouchardière the perfect opportunity to crack one of the scatological jokes in his repertoire and to make fun of the mass press at the same time. When Bicard sees a fellow patient reading a newspaper, he asks the man if ­there is any news. The man responds in what could be taken as a commentary on the state of an allied offensive. “Oh, it’s hard, it’s hard. Well, let’s hope we make it [through]” (58). The next day, the man is reading the papers again. Bicard asks him for an update on the attack. “Oh, it went very well. This time, we did it . . .” With “energy” and “perseverance,” the man implies, victory is pos­si­ble (58). The punch line, of course, is that the man is not talking about success at the front, but success on the toilet. He has been taking the ­waters “at both ends” in an effort to overcome constipation (58). 27

Rabelaisian Humor and the Destruction of Convention

In Scipion Pégoulade, La Fouchardière had used scatological humor to deflate patriotic rhe­toric, having the town pharmacist ask his clients to wait, out of patriotism, for their purgatives. He l­ater gave Bicard a “glorious” wound to the backside. Like La Fouchardière, Jaroslav Hašek employs earthy, ribald humor to recalibrate readers’ attention, bringing it down from the abstract language of bourrage de crâne to the often-­undignified realities of the h­ uman body. Comic characters like Scipion, Bicard, and Švejk work to bring back into view the very t­ hing that official languages of heroism are attempting to hide: the centrality of undignified, vulnerable h­ uman bodies to the real­ity of war. They are attempting to reassert the primacy of m ­ atter over ideas. In a

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world in which p­ eople have so cynically manipulated, cheapened, and corrupted the words upon which we rely to express our most sincere values and beliefs, ­these characters irreverently, though at times perhaps unwittingly, puncture any pretense at seriousness or solemnity. In their very absurdity, ­these characters’ volubility and linguistic vitality still manage to ring as more true than the death-­dealing lies spouted all around them. This thematics of the hollowness of clichés and timeworn phraseology is nowhere more brilliantly developed than in the moments in The Good Soldier Švejk when Švejk strips from the language of heroism the decorum and seriousness of its euphemisms. In the opening chapters of The Good Soldier Švejk, Hašek has his man on the street put a burlesque scatological spin on war zeal. Švejk is brought before a medical inspection board and accused of being a “malingerer.” The inspector has a special punishment for men he suspects of shirking their combat duties. He gives them “a handsome dose” of what­ever the doctor on duty has prescribed as needed to get them fit for ser­vice. In Švejk’s case, this means an enema. Švejk d­ oesn’t complain or try to get out of his treatment. He “[bears] himself with steadfastness,” admonishing the rough nurse in charge of the procedure, “­Don’t spare me. . . . ​Remember your oath. . . . ​Try hard to think that Austria rests on ­these enemas and victory is ours” (69). ­Later, a­ fter Se­nior Chaplain Ibl delivers “a highly inspired address” to the men during a drumhead mass, Švejk expresses his contented approval of the “moving speech” (447). “I love it when p­ eople drivel utter bunkum,” he remarks m ­ atter-­of-­factly, citing “marvelous” images from the speech, such as “the last breath of the d­ ying,” “the groans of the wounded,” and “the wailing of the population” (448). ­Here he echoes an earlier commentary he had made while he was still in the ser­vice of the drunken and debauched chaplain and spiritual con artist Otto Katz. 28 In response to a surly corporal’s accusation that Švejk was a shirker who should be sent to the front and “driven for all [he’s] worth on to bayonets over barbed wire, mines, and mortars,” the good-­humored Švejk had replied: “I think that it’s splendid to get oneself run through with a bayonet, . . . ​and also that it’s not bad to get a bullet in the stomach. It’s even grander when y­ ou’re torn to pieces by a shell and you see that your legs and belly are somehow remote from you. It’s very funny and you die before anyone can explain it to you” (153). ­Later, his beloved Lieutenant Lukás informs Švejk that they ­will soon be joining a march battalion headed for the front and asks Švejk if he is happy about the news. “Humbly

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report, sir, I am awfully happy,” Švejk replies, uttering his own fine flourish of “utter bunkum,” worthy of the most delusional newspaper article or military speech: “It’ll be r­ eally marvelous when we both fall dead together for His Imperial Majesty and the Royal ­Family . . .” (213). Scipion Pégoulade’s feigned war enthusiasm and desire to fight are mirrored in the famous opening scene of The Good Soldier Švejk in which the rheumatic Švejk has himself carted off to a recruitment office in a bath chair, waving his crutches in the air (58). As he explains to his landlady, Mrs. Müller, who pushes his chair, “I ­shall go to the war in a bath chair” (55). ­A fter all, Švejk argues, “Except for my legs I’m completely sound cannon-­ fodder, and at a time when ­things are ­going badly for Austria ­every cripple must be at his post” (56). The public spectacle Švejk creates is recorded in a newspaper article entitled “A Cripple’s Patriotism.” Like La Fouchardière, Hašek parodies the mainstream press, inserting into the narrative a mock newspaper article from the Prague Official News in which Švejk, described as a “son of the Czech ­people” and a “cripple on crutches,” is “pushed in an invalid chair by his aged m ­ other.” Švejk’s ridicu­lous prank is transformed by the journalist’s prose into the noblest self-­sacrifice. “Spontaneously and regardless of his infirmity,” the article concludes, this cripple “had himself driven off to war to sacrifice his life and possessions for his emperor” (59). The same report is picked up by the editorial staff of Bohemie, who “invite their readers to or­ga­nize collections in aid of the loyal and heroic cripple” (69). Through newspaper scenes such as ­these, Hašek makes the same point as La Fouchardière and L’Œuvre: that the mainstream press is written for imbeciles.

Comic Heroism and the Breakdown of the Bureaucratic Machine

By the time the gullible Baroness von Botenheim gets wind of this article and seeks out the heroic cripple in his hospital bed, Švejk has privately “observed with horror that his rheumatism [is] beginning to dis­appear” (61). This is one of the moments in the text in which we as readers are allowed to see ­behind the mask of “idiocy” that Švejk has donned—or that we suspect he has donned. At times, we see what Robert Alter calls the “flash of the fang,” or moments in which Švejk takes advantage of not being observed to enact vio­

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lence, aggression, or brutality upon ­others—­something he would never do with a superior officer watching (109, 112, 135). The motor sustaining the plot of the novel is Švejk’s inscrutable personality and role-­playing. In Scipion Pégoulade, we are given access to the true person b­ ehind the mask. In Scipion’s moments of private sincerity and candor, we see his dispirited reaction to the obstacles thrown his way. With Bicard, ­things become a ­little more ambiguous. Throughout most of the novel, we are given l­ ittle basis upon which to determine w ­ hether the public persona Le Bouif cultivates is identical to his private self. Le Bouif is a babbling machine wound up by the presence of an interlocutor, usually the La Fouchar­ dière character. In one scene, as Bicard is about to launch into one of his far-­fetched stories, La Fouch’ expresses reluctance to be taken on such a verbal joy r­ ide and is skeptical about Bicard’s intentions. “I gave le Bouif a stern look. He was as serious as a heart attack (sérieux comme un âne qu’on étrille): his blue eyes expressed the utmost candor and absolute sincerity.”29 La Fou­ char­dière’s attitude ­toward Bicard and the attitude the reader is meant to adopt with re­spect to him are not clear. Bicard i­ sn’t just playing the role of an idiot, as we suspect Švejk is. He often seems genuinely ignorant—­lacking in basic common sense, having an approximate command of vocabulary, and exhibiting a tendency to take t­ hings too literally. Perhaps the army medical inspector is right to read in his “excessively jovial expression” a sign that something is not quite right with this guy. And yet in some ways Bicard comes across as saner and more honest than the p­ eople around him. The “man on the street” character is a consummate conformist. As Bicard explains, “Me, I’m not an optimist [“optimisse”] ­because that brings certain disillusions; I’m not a pessimist [“pissimisse”] ’cause that has definite incon­ve­niences in society. I’m a fatalist [“fatalisse”] ’cause that’s a pretty safe position; it spares me from trying to direct events over which I have no control . . . ​and to make predictions about stuff I d­ on’t understand at all.”30 He practiced this fatalism at his beloved racetracks, where he had always taken the attitude that “the one who’s supposed to win w ­ ill win” and that t­ here was nothing one could do to affect the outcome. This way, Bicard beams, as he explains his philosophy to La Fouchardière, “I was sure always to be right. I was ‘placid and impassive’ [‘impavide et placide’ (literary style)], amid the general turmoil” (for “turmoil,” Le Bouif uses the term “incandescence” instead of “effervescence”).31 This same attitude serves him

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in war­t ime. 32 Instead of trying to ­w ill ­things to happen, he trusts that sooner or ­later they ­will happen on their own. Where Scipion goes wrong is in aspiring to an old-­fashioned ideal of heroic stature. Luckily for him, he ­doesn’t fit the fake mold he has made for himself. A ­ fter all, if he had lived up to his own legend, he would likely have been among the first to die on the “fields of glory.” Bicard and Švejk exhibit traits typical of what Robert Torrance calls the “comic hero”: “amid universal delusion he alone is in command of himself.”33 As Cecil Parrott observes of Švejk, he “drives ­others mad while remaining sane himself.”34 We suspect he is playing a role, but he plays it so well and stays in character so consistently that we are just as destabilized in our understanding of his true self as are the characters in the novel. Švejk’s superiors cannot for the life of them decide w ­ hether he is a “camel and fat-­headed 35 idiot” or a “cunning blackguard,” a “half-­w it” or a “scoundrel who [is] trying to make fun of the war.”36 He cannot be assimilated within any preexisting bureaucratic category, but he cannot be rejected from the system altogether. With his endless refrain, “Humbly report, sir,” Private Švejk plays the part of the obedient soldier to the hilt, pushing army discipline to the point of absurdity. While Bicard is openly irreverent, in­de­pen­dent, and suspicious of authority, especially when authority is not within earshot, Švejk is obedient to the letter. He executes ­orders with the same literalism that Bicard displays in his conversations with La Fouch’. By taking ­orders so literally, parroting jingoistic rhe­toric so “sincerely,” and telling meandering stories with such a dizzying level of trivial detail, Švejk irritates his superior officers to the point that they ­will do anything to get him out of their sight. He disrupts and subverts normal military protocols and operations, threatening to bring the military machine to a grinding halt. Indeed, with regard to Švejk, the machine does break down, since he manages to spend most of the novel far from the fighting, shuttled from hospitals to prison cells to non-­ combat details. ­These average “man on the street” characters are idiosyncratic and inscrutable, and thus radically other, but they are completely ordinary at the same time. Their lack of heroism and their re­sis­tance to militarization make them unlikely role models. We are invited to sympathize with them and to recognize in them an individualism and in­de­pen­dence of spirit that cannot be crushed by even the most well-­oiled bureaucratic machine. As ironic as it

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may seem, ­these everyday characters, in their extraordinary ordinariness, triumph over the extraordinary events in which they find themselves caught up. Their worldviews and selfhood are so confident and self-­contained that the events and demands of the outside world can barely touch them. The outside world, like the war, is ultimately irrelevant to t­ hese characters, who obstinately, though perhaps unwittingly, pursue their idiosyncratic, voluble, automatic, and irrepressibly creative courses in life, despite and in the face of the world-­historical events and soul-­crushing bureaucracies that seek to instrumentalize them. Comic situations arise around ­these characters from unexpected reversals of power dynamics—­from the fact that none of the other, more hierarchically placed characters in the novels can get a word in edgewise. In La Fouchardière and Hašek, the ordinary common man ends up being a machine more unstoppable than the military machine. ­These characters are “monkey wrenches” in the system that bring the wheels to a grinding halt without being crushed by them.37 The “bureaucratic beasts of prey” are no match for the “man on the street.”38 Their imperviousness to militarization is not heroic or revolutionary. It is a “natu­ral” extension, not of their inherent strength of character, but of their inherent humanity, however flawed and unflattering that humanity might be. In this sense, characters like Scipion, Švejk, and Bicard may be ridicu­lous, but they are not ridiculed. It is the pompous, posturing ideologues and military die-­hards who are ridiculed in ­these texts, not the man on the streets. We may laugh at their comic misadventures and backfiring schemes, but in laughing at them “we can no longer pretend to be laughing at a situation that is not our own.”39 Indeed, in his preface to The Good Soldier Švejk, Hašek assures, or perhaps warns, his readers that they ­will sympathize with the “quiet, unassuming, shabbily dressed man,” the “modest, anonymous hero,” that is the “heroic and valiant good old soldier Švejk.” 40 Like Hašek and La Fouchardière, Charlie Chaplin understood that the hero of the twentieth ­century would be a man of the crowd—­a man on the street and of the streets, a “modest, anonymous hero.” Chaplin knew that the modern hero’s valor (and sanity) would be mea­sured not in g­ reat deeds or ambitions to change the world but in the ­simple desire and determination to stay alive. They would be mea­sured in the unique manner in which the man on the street manages to preserve some modicum of in­de­pen­dence and dignity despite the dehumanizing forces of the world with which he must contend. Chaplin’s combination of low slapstick and high pathos, of comedy and

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tragedy, of realism and sentimentalism, of automatism and humanity, had a universal appeal. The L ­ ittle Tramp’s visual tics and gags recall Bicard’s and Švejk’s verbal ones. Like the ­Little Tramp’s duck walk and cane twirling, Bicard’s malapropisms, and Švejk’s willfully punctilious “Humbly report sir” are central to their nature. ­These characters are, to borrow from Cecil Parrott, “inseparable from the manner in which [they express themselves].” 41 Like Bicard’s and Švejk’s verbal eccentricities, the ­Little Tramp’s gags and comic business ­aren’t gratuitous. They are a form of expression for the uniquely modern and yet increasingly universal subjectivity of the man on the street. Like La Fouchardière and Hašek, Chaplin would march his man on the street off to war in what French critics would call “the best film of the war,” Charlot soldat (Shoulder Arms, 1918). If Charlie Chaplin braved the censors and a public already suspicious of his noncombatant status in order to make a war film, it is ­because he understood that the most subversive but also the healthiest attitude to adopt in times of crisis and turmoil, as in the ordinary “vicissitudes of life,” was one of irony and irreverence, but also kindness and generosity. “Humor,” Chaplin l­ater wrote in his autobiography, “heightens our sense of survival and preserves our sanity.” 42 We ­will have occasion to return to Chaplin ­later in this study. For now, let us turn our attention to another writer who resorted to humor for the telling of his experience of war. Montmartre playwright and journalist turned soldier-­novelist Pierre Chaine found an outlet for his war stories in L’Œuvre, the same paper that promoted Barbusse and La Fouchardière. Like La Fouchardière, Chaine was greatly influenced by the antimilitarist and anarchic satire of Anatole France, who would write the preface to the freestanding volume of Chaine’s war novel, Les Mémoires d’un rat, a­ fter its serialization in L’Œuvre. In Chaine, we find a unique approach to soldier characterization. The novel’s main character is not a man on the streets, but a rat in the trenches. We also see a dif­fer­ent approach to critiquing war culture and bourrage de crâne from that taken by La Fouchardière or Hašek. Chaine’s hero is not ignorant or demonstratively idiotic. He is a representative of the shrewdest, most adaptable of all animal species. By writing a modern-­day animal fable, Chaine found a mechanism through which to work around and within the straightjacket of war culture and to push the limits of what could be expressed and i­ magined during war­time.

5. Animal Instincts

Lessons from a Trench Rat Life is simply one continual watch against the menace of death;—it has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct . . . ​ —­Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

In British trench poet Isaac Rosenberg’s famous “Break of Day in the Trenches,” a solitary sentry watches the “darkness” of night “crumbl[e] away” into day. 1 This “crumbling” suggests a landscape devastated by war and a speaker who has grown accustomed to such destruction. The poet holds ­little hope for any change. He is locked in the grip of “the same old druid Time” that has made him old beyond his years and condemned him to the indefinite status of a soon-­to-be relic of the past. As the poet reaches out to pluck a poppy from the parapet wall “to stick ­behind [his] ear”—as if to acknowledge and even embrace his own mortality—­this slippage into death is suddenly halted by the irruption onto the scene of an active life princi­ple. A “live ­thing leaps [the speaker’s] hand,” capturing his attention and drawing his thoughts back from “old druid Time” to the pres­ent. His thoughts return from the death symbolized by the poppy to the life pulsing in the leaping creature that has just brushed against his hand. What follows is an attempt on the part of the poet to identify with the trench rat and with the life princi­ple it embodies. The speaker tries—­and ultimately fails—to put himself in the rat’s place, to imagine the war from the rat’s perspective, and to see himself through the rat’s eyes. The speaker immediately acknowledges the rat’s superiority over himself. Unlike the soldier, who is trapped in the confined space of the trench, immured at the edge of no-man’s-land and forced to contemplate the spectacle of the dead bodies 113

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“sleeping” ­there, the rat is ­free to follow his “plea­sure,” to act upon his “cosmopolitan sympathies” by fraternizing with the e­ nemy. The speaker only hints at the gruesome form of fraternization in which the rat engages. He knows that having “touched” his own “En­glish hand,” the rat is ­free to “do the same to a German.” Not all of the hands the rat ­w ill touch w ­ ill belong to the living. As e­ very soldier was painfully aware, the trench rat fed on the corpses of soldiers in no-man’s-land, gnawing away at their eyes, noses, lips, and, yes, hands. Perhaps the rat’s knowledge that the “live t­ hing” he “touches” now w ­ ill be the dead t­ hing upon which he w ­ ill soon feast is what inspires the “queer sardonic rat” to “inwardly grin” as he casts a slightly condescending glance at the “strong eyes” and “fine limbs” of the “haughty athletes” he passes in the trenches. How can the “droll rat” not be aware of his superiority over ­these poor souls, held by invisible “bonds to the whims of murder” and “sprawled”—in life as in death—­“ in the bowels of the earth, /The torn fields of France”? ­These men, for all of their supposed superiority over animals, are, in this war, “less chanced . . . ​ for life” than the ­free and nimble rat. The rat is a seemingly indifferent witness to the horrors of war. He, too, must surely be aware of the “shrieking iron and flame/Hurled through still heavens,” but such cosmic fury seems out of proportion with the trench rat’s tiny stature. As he scurries across the parapet, he is less likely to see the “iron and flame” “shrieking” in the sky than the horrified “eyes” of the men, their “quaver” and their “heart[s] aghast.” The image of traumatized soldiers, viewed through the eyes of the rat, brings the poet back to his reflections on death. His attention turns from a failed identification with the rat, so “chanced . . . ​for life,” to the poppy, symbol of death and oblivion, which he places b­ ehind his ear. Poppies, like the men in whose “veins” they put down their “roots,” “drop, and are ever dropping.” The poet’s poppy, like his life, is “safe” for the time being, but its days are numbered. The poppy is “just a ­little white with the dust,” pale like ­those f­ aces in no-man’s-land, which w ­ ill be nibbled away to nothing by the “cosmopolitan” rats. The poppy, like the soldier, is contaminated by the “dust” of the “darkness” that “crumbles away” at daybreak, and like the soldier, the poppy ­will soon commingle with the “dust” of long-­forgotten souls frozen in that “old druid Time” of British pastoral elegy. 2 For his part, the “haughty athlete” in the trench is reduced to mea­sur­ing his life span in terms of t­ hose of the poppy and the trench rat. Paradoxically and tragically, of the three it is the rat and

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its descendants who, despite their typically short life spans, reign as uncontested masters of the trench world and are likely to outlive both the poppy and the young soldiers already half-­buried in the “dust” on ­either side of the “sleeping green.” The poet seems sadly reconciled to death, or at least lacking in hope. He is unwilling or unable to proj­ect himself into a ­future of life. He can only contemplate a ­future marked by Druid time—in which darkness crumbles into dust. The reader might wish the soldier could take a lesson from the resilient and lively trench rat—­wish he would somehow revolt against death, instead of embracing it, and affirm a desire for life rather than a resignation to death. It is almost unbearable to see the soldier mocked so openly by this “demonic” creature with its “sardonic” grin.3 Although his movement of plucking the poppy has been interrupted by the rat, the soldier completes that movement, tucking the poppy b­ ehind his ear as if to prefigure the dead body he ­will soon become, with poppies pushing roots into his veins. Paul Fussell describes the “recourse to the pastoral” in poems such as this one as “an En­glish mode of both fully gauging the calamities of the G ­ reat 4 War and imaginatively protecting oneself against them.”  As perverted as traditional pastoral elegy is by the replacement of the songbird by the trench rat, the final note is that of the “sleeping green” of oblivion symbolized by the poet’s poppy.5 In identifying with the rat instead of the poppy, the poet would have been making a radical philosophical choice—­and a radical literary one as well. The rat belongs not to the pastoral, but to the picaresque. Both literary modes represent “impor­tant patterns of response to an unacceptable world.” 6 If the pastoral offers the comfort of oblivion, the picaresque offers the hope of survival. The picaresque response to a world that is chaotic, unpredictable, hostile to man, and indifferent to his desires and aspirations is a more pragmatic and pres­ent-­centered response than that of the pastoral. It offers consolation inasmuch as it expresses a confidence in man’s ability to survive in a world stripped of h­ uman meaning and values as long as he can learn to cultivate ­those animal instincts latent within him. The rat in Rosenberg’s poem signals the degradation and debasement of the trench world. It captures something of the unique “essence” of the First World War.7 But the rat in ­Great War lit­er­a­t ure does not function only as a symbol of degradation. 8 It also signals recourse to “elementary forms of survival”—­survival of the mind and body—­t hat are strategic and pragmatic.9 The rat, the nemesis of the historical soldier in the trench, was a

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constant reminder, not only of death at its most obscene, but also of life at its most tenacious—­even in the face of the most outrageous of odds. As a parasite, the rat is a “tactician of the quotidian,” one of the craftiest and most intelligent of animals.10 In the words of William Faulkner, rat intelligence is defined by “the ability to cope with environment: which means to accept environment yet still retain at least something of personal liberty.”11 The war­time picaresque showcases forms of animal instinct and intelligence as apt models of survival in extremely hostile conditions. The picaresque is consolatory to the extent that it posits the possibility of maintaining some degree of “personal liberty” within the extreme constraints imposed by trench space, military hierarchy and discipline, and the randomness and unpredictability of a perverted kind of adventure-­time.

The Mousetrap: Symbol of the Picaresque Life

“In the picaresque tradition,” Joseph Meeker reminds us, “­people are shown living as other animals live, confronting the pres­ent defensively and opportunistically, without expectations or illusions, proud of their strength but aware of their limitations, mistrustful but not cynical or malicious, and above all adaptive to the immediate environment.”12 Picaros react parasitically and pragmatically to their environment, adapting their be­hav­ior to a world they have no hope of changing. The most successful stance in the picaresque tradition is a defensive one, in which the hero reads his environment and his fellow h­ umans with cautious mistrust, ready to take “evasive action” when necessary and to pounce on opportunity when it pres­ents itself.13 Success in “the picaresque life” depends, not on transcending one’s animal nature, but on embracing it, subordinating if necessary moral imperatives to biological ones.14 The picaresque tradition has always seen an affinity between h­ umans and animals.15 Man-­beast analogies abound in the Eu­ro­pean picaresque just as they do in ­Great War lit­er­a­ture.16 Consider the case of Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (1668). The title character, Simplicius Simplicissimus, so fully embraces the comparison between h­ umans and animals that he refuses to take off the calf’s-­skin disguise and donkey ears his master’s lackeys have put on him in his sleep. When he wakes to find himself in a goose-­coop decked out like a calf, he decides to turn this condition “to [his] best advantage,” mooing and playing to the hilt the role of court

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fool.17 In this getup Simplicius is ­free to pursue his agenda of “castigat[ing] all follies and censur[ing] all vanities,” having come to the conclusion that “­humans could be more swinish than swine, more savage than lions, more lecherous than goats  . . . ​and more poisonous than snakes and toads.”18 Not only are h­ umans no better than animals, but they can also be worse than them. Be­hav­iors that can be excused as ­simple survival strategies in the animal kingdom can become forms of vice and corruption in h­ uman socie­ties. Refusing to be humiliated by his calf’s skin, Simplicius chooses to embrace his animal disguise and the paradoxical moral authority it confers upon him. In soldier-­writer René Benjamin’s 1915 novel Gaspard, real animals do the work of castigating ­human follies and vanities. Gaspard’s affinity for animals is demonstrated throughout the novel, and his animal-­like philosophy of life is sanctioned and confirmed in a remarkable closing scene in which he visits a comrade’s wife to share news of her husband’s death. In order to spare Madame Burette’s feelings, Gaspard invents a heroic and painless death for his friend—­the classic “belle mort” of the bullet to the forehead—­and substitutes this “belle mort” for Burette’s a­ ctual slow and gruesome death from a stomach wound.19 Madame Burette appears to buy the “post-­card” story about Burette’s noble death, even if her two canaries do not. 20 “Only the canaries,” the narrator tells us, “who ­don’t understand a ­thing about honor, continued chirping with joy, and they seemed to be saying stupidly: Even in a cage, tweet-­tweet, tweet-­tweet, life is better than death, tweet-­tweet, tweet-­ tweet.”21 Gaspard knows a horrible truth from which Burette’s wife must be spared: that her husband died a ghastly death that can only be redeemed, if at all, by an uncertain national victory. He understands what no civilian can, that on the level of the individual life, animal “stupidity”—­the affirmation of the value of life over death—is the highest form of intelligence. While the text does not invite readers to call the continuation of the war into question—­ that is taken for granted as an absolute necessity—it does invite them to reject the traditional commonplaces like honor and glory that make warfare in the abstract seem a noble and rational enterprise. If the picaresque tradition is full of animal imagery, it makes par­tic­u­lar use of the mouse and of the figure of the mousetrap. As Giancarlo Maiorino points out, “[the] underprivileged have always seen the parallel between themselves and the mice who get caught in traps.”22 In the picaresque world men set traps for one another, and survival is a ­matter of steering clear of ­these traps when you can, or getting yourself back out of them when you cannot.

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The foundational text of the picaresque tradition, the anonymously published Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), features a picaro who is forced to imitate a mouse and to contend with mousetraps in order to stay alive. Lazarillo’s stingy master, the priest, feeds him next to nothing but keeps a tightly locked chest full of holy bread. When Lazarillo manages to get a key to the chest, instead of taking w ­ hole loaves outright, he breaks the bread into crumbs and leaves mouse-­like nibble marks so his master w ­ ill believe that mice have gotten into the chest. When his master sets a mousetrap inside the chest, Lazarillo simply takes the cheese and the bread, keeping one step ahead of his wily master and adjusting his tactics in response to his master’s, just as his “clever ­little rodent friends” would do. 23 Meanwhile, in Francisco de Quevedo’s El Buscón (The Swindler) (1626) the starving band of swindlers who adopt Pablos describe themselves as “the terror of feasts,” and “the mice in eating-­houses.”24 Through the most ingenious acts of sartorial bricolage, t­ hese men, who are in real­ity “as poor as  . . .  church [mice],” manage to pass themselves off as wealthy gentlemen.25 They live in Madrid “by [their] wits,” “scroung[ing] from the city dustbins” and inviting themselves, as mice do, to dine at “other p­ eople’s h­ ouses.”26 The trope of the mousetrap makes its way into the French picaresque tradition by way of Alain-­René Lesage’s Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715, 1724, 1735). When Gil Blas accepts a ­ride from two mysterious ­horse­men in the forest, he does not suspect that they are leading him to a strange underground hideout. In the scene in which Gil Blas descends into the underworld of this band of highwaymen, we get a taste of the “distinctive buoyant gaiety” in Gil Blas’s style that Robert Alter finds typical of the “Gallic” picaresque. 27 “The h­ orse­men made me go [into the cave] with them,” Gil Blas explains. “Then, lowering the trap door with ropes which w ­ ere attached to it for that purpose,” he continues, “­there was the worthy nephew of my U ­ ncle Perez, caught like a rat in a rat trap.”28 This entrapment scene is replayed two hundred years l­ater when Louis-­Ferdinand Céline’s picaro Bardamu (Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932) is momentarily seduced into volunteering for ser­vice on the Western Front. Bardamu does not possess the same “buoyancy” or “gaiety” as Gil Blas. He resembles the more “hard-­boiled” picaros of the Spanish tradition as he describes his first steps on a long, lonely journey to the end of the night. 29 Suffering from a fleeting bout of martial enthusiasm on a warm August after­noon in 1914, Bardamu falls in b­ ehind a parade of soldiers marching past the Place

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de Clichy. ­There ­will be no g­ oing back for Bardamu and his kind. As the cheering crowd thins out, the real­ity of the situation sets in: “Pretty soon ­there was nobody but us, we ­were all alone,” Bardamu observes. “I was about to clear out,” he explains, but it was “Too late! T ­ hey’d quietly closed the gate ­behind us civilians. We w ­ ere caught like rats.”30 A more explic­itly deadly rattrap analogy can be found in Le Feu, one of the most impor­tant literary inspirations for Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit.31 A small group of soldier survivors surveys a devastated, post-­ bombardment landscape. A series of duckboards have collapsed, sending the soldiers down into the mud-­filled shell holes below. Barbusse has one of his characters describe the scene as “a man mousetrap.”32 So viscous is the mud below the boards that men are trapped waist-­high, unable to extract themselves. ­Those who do break ­free of the mud’s suction do so at the cost of their pants, boots, and equipment, and wander away half-­naked and dazed. In Léon Werth’s Clavel soldat (1919), the rat trap functions both literally and meta­phor­ically. The narrator compares the enthusiasm of mobilization in 1914 with the stupor in which the typical infantryman finds himself in the summer of 1915. Stripped of his past, having lost his faith in a f­ uture victory, the average poilu has “given up on every­t hing and every­body.”33 Caught in an eternal pres­ent, he can do nothing but “wait, drink wine, play cards or checkers, consolidate trenches, dig shelters, attack, yell, sleep,” and “suffer,” not “like a man,” but “like a captive beast.”34 In August 1914, the novel’s main character, André Clavel, had volunteered for active duty. As a self-­imagined “soldier of the Year II,”35 he had been willing “to kill and to be killed.” Instead of the “drunkenness of bayonet charges,” however, the war had brought only “the cell, the hut, in ditches or in cellars,” all of ­those literal spaces of confinement and captivity that mirror the existential captivity of Clavel’s ever-­darkening outlook.36 No won­der the narrator takes note when a “rat is caught in the rat trap.” The rat’s fate and the vio­lence he endures mirror what the soldiers face. Comic shadows of the picaresque trope of the mousetrap also appear in Charlie Chaplin’s use of the device in his 1918 film about the First World War Shoulder Arms (Charlot soldat in France). The mousetrap is the perfect accessory for slapstick comedy. No m ­ atter how predictable the trap’s mechanism may be, in slapstick it ­will always get the better of the comic character and get a laugh from the audience, as it snaps shut on unsuspecting fin­gers, toes, noses, or backsides. In Shoulder Arms, Charlot arrives at the front with a

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mousetrap and a cheese grater hanging from his b­ elt. ­Here the mousetrap is both a meta­phor for Charlot’s structural position in the war and a talisman against the war’s hardships. As a soldier, Charlot ­will resemble the rat as he squeezes with ­great difficulty, given his elaborate equipment and inherent awkwardness, into a tiny dugout. But he has come prepared—­with trusty mousetrap and cheese grater turned back scratcher—to make this inhospitable place his home. We smile at Charlot’s earnest preparedness to face any contingency at the front and to make himself comfortable in the most hostile of environments. Of course, Charlot’s tiny mousetrap is hopelessly out of scale with the kinds of rats he is likely to encounter at the front. Press reports and soldier accounts stressed both the grotesque size of trench rats and their overwhelming numbers. It is perhaps in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front that we get the most extensive description of trench rats. Remarque has his narrator Paul Bäumer describe the “shocking, evil, naked ­faces” and “nauseating,” “long, nude tails” of the huge “corpse-­rats” who feed on ­human flesh, eat cats and dogs, and invade dugouts.37 ­After a failed attempt by platoon mate Detering to “outwit” the rats, the men decide to “make war” on them.38 In one often-­cited scene, the men release pent-up aggression by thrashing wildly at the trench rats, stabbing them with spades or burning them with torches, and then throwing “bits of rat over the parapet.”39 ­Here the b­ attle against the trench rat becomes a pretext for the depiction of the men’s own animal ferocity. In a short war­time pamphlet of pithy fragments and aphorisms called Ronge-­Maille vainqueur (Victorious Mesh-­Gnawer) written from the point of view of a trench rat, Goncourt Academician Lucien Descaves had used a similar strategy to diagnose and condemn ­human brutality. The text was so merciless in its depiction of rat necrophagy and so antimilitarist and antiwar in its tone that it did not pass the censors in 1917. The text was fi­nally published in 1920, in a luxury book edition with illustrations by Lucien Laforge. Ronge-­Maille takes his name and his mandate to “educate men” about their flawed nature from La Fontaine.40 He speaks in the name of all trench rats as unabashed and unrepentant war profiteers. The hardened and cynical Ronge-­Maille flaunts his superiority over ­humans. “When they count up the billions that wars cost,” he concludes, “maybe [men] ­will fi­nally admit that la bête is less harmful than la bêtise” (animals are less harmful than stupidity).41 He brags with black humor about his indiscriminate feasting on French and

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German soldier corpses: “Animals cannot say that man is good to them, ­until they have tasted him.” 42 Ronge-­Maille and his comrades take their revenge for the “war of extermination” that h­ umans have unleashed on the world with no re­spect for their fellow animal creatures or for the natu­ral environment.43 The rat’s ­simple biological code is superior to men’s supposedly moral one. “Why,” Ronge-­Maille rhetorically asks, “do [men] seem to despise life so much,” while for animals life is the highest value?44 Ronge-­Maille sees through ­every form of ­human hy­poc­risy and warns his species not to imitate man in his cruelty and folly: “It is not enough for men to destroy us: now they are devouring each other.” “Let us not imitate [men],” Ronge-­Maille exhorts his fellow rats. Instead, “let us ­settle for devouring them.” 45 A series of bold, stylized pen and ink drawings by Laforge depict the rats ­doing just that—­ burrowing nose down into the open bellies of dead French and German soldiers. Descaves’s Ronge-­Maille is a deeply sinister descendant of La Fon­ taine’s, just as the trench rat is a repulsive and obscene figure compared to the typical mice and rats of the older picaresque tradition.

Trench Rats: From Repulsion to Identification

By the nineteenth ­century, the figure of the rat, like the pig, had taken on new symbolic significance as the despised and disgusting “­others” of bourgeois urban modernity. They ­were the dwellers of sewers and slums, representing the dark depths of the repressed psyche of modernity.46 It is not surprising, then, that French writers made comparisons between German soldiers and rats and pigs. The attempt by early commentators to give a pseudoscientific account of German racial inferiority is well documented.47 French psychologist Dr. Edgar Bérillon is particularly famous in this regard. He published studies using “scientific evidence” to show that German bodily fluids ­were chemically dif­fer­ent from French fluids, thereby explaining the “unpleasant odor” that German soldiers gave off. Bérillon also diagnosed and decried the ­ ere many texts like phenomenon of excessive German defecation.48 ­There w ­these that undertook to diagnose the dif­fer­ent forms of German degeneration: insanity, servility, and above all brutality. The boche, it was understood, belonged to a dif­fer­ent race from the French, if not a dif­fer­ent species, one deprived of any sense of h­ uman decency. Germans ­were overwhelmingly compared to pigs in French ­Great War culture, but they ­were also compared to rats and other vermin.49 In November

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1915, an article entitled “Worse Than the Boches Are the Rats!” ran on the front page of the mass-­circulation Pa­r i­sian daily newspaper Le Matin.50 This article was reprinted—­copied by hand word for word—in the inaugural issue of the trench newspaper Le Rat-à-poil (The Skinned or Naked Rat).51 The author, a “militaire” in Le Matin and a “poilu” in Le Rat-­à-­Poil, argued that ­because of their intelligence, trench rats ­were more formidable enemies of the poilu than ­were the boches.52 Like the “Boches on the Yser,” the author insisted, trench rats “swarm” and “pullulate” and “launch an assault on rest camps.” Whereas the “Boche is a thick-­headed brute” who w ­ ill eventually be defeated, the trench rat is exceedingly clever. He has in his repertory an infinite variety of tricks, and he perfects his methods as he goes along, “adapt[ing] to what­ever circumstances combat pres­ents.” The trench rat employs “rascally inventions” and “demonic ruses,” while the boche is totally predictable and “never innovates.” “What a strange war,” the article concludes, “where it’s not enough to invent weapons of destruction for use against men who behave like beasts, but where y­ ou’ve also got to come up with [ways] to fight beasts who use the crafty tactics of men!” A positive outcome to the war would come if the rats invaded ­enemy lines: “In this way the Boches, who are tightening their b­ elts, could eat the rats,” the author muses, and the rats, “who are d­ ying of hunger, could eat the Boches!” In the lead article of this inaugural issue of Le Rat-­à-­poil, the soldier-­ editors justified their decision to name their paper ­after their nemesis the trench rat, joking that—­like it or not—­the rat was the constant companion to the poilu and a “hairy one” in its own right.53 The crafty sparring between like-­ minded adversaries—­the rat and the poilu—­was intended to showcase poilu resourcefulness—­t he skillful deployment of Le Système D—­a nd to insist upon the soldier’s ability to cope with his environment just as well as his cunning foe. If the “queer sardonic rat” in Rosenberg’s poem fails to shake the poet out of his elegiac mood, similar trench rats in other ­Great War texts are deployed for precisely that purpose: to direct the reader’s attention ­toward the arts of survival and the “tactics of the everyday” that rats and other parasites so skillfully deploy. Comparisons between soldiers and rats develop more fully the insight of Rosenberg. In the debased world of the trench, the soldier and the rat not only commingle and cohabitate, but they also might actually, quite perversely, have a g­ reat deal in common. The soldier would do well to learn from the trench rat how to stay alive.

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As the war progressed, analogies between trench rats and frontline soldiers became more explicit and extensive. The repulsive, necrophagous be­ hav­iors of the trench rat w ­ ere exorcised in f­ avor of an emphasis on the rat’s animal arts of survival. René Benjamin’s 1915 Gaspard, the first successful French novel of the war, took the name of its title character from a nineteenth-­ century slang term for rat. The narrator makes the comparison between his protagonist and a rat early in the novel, when Gaspard periodically jumps off a military train in order to steal refreshments. “Next stop, he’d be off again,” the narrator recalls. “You’d urge him on, and then he’d dis­appear, like a rat in a hole.”54 Throughout the novel, Gaspard darts around, scavenging for food and wine and d­ oing his best to save his hide. Henri Barbusse, in his letters to his wife, used a similar vocabulary to compare soldiers to rats. The trench, he wrote in one letter, is a “rat’s palace teeming with soldiers.”55 In another letter he described nightfall as the moment when the soldier stretches his legs and moves about, the moment when each “rat with a kepi pops out of its hole.”56 Such analogies between soldiers and rats would have a long life in the twentieth c­ entury. The term “Desert Rats,” for example, was coined for the British 7th armored division fighting in North Africa during the Second World War, and the name continued to be used for troops serving in Af­ghan­i­stan. Meanwhile American GIs charged with flushing Viet Cong soldiers out of their elaborate system of tunnels w ­ ere called “Tunnel Rats.” The comic and playful comparisons between soldiers and rats in Barbusse’s letters and Benjamin’s novel recalibrate reader expectations of life at the front at the same time that they provide a reassuring portrait of soldier vitality. For writers who tended t­oward an epic heroization, if not deification, of the French Infantryman as sacrosanct representative of the patrie (homeland), such comparisons between the greatest of all warriors and the most repulsive of all animals must have been troubling. Indeed, pundit Maurice Barrès had already expressed uneasiness with the new slang term—­poilu—­being used to describe the French Infantryman. It was precisely the animality of the word that offended Barrès. The term meant literally “hairy one,” and was based on the association between hairiness and virility. Such earthy physicality and vulgarity was, for critics like Barrès, beneath the dignity of the victors of the Marne. Barrès took the opportunity to comment upon the word poilu in an article published two days before the first Journée du poilu (Poilu Day), a

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government-­sponsored fund-raising day. Barrès suggested that Journée du combattant (Combatant Day) or simply Journée du soldat (Soldier Day) would have been a more appropriate name for the event. Such terms retained a note of solemnity and re­spect—­precisely what was lacking in the word poilu. “Poilu!” Barrès bemoaned, “the term has something animal about it.” The word “lacks dignity,” he continued, “it exudes a joviality that is out of place and brings us too close to farce.” 57 From the “starry sky” of the epic mode, the Infantryman as poilu had plummeted to the basest level of comedy.58 He had fallen from superhuman status to subhuman status with one act of linguistic slovenliness. For writers like Barrès, analogies with the animal kingdom should be reserved only for the e­ nemy. By the time Barrès was ready to acknowledge the new vocabulary that had brought the French soldier down to the level of a “hairy one” who stuffs his “gueule” (mouth of an animal) and complains of his aching “pattes” (paws), soldier-­novelists, trench journalists, graphic artists, and other commentators had been using comparisons between soldiers and animals for months. And they would continue to do so throughout the war. That the sacrosanct, quasi-­divine hero of the epic mode could be brought so low is a testament to the work of contestation that ­Great War picaresque writers ­were ­doing within the larger war culture. ­Human beast allegories gave the reader an imaginative framework for approaching the degraded world of the trench, where material realities trump h­ uman aspirations and animal instincts and be­hav­iors prevail. Animal analogies put the body—­its needs and its vulnerability—at the center of stories about war. Both bodies in pain and bodies seeking plea­sure ­were omnipresent in French ­Great War fiction. A typically Gallic sense of insouciance and joviality, so central to the notion of Le Système D, was, however, in no way incompatible with serious reflections upon death, ­dying, and mutilation. Indeed, joviality must be seen as just one survival strategy among many in the French picaresque arts of survival. It is in this context that we can consider one of the most remarkable French novels published during the war, a novel that reactivated the uniquely light and entertaining French picaresque tradition established by Lesage in the eigh­teenth ­century. Unlike the hardened and cynical picaros of the Spanish and ­later En­glish traditions, Lesage’s Gallic picaro was a fundamentally good and likable, if slightly rogu­ish, figure whose upward mobility was the reward for his perseverance, cleverness, resourcefulness, and adaptability.

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As Richard Bjornson has shown, the Gallic picaro was an attractive and appealing character capable of forging rudimentary relationships, keeping his spirits high, and moving through the corruption around him without being permanently corrupted himself.

Animal Ridens: Les Mémoires d’un rat

On January 29, 1917, readers of Gustave Téry’s recently revamped daily newspaper L’Œuvre would find nestled in the popu­lar fourth-­page feuilleton (serial novel) space the first installment of a war novel like no other. Pierre Chaine’s Les Mémoires d’un rat (Memoirs of a Rat) would be a huge departure from L’Œuvre’s previous serial novels, especially Barbusse’s Le Feu. Barbusse had used ­every device in his naturalist toolkit to describe industrial warfare in both its mythic proportions and its minutest, most graphic detail. L’Œuvre’s newest serial novel, like Le Feu before it, would be a first-­person account of, and reflection on, trench warfare written by a soldier at the front—­but this time with a decidedly non-­naturalist twist. Les Mémoires d’un rat and its sequel, Les Commentaires de Ferdinand, ancien rat de tranchées (The Commentaries of Ferdinand, Veteran Trench Rat)—as their titles suggest—­are written entirely from the perspective of a trench rat. Published amid a flood of realist-­naturalist firsthand accounts and documentary-­style novels, Les Mémoires d’un rat flaunts its fictional status—­reactivating generic conventions from the roman comique, the conte philosophique, the “dog narrative,” and the French picaresque tradition.59 The trench rat Ferdinand is a consummate survivor. Like his master, the poilu Victor Juvenet, Ferdinand w ­ ill come out of the trench experience virtually unscathed. Yet, his experiences in the trenches ­will be harrowing. Long before Art Spiegelman chose to depict the trauma of the Holocaust and the Second World War from the point of view of a f­amily of mice, Pierre Chaine had a­ dopted a similar technique to tell his own “survivor’s tale” of the industrialized warfare of the Western Front. As we saw with the examples of Ronge-­Maille and Rosenberg’s “queer sardonic rat,” the trench rat is not an easy animal to sentimentalize. Yet this is precisely what Chaine does—­giving readers a rodent protagonist who is an animal ridens, an animal who laughs. Ferdinand combines the pragmatism and instincts of an animal with the wit, eloquence, and sense of humor of a ­human being.

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Chaine was not alone in using an animal protagonist to tell his story of the war. Any number of “dog narratives” circulated in French G ­ reat War culture—in newspaper and magazine articles, in c­ hildren’s books, and in fictionalized memoirs.60 From s­ imple mascots to rat-­hunters to rescue dogs sent into no-man’s-land to identify and aid wounded soldiers, dogs w ­ ere a ubiquitous presence on the Western Front. ­These “poilus à quatre pattes” or “four-­legged poilus” represented animality at its most benign and comforting, and dog protagonists such as Benjamin Rabier’s Flambeau embodied all of the heroic qualities of the epic-­mode poilu, such as courage, self-­sacrifice, and devotion to la patrie. By choosing a rat as his four-­legged poilu, and not a dog, Chaine marked a significant departure from the heroized animal narrative. In opting for the rat over the dog, Chaine made the opposite choice from Rosenberg’s soldier in “Break of Day in the Trenches.” He opted for the picaresque over the pastoral. Ferdinand the trench rat shares an intimacy with his h­ uman master and the squad around him, but he also views ­human be­hav­ior with the ironic distance of the satirist. The animal, like the fool or the foreigner, can utter truths that would be too scandalous if uttered by more respectable or more mainstream characters. Chaine exploits to the fullest the device of the outsider—­using Ferdinand’s ignorance and naïveté to treat with sharp but graceful irony such revered war­time notions as honor and duty, self-­sacrifice, military grandeur, and “civilized” rules of war­time engagement. His witty aphorisms, weighty punch lines, literary citations, and ironic lessons learned at the front are delivered in an elegant diction that recalls that of Gil Blas and contrasts sharply with Juvenet’s soldier slang or with the “crackling prose” of ­later G ­ reat War picaresque narratives such as Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit.61 By his own admission, Ferdinand is a “dangerous rat,” whose irony, humor, and refusal to “make a tragedy out of the war” have not been appreciated by the “over-­scrupulous” minds or “perhaps guilty” consciences of armchair patriots and bureaucrats on the home front (224). This refusal of epic or tragedy should not be confused with naïve optimism of the kind found in early accounts of the war and decried by soldiers. Ferdinand takes such treatments head on, alerting his readers in the first chapter of his memoirs that they w ­ ill not find in his pages “the cheerful and chatty heroism” of typical “récits du front” (trench stories) (15). They should not expect to find accounts of wounded soldiers who “­can’t wait to go back up the line” and “refuse to be

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evacuated from the front,” or of the dead men rising in the “Debout les morts!” legend.62 The lit­er­a­ture that a “­humble trench rat” like Ferdinand can offer is, he insists in one of his signature puns, naturally more “terre à terre” (down to earth) (15). But staying “down to earth” does not mean wallowing in the muck. If Ferdinand refuses an epic vision of the war, he is equally opposed to an abject or morbid one. Ferdinand again turns to wordplay to condemn the “repugnant butchery” described in gory detail in so much war lit­er­a­t ure. Ferdinand first uses the word “étalage” (display), and then corrects himself, opting for the term “étal” (butcher’s stall). In “butcher’s stall” texts, readers encounter nothing but “open stomachs, intestines in the sun, gushing brains, teeming corpses and other horrors.” For ­those who have seen such visions firsthand, ­these “realistic descriptions” are painful. For ­those who have not lived through such horrors, ­these descriptions are useless, since nothing “can ever give the sensation of a battlefield to someone who has not seen one.” Realistic depictions of the horrors of war w ­ ere available to readers before this war, Ferdinand argues, and yet “­those who read them ­were [still] surprised” by what they saw at the front. It is in the name of psychological accuracy and sheer practicality that Ferdinand concludes his critique of morbid descriptions of death and putrefaction. When soldiers are ­under fire, he explains, they often turn away from such sights. At other times, they are so overwhelmed by the carnage that they become desensitized to the sight of dead bodies. In ­either case, soldiers’ “impressions are not proportionate to the horror of the images they perceive.” So much depends upon a soldier’s state of mind at the moment he encounters a par­tic­u­lar visual stimulus. Ferdinand suggests that horror, like every­thing e­ lse at the war, is relative, not absolute, and must always be contextualized to be understood. Ferdinand’s main critique of morbid depictions of war scenes, however, is based on clear-­ eyed pragmatism. “What is the point of such unhealthy descriptions,” Ferdinand asks, “since they are in­effec­tive in stopping wars?” (16–17). If Ferdinand resists depicting the morbid physical realities of death and putrefaction, he reflects at length upon the psychological toll taken upon soldiers by life at the front, understood as a “long tête-­à-­tête with death” (82). It is not so much the image of dead bodies that horrifies soldiers, Ferdinand explains; it is, instead, the idea of the cessation of ­human consciousness and with it the disappearance of the individual’s unique set of memories. Such a state is attained in death, but also in madness, and Ferdinand recalls ­those rats

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who, ­under the pressure of emotions that ­were “too intense and repeated too many times,” went mad during the “­great persecution,” when the soldiers in this sector had attempted to exterminate the trench rats (83). Thus Ferdinand comments obliquely upon the phenomenon of shellshock, likening this ­mental condition to a kind of death of the mind, a “destruction of one’s personal self” that was a phenomenon of the war few writers of the time w ­ ere willing or able to acknowledge or articulate (84). Les Mémoires d’un rat moves effortlessly from comic to serious topics. Each installment recounts an episode in Ferdinand’s misadventures as he is transported from sector to sector in the ser­vice of his “master” and teacher, the Pa­r i­sian barber turned poilu Victor Juvenet. Witty chapter subtitles—­ reminiscent of t­ hose in picaresque novels such as Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (1668) or contes philosophiques such as Voltaire’s Candide (1759)—­guide the reader through the war experiences of Ferdinand and Juvenet. Ferdinand ends his recollections in much the same way that Dorgelès’s narrator ends Les Croix de bois, ­after first expressing a slight remorse for not having insisted upon the tragic side of war. Ferdinand explains that he has taken his light and comic tone from the soldiers themselves, and he claims to have written his memoirs “not for posterity,” but for the “entertainment of [his] comrades” (224). Like many literary picaros before him, Ferdinand is born during war­time and lives his entire life u­ nder its shadow. He is mobilized by force and made to take an active role in the war. Through almost forty episodes Ferdinand survives the twists and turns of fate. He sees frontline duty at Verdun, Vauquois, and the Chemin des Dames, is captured, released, and captured again, enjoys the good life in army billets and supply depots, and discovers Paris and the civilian population when he goes on leave with Juvenet. Invalided out of ser­vice ­after a gas attack, Ferdinand returns to Paris to live with Juvenet’s wife and to follow the war from the sidelines of the home front. It is with typical picaresque bluntness that Ferdinand describes his childhood and initiation into the harsh realities of trench life. The childhood home from which Ferdinand is cast out by the war is a dugout in the frontlines. From a kindly old master, a trench rat and veteran of the 1914 war of movement, Ferdinand learns to identify the many “traps” laid out for him in the trenches and learns the importance of employing “caution” and “cunning” to escape from such traps. Thanks to his master, he learns, for example, to

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distinguish between the many dangers lurking in the sky. Hawks and buzzards are deadly, while airplanes, so dangerous for the soldiers, are harmless for rats (21). Despite the training he receives from the old rat, Ferdinand is not prepared for his first encounter with a trench rocket. When an illuminating flare goes off a few feet beside him, he panics, seeking refuge in the first hole he finds—­a soldiers’ latrine. He w ­ ill get himself out of this predicament—­ that is, he w ­ ill literally se démerder (get himself out of the shit)—by taking multiple baths in the tank of chlorinated drinking ­water provided for the soldiers. Even before his capture by the poilu Juvenet, then, Ferdinand has been initiated into the hostile world of the trench and has begun to develop the same skills of Le Système D so often praised in the French Infantryman. Indeed Ferdinand’s capture and forced mobilization ­will be the result of poilu “bricolage” and “ingenuity” (25). When a five-­centime price is put on the head of each trench rat, the soldiers set to work constructing makeshift traps out of materials at hand, temporarily suspending their other trench handicrafts (25). With the trench now thoroughly booby-­trapped, Ferdinand and his fellow rats experience a time of “calamity and fear” recorded in the annals of rat history as “the ­g reat persecution” (83). 63 Of course, this heightened state of awareness of the constant danger of death and destruction mirrors that of the soldiers and serves as a meta­phor for the “guerre des taupes” (war of moles) they are all waging (14). Ferdinand’s luck runs out when he is fi­nally caught in a trap set by Juvenet, the “sworn e­ nemy of rats” (125). When the men find Ferdinand in Juvenet’s trap, what follows is a familiar motif in twentieth-­century war lit­er­a­ture—­that of soldier cruelty t­oward animals and more specifically the motif of the tortured rat.64 In Chaine’s novel, like Werth’s and Remarque’s ­after it, soldier cruelty reveals the tenuous barrier separating men from beasts and is a sign of the “unleashing” in war­time of aggressive instincts and brutality (27). Some of the soldiers poke Ferdinand with their bayonets, while ­others pull his tail and another urinates on him. Meanwhile the crowd gathered around exchanges ever more cruel and sadistic ideas for killing him (33–34). As w ­ ill be the case throughout Ferdinand’s time at the front, Fortune intervenes in the form of a random coincidence. The col­o­nel arrives, ready to give the men instructions on the use of their gas masks. Rather than drowning the trench rat, he suggests, the men should keep him as a mustard gas detector (35).

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Through it all only one rat exhibits any sense of camaraderie (or “raterie” as Ferdinand calls it) t­ oward the captured Ferdinand, lingering by his cage and suggesting pos­si­ble escape plans (37). What looks like solidarity is r­ eally just a trick: the “fraternal” rat makes off with the cheese from Ferdinand’s cage, stealing Ferdinand’s girlfriend Ratine in the pro­cess. It is only a­ fter being abandoned by his friends, and indeed his entire species, that Ferdinand w ­ ill seek companionship with the poilus and feel the first stirrings of a military esprit de corps. ­Human friendships, Ferdinand w ­ ill soon observe, are no more stable or binding than rat ones. Indeed “trench friendships,” Ferdinand suggests, are ultimately as illusory as “raterie” and typically do not survive even one trip back to the home front. Identification and mutual understanding among soldiers of dif­fer­ent classes and backgrounds is pos­si­ble only at the front, where each soldier “feels close to all the o­ thers and sees a b­ rother in even the most ­humble man.” As one moves farther away from the front, differences become more pronounced, and “each man falls back into his rank” or station in life according to his “education, birth, or culture.” Once the war is over, ­these trench friendships, which appear “deep” ­because “cemented in blood,” ultimately dissolve as each man “hasten[s] to put distance” between himself and his former comrade (124–25). Such clear-­eyed realism is typical of the picaresque tradition, which stresses solitude over solidarity and individualism over community. The picaresque is not, however, totally immune to sentiment, especially in the French tradition. As Richard Bjornson reminds us, the Gallic picaro retains an “ability to establish relationships on the basis of sentiments like generosity, loyalty, and sincerity.” 65 Even when he has the opportunity to escape from Juvenet’s cage, for example, Ferdinand does not avail himself of this opportunity, preferring his master’s companionship to freedom in the wild. What Ferdinand admires most in Juvenet is his ability to maintain his integrity amid the corrupting and degrading influences of the war. Juvenet is cut of nobler cloth than the men around him, who do not maintain their friendships and who unleash their cruelty, aggression, and frustration on innocent creatures. Juvenet reminds us that not all masters in the picaresque tradition are stingy, hard-­hearted ones like the blind man and the priest in Lazarillo de Tormes. Simplicius Simplicissimus, for example, is taken in by a wise old hermit. The hermit treats him well and gives him the moral toolkit with which to navigate through a corrupt world while retaining his integrity

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and inner—if not outer—­dignity. Lesage’s Gil Blas is likewise endowed with a “personal sense of honor” that enables him in most contexts to resist the corruption around him. He has moments of weakness, but always corrects his course, maintaining throughout his adventures a fundamental sense of h­ uman decency. 66 Of the two main characters in Les Mémoires d’un rat, it is Ferdinand, not Juvenet, who is the most susceptible to the “corruption” of bourrage de crâne (skull-stuffing). Juvenet resists the influences of knee-­jerk nationalism and bellicosity more easily than does Ferdinand, who adapts his thinking and his rhe­toric according to his entourage, and who is not immune from jingoism, particularly when he is in the com­pany of civilians. The reader is invited to turn a satirical gaze on Ferdinand and to register the author’s critique of militarism, xenophobic nationalism, and traditional notions of heroism through the naïve ac­cep­tance of such concepts by Ferdinand and through the rejection of such concepts by Juvenet. Consider, for example, the pride Ferdinand takes in his new role as mustard gas detector. This “sacrificial mission” enhances his sense of self-­worth. He seems unaware of the irony in his statement as he insists that he is as proud of himself for filling this role as he would be if he had actually “chosen it [himself], voluntarily.” Ferdinand embraces the outward trappings of heroism, although his picaresque spirit of self-­ preservation prevents him from embracing its ethos. He sees no contradiction in his admission that he would just as soon not fulfill his “sacrificial mission,” and that he enjoys the “honor” that comes from being u­ nder the “obligation to be a hero,” even if he sincerely hopes the opportunity ­will never pres­ent itself for him to act heroically (41). It is with a similar naïveté that Ferdinand parrots the civilian language of heroism when boasting about his time at Verdun. “I, too, was at Verdun!” he exclaims. “I, too, made of my chest a living rampart at the famous citadel.” This is, of course, a ridicu­lous proposition, given the size of the rat’s tiny chest. H ­ ere Ferdinand engages in bombast of the Barrèsian kind, literally puffing himself up to fit the meta­phor he has chosen. Again, he seems not to register the contradiction to his core value of elemental survival in his near apology that “all [he] needed to become a hero was to get [himself] killed.” Ferdinand typically says too much, admitting in spite of himself that glory, honor, and pride in war are dependent upon context. He was “less proud when they w ­ ere leading [him] up [to Verdun],” he admits, than “­after the fact,” when he had come out of the ordeal alive (81). That Ferdinand’s animal

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nature ­will prevail even as he tries to speak the h­ uman language of heroism is not surprising. Rats, like all animals, hold their own lives in very high esteem. Again Ferdinand attempts to justify to himself and to his reader what to any self-­respecting animal, including ­human beings living at the level of elemental survival, should seem entirely self-­evident, but which is denied by the logic of heroism and self-­sacrifice: “my life has always appeared more precious to me than that of anybody ­else for the ­simple reason that it is mine” (82). “In the days when I lived in the trench,” Ferdinand admits in a similar confessional moment, “I must admit that the feeling of my personal interest clouded any clear vision of the common good” (108). At this point in the story, Ferdinand has been separated from Juvenet and is enjoying the comfort and security of a life of easy retirement in an army supply depot. This provisional conclusion to his adventures offers another ironic glimpse at the morally pliant Ferdinand. Now that his self-­preservation is no longer at stake, Ferdinand identifies even less apologetically with civilian perspectives on the war. Corrupted by the influence of bloodthirsty civilians around him, he criticizes the conduct of the war, calling for even larger-­scaled attacks, no m ­ atter what the cost in ­human lives. Like many soldier-­protagonists, Ferdinand recognizes that “­those who want war are not ­those who wage it,” and that the “masterpiece of organ­ization consists in making the collectivity do what each of its members finds the most repellent”: risk their own lives. The conclusions he draws from this understanding sound, however, like ­those of the civilians satirized in previous chapters. It is good, Ferdinand concludes, that each nation has a critical mass of individuals who are not asked to risk their lives for their country. Since for ­these p­ eople what is at stake is their material gain, and not their ­actual survival, they are in a position to maintain the aggressive spirit, to “suggest the bloodiest mea­sures” for ensuring victory, and to hold soldiers accountable for their lack of success (108). Now that his own life no longer hangs in the balance, Ferdinand enthusiastically calls out for bold mea­sures and ambitious offensives. “Just think of the results that could have been achieved from one ­giant massacre,” he muses. ­Wouldn’t such a “massacre,” he argues, be better than the “slow trickle of deaths” that have resulted from repeated “weak and partial offensives”? (109). Juvenet is less susceptible than Ferdinand to civilian logic and the language of heroism. He is guided by “rules of honesty and honor” that prevent him from adopting the flawed reasoning and willful self-­delusions of the

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death-­driven, jingoistic society around him. He is impervious to “lofty arguments” that justify war as a rational or moral enterprise. He is unable or unwilling to reconcile abstract concepts with their deadly material consequences (46). Ferdinand couches Juvenet’s re­sis­tance to the corruption of humanist values in terms of a failure of the imagination or intellect: Juvenet’s “­simple mind could not wrap itself around the idea of a moral code of war, since the war seemed to him to be the negation of all moral standards. A declaration of war was the same for him as a suspension of all divine and h­ uman laws: it was an explosion of brute force.” Juvenet’s personal moral code rejects the artificial distinctions used to rationalize war as fair play. For Juvenet, t­ here can be no meaningful distinction between a civilian and a soldier since only a uniform separates the two. In the same way, ­there can be no moral superiority in using 210 millimeter shells that reduce ­human bodies to “pulp” instead of using poison gas, just b­ ecause shells have been approved by The Hague conventions and chemical weapons have not (46). To illustrate his master’s moral incorruptibility, Ferdinand tells the story of Juvenet’s refusal to kill a German soldier caught literally with his pants down on the other side of no-man’s-land. As the soldier squats in a latrine, the sharpshooter Juvenet has a clear line of sight for a direct hit. But Juvenet feels a vague sense of compassion for and solidarity with the unsuspecting soldier. He cannot bring himself to kill a man in such an undignified position while he himself stands protected b­ ehind a parapet. When his sergeant insists that he fire the shot, he misses on purpose, thus managing to stay true to his own moral code without appearing to reject the war’s demands. While every­ one around him seems to accept war’s destruction of “all moral barriers,” Juvenet resists such brutality. He accepts that the army can demand of him that he “be killed” but not that he kill (47). As much as Ferdinand admires his master’s critical spirit, he cannot help couching Juvenet’s values and be­ hav­iors in nationalistic terms. For Ferdinand, this “lack of logic” on Juvenet’s part is typical of “French chivalry” as active re­sis­tance to barbarism (47). Juvenet is not completely immune to corrupting influences, but he always returns to his moral center in the end. His upward mobility in the military hierarchy, for example, manages to “corrupt” him (181). ­Every promotion takes him farther away from frontline duty and exposure to danger while si­mul­ta­neously enhancing his image and powers of seduction. Juvenet changes his personal grooming habits to match his newfound

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sartorial elegance, proudly displaying his sergeant’s stripes, outfitting himself with a “white detachable collar,” and adopting the more “martial and distinguished” American-­style mustache (182). Far from being “damaged” by the war as he now experiences it as a noncommissioned officer, Juvenet appears to be “perked up” by it (181). As Ferdinand observes, Juvenet’s only thought becomes “to s­ ettle down as comfortably as pos­si­ble in the war,” thanks to his newfound filon (cushy job) (173). Physical comfort comes, however, at a moral price. “Circumstances” and his new “entourage” contribute to Juvenet’s corruption and his eventual act of “infidelity” with the camp follower Marie-­Louise, by many years Madame Juvenet’s ju­nior (179). Juvenet w ­ ill be made to see the error of his ways when his “intoxication with w ­ omen’s smiles” wears off, and he discovers that Marie-­Louise has been sharing her affections with Juvenet’s favorite new recruit (179). Juvenet says goodbye to his lover and to his youth, reaffirming his commitment to married life and renaming his dugout Villa Joséphine, a­ fter his wife (195). It is impor­tant to note that Ferdinand does not treat Juvenet’s promotion within the military hierarchy with scorn. That Juvenet is promoted to the highest rank of noncommissioned officers is a sign of his competence and decency. He is rewarded for his combat skills—­calm and leadership u­ nder fire and a sense of fairness (157). The fact remains that throughout his ­career Juvenet has not sought such advancement out of a desire for honor or prestige, but rather out of a desire for self-­preservation. In volunteering for a machine gun crew and setting himself on the path to promotion, Juvenet is engaging in the soldier’s eternal quest for the filon or more protected post. Earlier in the novel, Juvenet had managed to get himself named cook, for example, to avoid being “cannon fodder” (127). Juvenet secures this filon, Ferdinand points out, without the help of his well-­connected cousin Ernest. Deriving a vicarious sense of pride from his cousin Juvenet’s exposure to danger, Ernest would literally rather see Juvenet dead than protected from frontline duty (128). With the exception of this occasional maneuvering for a cushier post, Juvenet displays a typical picaresque passivity with re­spect to fickle and chaotic fortune. 67 Such passivity is, of course, even more pronounced in Ferdinand, whose margin of maneuver—­represented by his tiny cage—is even more restricted than Juvenet’s. Neither Ferdinand nor Juvenet is a rebel in any active sense. Each can be critical of the war, but neither argues for a ces-

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sation of hostilities, and neither refuses to fight or deserts his post. This picaresque passivity should not be confused with abjection or victimhood. Juvenet’s sense of integrity, buffered by his honesty and wit, protects him from cynicism and despair. His irreverent sense of humor enables him to push back against military authority and assert his dignity and in­de­pen­dence. When, a­ fter being caught hiding his wife in his billets, Juvenet is demoted and sent back to the front, for example, he turns this ignominy into a badge of honor. Since his transfer papers say he is “good for nothing but being sent to the trenches,” he plays upon his new comrades’ sense of dignity and self-­worth, calling attention to the conflation made in his punishment between frontline duty and a prison sentence (142). “I’m a recidivist,” he quips, awakening the squad’s “rebellious spirit” and heaping disgrace, not upon himself, but upon Captain du Schnock for his clumsy association of frontline soldiers with criminals and of frontline ser­vice with the expiation of a crime (143). Schnock has come dangerously close to admitting in writing what Ferdinand has sensed from the start, that frontline ser­vice, if it ­were used as a punishment for a crime, would be outlawed as an “inhumane barbarism” and a form of cruel and unusual punishment (53). In Les Mémoires d’un rat and Les Commentaires de Ferdinand, we see a dif­fer­ent sort of irony at work from the kind Paul Fussell sees as central to “modern memory.” If Fussell’s irony is melancholic and nostalgic, the picaresque irony of Pierre Chaine’s satirical trench rat and his master is salutary and bracing. The ironic distance of the satirist is not just a way of understanding the world and one’s place in it. It is also an active survival strategy. “At first glance,” Robert Alter writes in reference to the Gallic picaro Gil Blas, “it seems remarkable that Gil Blas can demonstrate,” even in the most difficult predicaments, “a resilience that even allows him to be capable of irony.” Alter’s analy­sis does not stop ­there, and his observation about Gil Blas could easily apply to Ferdinand and to other G ­ reat War picaros who deploy irony as yet another survival strategy of Le Système D. “Perhaps it would be more accurate,” Alter corrects himself, “to say that the habit of irony is what makes [Gil Blas] capable of such resilience.” 68 Ferdinand’s position as naïve or uninformed animal outsider allows him to observe ­human social norms and institutions from a distance. However much he identifies with his squad and his new master (and l­ater with civilians) and as proud as he is when his fur is dyed horizon blue, he retains a critical distance from the men and from the war. Ferdinand’s animal instincts

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­ ill not allow him to mythologize or overly sentimentalize his relationships w with the men. For most of his time at the front, his ironist’s realism allows him to see through the most comforting illusions. Neither Ferdinand nor Juvenet experiences despair, alienation, or victimization. “The ironist’s way of looking at t­ hings,” Alter insists, “keeps experience—­even when it is threatening—at arm’s length” (or in Ferdinand’s case, at paw’s length).69 Ferdinand and Juvenet as ironists are capable, like Gil Blas before them, of “converting the terrible into the comical, or, at any rate, of rising above [their] dilemma” to remain morally intact.70 Fi­nally, if the h­ uman soldier Juvenet is less susceptible to corruption than the trench rat Ferdinand, in neither case does the “moral pliancy” of t­ hese picaros “collaps[e] into baseness.” 71 Animal instincts and humanistic ones converge in ­these novels, which explore both the sentiment of survival and the survival of sentiment amid and despite the brutalizing and dehumanizing forces of war. A similar moral and emotional resilience is embodied in another set of prominent G ­ reat War picaros, Bruce Bairnsfather’s “Old Bill” and Francisque Poulbot’s Montmartre street ­children or poulbots. With Bairnsfather and Poulbot, we turn in the following chapter to the pictorial picaresque and to the arts of survival depicted in the most iconic cartoons of the war. Each artist sought to convey (and construct) as eco­nom­ically as possible the unique national character and habitus of his compatriots. In “Old Bill,” Bairnsfather depicted the phlegmatic practicality of the British picaresque spirit. Through his resourceful gamins (kids), Poulbot, on the other hand, celebrated the cocky flamboyance of the Gallic picaresque.

6. Phlegm Meets Flair

Images of the Infantryman in War­time Britain and France

Advancements in print technology, photomechanical reproduction techniques, typography, graphic design, and color lithography all contributed to an explosion of images in print media immediately before the First World War. Prewar transformations in the illustrated press found new impetus during the war, with newspapers using images and cartoons to draw in and keep readers and to fill the war­time information gap. Some of the best-­ known commercial artists and illustrators of the time w ­ ere regular contributors to illustrated magazines, including humor magazines like Le Rire rouge and La Baïonnette, which also contained short stories and commentary from mobilized writers and artists. Their works often debuted in humor magazines or illustrés such as L’Illustration or Lectures pour tous before being recycled in the big Pa­ri­sian dailies and in ­albums, posters, postcards, board games, commemorative plates, and other affordable media.1 Like photog­raphers, illustrators understood that ­people wanted to see the war as much as they wanted to read about it. The satirical cartoon offered the perfect wedding of text and image, with verbal punch lines complementing and completing visual ones.

Cockney “Contemptibles” in Search of a Better ’Ole

One of the most famous British cartoons of the ­Great War depicts two soldiers shoulder-­deep in a shell-­hole. The dark sky above them is full of whizzing bullets, represented by crisscrossing white lines, and shell explosions, 137

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Figure 5. Bruce Bairnsfather, “Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it.” Published in The Bystander magazine and then in the collected volume Fragments from France (1917), New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons / London: The Bystander.

rendered as large white clouds. The sky and explosions, which occupy the top two-­thirds of the frame, dwarf the two Infantrymen. One, hunkered down in the shell-­hole, scowls at the other, who is standing with his arms stretched out on the ground in front of him, looking bewildered and alarmed. In a cockney accent, the scowling soldier says to the other, “Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it” (fig. 5). The caption became a sort of catch phrase for British soldiers at the front. ­There’s no use getting worked up about the bombs raining from the sky, the caption suggests. It’s best simply to ­settle down and get on with the business of waiting out the barrage. If you ­haven’t sized up the situation by now—if you actually believe t­ here’s a safer or more logical spot to be in than this ran-

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dom shell-­hole you find yourself in—­then go to it, the scowling soldier suggests. The truth this cartoon expresses is that for t­hese Tommies, as for thousands like them, t­ here is “no where to run.”2 The Infantryman is entirely at the mercy of blind chance. The ethos conveyed is that of resignation: the frightened soldier should shut up and let the seasoned one—­who has long since wised up to the ways of the war—­“carry on” as best he can. Almost as famous as this “Better ’ole” cartoon was “So Obvious,” a drawing featuring the same war-­weary, scowling old soldier, this time named “The Fed-­Up One,” slumped down against a brick wall in a bombed-­out barn. The wall, which has an enormous hole in it, is being contemplated by “The Young and Talkative One,” a clean-­shaven young soldier with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. “Who made that ’ole?” the young one asks. “Mice,” replies the fed-up old soldier in quick, sarcastic repartee. ­These cartoons, like many more in this series, depict a quintessentially picaresque situation—­the initiation of an inexperienced novice into the harsh realities of a hostile and unpredictable world. They set up a typically picaresque relationship, that between master and apprentice. The inexperienced recruits in ­these cartoons are taught how to approach and understand this dangerous world by an older, wiser “master.” For the hundreds of thousands of British readers—­both soldiers and civilians—­who eagerly sought the drawings of captain-­cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather in the pages of the weekly magazine The Bystander, the old master in ­these picaresque pictures was instantly identifiable as William Busby, aka “Old Bill.”3 His sidekick, the fresh-­faced recruit in “So Obvious,” was known as Bert. Bairnsfather had been among the first wave of British soldiers sent to the front. He spent the first six months of the war in the frontlines before being invalided out with shell shock in April 1915.4 ­A fter recovering, he was sent to the Isle of Wight, to the Royal Warwickshire Depot, to train new recruits and command a com­pany of two hundred “old soldiers” who w ­ ere back from fighting in France and w ­ ere now on light du5 ties. Bairnsfather l­ater wrote of his g­ reat admiration for the men in this group and their approach to military life. In From Mud to Mufti (1919), his second volume of illustrated memoirs, Bairnsfather described the “work-­evading” tactics of the veterans in his com­pany. “It was astonishing,” he wrote, in reference to the men’s old war wounds, “how bad ­those old wounds became on the day that the route march came around.” 6 “I love t­hose old work-­evading, tricky, self-­contained

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slackers—­old soldiers!” Bairnsfather continued.7 “And good ‘old Bill,’ ” he ­ ere, Bairnsfather wrote, “belongs to t­hese loveable humorists.” 8 They w affirmed, the “ ’cutest set of old rogues imaginable,”9 and Bairnsfather admits to having “had to go off b­ ehind some huts to laugh” at the “quaint and cunning tricks amongst themselves, or directed against [him].”10 Their trickery and work-­evasion is not condemned as a sign of cowardice or incompetence. Bairnsfather gives ­these “old contemptibles”—­ members of Britain’s often-­derided prewar regular army—­full credit for being fierce fighters when they need to be. He summed up the men’s approach to the war this way: “Total Outlook: As l­ittle work as pos­si­ble. Total Ability: Fight like hell, and c­ an’t be beaten.”11

The Birth of Old Bill

Bairnsfather had sent his first drawings to The Bystander in the early months of 1915, when he was still at the front. This high-­quality weekly magazine, founded in 1901, actively sought cartoon contributions from men at the front.12 By the ­middle of 1915, Bairnsfather had been commissioned by The Bystander to produce a drawing a week.13 He would be The Bystander’s “most successful artist,”14 a “global celebrity” and arguably “the most popu­lar artist of the ­Great War.”15 The Bystander quickly expanded its offerings of “Old Bill” cartoons into new markets and media such as postcards and, most successfully, collected volumes of Bairnsfather’s Bystander drawings entitled Fragments from France. Seven volumes of Fragments from France would appear during and immediately ­after the war, selling in the millions of copies, before The Bystander commissioned Bairnsfather in 1919 to produce his own weekly magazine called Fragments.16 The British army quickly capitalized on Bairnsfather’s success, choosing not to send him back into combat but instead to appoint him the first ever “Officer Cartoonist.”17 The move was inspired by a request from the French Intelligence Department, which asked that Bairnsfather be “loaned to them, to create for France what he had created for his own country—­higher morale through laughter.”18 Bairnsfather made a tour of the French front, including a visit to Verdun, before touring the Italian front in 1917 at the request of the Italian army and then heading back to France in 1918, this time in the ser­vice of the American propaganda department and with the mission of capturing the spirit of the American soldier.19

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Bairnsfather had received formal training at the John Hassall School of Art and was influenced by Hassall’s distinctive poster style of flat color and thick, bold outlines. 20 Though never a successful advertising artist himself, Bairnsfather had a visual style very much in keeping with the prewar British advertising aesthetic of well-­crafted, finely detailed, “paint­erly” pictures. 21 ­These pictures had a finished quality and told a story. 22 What was striking in the majority of the “Old Bill” cartoons was Bairnsfather’s departure, within a similar visual style, from the sentimentality of prewar British ad­ ere “part of vertising. 23 It has been argued that illustrators during the war w 24 a collective voice and firmly echoed popu­lar opinion.” A handful of graphic artists stood out from the crowd, echoing popu­lar opinion, perhaps, but also inflecting it. 25 Bairnsfather’s drawings went against a certain traditional, chivalric, and emotional grain that was dominant in prewar and war­time British culture. 26 The Old Bill cartoons ­shaped, as much as they reflected, “British imaginings of the ­Great War.”27 Critics of Bairnsfather’s work ­were quick to point out the gaping distance separating figures like Old Bill, Alf, and Bert from traditional, heroic depictions of the British soldier. In a late 1916 letter to his m ­ other, trench poet Wilfred Owen described the men around him, with disappointment bordering on disgust, as “the roughest set of knaves I have ever been herded with.” “On all the officers’ f­ aces ­there is a harassed look that I have never seen before,” Owen observed. Meanwhile the men of the rank and file w ­ ere, 28 for Owen, “just as Bairnsfather has them—­expressionless lumps.” Around that same time, an article about Bairnsfather’s cartoons by Captain James Steuart Wilson appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.29 “The Soldier Who Made the Empire Laugh” was a scathing critique of Bairns­ father’s recently published illustrated memoirs, Bullets to Billets. “It is not with Captain Bairnsfather’s humour that we quarrel,” Wilson insisted, acknowledging the “chorus of praise” for Bairnsfather issuing from “civilians and soldiers alike.” “It is b­ ecause,” Wilson continued, “he standardizes—­almost idealizes—­a degraded type of face.” “Bairnsfather’s Alf and Bert” are, in Wilson’s eyes, “disgusting, ­because they are so pos­si­ble.” Soldiers fitting this type would be “most summarily dealt with” by any self-­respecting battalion. Such soldiers are “the very type which the Army is anxious to suppress.”30 The prob­lem, Wilson thought, was that too many artists and writers ­were modeling their soldiers on Kipling’s Private Ortheris from his Soldiers Three. A case in point was a character in “Mr. Wells’s last book,”

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the “Cockney soldier of the new Army.” As remarkable to Wilson as the soldier’s constant swear words was the “disgust that he aroused in his fellow-­ soldiers, who preferred—­shall we say Words­worth’s ideal?”31 In a preface to the fourth volume of Fragments from France, The Bystander’s editor Vivian Car­ter acknowledged the lineage between Bairnsfather’s soldiers and Kipling’s Soldiers Three, arguing that if the “immortal” “much-­ tried trio” of Old Bill, Alf, and Bert “have their place in the gallery of the grotesque,” they “have their place also in the hearts of their countrymen.” According to Car­ter, Bairnsfather had captured the spirit of “the ­simple man caught in the vortex of a war of unaccustomed complexity,” and had offered Old Bill and the gang “in proof that ­human nature and humour survive in the heart of horrors.”32 In the seventh volume of Fragments from France, Bairns­ father offered his own rebuttal in the form of a satirical cartoon called “No Joke!” In it, Bairnsfather depicted two Tommies in a trench. The soldiers have labels pasted over their ­faces, labels that encapsulate the critique of Old Bill and his crew by Owen, Wilson, and their ilk—­the first pasted label says “Vulgar” and the other “Undesirable.”

What Survival Looks Like

Old Bill is a ­middle-­aged picaro. He has seen all that the war can throw his way, and he has resigned himself to its dangers and discomforts. He is neither a hero nor a victim, but simply a survivor. In countless cartoons, Old Bill is depicted “carry­ing on” with his vari­ous tasks—­cutting a comrade’s hair (“Coiffure in the Trenches”), scolding Bert for making fun of him (“An In-­fringe-­ment”),33 reading a letter (“Poor old Maggie! She seems to be ’avin’ it dreadful wet at ’ome!”), smoking his pipe (“­There goes our blinkin’ parapet again”), sleeping (“Shut that blinkin’ door. T ­ here’s a ’ell of a draught in ’ere”), or simply standing with his hands in his pockets (“No ‘Light’ Call”).34 In ­these cartoons, Old Bill appears to be indifferent to the chaos around him—­ falling bombs, pelting rain, flooded trenches, crumbling buildings, or even a German soldier in a gas mask lunging over the parapet. Old Bill has long since ceased to waste his precious energy being agitated by such incon­ve­niences or upset about situations he cannot change—­these are simply part of daily life at war. It is hard to tell ­whether Old Bill has developed nerves of steel or ­whether he is just too tired and fed up to react. He seems more irritated than disturbed by the sights and sounds of war.

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Bill’s resignation should not be taken as abjection or as an abdication of his prewar personality. This resignation involves an understanding of the war as a conflict that must be fought and won. It signals an ac­cep­tance on his part of the soldiers’ role as “workers ­doing a necessary job at the front.”35 It is in the unflappable attitude, the clever repartee, the dismissive remark, and the foul language that Bill exhibits his re­sis­tance to the brutalizing and dehumanizing effects of war. Through sarcasm and irony, he manages to deflate and distance himself psychologically from, the horrors around him. With typical British phlegm, Old Bill, like all good En­glishmen, can be counted upon “not only . . . ​not [to] ‘make a mountain out of a molehill,’ ” but indeed to “ ‘make a molehill out of a mountain,’ ” as Wyndham Lewis famously put it.36 Through his threats of ear boxing or his angry frowns directed at the comrades who repeatedly compare him to a walrus—(“Fish and Chip”)37—­Bill asserts his virility and dignity as a man, despite the humiliating clothes he must wear and conditions he must endure. One famous cartoon pushes this often repeated walrus joke to its extreme. “Natu­ral History of the War” depicts the “Flanders Sea Lion (Leo Maritimus)” (fig. 6).38 A sea lion lies flopped out on the ground, its flippers stretched in front of it and its tail curled around ­behind. Empty jugs and tin cans lie strewn around the sea lion, whose blubbery skin morphs at the neck into the signature balaclava or helmet liner worn by Old Bill. Multiple chins lead to Bill’s distinctive walrus mustache. The creature looks directly and somewhat defiantly at the viewer from squinting eyes with deep, puffy bags beneath them. The caption reads: “An almost extinct amphibian, first discovered in Flanders during the Winter of 1914–15. Feeds almost exclusively on Plum and Apple Jam and Rum. Only savage when the latter is knocked off.”39 Old Bill’s primary preoccupation is not with acts of bravado or heroism but with filling his belly—­even if it means making do with monotonous army rations of plum and apple jam. Old Bill’s basic passivity is communicated in many cartoons by his seated or squatting posture and by the relentless grunt-­eye view from which we see him. “Natu­ral History of the War” pushes this logic of immobility40 further, by comparing Old Bill to the large, flabby amphibious walrus crawling clumsily on his belly when he is on land. It is hard to imagine Old Bill charging across no-man’s-land. In the rare cartoons in which Bill is depicted in a heroic (though thoroughly tongue-­in-­cheek) stance, it is his defensive, not offensive, posture that is emphasized. “Ils ne passeront pas” (They W ­ on’t Get Through)

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Figure 6. Bruce Bairnsfather, “Natu­r al History of the War: The Flanders Sea Lion (Leo Maritimus).” “An almost extinct amphibian, first discovered in Flanders during the Winter of 1914–15. Feeds almost exclusively on Plum and Apple Jam and Rum. Only savage when the latter is knocked off.” Published in The Bystander magazine and then in the collected volume Fragments from France (1917), New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons / London: The Bystander.

depicts a vigorous Old Bill firmly planted on widely spaced, sturdy legs, holding a ­rifle with bayonet affixed. The caption is a play on a famous turn-­of-­ the-­century song lyric often applied to “Old Contemptibles” like Old Bill.41 “Old soldiers,” Bairnsfather’s caption reads, “never say die, t­ hey’ll simply block the way” (versus “fade away” in the original).42 As blubbery sea lion or virile defender of allied territory, Old Bill has earned his credentials as a fearsomely determined survivor. That the sea lion is capable of energy and aggression when provoked is never in question. But the last t­ hing on Old Bill’s mind is becoming a hero “in the traditional sense.” 43 Such heroism would hardly seem appropriate in British military and civilian culture—­where rigid class hierarchies had long reserved heroism and panache for the upper, officer class. Members of the rank-­and-­file like Old Bill, coming largely from the urban working classes, had traditionally been treated with a certain condescension. This condescension is parodied in one cartoon, “Protection on the March,” which features a perplexed Old Bill

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decked out for the next attack. He has collected tin helmets and affixed them all over his body—on both shoulders, both knees and elbows, his stomach and backside. A tall, lean officer, with tightly cinched waist and shining spurs stands with clenched fists and a disdainful expression on his face. “Old Bill,” the caption reads, “had thought of a splendid idea for the next advance, and, frankly, was rather hurt when a Staff Officer condemned it.” 44 This class snobbery is turned on its head by Bairnsfather, who depicts gruff old soldiers like Old Bill or his cockney sidekicks Bert and Alf as the true heroes of the war. It is in their very flippancy and sarcasm that this new form of heroism resides. As one critic of the film version of Bairnsfather’s cartoons, The Better ’Ole, observed in 1918, “it is the flippancy of the British soldier which enables him to play the hero u­ nder conditions which the thoughtful man at home can hardly contemplate without a shudder.” 45 Old Bill’s only aim and ambition is to endure the war and to emerge from it unscathed and unchanged. This is precisely what he does in the many cartoons that imagine him still alive and kicking years into the war and indeed long a­ fter it: cartoons like “19 . . ?,” 46 “Old Bill’s War-­Aim,” 47 “Once upon a time,” 48 “William the Conqueror II,” 49 “The Wisdom of Bill,” 50 “En Route to a Far, Far Better ’Ole,” 51 and the famous armistice image “ ’Ullo!”52 in which a disheveled Old Bill, arms lain down, rests seated on a tattered German Imperial throne. Writing a­ fter the war, Wyndham Lewis attributed to Old Bill a quintessentially British sense of humor and an invaluable role in the final victory. “ ‘Old Bill,’ ” Lewis wrote in 1937, “was the real hero of the World War, on the En­glish side, much more than any V.C.” A recipient of the Victoria’s Cross, he explained, is a “fellow who does something heroic.” But, he continued, d­ oing something heroic is “almost unEn­glish.” “It is taking t­ hings a bit too seriously,” he explains, “to get the V.C.” “The ­really popu­lar fellow,” he insisted, “is the humorous ‘Old Bill’ à la Bairnsfather.” “And it r­ eally was ‘Old Bill’ who won the war,” Lewis concluded, “with all that expression ‘won the war’ implied.”53 In this Lewis echoes a sentiment expressed by General Sir Ian Hamilton, who dubbed Bairnsfather “the man who won the war.”54

British Phlegm vs. French Flair

Old Bill embodied what critics argued ­were distinctly British traits and a uniquely British approach to life: patience, endurance, and resignation.

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Allied commentators returned repeatedly to the same stock set of national traits to characterize the British—­traits that ­were complementary to, but distinct from, ­those of the French. To the British soldier’s legendary phlegm—­ his imperturbability, evenness of temper, self-­possession, and strength of character—­t he French soldier offered his legendary flair—­his wit, vigor, and panache. The British Tommy and the French poilu ­were held up in allied propaganda as a sort of odd ­couple—­dramatically dif­fer­ent in temperament but excellent partners in war. Bruce Bairnsfather’s collaborator, Captain A. J. Dawson, drew a clear distinction between the French and British fighting spirits. The “French spirit,” Dawson argued, “is more articulate, and leaps to the eye far more than does the rather sardonic, often almost melancholy-­seeming and wholly indomitable spirit of Tommy.”55 “Every­one,” he continued, “has heard of French gallantry and dash; German thoroughness and efficiency; British stubbornness and endurance.”56 While the British w ­ ere often described as humorous, the French ­were described as witty. “Wit,” one British war­time journalist insisted, “comes from the head,” but humor of the British kind comes “from the heart.”57 In war, good old-­fashioned British humor was desirable, the journalist continued, b­ ecause it “prevents Tommy from being an up-­and-­down man.” This attitude seems to have been fairly widely held, along with the notion that the French w ­ ere more prone than the British to swings of mood—of exaltation followed by disappointment, or optimism followed by depression. The even-­ keeled British, so the logic goes, had no illusions about the war; they d­ idn’t overthink t­ hings; they gritted their teeth and carried on, just like Old Bill.58 Of course, this vision of British humor ignores an impor­tant ele­ment in the iconography of the Tommy. While he was, indeed, often characterized as ­silent and sardonic, he was also portrayed as a “cockney joker,” cheerful in adversity and ready with a clever quip for any situation.59 The cockney was perceived as “metropolitan, streetwise, quick-­witted and quick-­spoken.” 60 This image of the cockney Tommy was captured in one of the most popu­lar British songs of the war, which told the story of “Private Perks,” the “funny ­little codger,” who was “five feet none” and “an artful l­ittle dodger.” 61 If Old Bill embodied none of the sprightliness or artful dodging of “Private Perks” or his pre­de­ces­sor in Dickens’s Jack Dawkins, he had the same cockney wit. In the figure of Old Bill the quick wits of the street-­smart kid met the lethargy and inertia of the m ­ iddle-­aged man in a mixture of traits

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that would resonate with dif­fer­ent kinds of British humor—­the ­silent and sardonic kind and the more flamboyant, cockney kind. The French piou-­piou, on the other hand, was, according to one British journalist, “a gay, volatile, impressionable, patriotic, fiery, casual, electric creature.” 62 ­These qualities made him a formidable fighter. This same “intense and ­eager spirit,” which is “the very life-­blood of France,” can be seen, the journalist added, in the c­ hildren of France. He goes on to describe the actions of a heroic fifteen-­year old crippled boy who, refusing ­under pain of death to serve as a guide for the Germans, “spat straight in [the] face” of a German officer before he died. Such intensity of spirit does have its drawbacks, the journalist conceded. It leaves the French Infantryman vulnerable to mood swings and depression, conditions from which, it was widely argued, the Tommy never suffers. In their 1920 comparative study of war posters, Martin Hardie and Arthur Sabin argued that ­these national traits could be seen, not just in the content of posters and war images, but also in their style. French artists, with their “lighter and more fascinating touch” in poster design, Hardie and Sabin argued, brought “vigour and freshness,” and the “air of glad youth” to the “war-­weary spirits” of the British.63 Among the French graphic artists cited by Hardie and Sabin as bringing “a spring wind” over flagging British spirits is Francisque Poulbot, with his drawings of Montmartre street ­children.64 Les poulbots, as ­these c­ hildren came to be called, embodied that panache or French flair celebrated by British critics.

Les Poulbots: Cheeky Child Heroes and Kindred Spirits of the Poilu

As the example of Old Bill makes clear, the picaresque need not be approached as an exclusively narrative mode. From its inception, the picaresque worldview and approach to life had been expressed, not just in stories, but also in images.65 The picaresque underlies, for example, the many studies of street urchins, beggars, dwarves, and other marginals in Flemish and Spanish “low-­life” painting of the Baroque period. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1618–1682) was a specialist in the genre, producing realistic portraits of orphans and street c­ hildren who w ­ ere the close pictorial cousins of literary child picaros before them like Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) or El Buscón’s Pablos (1626). In works such as Boys Eating Grapes and Melon (1645–1646), The

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Young Beggar (1645–1650), The L ­ ittle Fruit Seller (1670–1675), and Three Boys Playing Dice (1675–1680), we see barefoot ­children in tattered clothes fending for themselves on squalid city streets, picaresque spaces of contingency and chaos, where the events and encounters shaping young lives are governed by chance. Unlike his pre­de­ces­sor Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), also known for his depiction of street ­children and the urban underclass,66 Murillo does not depict his beggars and urchins as physically deformed and, by tacit extension, given prevailing attitudes of the time, morally deviant. His is neither a harshly satirical nor an unblinkingly realistic mode but a softened, some would say sentimentalized, expression of the picaresque. ­These ­children may be scavenging for food, begging for alms, or picking off lice, but they go about t­ hose survival tactics with a gentle innocence suggestive of inner purity and spiritual redemption.67 In classic picaresque tales, the protagonist begins his adventures in childhood, when he is thrown out of his home and forced to fend for himself in the harsh, wide world. A period of learning and acquisition of experience but also of extreme vulnerability, childhood is a perennially privileged theme of the picaresque mode. Of course, not all coming-­of-­age stories are picaresque and not all child protagonists are picaros. The picaresque mode receded in the nineteenth ­century, in ­favor of apprenticeship stories set in non-­picaresque worlds (worlds mirroring prevailing attitudes about pro­gress and probability) and depicting characters motivated by non-­picaresque (bourgeois) values. The ­century did give rise, however, to a handful of highly memorable child protagonists who embodied the picaresque way of life and kept the picaresque spirit alive. Dickens’s Artful Dodger, Jack Dawkins (in Oliver Twist, 1838), comes to mind, as does Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (in the eponymous novel, 1884). For the French, however, the most impor­tant, ubiquitous, and cherished child-­picaro of the nineteenth ­century was the gamin de Paris. A literary and pictorial type, the gamin appeared in paintings such as Delacroix’s La Li­ berté guidant le ­peuple (1830) and in plays, songs, poems, and caricatures. In Les Français peints par eux-­mêmes (1840–1842), one of the illustrated studies of social types or physiologies, writer and critic Jules Janin described the gamin de Paris as a figure who is hard to pin down, both physically and morally. A consummate vagabond, the gamin could be found roaming the streets of Paris, from the banks of the Seine where he thumbs his nose at the police, to

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the public squares where he goes to g­ amble, to the Paris morgue where he goes for a good laugh, to the theater where he goes to make a ruckus.68 The gamin is irreverent and rebellious, displaying no re­spect for authority, but he is also tender and generous and naturally takes the side of the weak against the strong. The gamin de Paris was a bundle of contradictions, a creature possessing “the most remarkable mixture of vices and virtues, of good qualities and flaws, of insouciance and courage, of ruse and naïveté.” 69 This seemingly inscrutable figure, Janin argues, embodies and represents to perfection the unique French national spirit.70 The most famous nineteenth-­century gamin de Paris and the one who would serve as a model for all subsequent gamins ­until the First World War was Gavroche, the cocky street urchin with the heart of gold from Victor Hugo’s 1862 sweeping novel Les Misérables.71 Gavroche “runs, looks out, begs, wastes time, stuffs his pipe, swears like a cursed man, haunts the cabaret, hangs out with thieves, flirts with the girls, speaks in slang, sings dirty songs, and has no meanness in his heart. That’s ­because he has in his soul a pearl, innocence, and pearls ­don’t dissolve in the mud.” 72 If we added to “the mud” the words “of the trenches,” we could easily substitute this description of Gavroche for that of the iconic literary and pictorial poilu from ­Great War novels and cartoons. Hugo’s description of Gavroche begins with a long inventory of lack and deprivation. Gavroche ­doesn’t have “a shirt on his back, or shoes on his feet, or a roof over his head.” 73 He is, like the Infantryman a­ fter him, the ultimate “have-­not.” Actually, Gavroche does have clothes, which are pieced together from hand-me-­downs (including w ­ omen’s clothing), and he does have a roof over his head, the inside of a massive public statue—­Napoleon’s elephant—­ which he has repurposed and furnished with found objects, including a boy-­sized wire cage to protect himself from rats. Gavroche is a practitioner, avant la lettre, of Le Système D. Critics began to make the connection between Gavroche and the Infantryman as soon as the first literary repre­sen­ta­tions of the war began to appear. In a December 1915 review of Gaspard, the first best seller and Goncourt winner of the war, conservative critic Léon Daudet called the novel’s title character Gaspard the “cousin of Gavroche.” Soldier-­novelist René Benjamin had, in the wisecracking Pa­ri­sian snail merchant Gaspard, created a soon-­to-be iconic portrait of the foot soldier. Writing in L’Action Française, Daudet described Gaspard as “spontaneous, brave, loyal and

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clever, débrouillard, of course, a good comrade, up for the most absurd jokes one minute and rejecting them the next.”74 Catholic critic René Aigrain concurred that Gaspard’s “childish pranks” ­were “worthy of Gavroche.”75 Writing near the end of the war, literary critic Albert Schinz predicted that Gaspard would “remain a type in French lit­er­a­ ture,” such as “Hugo’s Gavroche.” The word Gaspard, Schinz insisted, had already entered the French language as a word for the “intelligent, alert man of the p­ eople of France, or rather of Paris,” and a perfect repre­sen­ta­tion of “the French soldier.” According to Schinz, Gaspard projected the image of the poilu “which the general public, especially abroad, likes to imagine.” This association can be made, Schinz insisted, “perfectly legitimately,” since “Gaspards are more likely to be found in the French army than elsewhere, although nobody would think” that all French soldiers are Gaspards.76 While it is true that not all literary and pictorial poilus ­were depicted as Gaspards or Gavroches, it is also true that Gavroche and the gamin de Paris in general provided a widely recognized and consensus-­building iconography for the Infantryman that was legible and popu­lar both at home and abroad. It is this popularity and legibility that explains, at least in part, the spectacular rise to fame during the war of Francisque Poulbot and his drawings of Montmartre street c­ hildren. W ­ hether Poulbot’s drawings drew upon the success of novels like Gaspard or fed that success is hard to determine. The two ­were prob­ably mutually reinforcing. What is clear is that both the novels and the cartoons drew upon a preexisting my­thol­ogy with deep roots in nineteenth-­ century French culture that could be updated, repurposed, and mobilized in the effort of artists and writers to imagine French responses to, and understandings of, the G ­ reat War.77

Francisque Poulbot

If the name Francisque Poulbot does not resonate strongly outside of France, it is one that is still familiar to older generations of French ­people ­today. Poulbot’s war­t ime work has received less scholarly attention than that of avant-­garde or of better-­known poster artists such as Jean-­Louis Forain, Théophile Steinlen, or Adolphe Willette. Many ­people know about Poulbot’s popularity during the G ­ reat War, but few p­ eople seem to know quite what to make of that popularity. His is a name that, among historians and specialists of the First World War, seems to come up in conversation more than in print.

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When Poulbot is mentioned, it is usually only in passing, as, for example, a “specialist in the repre­sen­ta­tion of ­children at war.” 78 As unique and as popu­lar as Poulbot’s cartoons ­were in their day, by our standards they are easy to dismiss as old-­fashioned, maudlin, and sickly sweet—­not to mention jingoistic and emotionally manipulative. And yet, Francisque Poulbot was “one of the most popu­lar French graphic artists of the first half of the twentieth ­century.”79 His work was popu­ lar before the war, but it was during the war that he experienced his most productive period, and by the end of the war, his name had become a ­house­hold word. 80 His drawings of Montmartre ­children playing at war, fraternizing with the poilu, making fun of boches, falling victim to German atrocities, or empathizing with Belgian refugees w ­ ere ubiquitous. They appeared throughout the war in the national newspaper Le Journal, which sold close to one million copies a day at the height of its war­time success.81 Se­lections of t­ hese and other drawings w ­ ere republished in the two bound volumes Des gosses et des bonhommes (1916) and Encore des gosses et des bonhommes (1918) and also as postcards. His work appeared in the major illustrated humor magazines popu­lar during the war, such as La Baïonnette, Le Rire rouge, and L’Anti-­Boche, and on any number of war­time and postwar fund-­raising posters. Se­lections of ­these drawings and posters ­were displayed at the war­time Salons des humoristes. Poulbot’s 1915 Christmas poster for the Journée du poilu fund-­raising day was particularly well known. The poster, which features a ­little girl in a nurse’s outfit and a ­little boy in a képi, was so popu­lar that when a Journée du poilu was held three months ­later in Bondoukou, in the Ivory Coast, fund-­raisers staged a tableau vivant of the poster, with an Ivorian girl and boy standing in front of a backdrop reproducing the poster’s typography and framing. 82 Photo­g raphs of the scene circulated back to France where they appeared in L’Illustration. Poulbot’s war bonds posters w ­ ere extremely well known. One particularly popu­lar and often reproduced poster depicts a female poulbote as Marianne, wearing a tattered dress and standing among ruins. Though his drawings w ­ ere aimed at an adult audience, we know that French schoolchildren copied his drawings, evidence not only of the ­free circulation of images during the war but also of the porous bound­ aries between the world of adults and the world of ­children. 83 The vast majority of Poulbot’s war­time drawings are set in the streets of Montmartre, not at the frontlines. Poulbot made l­ ittle attempt to depict life at the front, choosing instead to draw the war from the perspective of the

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country’s youn­gest civilians—­children. T ­ here are a number of reasons for this approach and for its success. First, Poulbot spent the war on the home front. Thirty-­five years old in 1914, he was called up at the beginning of the war and served for several months in the Territorial Army (reserves) near Brest. In February 1915, he was invalided out of the army ­because of a debilitating degenerative bone disease. He returned to Montmartre, where he spent the war and indeed the rest of his life. 84 The war years would be among the most productive of his ­career. 85 Poulbot consolidated and refined a pictorial vocabulary that contributed to and resonated strongly with a developing French war­time visual aesthetic. His style, as much as the situations he depicted, ­were immediately recognizable to viewers and ­were considered to be quintessentially French. As Kenneth Silver, Mark Levitch, and ­others have shown, the bold color, flat shapes, and abstraction associated with a modernist poster aesthetic w ­ ere 86 rejected during the war as Germanic. The language of Gallic authenticity became that of the line and more particularly of the sketch. 87 German heaviness and solidity of form was countered by a French “lightness of hand,” which connoted not only fine draftsmanship, but also the art of suggestion or evocation—­the superiority of French subtlety over Germanic bluntness.88 The sketch, with its rhe­toric of rapidity and spontaneity in the capture of an attitude or a gesture, was taken to suggest sincerity or authenticity, unlike the carefully orchestrated, manipulative, and aggressive rhe­toric of advertising suggested in the eye-­catching boldness of German design. In Poulbot’s drawings, form reinforced content—­with the form of the sketch and the subject ­matter of ­children at play connoting spontaneity, candidness, and authenticity. Poulbot’s drawings ­were almost always of ­children, but they ­were not addressed explic­itly at ­children. Indeed, as in most war­time propaganda, c­ hildren in t­ hese drawings “stood in for adults.”89 As c­ hildren, they can be considered trustworthy. Their intuitions and instincts can be understood as t­ hose of the nation or the race.90 Their reactions to the war can show the way for adults. Les poulbots respond with the “vigor and freshness of youth”91 to adult war­time situations—­Zeppelin raids, food shortages, the absence of loved ones. They betray none of the war weariness of the civilian adults around them. They respond to the war, its challenges and its destruction, with absolute psychological immunity. Les poulbots have the ability to amuse them-

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Figure 7. Francisque Poulbot, “Si on voit pas l’Noël, on verra peut-­être un Zeppelin. / If we d­ on’t see Santa, maybe w ­ e’ll see a Zeppelin.” © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

selves with very ­little. They demonstrate the same ability as the poilus in the trenches to “ne pas s’en faire” or to avoid worrying, while taking t­ hings as they come. In one famous drawing, two poulbots are perched high on a Montmartre rooftop, shivering in the cold, hoping to catch a glimpse of le Père Noël (fig. 7). One child says to the other, in complete ignorance or disregard of the dangers involved, “If we ­don’t see Santa, maybe w ­ e’ll see a Zeppelin.”92 In addition to serving as role models for adult civilians, the poulbots, in their attitudes and activities, bridge the gap between the front and the home front. Poulbots are often depicted engaging in literal dialogue with soldiers—­ standing to attention and greeting soldiers coming to Paris on leave, for example. Typical captions cite boy poulbots wishing they w ­ ere old enough

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to fight or regretting that the war w ­ ill be over before they reach conscription age. Poulbots are often depicted imitating soldier slang while acting out battlefield scenarios, often by humorous analogy with adventures in their daily lives b­ ehind the lines. Such adventures often involve ridiculing adults—­ shirkers, profiteers, or stingy bourgeois who d­ on’t support the war loan effort—or evading punishment for acts of irreverence or general mayhem. Poulbot’s mobilization of the image of c­ hildren in the war effort was not unique to him or even to the First World War. As Stéphane Audoin-­ Rouzeau has shown, the Franco-­Prussian War was a “decisive step” in the “crystallization” of the “image of the enfant héroïque,” an image that reaches its fullest expression with the First World War. Images of ­children and discourses around childhood are omnipresent in French ­Great War culture.93 Child soldiers or ­children performing war work appear in novels, picture ­albums, toys, games, and textbooks as modern day enfants-­héroïques—­ either as clearly fictional characters like L’Espiègle Lili (Mischievious Lili), Bip et Bop, or les poulbots, or as real, historical actors (though certainly mythologized) like child martyr Émile Desprès or the adolescent soldier Jean- ­Corentin Carré.94 Claude Digeon has analyzed the crucial role that the figure of the enfant-­ héroïque played in stories and novels written about the Franco-­Prussian War. “The child hero is essential,” Digeon writes, “­because he highlights German brutality, ­because he opposes his weakness to [the German’s] ruthless force, his nimbleness to Germanic clumsiness, his délicatesse to the coarseness of the [German] roughneck soldier.” 95 The child hero, Digeon suggests, is easily recognizable as incarnating the French character traits of “audacity,” “initiative,” and “cleverness.” 96 Although ­actual, historical child soldiers dis­appeared from the French army in 1884, the rhetorical or discursive mobilization of French childhood intensified in the years leading up to the First World War.97 Child heroes invaded French lit­er­a­ture for ­children and adolescents in the last de­cades of the nineteenth c­ entury, at precisely the same time that the child soldier definitively dis­appeared from French military society. The mobilization of ­children shifted during this period, and was experienced as an intense psychological, emotional, and intellectual pressure exerted on adults to produce babies—­the soldiers of tomorrow—­and exerted on ­children to make themselves worthy of la patrie.98 The most widely used textbook of the Third Republic, Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (1877), was just one of many

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texts at this time designed to teach schoolchildren, and particularly boys, the values of self-­sacrifice and devotion to the nation.99

Commercial Bohemia, Prewar Montmartre, and the Mean Streets of the “Maquis”

The pre­war poulbots did not fit this pious, civic-­minded mold. In fact, they took many of their cues from a very dif­fer­ent turn-­of-­the-­century discourse, that of antimilitarism. Like a ­whole band of fledgling Montmartre writers, journalists, and artists who would ­later make names for themselves during the war, including Roland Dorgelès, Pierre Mac Orlan, and Gus Bofa, Poulbot was an admirer of the comic antimilitarist playwright and novelist Georges Courteline.100 He was commissioned to draw cover art for several of Courteline’s comedies, including Le Train de 8h47 and La Vie de caserne.101 Members of the prewar commercial Bohemia, press and advertisement illustrators for the most part, as opposed to in­de­pen­dent paint­ers and fine artists, rubbed shoulders with Courteline and with each other in the taverns and cabarets of la Butte of Upper Montmartre.102 They sent stories and drawings to the same newly founded satirical and social protest magazines— Le Rire (1894), Le Sourire (1899) L’Assiette au Beurre (1901)—­whose offices ­were located in the nearby press district of the streets of Réaumur and Faubourg-­Montmartre.103 They exhibited their work in the annual Salon des humoristes, which was founded in 1907 amid the growing popularity of the satirical press and the rise of the professional category of the “humoriste,” in contradistinction to the nineteenth-­century po­liti­cal caricaturist.104 Antimilitarism was just one tenet of the antiauthoritarianism, nonconformism, irreverence, and pranksterism cultivated by the école de Montmartre, as Armand Lanoux has dubbed this branch of the Montmartre bohème.105 They took on the army, the educational system, the church, and shone a spotlight on the social prob­lems of the day: alcoholism, prostitution, child endangerment and neglect, and rampant social i­ nequalities.106 Turn-­of-­the-­century Montmartre, it is well known, was a wonderful place for the starving artist. It offered cheap lodgings and studios in run-­down apartment buildings-­turned-­communes like the Bateau Lavoir. Between the streets of Lepic and Caulaincourt and the pres­ent-­day ave­nue Junot, ­there was at this time a kind of shantytown, referred to as the “Maquis.”107 At one point or another Toulouse-­Lautrec, Steinlen, Poulbot, and many o­ thers called the

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makeshift hovels of the Maquis their home. It has become a truism to say that Montmartre at the turn of the c­ entury had retained a village-­like atmosphere, with its rabbit hutches, its uneven paving stones, and its windmills. The romanticism and nostalgia associated with the Montmartre of the belle époque—­a romanticism that many of the Montmartrois of the prewar bohème worked hard to propagate—­masks a much harsher real­ity. Beneath a certain “comic-­ opera Bohemianism” lay “squalor, hunger and despair.”108 If Montmartre was a “capital of plea­sure,” Louis Chevalier reminds us, it was also a “capital of crime”—an urban space situated at the margins of a ­great city and at the margins of legality.109 Its bric-­à-­brac landscape of dilapidated buildings, uneven rooflines, crumbling staircases, ramshackle wooden fences, and rusting sheet metal might provide inspiration for artists, but it also served as home to marginal figures living in squalor and destitution. Rag-­and-­bone men, vagrants, battered and abandoned ­women and ­children, prostitutes, alcoholics, orphans, tuberculosis victims—­these, too, ­were the inhabitants of prewar Montmartre, a decidedly picaresque world with its abandoned lots, its poverty, lawlessness, and lack of infrastructure. Throughout his life, Poulbot showed a humanitarian interest in the plight of the ­children of Montmartre. ­After the war, he founded La République de Montmartre, a charitable organ­ization whose primary proj­ect, Le Dispensaire des petits poulbots (community health clinic), provided ­free medical attention to poor and working-­class c­ hildren and m ­ others of Montmartre.110 When Francisque Poulbot moved to Montmartre in 1899 and began his ­career as a press illustrator (“dessinateur de presse”), he began to develop a pictorial vocabulary for depicting Montmartre and its inhabitants. With a very eco­nom­ical line, he traced its broken boards, its stovepipes, jagged fences, abandoned wagon wheels, leaning lampposts, and cobbled streets. He captured the transient nature of la Butte—­a perpetual construction site during t­ hese years of urban expansion. Piles of rubble and abandoned building materials gave way to weed-­infested vacant lots, all with the vision of the basilica of Le Sacré Coeur, still in scaffolding, looming on the horizon.111 Over time, Poulbot specialized in the depiction of Montmartre street ­children and their everyday adventures, which w ­ ere set almost exclusively out of doors, in the streets, and almost always without adult supervision. Without falling into misérabilisme, he drew c­ hildren with bare feet or worn-­out shoes, tattered pant legs, patched seats, and frayed caps. His drawings w ­ ere not moralizing or condescending, not heavi­ly romanticized. If ­these street ur-

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chins ­were left to their own devices, abandoned by their parents and the educational system, t­ hese images suggested, they ­were also perfectly capable of fending for themselves. ­These early poulbots are scrawny, but not starving; they are poor, but not abject or humiliated; they are innocent, but also tough. ­These c­ hildren are buoyant picaros of the traditional Gallic variety—­wise beyond their years, pragmatic and cunning, but not corrupt or dangerous. Poulbot’s street ­children spoke in street slang, smoked cigarettes, and threw stones. They w ­ ere masters of quick and clever repartee. They could be sarcastic, cutting, even cynical, and at times a bit lewd. They ­were idlers, pranksters, and show-­offs: French “­little rascals.”112

Les Poulbots Play at War

The poulbots and their landscapes w ­ ere a preexisting, ready-­made template that could be easily modified and mobilized to respond to the imaginative needs of society at war.113 The visual cues used in the depiction of prewar poulbots are recycled, for example, in the depiction of barefoot and bedraggled Belgian refugees. The same goes for the surrounding landscape. While French ­children are most often depicted playing in the streets of a non-­threatening urban environment, Belgian refugees and French ­children in the occupied territories or territories closest to the war zone inhabit a landscape that resembles the rubble-­strewn, ramshackle streets of Montmartre. In the more limited set of drawings depicting poilus at the front, we see huts and dugouts, trenches and stretches of no-man’s-land that use the same shorthand cues once used to evoke the picaresque world of la Butte. During the war, les poulbots lost much of their hard-­edged raggedness. Their ­faces became rounder and their hair better combed. War­time poulbots are better dressed than their prewar counter­parts. Indeed, they often look downright respectable, wearing laced-up shoes, tidy outfits, or smart ­little military or nurses’ uniforms.114 In some drawings their toys look store-­bought, while in o­ thers they are clearly improvised from abandoned materials found in the streets. Poulbot must have sensed that his street c­ hildren would need to be reformed if they w ­ ere to have the broad appeal required for the maintenance of some sort of national consciousness in war­time. This would be especially impor­tant in the many posters advertising fund-­raising days. Bourgeois viewers, t­ hose who ­were most likely to open their wallets and purses, would need to be able to see themselves and their own c­ hildren in the poulbots.

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The poulbots have exaggeratedly round heads, wispy hair, large eyes, and button noses. Their poses are natu­ral and spontaneous, touchingly awkward—­shoulders hunched, chest or pelvis thrust forward, hands in pockets or crossed b­ ehind their backs, feet turned out, or knees turned in. The poulbots’ world is governed by rigid codes of gender and race. Boy poulbots are depicted taking part in a number of dif­fer­ent kinds of activities, chief among them playing at war. Quite predictably, girl poulbots are depicted playing nurse or ­mother to their dolls when they are not shown taking care of the many seemingly abandoned baby poulbots who inhabit this strange, liminal world. If the war­time poulbots are better cared for and better dressed than their prewar counter­parts, they are no less sassy or resourceful. If they are bourgeoisified, they are no less critical of bourgeois adults. While French poulbots are clever, kind, and cute, German c­ hildren in Poulbot’s world are dull-­eyed and myopic, pig-­nosed and freckled, with weak chins, square ­faces, and round glasses. A similarly racially segregated visual code is used in the depiction of French and German soldiers—­poilus have rounded, open, smiling f­aces, while boches resemble their younger counter­parts and have the same square, unattractive, and unintelligent-­ looking ­faces. Poulbot’s work, like most graphic art of the First World War, “drew upon and extended a reservoir of themes which had an increased valency in the charged atmosphere of war reporting.”115 As we have seen, Poulbot’s depictions of the ­enemy reproduce the same racialized ste­reo­t ypes found in newspaper articles and dime novels. His collection of cartoons, Les Gosses et les bonhommes, is representative of the ways in which Poulbot reworked a set of stock themes and scenarios from the wider war culture. He was among many to exploit the widespread rumors of German atrocities committed during the invasion of Belgium and France.116 He produced a series of images of ­little Belgian ­children with ban­dages where their hands once ­were. In one famous image, he depicts a girl kneeling beside a small grave where she has buried her severed hand. Similar drawings allude to the supposed use of Belgian hostages as h­ uman shields during the German invasion or to the sadism and unscrupulousness of German officers. In one drawing, two Belgian girls with severed hands won­der, “If it ­weren’t for the officer, maybe the soldiers ­wouldn’t have done anything to us?” Another drawing pictures a very young girl giving ­water to a wounded German soldier. A group of his comrades is huddled b­ ehind a patch of trees watching the scene unfold. The leader of the

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group holds the other soldiers back saying “Let her give him something to drink, w ­ e’ll kill her afterwards.” In contradistinction to German cruelty, Poulbot celebrates allied kindness. In one famous drawing, a smiling girl kneels to place flowers on a battlefield grave and explains to her friend, who balances an enormous baby on her narrow hip, “This one’s a boche, but I’m giving him flowers all the same.” Poulbot d­ oesn’t hesitate to recycle the same stock jokes found across print culture. He shows a German ­mother feeding her c­ hildren le pain K.K. (kaiserliches Kriegs-­Brot), a war­time austerity bread made with flour substitutes whose name, when pronounced aloud in French, gives the word caca or poop. He often depicts wild-­eyed German soldiers throwing their arms up in surrender while shouting “Kamarade!” Often such tropes are used to showcase the cleverness and ingenuity of French ­children. In one drawing, a French ­mother with a small whip in her hand corners her son who has just broken a plate. As the ­mother approaches, the cheeky tyke falls to his knees, crying “Camarade! . . . ​Mommy . . . ​camarade!” In another drawing, two small boys near the war zone are playing ­behind a mound of rubble as a bombed-­out farm­house burns on the horizon. The boys have propped a sal­vaged stovepipe up on the mound of rubble, and a group of advancing German soldiers has just fallen to its knees in front of them. “They take us for artillerymen!” one of the boys scoffs, while the other doubles over with laughter (fig. 8). ­Whether this image is meant to convey German gullibility or French cleverness (or both) is at first glance difficult to determine. In e­ ither case, the ­little French boys seem unfazed by the destruction around them and find ways to entertain themselves even amid the rubble of their bombed-­out village. When this image is read alongside another image of German surrender, very similar in composition, the message comes into focus. This time, a lone poilu sits in a trench, which occupies the same left-­hand corner of the picture frame as the boys’ improvised gun station. Like them, he is surrounded by sal­vaged materials—­a board forms a bench in the trench wall, an umbrella planted in the parapet provides shade, and a rucksack serves as a writing desk. As the German soldiers fall to their knees and raise their arms shouting “Kamarad!” this grown up version of the poulbot mutters ­under his breath, “­Here we go again . . . ​never a minute to oneself.” Like the ­children, the poilu seems right at home in this barren b­ attle zone, and like them he f­ aces the hardships of the war with perfect equilibrium and amused irony.117

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Figure 8. Les poulbots play at war. “Ils nous prennent pour des artilleurs / They think we are artillerymen.” © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Encouraged by his cartoon success, Poulbot branched out during the war, designing dolls, producing a short film, A quoi rêvent les gosses (What Kids Dream About), and writing dialogue and designing costumes and sets for Paul Gsell’s play Les Gosses dans les ruines (Kids among the Ruins).118 With Alfred Machard, dubbed the “Poulbot of lit­er­a­t ure,” Poulbot co-­wrote Le Massacre des innocents (1918), a story about the ascension into heaven of three ­little scamps killed in a Gotha raid.119 In October 1920, Francisque Poulbot was awarded the Legion of Honor for his contribution to the “exaltation of patriotic sentiment” during the war. His drawings had captured the fearlessness of the French p­ eople of all ages and classes, and had “brought moral support to the public spirit.”120 The popu­ lar, mainstream illustrated magazine L’Illustration published an article on Poulbot, announcing his receipt of the Legion of Honor and celebrating his war­time work. The author, André Laphin, recalled the overwhelming war­ time popularity of Poulbot’s drawings and commented upon the use of the word “poulbot” as a replacement for a “gavroche” or a “titi.” All over the country, Laphin explained, the expression “a poulbot” was being used to describe any “puny but sassy and resourceful kid.”121 Further proof of the poulbots’ authenticity, Laphin suggested, came from the fact that during the

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war, t­ hese drawings w ­ ere popu­lar even among soldiers from the countryside who had never set foot in Paris before the war.122 With les poulbots, the gamin de Paris had transcended his original Pa­ri­ sian working-­class context to become a universal symbol, not just of French childhood, but of Frenchness in general. During and a­ fter the war, les poulbots inhabited a privileged space in the French cultural imaginary, embodying resourcefulness, rebelliousness, and courage—­the same character traits attributed to the soldiers in the trenches.

Icons of the First World War

The cartoons of Bruce Bairnsfather and Francisque Poulbot w ­ ere as iconic in ­Great War Britain and France respectively as Bill Mauldin’s cartoons of Willie and Joe w ­ ere for the United States in the Second World War.123 Like Mauldin, Bairnsfather and Poulbot created archetypal characters who embodied national responses to the horrific realities of industrialized warfare. Bruce Bairnsfather and Francisque Poulbot took very dif­fer­ent stylistic approaches. Bairnsfather’s drawings are finished and polished, with fine gradations in tone, while Poulbot’s are made to appear sketched and spontaneous. Their heroes are literally ages apart: Old Bill is a paunchy, m ­ iddle-­aged soldier in the trenches, and les poulbots are scrawny c­ hildren ­running loose on the streets of Montmartre. And yet, the same picaresque ethos governs ­these pictorial worlds and their protagonists. Bairnsfather’s gruff and grumpy Old Bill stoically endures the hardships of life at the front, braving the bullets with phlegmatic practicality and nerves dulled by fatigue. As George Robb puts it, Old Bill is “especially ­adept at making the most of bad situations.” He may be “cynical about patriotic rhe­toric” but he is nonetheless ready to do “his duty.”124 The poulbots’ adeptness is flashier and more flamboyant. Not only do they wield words with a wit as quick as lightning, but they also rework the environment around them to fit their imaginative and patriotic needs. They are sustained by endless enthusiasm and optimism, expressed as sass and panache. Even ­those Belgian refugee poulbots who have suffered dismemberment and displacement remain psychologically intact. They exhibit “picaresque immunity” to the soul-­crushing vio­lence of war. The French and British literary traditions each had their own nineteenth-­ century model of the “artful dodger” to draw upon for the creation of a modern, demo­cratic hero skilled in the art of survival. To varying degrees,

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they also faced the same challenge of building a new heroic code, not around the officer class, but around the ordinary foot soldier in the trench. What they also shared, of course, was a need to reassure their respective home populations and their allies that they could win the ­Great War. That meant crafting a message about the fundamental compatibility of democracy and military discipline. Individuality, in­de­pen­dence, freedom of speech and thought, caustic humor and even levity—­far from being signs of weakness or decadence—­were markers of civilisation and tenets of allied soldier heroism in a modern, demo­cratic age. In the next chapter, we w ­ ill look at the high cost of survival paid by literary and cartoon soldiers whose experiences situate them on the far end of the picaresque spectrum—­the end associated with cynicism and misanthropy. Soldier-­cartoonist Gus Bofa and soldier-­novelist Léon Werth ­explored the limits of “picaresque immunity,” tracing the portrait of the Infantryman caught in the grip of le cafard, a debilitating condition that left its victims psychically drained and teetering on the edge of moral and emotional breakdown.

7. Le Cafard

Brutalization, Alienation, and Despair Making war has been reduced to this: waiting. Waiting for replacements, waiting for letters, waiting for grub, waiting for dawn, waiting for death . . . ​ And each ­thing comes in its own time: you just have to wait . . . ​ —­Roland Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois (1919)

In their choice of visual artists, Hardie and Sabin do not mention another impor­tant French graphic artist of the time, one who captured that other side of French temperament described by British critics—­the mood swings and depression. During the war, soldier-­cartoonist Gus Bofa was a regular contributor to La Baïonnette. Bofa paints a much darker image of the Infantryman than Bairnsfather or Poulbot (fig.  9). Bofa’s hollow-­eyed victims of cafard, or trench depression, are soldiers in the prime of life made old before their time by a war that seemed as if it would never end. Bofa’s unique pictorial style and the distinctive, non-­nationalistic visual vocabulary he developed for describing Infantrymen set him apart from his peers, even from his fellow Baïonnette collaborators, and explain in part why he is now beginning to gain more critical attention, while artists like Poulbot are increasingly consigned to an opaque and irretrievable past.

From the Salon des humoristes to the Salon de l’araignée

The same reasons cited for Poulbot’s receipt of the Legion of Honor in 1920 are the ones that led to his being barred from the Salon de l’araignée (The Spider’s Salon), the new annual salon for graphic artists founded earlier that year. Le Salon de l’araignée opened its doors at the Devambez gallery on boulevard Malesherbes in March 1920. It was founded by war veteran and 163

Figure 9. Gus Bofa’s image of the Infantryman from La Baïonnette’s special issue on Les Loustics (funny guys), March 23, 1916. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris; Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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graphic artist Gus Bofa as a way to bring together, support, and publicize the work of graphic artists who had fought in the war and w ­ ere now trying to launch their c­ areers. Civilian artists, foreign artists, and artists working in nonprint media would not be excluded from the salon. In fact, over time the salon would welcome paintings, sculptures, and other works by now well-­ known international avant-­gardists like Marie Laurencin, Marc Chagall, Kees Van Dongen, Georges Grosz, and Foujita, among ­others.1 It was, therefore, not Poulbot’s civilian status that kept him out of the salon. It was b­ ecause, in the opinion of Bofa and his friends, Poulbot was among ­those graphic artists who had “dishonored themselves during the war.”2 It was Poulbot’s war­time jingoism and chauvinism that displeased Bofa, who was e­ ager to rekindle the spirit of in­de­pen­dence, nonconformism, and revolt that the term humoriste had once conveyed. The Salon des humoristes, Bofa felt, had become a mediocre, rearguard institution discredited during the war. Bofa did not identify with the Salon des humoristes’ obsession with Montmartre or with the “vieille gaîté française” (traditional French gaiety) that artists like Poulbot celebrated.3 For Bofa, t­ here could be no g­ oing back to the Salon of the belle époque. Too much had changed. Too many ­people had died. ­There would be no place in the Salon de l’araignée for former bourreurs de crâne (skull-stuffers).4 As we ­will see l­ater, however, in setting up a rigid opposition between his own intellectual engagements and ­those of his skull-­stuffing former colleagues, Bofa occludes his own war­time participation in certain forms of bourrage de crâne. In founding the Salon de l’araignée, Bofa was also attempting to trace a clear dividing line between the commercial bohemia of the Montmartre of the belle époque and war years and the avant-­garde bohemia of postwar Montparnasse. For his own part, Bofa would progressively distance himself from his own prewar and war­time activities in advertising and satirical journalism and move t­oward the burgeoning field of luxury book illustration.5 This retreat into the small-­print-­r un luxury market explains in part Bofa’s low profile ­today. Bofa was, like Poulbot, one of the most impor­tant graphic artists of the early twentieth c­ entury and entre-­deux-­guerres, a founding f­ ather of modern graphic arts. His postwar work was, however, available to a very limited audience. But ­there is more to the story. It has become a truism to say that intellectual “in­de­pen­dence” among writers, artists, intellectuals, and other culture makers “fizzled out u­ nder [the]

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pressure” of the war—­“giv[ing] way to the needs of national defense.” 6 Bofa was able to exert some degree of in­de­pen­dence, even among the pressures of a war­time market, and it is precisely the dark tone and the manner in which it was expressed that explain the more limited exposure of Bofa’s war­time drawings compared to ­those of Poulbot. Like many soldier-­writers and artists, Bofa unleashed the full force of his critique of the war only a­ fter the end of hostilities. Throughout the war, however, he remained committed to a certain iconic vision of the Infantryman that can be understood as picaresque. Rather than placing Bofa and Poulbot at absolute ideological loggerheads, therefore, we should think of them as working at two dif­fer­ent ends of the same picaresque spectrum: Poulbot on the comic end and Bofa on the satirical end. The real distinctions between Poulbot’s war­time work and Bofa’s lie, not between bourrage de crâne and what­ever its opposite would be, but between Poulbot’s sentimental and nationalistic picaresque idiom and Bofa’s darkly satirical, universalist one.

Drawing the Infantryman: The Birth of a Tramp

Gus Bofa was just four years younger than Francisque Poulbot. When the war broke out, and Poulbot was sent to Brest to run convoys with the territorial branch of the army, Bofa was sent to the front. On December 7, 1914, he was badly wounded by a German machine gun. Transported to a military hospital, the athletic Bofa refused to allow army surgeons to amputate his mangled leg, which would eventually heal well enough for him to walk without crutches. In 1915, while still in a military hospital recovering from his wounds, Bofa began sending drawings to the illustrated satirical weekly La Baïonnette and the mainstream daily newspaper Le Journal, two publications to which Poulbot also sent drawings. Like Poulbot, Bofa had made a name for himself before the war as a draftsman, illustrator, and cartoonist. Like Poulbot, he had achieved significant exposure through his work in advertising. In 1910, Bofa had been commissioned to produce advertising copy for the luxury automobile com­pany Charron Ltd.7 For this campaign, Bofa created the memorable figure of Tom Charron, a tall, lanky tramp or hobo figure with one squinting eye, a long, narrow face, red nose, prominent chin, and sunken mouth. Tom wears shoes with no socks, patched pants, and a large floppy hat. He is accompanied in his wanderings by his faithful bulldog Sam. Tom and Sam are depicted rough-

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ing it on city streets that are occasionally graced by the appearance of a shining Charron motor car. The scenarios are Chaplinesque. In one poster, we see Tom and Sam stuck on the side of the road to Trouville, miles from town, warming a tin can over an improvised fire. Tom muses that if he only had a Charron, he could be warming up his gruel in Trouville, like a “chic man.” His canine companion Sam brings him back to earth with the question, “Do they eat gruel in Trouville?”8 In another image, Tom and Sam doze u­ nder a tree, Tom dreaming of riding in style in a Charron 16 HP.9 Tom the tramp’s eternal good humor and ability to make himself at home, even on the quays of the Seine, prefigure the attitude embodied by Charlot. In another image Tom, propped back in a chair, legs crossed contentedly, relaxes ­under a bridge. A wine ­bottle holds his candle, and a beat-up old trunk serves as a t­ able. The only t­ hing missing to make him as happy as (French president Armand) Fallières is . . . ​a Charron.10 The war did not erase Tom’s image. Indeed, that image and the visual style Bofa developed around it formed the basis for the many Infantrymen he drew during the war. That Tom remained relevant and recognizable ­after the war—­and that he was seen to share a certain sensibility with Chaplin’s ­Little Tramp—is suggested by the fact that the editors of the 1923 Christmas cata­log for the mass-­distribution com­pany Félix Potin chose to feature Tom, Charlot, and batty comic book heroine Bécassine all together on the front cover.11 Bofa’s success in advertising quickly led to other opportunities in the rapidly expanding market of lavishly illustrated satirical and humor magazines.12 Between 1909 and his mobilization in the war, Bofa served as artistic director first of Le Rire and then of Le Sourire. In 1912, in collaboration with his lifelong friend Roland Dorgelès, Bofa created La Pe­tite semaine, a parodic newspaper in the spirit of the ­later war­time creation of Maréchal and Gassier, Le Canard enchaîné.13 With this proven track rec­ord and solid reputation, Bofa was well placed to find work during the war. He contributed to Le Journal and L’Excelsior,14 among ­others, but it was in La Baïonnette that he achieved the greatest exposure and that he was able to make the biggest editorial and artistic impact. His drawings appeared alongside t­hose of the most impor­ tant cartoon artists and illustrators of the day such as Poulbot, Steinlen, Sem, Fabiano, Paul Iribe, Willette, Marcel Capy, and Chas Laborde, and his work was often chosen for La Baïonnette’s cover art.

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As Mark Levitch has argued, visual culture in France during the war was “virtually colorless,” favoring, particularly in poster design, “sober compositions in which color had been virtually banished in ­favor of a self-­ consciously artful hand-­drawn line.”15 ­There was an exception to this trend, however. The satirical magazines had, since their inception in the late 1890s, made the use of vivid color and high-­quality illustration techniques one of their chief selling points as they set out to garner the widest pos­si­ble reading audience. True to this tradition, “the leading humor magazine” during the war, La Baïonnette, fully embraced the use of bold color.16 Perhaps no graphic artist achieved a more successful marriage than did Gus Bofa between the distinctly “French” “hand-­drawn line” so prominent in Poulbot’s work, and the bold, flat blocks of color associated with international “pictorial modernism,” widely construed by the Allies as Germanic.17 Bofa’s unique pictorial style set him apart even from his fellow Baïonnette collaborators. Bofa’s Infantrymen appeal to con­temporary sensibilities in their tone and expression and in the strikingly modern style in which they are drawn. Con­temporary illustrator, graphic novelist, and cartoonist Jacques Tardi captures the shock of recognition that con­temporary reader-­viewers can have when they see Bofa’s work for the first time. In an interview, Tardi shared how he had stumbled upon Bofa’s drawings while thumbing through war­ time issues of La Baïonnette. “Bofa’s drawings fascinated me,” Tardi told his interviewer, “They w ­ ere far superior to the o­ thers. I looked only at them.”18 Indeed, Bofa’s influence can be seen in the many poilus Jacques Tardi has drawn since he first began working on the First World War in the seventies and eighties. This is a ringing endorsement for Bofa from one of the most famous and celebrated cartoon artists of the ­Great War revival of the 1980s to ­today. Jacques Tardi is the illustrator of Futuropolis’s 1988 illustrated edition of Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit and of Didier Daeninckx’s Le Der des ders (Casterman, 1997) and Varlot soldat (L’Association, 1999). He has also written and illustrated his own cartoon a­ lbums and graphic novels about the First World War, such as La Véritable histoire du soldat inconnu (Futuropolis, 1974), Le Trou d’obus (Pellerin, 1984), and C’était la guerre des tranchées (Casterman, 1993). Two aspects of Bofa’s work in par­tic­u­lar stand out as influential for Tardi and for con­temporary reimaginings of the Infantryman. First, unlike Poulbot and, indeed, unlike the majority of humorists working during the war, Bofa seldom chose to depict the e­ nemy, and when he did, it was without the

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usual racialized, ste­reo­t ypical attributes (square f­ aces, round glasses, pig noses) or gestures (throwing arms up in surrender, brutalizing innocent ­women and c­ hildren). He was likewise less invested than many graphic artists of the time in visually differentiating among allied soldiers. Bofa provided the cover illustrations for three issues of La Baïonnette dedicated to allied soldiers: Les Tommies (June 15, 1916), Nos Amis les Russes (July 20, 1916), and À l’Américaine (October 10, 1918). To be sure, Bofa employs a commonly accepted visual shorthand for depicting allied soldiers. His Tommy is a clean-­ shaven figure with a pipe. His Doughboys wear riding pants, bandanas, and wide-­brimmed hats, and one of his Rus­sian soldiers sports a bushy mustache, while another wears the visored hat of the Rus­sian army. In French and British visual culture, the British soldier was often depicted as an aristocratic officer, an elegant, monocled figure, as opposed to the strapping American cowboy soldier or the boisterous Rus­sian Cossack. Bofa gestures t­ oward t­ hese national ste­reo­types, using the same under­lying visual style—­solid lines and bold, flat color—­for depicting all Infantrymen as gaunt, thin-­lipped, sunken-­ cheeked specters with cigarettes dangling out of their mouths. ­There was no lack of short, stocky poilus in the pages of La Baïonnette. Soft, curved lines ­were used to trace full, round ­faces, slumped shoulders, and backs curved u­ nder the weight of over­stuffed backpacks. Marcel Capy’s poilus stand out, for example, as rounder, healthier, comic counter­parts to Bofa’s lanky, emaciated Infantrymen.19 They recall the rounded figure of Bicard traced by cartoonist Hautot or the squat, pudgy Good Soldier Švejk developed ­after the war by Joseph Lada. Like Hautot and Lada, Gus Bofa and Marcel Capy worked in a picaresque vernacular inasmuch as they avoided sentimentality or heroic aggrandizement. But Bofa’s soldiers are drawn with a tough, sinewy line. In some drawings his f­ aces are so abstracted—­long, oval, gaping eyes; triangular noses; thin, wiry bodies—­that they resemble (clown-­like) skeletons. When viewed among the Baïonnette’s collection of plump and plucky poilus, Bofa’s Infantrymen look sickly and shifty. ­There is a hint of pathology, both physical and psychological, about ­these soldiers that sets them apart from the vast majority of cartoon Infantrymen of the time. ­There is a cutting edge and a dark undertone to poilu joviality as it is depicted in Bofa’s cartoons. In La Baïonnette’s special issue on Le Système D, for example, Bofa’s cartoons used many of the same stock themes and characters, as well as the situational comedy, explored in G ­ reat War culture at large. At first glance, his depiction of the débrouillard can be read as feeding

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the ambient bourrage de crâne about the joviality and resourcefulness of the poilu. On closer inspection, however, Bofa’s work stands out as dissonant, perhaps even subversive—­not thematically, but stylistically and tonally. T ­ here 20 is something hard and vaguely deviant about Bofa’s débrouillard. With his slightly angled kepi, his one squinting eye, and his off-­duty turtleneck, Bofa’s aggressive, thieving, swearing débrouillard resembles the prewar Pa­r i­sian street gangster or apache. Bofa’s débrouillard is both a reassuring survivor— he ­will muddle through this war just fine—­and a bit of a thug, someone you would not want to encounter in a dark alley. This same slightly shifty, squinting poilu appeared a month l­ ater on the cover of La Baïonnette’s March 23, 1916, special issue devoted to les loustics (see fig. 9). The loustic was another popu­lar French G ­ reat War type that often overlapped with the débrouillard. A loustic was a funny guy or entertainer—­a character like Dorgelès’s Sulphart or René Benjamin’s Gaspard. Like his débrouillard, Bofa’s loustic looks directly at the viewer. A cigarette hangs from the side of his mouth. His smiling face is asymmetrical. His left eye is squinting and the left side of his mouth is closed, while his right eye, a pale, milky blue, is wide open, almost bulging. The right side of his mouth, slightly open, reveals two scraggly teeth. The deep creases around the loustic’s thin, hard mouth contrast with the ruddiness of his high, round, salient cheeks. A long, sinewy neck, stubbled chin, and bulging Adam’s apple, coupled with the absence of any vis­i­ble hair beneath his helmet and around his large, protruding ears, suggest that the loustic is past the prime of his youth. And yet, the loustic is not a member of the Territorial Army or pépères (grandpas), as they ­were called by younger soldiers. His age is more metaphysical than literal. He has grown old before his time. The one large bulging eye, the thin-­lipped grin, and the dangling cigarette give the loustic’s smile the slightly desperate appearance of a grimace. It is as if the loustic’s forced smile and manic humor are all that shelter him from despair. Ironically, this funny guy looks like a prime candidate for le cafard (trench depression). ­These two seemingly contradictory states—­jocularity and depression—­ are precisely the mood swings that British journalists and propagandists attributed to the French soldier. In opposition to the stoic and steady Tommy, the poilu was an “up-­and-­down man,” prone to fits of optimism and depression.21 ­These states are explored in more explic­itly visual terms in Bofa’s cover illustration for the November 16, 1916, issue of La Baïonnette entitled T’en fais pas!, or “­Don’t worry!” The cover features two heads floating on a white

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background. Each wears the French “Adrian” helmet with chinstrap down. The head on the right has a normal, flesh-­colored face, a scraggly mustache, and long stubble on the chin. He is viewed in profile, smiling contentedly, eye closed, with a well-­worn pipe hanging out of his mouth. The other face looks directly at the viewer. Two large, semi-­circular eyes stare from beneath a deeply creased brow and a heavy helmet pulled down low, covering the forehead. The figure has large, protruding ears, a long nose with flared nostrils, and a thin straight line for a mouth. Deep circles are traced beneath the soldier’s eyes. The figure is abstracted, composed from a few ­simple lines with hash mark shading that contributes to the weary, bedraggled expression of the soldier’s face. The drawing is sinister and ambiguous. Read left to right the message seems to be that by keeping the ­simple poilu motto in mind—­Don’t worry—­the soldier can remain optimistic and ward off despair. This reading would be consistent with a similar opposition developed in La Baïonnette in twin issues on Les Optimistes and Les Pessimistes, in which the pessimist is depicted with bluish-­green skin and a scowling expression on his face. If the image is read from right to left, however, it seems to suggest a somewhat dif­fer­ent attitude. B ­ ehind the face of the smiling poilu, who keeps up his morale with a strong dose of nicotine and positive thinking, lurks a dark, damaged soul in the firm grip of le cafard. The green poilu is a menacing creature. His face suggests deep depression but also anger and pent-up aggression. If Bofa’s loustic seems like someone who would scare you in a dark alley, his cafard victim looks like someone who would stab you. Bofa’s drawings of the débrouillard, the loustic, and the cafard victim bear a striking resemblance to his self-­portraits as a soldier. The loustic’s regimental number 346 is the same as Bofa’s and appears on the tunic he wears in a 1921 portrait he did of himself and friend Pierre Mac Orlan returning from the war. 22 Indeed, many of Bofa’s soldiers are abstracted, exaggerated self-­ portraits. ­These are physical self-­portraits—­Bofa was tall and lanky and had large, protruding ears, just like Tom Charron and the Infantrymen in his drawings—­but they are also, and more importantly, psychological self-­ portraits. 23 In his unique, and hardly reassuring, manner of drawing the Infantryman, Bofa provided an intimate if oblique portrait of the soldier in distress. Like their creator, Bofa’s Infantrymen bear the scars of war. With his pencil, Bofa was able to gesture t­ oward the traumas of war without risking the censor’s scissors or being labeled a defeatist.

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Bofa’s skeletization of the Infantryman allowed him to blur the lines between allied and e­ nemy soldiers. 24 A case in point is his depiction of the widely celebrated, if not actually taken as fact, war legend known as “Debout les morts!” (Rise Up, You Dead!). According to the legend, a French captain had rallied his wounded men during a hopeless bombardment by calling out the barracks expression used to rouse the soldiers from their beds during basic training, “Debout les morts!” or “On your feet, deadheads!” This rallying call had miraculously roused the exhausted and debilitated men, who ­were buoyed up by the souls of their dead comrades. In Bofa’s version, the soldiers are German zombies. “Wounded in Belgium, killed in Rus­sia, on the way now to Verdun . . . !” the caption reads, “Quel métier! [What a job!]” The soldier in the foreground is a fully clothed and outfitted skeleton. His back is curved u­ nder the weight of his pack; his lanky legs are buckled, and his exaggeratedly long arms almost drag the ground. The viewer cannot help but recognize the universal condition of the soldier in this image. The fighting in Rus­sia and the pointed helmet or Pickelhaube are the only markers that set this soldier off as German. He is heading to Verdun, which was the site of countless German deaths, but also of countless French deaths. It would not have been acceptable within war culture to use French soldiers for such a literal and gruesome image of death, but ­here Bofa refers obliquely to them through the figure of the dead German soldier. Reference to soldiering as a “job” also collapses national distinctions, folding all Infantrymen into the same class or cohort. This skeleton could be anybody—­what is highlighted is not the brutality of the ­enemy, but the brutality of war. This soldier represents the state to which all soldiers are reduced—­that of walking dead whose days are numbered and who must content themselves with living on borrowed time. The skeleton also signals a kind of X-­ray view of the soldier who has been so hollowed out by war, has been made so catatonic, that the distinction between the living and the dead is impossible to discern. How dif­fer­ent is this soldier’s catatonia from the dulled nerves and fatigue of Old Bill. Bill’s stupor is healthful and beneficial. Bofa’s skeletal stupor is pathological and perverse. This black humor is echoed in another drawing, this time of a slightly manic-­looking poilu threatening to launch a grenade at a German corpse. The soldier shouts, “Hands in the air.—­Quick—or I’ll rough you up! . . .” Can this poilu no longer distinguish between the living and the dead, or are his nerves so frayed that aggression as self-­preservation has become automatic?25

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Bofa’s approach to depicting soldier suffering is oblique. In this way, it recalls the approach of surgeon-­soldier and war novelist Georges Duhamel. In La Vie des martyrs (1917) and Civilisation (1918), Duhamel described the gruesome wounds and painful recovery of wounded soldiers as they made their way from field hospitals to military hospitals to convalescent homes. It is by focusing on the effects of war on the suffering ­human body, and not on the day-­to-­day details of the trench experience, that Duhamel was able to register the horrors of war while also insisting upon the enduring humanity of its victims. Duhamel’s doctors and nurses are shown heroically ministering to soldiers who have an indefatigable w ­ ill to live and refuse to give themselves over to despair. Any comparison between Bofa and Duhamel is ironic when considered in the light of Bofa’s own depiction of life as a wounded soldier and of the Infantryman’s encounter with army medical personnel. His cover illustration for La Baïonnette’s March 17, 1917, special issue Chez les toubibs (With the Docs) features a slightly crazed-­looking, hairy-­armed, large-­mustached, bulging-­eyed doctor with a scalpel ­behind his ear and a syringe in his hand. The back cover illustration, “L’Arracheur” (The Extractor), shows a portly, red-­faced dentist who is e­ ager to rip out yet another tooth from the sunken jaw of a thin, pale, and frightened poilu. “Allons!” [­Here we go!], the dentist prepares his patient, “­we’re ­going to take the second one. It’s not that it’s in particularly bad shape, but it w ­ ill make a round number.” Many of t­ hese drawings w ­ ere reproduced, along with a collection of new drawings, in the ­album Bofa published that same year with La Re­ nais­sance du Livre. Entitled Chez les toubibs, croquis d’hôpital (With the Docs, Hospital Sketches), the ­album went even further than the Baïonnette issue had in satirizing military medicine and in depicting army medical personnel as sadists. Surgeons and physical therapists wear aprons that make them look like butchers, a point made on the front cover, which features a small inset drawing of a surgeon-­butcher with a huge knife in hand, wearing a bandana over his mouth as a mask, and standing ominously over the end of an operating ­table on which can be seen two bare feet. The raised shoulders, rounded back and lowered neck of the heavi­ly abstracted surgeon—­ his face and hands are solid, featureless black shapes—­g ive him a slightly bestial appearance. Doctors, surgeons, nurses, and dentists are depicted in t­ hese cartoons as incompetent, insensitive bureaucrats with very ­little common sense. In

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“L’Héliothérapeute” (The Sun Therapist), for example, an army doctor and a visiting officer stand in an open courtyard observing three patients lying on hospital beds. As rain pounds down on the helpless and exposed patients, their comrades peer down at the scene from a hospital win­dow. The doctor explains to the inspecting officer, “Of course, if t­here was a l­ittle sun, that would do them even more good.”26 In the ­album, Bofa produced several self-­portraits. One of the most gruesome drawings, entitled “Encouragement,” is of Bofa’s thin, almost skeletal, nude body stretched out on a massage t­ able. As Bofa covers his mouth in agony, sweat rolls down his brow. His knitted brow and wide, gaping eyes communicate excruciating pain. The large, strapping nurse, meanwhile, exercises her patient’s damaged legs, instructing him, “­Don’t tense up! Let yourself go . . . ​Relax!”27 Bofa’s take on the popu­lar war­time expression “saving one’s skin” in another self-­portrait is both triumphant and chilling. Bofa appears to lean nonchalantly against his mantelpiece as a rolling fire blazes and his dog lies stretched out in its warmth. Bofa’s injured foot is crossed in front of the other: he is leaning for support as much as for this relaxed effect. On the wall above the mantel hangs the tightened skin of an outstretched ­human body. A small sign reads, “My hide brought back from the front and the hospital.” The implication, of course, is that the veteran has saved his skin, not just from the frontlines, but also from the doctors b­ ehind the lines who did their best to do him in. In a drawing called “Le Malade,” Bofa goes even further in suggesting bodily dismemberment and the disintegration of personhood at the hands of military bureaucrats-­as-­sadists. A gaunt, slouching patient shuffles through the halls of a hospital. Seen in profile, the patient puffs on a pipe as he stares ahead through huge, vacant eyes. The seat of his pants is sagging. A short text reads, “The patient, for The Administration, he’s ‘Number 4’ or ‘Number 7,’ or ‘Number 9.’ For the medical personnel, he’s ‘The Arm’ or ‘The Thigh’ or ‘The Thorax.’ ” “I knew one,” the text continues, who “for eight months” had “no other name than ‘The Anus.’ ” And even then, the text insists, “It was a bit of Glory!” This dressing-up of abject and humiliating suffering in the language of military glory recalls, though in a much darker key, the “glorious” wound to the backside that lands Private Bicard in the hospital. The caption to “Le Malade” goes further in deflating this perverse glory, identifying the patient by his once impressive name—­“The

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Count Guy de Marchursoir, light cavalry marshal”—­and then by his degraded moniker—­“the anus of the ward.”

Postwar Malaises and the Creep of Le Cafard

All of Bofa’s biographers conclude that his war experiences deeply traumatized Bofa and left him a changed man. Journalist and film critic Georges Charensol’s memoirs are particularly helpful in illustrating the contradictory range of responses common among veterans of the First World War. He describes “­these veterans who came home disgusted by the war that they had fought so hard. But, cocardiers (jingoistic or belligerently nationalistic), they w ­ ouldn’t stand for anybody speaking flippantly about the war.” “They hated the war,” Charensol explained, “but they talked about it constantly and w ­ ere very proud of the courage they had shown and of the cleverness that had allowed them to survive.” Of all of t­ hese vets, “only Gus Bofa remained s­ ilent,” Charensol observed. Bofa had been “deeply marked” by the ­ ere deeply war, both “mentally and physically.”28 Of course, all war vets w marked by their experiences. The difference is perhaps that unlike many of his contemporaries, who repressed or forgot their cafard, or war depression, Bofa gave expression to his melancholy both during and a­ fter the war. 29 For lifelong friend and collaborator Pierre Mac Orlan, Bofa had found a form of plastic expression for “the worms to which our era gives birth e­ very day,” ­those infectious attitudes of “fear, dishonesty, and stupidity.”30 For Mac Orlan, Bofa’s pencil had given form to the “young monsters”31 born of war and its aftermath and inhabiting a postwar world that was “disturbingly corrupt and directionless.”32 Bofa captured the atmosphere of darkness and disillusionment of the postwar depression in his 1930 collection of drawings of Pa­ri­sian and suburban solitudes, Malaises. In this small-­print-­run ­album of charcoal and pencil drawings, Bofa traded the bold, hard line of his war­time drawings for a softer, smokier, more atmospheric effect. Multiple sketch lines in a quivering hand lend a blurred quality to contours that are outlined in pencil. Picture frames crowded with anonymous figures alternate with scenes of ­silent solitude—­ empty quays with a lone figure waiting for a train, a silhouette in the open doorway of a deserted café, a stray dog at an empty intersection, h­ otel corridors lined with the shoes of guests hidden ­behind closed doors. Malaises captures in line and shadow the same physical and existential sickness and

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uneasiness conveyed through the episodic wandering of Ferdinand Bardamu two years ­later in Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit. Bofa begins his preface to Malaises by seeking some kind of meaning to ­human life. Does God even know what the meaning of ­human life is, Bofa asks, or is he counting on us to help him figure it out? ­Human beings have grown weary, Bofa suggests, and “blasé about the pos­si­ble joys of this pre­ dictable game that is life.” In the absence of any meaning to life, ­people just pick off the top of their heads the first “sentimental, honorable, or merely sufficient motive for living,” one that ­will “justify in their own eyes the care they take to avoid colds, car accidents, gunshots, and, generally, all ­those occasions” life pres­ents for one to “lose this superfluous and inexplicable possession that is existence.” They take l­ittle morsels of life and swallow them ­whole, with their “eyes closed,” convincing themselves that life actually “tastes good,” or at least that one gets used to it a­ fter a while. But when this “well-­ ordered fiction breaks down,” and the “monotonous hum” of the artificial machine of life suddenly stops, one sees “brief, ­silent drama[s],” like ­those pictured in the a­ lbum. The plot of t­hese dramas is sickeningly familiar, its protagonist all too well known to us, despite his being invisible in the regions where we live. But if you find yourself u­ nder “the African sun,” or in “sea mists” or “muggy nights in the Far East,” you might see this “unnamable” creature known by his “nickname: Le Cafard.” 33 As the economic conditions of fragile, war-­torn Eu­rope deteriorated, and as the storm clouds of another war gathered on the horizon, Bofa had come to see le cafard, this kind of depression and existential weariness, once the terror of the soldier in the trenches, as the default emotion of the h­ uman condition. The term was not new to the twentieth ­century. The colonial army in North Africa had brought it into the French lexicon in the ­middle of the nineteenth c­ entury, and Baudelaire uses it in Les Fleurs du mal (1857).34 Like Baudelaire’s spleen, le cafard is not easily summed up, but conveys aw ­ hole constellation of emotions and sensations. The way le cafard is expressed and identified in ­Great War texts is often subtle. It is not always called directly by its name. But the range of emotions carried in the term cafard would have been familiar to any foot soldier in the trenches, as would the name itself. Like Le Système D, le cafard had a long history within the context of the colonial army and military life before it reached common parlance during the First World War. French army psychologists took le cafard very seriously, and reports on the condition by military psycholo-

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gists, such as Louis Huot and Paul Voivenel’s Le Cafard (1918), appeared during the war.35 In his dictionary of soldier slang François Déchelette saw le cafard as “naturally rampant in the trenches,” but also “in the colonies.”36 Lazare Sainéan noted that le cafard was the “military expression for the spleen that lays hold of a private ­after an extended stay in the barracks, the fresh recruit in the depot,” or the “Poilu in the trenches.”37 Like le spleen, le cafard connoted lassitude and world-­weariness. A sufferer might be in a fog or stupor, outwardly unresponsive, but inwardly tormented by dark, obsessive thoughts. The range of nagging sadness understood as le cafard went from a vague feeling of the blues or melancholy to utter discouragement and dejection.38 Le cafard took its name from the cockroach, an insect that flees the light and “feeds on the shadows.”39 Like the trench rat, the cafard gave its name and image to a number of trench newspapers, including Le Cafard enchaîné (The Chained Roach), Le Cafard muselé (The Muzzled Roach), L’Anti-­cafard: Revue anti-­boche (The Anti-­Roach: An Anti-­Boche Magazine), and Face aux boches: Bulletin destiné à la destruction du cafard dans les boyaux (Against the Boches: Bulletin Designed to Destroy the Roaches in the Communication Trenches). In ­these papers, le cafard was subjected to a healthy dose of mocking laughter and indefatigable good cheer. Of course, the patented French habitus of Le Système D was, along with French “gaiety,” seen as another power­ful antidote to le cafard. The vari­ous tactics understood as Le Système D could be mobilized to ward off depression, despondency, hopelessness, and homesickness.40 If, that is, the soldier ­were still resilient enough, still psychologically intact enough, and still sane enough to call upon the inventive resources of Le Système D. Having le cafard often meant having a disturbed mind, yielding to ­mental instability or insanity. Warding off le cafard took energy and a conscious effort. In his discussion of le cafard, Lazare Sainéan cites passages from Arnould Galopin’s novel Les Poilus de la 9e that describe the ­mental approach a soldier must take to fend off le cafard. It is a picaresque attitude that one must adopt—­a resignation to living only in the pres­ent moment. You have to resign yourself, Galopin’s narrator explains, “to looking no farther than the battlefield.” “Other­wise,” he continues, “if you let yourself become overcome with le regret [meaning regret but also homesickness], you’ll get a ­really bad case

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of le cafard.” Not every­one succeeds in this endeavor. “However much I try to force myself to dispel the darkness creeping into my heart,” Galopin’s narrator admits, “I c­ an’t manage to do it.” 41 If we as twenty-­first-­century readers find the notion of fighting depression with resourcefulness and good cheer terribly naïve and even ideologically suspect, we should attempt to imagine the war­time context in which discourses of ­mental illness, post-­traumatic stress disorder, or even shell shock ­were not fully available to common soldiers and civilians. When such discourses ­were available, they carried the stigma of effeminacy, which would have been experienced as humiliating within the dominant regime of early twentieth-­century masculinity. As heartbreaking as it was to succumb to le cafard, being conscious of the “creeping” of darkness into one’s mind and heart could ultimately be seen as a sign of ­mental and moral health. As Déchelette sees it, “He who has never had le cafard is a monster and ­doesn’t deserve to be called a man.” 42 Perhaps we should extend this logic to suggest that the minute a soldier becomes incapable of registering his own cafard as a distinct feeling, one that has crept in and may one day creep back out, that soldier becomes susceptible to pathology—to thoughts of suicide, but also of hom­i­cide. With Déchelette’s warning, we return to that word—­monster—­used by Mac Orlan to describe the dystopian aftermath of the First World War. In the late 20s and throughout the 1930s, soldier-­writers would return to their memories of the First World War and would describe their experiences anew, this time without the constraints on imagination and expression pres­ent u­ nder “war culture.” The publication of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) is widely seen as opening the floodgates for ­these darker, more cynical literary remembrances of the war. Remarque’s Paul Bäumer describes how a group of young, impressionable students w ­ ere turned into monsters of sorts, becoming “hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough.” This was “good,” Bäumer concludes, since this moral hardness was exactly what he and his friends lacked, and what they would need to see them through. By becoming hard, they steeled themselves against le cafard. “We did not break down,” Bäumer remembers, “but adapted ourselves.” 43 Céline’s literary poilu Ferdinand Bardamu is such a hardened individual, a kind of monster-­in-­the-­making. Bardamu’s is from the start a directionless life. He volunteers for the army on a lark, fights in the war, lands in a convalescent hospital, is released from the army, goes off to an African col-

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ony to attempt to remake his life, sails from ­there to Amer­i­ca, discovers New York, makes his way to Detroit, where he works at Ford Motor Com­pany, returns to France, and spends the second half of the novel working as a doctor in a working-­class Pa­r i­sian suburb. His wanderings are punctuated by uncanny recurring encounters with another soldier he had met one dark night during the war, Léon Robinson, who ­will attempt to draw him into a plot to kill an old w ­ oman in order to steal her job and life’s savings. The ­Great War Système D is ­here turned to destructive ends, as tactics for “getting by” devolve into plans to “get one over” on another h­ uman being and to get ahead, even if it means taking a life. While Robinson is ready to act on his contempt for mankind, Ferdinand, the compassionless doctor, expresses his in long interior monologues. We see the world through his jaded and cynical eyes, and that world is an indiscriminate fog of h­ uman pettiness, greed, and vio­lence. Céline describes pro­cesses of decay, putrefaction, and melting—on Bardamu’s voyage to the colonies and back in the rotting, rancid suburb of Rancy. The world and the self are subject to implacable forces of dissolution and disintegration. ­There can be no firm moral or psychological place from which to summon the energy or resourcefulness to combat the entropy of a world and a self that are coming undone. Voyage stages a confrontation between the implacable forces of a hostile world and a protagonist’s diminishing psychic resources for coping with ­those forces. Bardamu is caught forever in the catatonic state of the cafard sufferer. For him, all bound­aries of h­ uman vice and virtue are blurred. “­There o­ ught to be some mark by which to distinguish good p­ eople from bad,” Bardamu muses.44 Instead, life is continually “trick[ing]” us, luring us ever deeper into the dark night of depression, fear, and hatred.45 As Bardamu sees it, the ­human condition is a restless hoping for something better followed by renewed disappointment—­a nauseating recognition of the sameness of one’s condition, of the implacable rules of ­human greed and contempt for one’s fellow man that keep the poor in their miserable, hopeless state. “Men are the ­thing to be afraid of, always, men and nothing ­else,” he concludes.46 What Bardamu learns during the war, he carries with him his entire life. Indeed, t­ here can be no demobilization for this veteran, since for him, the ­human condition is defined by a continual state of war against one’s fellow man. Retreating into the self can offer, however, no solace. T ­ here is war without and war within. This is something Bardamu is all the better placed to

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understand in that he finishes the book working at an asylum for the mentally ill. “The only true manifestations of our innermost beings,” Ferdinand decides, “are war and insanity, t­ hose two absolute nightmares.” 47 Indeed, the reader is left to won­der, along with Ferdinand, ­whether he has not gone insane, ­not in any raving, dramatic way—although he does have his moments of externalized rage—­but in a subtler, more insidious way. Bardamu’s life is composed of endless tableaux like t­hose depicted by Bofa in Malaises. His entire worldview, the one to which the reader has access, is filtered through a subjectivity that is warped beyond recognition. It is in a permanent fog of war that Bardamu ­will live out his unremarkable, unambitious life, a life that is “ethically and spiritually somnambulistic.” 48 Bardamu’s relationship to life—­his own and the lives of o­ thers—is deeply problematic. In Voyage, the picaresque love of and commitment to life are running out of steam. This is all the more disturbing in that Bardamu spends the postwar years practicing medicine in the Paris suburbs. War and life have taught him not to give a damn about o­ thers. “You never mind very much when an adult passes on,” Bardamu coldly admits; it just means ­there’s “one less stinker on earth.” 49 Through his journeys, beginning during the war, Bardamu exposes man’s exploitation of man, rejects the army, colonialism, and industrial capitalism. But he has no faith in humanity. He ­doesn’t come to the defense of the poor or the weak or the helpless. He ­doesn’t even pity them. If the down-­and-­outs of this world had money and power, Bardamu understands, t­ hey’d be just as ruthless and self-­serving as the rich. Soviet writer Maxim Gorky gave expression to the Communist Party’s disappointment with Voyage au bout de la nuit, a novel that, in their view, could have led to a raising of po­liti­cal consciousness in the name of the proletariat cause, but instead leads to a nihilistic dead end. Writing in 1934, Gorky intuited the danger of a picaresque ethos pushed to its extreme. “Bardamu,” he writes, “has lost his homeland, hates p­ eople, calls his m ­ other a bitch and his mistress a whore, is indifferent to crime, and having no basis from which to rally himself to the proletariat, is altogether ready to embrace fascism.”50 Of course, Gorky was himself blind to the danger of Stalinism as another brutal form of totalitarianism, as was Henri Barbusse, who wrote a celebratory biography of Stalin in 1935. The point is that the same danger of Voyage au bout de la nuit is lurking in all war novels that drink from the picaresque well. The picaresque mode carries with it an ethos of self-­preservation and a potential

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for social atomization that are difficult to reconcile with ­human solidarity and community building. In the picaresque worldview, warfare is, as Céline suggests, a meta­phor for the h­ uman condition and characterizes the interactions among individuals in a fragmented and stratified society. The picaresque worldview can lead to pathology, and war novels that embrace the darkest impulses of the picaresque mode can ultimately be seen as complicit with the very proj­ect of war, vio­lence, and mass death that they ostensibly seek to expose, if not to reject.

Brutalization

Already in 1914–1919 ­there w ­ ere texts and parts of texts that provided a glimpse into the pathology of le cafard and the psychological dark side of the picaresque. They suggest the alienation, brutalization, and hopelessness the poilu-­picaro ­faces when his clever wit turns caustic and destructive, when he has exhausted the psychic resources of Le Système D or has lost the “kernel of selfhood” from which to muster any resilience and resourcefulness. In some cases, the poilu’s tactics of Le Système D are depicted as having come unmoored from any sense of compassion for his fellow man. In ­these instances, the poilu turns his resourceful improvisation, not just against outsiders, but against the comrades at arms who are, in his estimation, as incapable of understanding him as civilians are. When the poilu’s drive for survival becomes disassociated from sentiment or from any kind of moral status quo, brutalization has set in. This hardened stance has been a feature of the picaresque since its inception. Robert Torrance d­ oesn’t choose at random the term “hard-­boiled” for the original Spanish picaros like Lazarillo de Tormes. The hard-­nosed, hard-­hearted practicality and self-­preservation of the traditional picaro are as pres­ent in the ­Great War picaresque toolkit for survival as are sentimentality and strategic solidarity. Most G ­ reat War soldier-­novelists showed the effects of le cafard on the soldier, but they ultimately had their protagonists pull back from the brink of alienation and brutalization. They acknowledged directly or indirectly the lesson learned by Grimmelshausen’s Courage in the Thirty Years War: that most ­people “grow worse rather than better in times of war.”51 They shied away, however, from depicting the poilu as ruthless or driven by homicidal anger.

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We do not have to wait for Remarque or the French war novels of the 1930s to see soldiers depicted as pitiless, suspicious, or tough. Barbusse openly acknowledged the brutality the citizen-­soldier displays once he has donned a uniform. Men at war are “ferocious,” 52 “demons,” 53 “savages,” “brutes,” “bandits,” and “bastards,”54 —­“stupid victims” one minute and “disgusting executioners” the next.55 ­Here and elsewhere Barbusse gestures ­toward the postwar concept of brutalization developed by George Mosse.56 Brutalization effectively breaks down the bound­aries between “civilization” and “barbarity,” suggesting that ­there is something in the experience of war itself, regardless of the nationality of the combatant, that pushes him to accept vio­lence as an inevitable part of life. The binaries that reserve barbarity for Germans and civilisation for the French come undone in picaresque texts that depict the French soldier as brimming over with anger and aggression that could just as easily be aimed at his comrades at arms or at the civilians b­ ehind the lines as t­ oward the e­ nemy. In Les Croix de bois, brutalization is acknowledged, but it is not allowed to shake the men’s fundamental humanistic core. “The swearwords, the groans, the canon, all ­those noises of our poor bestial lives,” the narrator writes, “­couldn’t harden our soul or wither its boundless tenderness.”57 ­There is a moment, however, when the narrator gets an unwelcome glimpse of a darker side to his comrades. The day before an attack, some of the men get drunk in a cabaret and become rowdy and aggressive. “One could feel . . . ​ their bellicose mood mounting,” Larcher writes, “it’s true, I no longer recognized them . . .”58 Larcher recognizes the men even less in the violent butchery scene that follows. Having been given knives, presumably in anticipation of taking the e­ nemy trench in the following day’s attack, the men vent their frustrations and pent-up rage on a side of beef that has been delivered for the eve­ning meal: “They pounced on the meat, and one a­ fter the other, with ferocious blows, they ripped into it.”59 A cook breaks up the scene, which ends with the narrator noticing a lone knife, covered with a bloody handprint, left planted in the hanging hunk of meat. Dorgelès’s ambivalence about soldier brutalization is characteristic of the stance taken by most writers during the war. In Le Feu, for example, the men’s daily interactions with one another are marked by aggression more than by compassion and by in­de­pen­dence more than by cooperation. The narrator nevertheless believes that the common goal of ending injustice and establishing the reign of equality ­will be sufficient in the postwar

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period to cause not only Franco-­German reconciliation but also inter-­ class cooperation.

Coming Back from Le Cafard

­ hese writers show scenes of soldier brutality, lack of solidarity, and cyniT cism, but they also show their characters pulling back from the bitterness, depression, and cognitive breakdown associated with le cafard. In one scene in Les Croix de bois, Jacques Larcher takes up watch duty the night before an attack. His gun points out of a slit in the trench wall as he surveys the darkness of no-­man’s-­land. Soon his eyes begin to glaze over: “Dazed, [he] looks without seeing.” 60 He begins to “think vaguely about t­ hings” before catching himself nodding off to sleep.61 He tries to keep himself awake by thinking of the impending attack, but his “heavy head” ­will not comply, and his “dulled mind” wanders into a “muddled reverie.” 62 The reader follows Larcher’s increasing stupor, as he is overcome with fatigue and gives himself over to dark thoughts. His sentences grow less coherent, as registered by the use of ellipses. “The war . . . ​I see ruins, mud, lines of exhausted men [ . . . ​] jagged tree trunks and wooden crosses, wooden crosses . . . ​All of that streams by, mixes together, merges. The war . . .” ­These dark visions, over which the narrator seems to have no control, worry him. “It seems that my w ­ hole life ­will be tainted by t­ hese dismal horrors,” the narrator reflects, as he tries to piece together a coherent vision of the war. His “defiled memory,” he worries, “­will never be able to forget.” 63 The narrator does not, however, dwell long upon such morbid thoughts. The chapter ends as he falls asleep, and the next chapter finds the men back at their billets ­behind the lines. During the scene of rest that follows, the men pull themselves back together, thanks in part to the power of forgetting. “The war is over for us, over for five days,” the narrator explains. “The attack, the dead, it’s all forgotten.” The only ­thing that counts for the men is “the pres­ ent, ­today itself,” the only day they can be sure to continue living.64 The irrepressible desire to live sees the men through. In the closing chapter of Les Croix de bois, Larcher points to another inner resource that helped his comrades survive the psychic destruction of war—­their sense of humor. In a melancholy, nostalgic mood, the narrator evokes the memory of his fallen comrades. It was their “joy” that allowed them to overcome the “worst ­trials.” “In the mud of relief marches, ­under

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the backbreaking ­labor of work details, before death itself,” the narrator addresses the ghosts he has summoned, “I heard you laugh,” but “never cry.” In writing the story of his comrades and their experiences, the narrator has chosen to include humorous anecdotes alongside horrific ones, wanting “to laugh, too, to laugh [their] laugh.” “We sure did laugh,” he remembers, “we laughed for a handful of straw, hot soup, we laughed for a solid dugout, we laughed for a night of rest, for a joke that was cracked, a line from a song.” The loss of a comrade was “quickly forgotten, and we laughed all the same.” However much the narrator might insist, as so many ­people did during the war, that the soldier’s good cheer was an effective antidote to despair, he also recognizes the willful self-­deception involved in such thinking. With time, the memories of his fallen comrades, so full of good humor and laughter, have “eaten deep down, like an acid that corrodes . . .” The laughter at the heart of Le Système D grows sour and destructive with time, a point that is illustrated by the sad demise of the squad’s funny man, Sulphart, as he sinks into alcoholism, bitterness, and depression. The gaiety of Le Système D may have kept Sulphart and Larcher afloat during the war, but in the postwar period it has lost its efficacy. Les Croix de bois ends famously with Larcher’s remorse at “having dared to laugh about [his comrades’] hardships, as if [he] had carved a penny whistle out of [their] crosses.” 65

Temporal and Narrative Dissolution

The everyday of the war­time picaresque is alienated from any unifying princi­ ple. Characters cannot situate themselves with re­spect to the past, but the pres­ent is far too deadly for them to look beyond the immediate f­ uture. When isolated from the past and the ­future, Bakhtin writes, the pres­ent “loses its integrity, breaks down into isolated phenomena and objects, making of them a mere abstract conglomeration.” 66 This breakdown of the pres­ent is nowhere more forcefully expressed as in soldier-­writer Léon Werth’s Clavel soldat, written in 1916 and 1917 but published, along with a second volume, Clavel chez les majors (Clavel with the Military Doctors), in 1919.67 If, for the most part, the individual episodes of war retain some legibility in Le Feu, Les Croix de bois, or Les Mémoires d’un rat, the same is not true of Clavel soldat. The chapters in the works of Barbusse, Dorgelès, and Chaine have titles, and even if ­there are no clear transitions between chapters, the chapters themselves are well-­crafted, rounded

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stories. The episodes in Clavel soldat, on the other hand, melt into one indiscriminate narrative stream. Not only do the episodes themselves lose their contours, but the narrative voice shifts back and forth from that of an omniscient, anonymous narrator to that of the soldier André Clavel himself. Clavel’s interior monologues alternate with anecdotes, observations, and conversations overheard among soldiers. Time in Clavel soldat is likewise more fluid than in most war­t ime novels, with both the narrator and Clavel shuffling backward and forward in time in their narration and reflections. Clavel soldat’s unnamed chapters have no internal logic or cohesion. Within chapters, long descriptive passages are juxtaposed with short, one-­ sentence paragraphs or passages of dialogue. ­There are no transitions between chapters, between episodes, or sometimes even between paragraphs and sentences. In one example, the narrator observes that “three cranial patients die in the field hospital . . .” 68 The very next sentence, in its lack of transition from the first, illustrates the concomitant banality of death and apathy of the men: “A card game begins between sappers and telephone operators.” 69 The text also makes obsessive use of ellipses and sentence fragments. The a­ ctual events of the narrative melt into this narrative stream, so that the emphasis shifts from the happenings of the war to the slow pro­cess of disillusionment, disgust, and descent into exhaustion under­gone by the central protagonist. This slow creep of le cafard into the protagonist’s psyche ­will be experienced as a kind of existential nausea.70 In his study of ­Great War soldier-­writing, Témoins, war veteran and literary scholar Jean Norton Cru expressed his disgust with Clavel soldat. He found the novel an “ugly, brutal, unpleasant, irritating” book, full of “coarse language,” and completely lacking in taste. Léon Werth, Cru insisted, finds “nothing but ugliness” in every­thing he sees, including “les poilus.”71 In this review, Cru echoed opinions voiced a de­cade earlier by veteran Jean Galtier-­ Boissière in the pages of Le Crapouillot.72 Galtier-­Boissière’s critique of Clavel soldat, like Cru’s a­ fter it, could easily be confused for a critique of Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit. Galtier-­Boissière, writing in 1919, called Clavel soldat “the most brutal and ­bitter book” to be written “about and against the war.” 73 The novel’s “perpetually gloomy tone” was bound to frighten readers. “­People w ­ ill say,” Galtier-­Boissière predicted, “that ­these are the aigreurs cafardeuses [depressive heartburn] of a gentleman who for 447 pages, with numerous repetitions and a remarkable lack of organ­ization, views the ­great war through [the bile of] his liver disease.”74 The book represented the

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“poisonous invectives” of an author who “hates all of humanity,” the g­ reat men of this world and the ordinary men, his officers, but also his own trench mates.75 Galtier-­Boissière, like Cru, makes no imaginative allowance for the possibility that Werth’s protagonist Clavel might hold opinions dif­fer­ent from the author’s own. Perhaps this is fair enough. By all accounts, Léon Werth, like Gus Bofa, did become embittered and disillusioned b­ ecause of the war. For Galtier-­Boissière, Werth’s novel did have some documentary value. Werth had not been held back by the “sense of propriety” that had constrained most soldier-­writers.76 The book was a document of “surprising frankness,” full of “keen and cruel” observations.77 Indeed Clavel soldat is unique in its frank references to ­human sexuality and aggression. In one scene, a French soldier asks if it would be wrong to rape German ­women and in another a Legionnaire reminisces about “the good old days in Madagascar,” when the men w ­ ere constantly drunk and the officers routinely raped w ­ omen in front 78 of their husbands. Prostitution and venereal disease are also openly discussed in Clavel soldat, and hatred of civilians is pushed further than in other novels. One soldier fantasizes about dropping bombs on Marseille and killing all the shirkers ­there.79 While most war texts feature references to colonial soldiers, Werth’s text is unique in its conflation and indictment of all wars, including the colonial wars. Colonial war, like the G ­ reat War, functions according to the same violent and unjust logic that Clavel condemns. Werth’s depiction of Clavel’s experience of disillusionment, resentment, alienation, and solitude are unique to this corpus, rivaled only by Voyage au bout de la nuit. Clavel loses his faith in humanity at the front. He is disgusted by his fellow soldiers, whom he describes as unthinking, egotistical brutes who w ­ ill be incapable of building a better world when the war is over. “Why are we ­here?” one soldier in the novel asks. “­Because it’s our duty,” another replies. A cook from Marseille who happens to be walking by overhears them and scoffs, capturing the ruthlessly self-­preservationist ethos Clavel sees in his trench mates: “­Idiots—my homeland is my hide.”80 One final recurring image in the text, that of rats fornicating in the hay where the men sleep, points to a lack of separation—­ physical or ethical—­between men and animals. This collapse of distinctions—­between wars, between civilians and the ­enemy, between men and beasts—­runs c­ ounter to what Paul Fussell describes as the “versus habit” of the G ­ reat War mind. This tendency is particularly strong among trench writers who divide space and time using “gross dichot-

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omies” such as day and night, activity and inactivity, pure adrenaline and utter boredom. 81 The narrator of Clavel soldat suggests that rather than seeing picaresque adventure time and everyday time as “gross dichotomies” that are diametrically opposed, one should see them as inextricably mixed. As paradoxical as it may seem, random, mass death is the everyday experience of the trench, and in trench warfare, death itself becomes unexceptional, banal, even boring. Rather than seeing stark contrasts, Werth’s André Clavel sees trench time and space as an undifferentiated m ­ ental and physical state of being—an existential cafard. In a scene of cognitive breakdown recalling that of Dorgelès’s Jacques Larcher, the narrator strains to see the world through Clavel’s eyes. “­There is no ridge [to take] . . . ​­there is no ­enemy. T ­ here is night. . . . ​drizzling rain . . . ​cold . . . ​the immobility of the stars . . . ​the frozen ground of the trench and ennui . . . ​Ennui that, from h­ ere on, follows us everywhere, is in us, never lets up, even during an attack, ennui stronger than fear, ennui that seeps into us like the cold, ennui that has become a part of us.” This weariness colors every­thing Clavel sees, including the landscapes around him. “Formless landscapes,” Clavel recalls, like ­those that stream by the win­dows “of a train car to a drowsy passenger.” 82 Like Bardamu ­after him, Clavel becomes a “drowsy passenger” through his own life, a bored, ­bitter sleepwalker who cannot shake himself from the clutches of le cafard.

Picaresque Textuality and the Order of War

Clavel soldat de-­emphasizes the events of adventure time in ­favor of a disintegrated sense of everyday time as a ­mental-­physical state of being. It also relies more heavi­ly than most war­time texts on intertexts as a means of highlighting the corroded contours between fact and fiction in war culture and the effects of that corrosion on the soldier’s tenuous grip on real­ity. Clavel soldat is packed with references to newspapers and newspaper articles. Unlike Le Feu, Les Croix de bois, and Les Mémoires d’un rat, which also make reference to newspapers and include scenes of soldiers reading, Clavel soldat includes newspaper articles, civilian letters, dépêches, communiqués, and rapports, songs, stories, and anecdotes, often set off from the body of the text by italics. 83 ­Whether t­hese are historical documents or pastiches is sometimes unclear, but the point is to expose the reader to a wide variety of textual strategies for representing war. T ­ hese parasitical texts read as illegitimate in the context of

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the narrative that frames them, but they also point outside the text to the cluttered and contradictory textual web about the war to which the average reader might be exposed. Though Léon Werth’s use of textual collage is more pronounced than that of Barbusse, Dorgelès, or Chaine, it is far from unique. The heterogeneity of the trench world, its simultaneous clutter and bare-­bones emptiness, is echoed on the poetic level by the hodge-­podge of conversations, storytelling, jokes, popu­lar sayings, slang interjections, and bits of popu­lar song that occur in varying doses in most war­time texts. Through Clavel’s monologues and the textual “brew” that interrupts them, we see the pro­cesses of brutalization, robotization, and intellectual destabilization at work on the protagonist and the men around him. The text figures a long, steady pro­cess of evacuation—of ideas, emotions, memories—­and a parallel pro­cess of linguistic and epistemological impoverishment and contamination. As Giancarlo Maiorino argues, this kind of literary and nonliterary “brew” is typical in the picaresque tradition. “Picaresque textuality,” Maiorino explains, “makes a ­wholesome meal out of bits and pieces of proverbs, lies, borrowed plots, business transactions, ­legal jargon, folkloristic echoes, and learned references.”84 “Picaresque textuality” is appropriately matched to the special narrative demands of the war­time everyday. This “subheroic world of sheer existence”85 is characterized by a material scarcity that is echoed in a kind of narrative scarcity. The war­time picaresque, like the original Spanish picaresque, fills in an other­wise empty space and time with language and objects. Writers who want to depict the daily existence of the Infantryman fill up the dead time of their narratives with language, just as the anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes fills his character’s mouth with words when he ­can’t fill it with food. 86 The other­w ise empty waiting time between marches, attacks, and the arrival of replacements is filled with dialogue, storytelling, joke-­telling, complaints, and memories, but also fragments of trench textuality—­references to or pastiches of postcards, magazine and newspaper articles, letters, and songs. Léon Werth is unique among war­time novelists to use this “picaresque textuality” as a means of incorporating a critique of bourrage de crâne and war culture into a coherent theory of the “ordre de la guerre” (the order of war)87 and to posit the inevitable reaction to that order: a kind of intellectual ver-

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tigo. This sensation is not unlike the “war nausea”88 the soldier feels a­ fter an extended stay in the trenches spent shoulder to shoulder with death and le cafard. The order of war, like the picaresque, is an ethos, a mindset, an attitude, a commitment to war and therefore to death. It is another word for war culture—­that series of discourses and repre­sen­ta­tions that both reflect and inflect p­ eople’s understanding of the war and their commitment to seeing it through. As le cafard creeps into the soldier’s consciousness, a once discerning mind can be hollowed out by an excess of vio­lence, hopelessness, and fatigue. That mind becomes susceptible to contamination from the “order of war” and the discourses that support it—­those of the soldiers in the trenches and of the civilians back home. “How is it,” the narrator asks as Clavel soldat opens, “that André Clavel has ideas so dif­fer­ent from t­hose of Le Petit Parisien and the Revue des Deux Mondes?” The answer, the narrator suggests, lies in Clavel’s “sensibility,” which tends t­oward “pity,” and in his robust capacity for critical thinking. 89 For a time, Clavel is lucid enough to observe his fellow soldiers as they are slowly absorbed into the shadowy unreality of civilian fantasies about the war. He watches as their capacity for in­de­pen­dent thinking and their very mastery of language are eroded, finishing in a kind of “torpor,” out of which the only distinguishable sounds are t­ hose of “moans, snippets from newspapers, and song lyr­ics.”90 So contaminated are the men’s minds by the media t­ hey’ve absorbed that they tell stories based on “what ­they’ve read” or on “stories from the newspapers” as if they ­were their own.91 The war experience so confounds any separation between fact and fiction that soldiers often c­ an’t even distinguish, Clavel observes, “between what t­ hey’ve seen and what ­they’ve been told.”92 Over time, the same mass-­media chatter that Clavel so decries begins to creep into his own imagination. He begins to see real­ity through eyes trained by war culture and bourrage de crâne. One rainy night, for example, he pauses to reflect on the sight of no-­man’s-­land. While the truth of this image is clear in Clavel’s mind, he can also understand the impulse to translate this image into the bombastic vernacular of the mainstream media. “The truth is that this is as boring as a missed bus,” Clavel muses, but it would make a “­great tableau for one of t­ hose war diaries they publish in right-­thinking magazines.” 93 Throughout the novel, Clavel fights against the brain-­numbing seduction of the skull-­stuffers, with their ready-­made myths and legends. By

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the end of the novel, however, he has been completely worn down. Giving up on any attempt to tell the truth about the war, he finds himself “ready to repeat any old story from the newspapers.”94

The Obscenity of ­Things

The documentary detail of the war­time picaresque—­a constant inventory of trench objects—­anchors text and reader in the materiality of trench life. The “destitute world of the picaresque,” Maiorino argues, has always been haunted by a certain “thingism”—­with protagonists fetishizing the few objects they own and fantasizing about objects they would like to own.95 In ­Great War texts, this “thingism” is manifested in the many episodes devoted to depicting soldiers packing, unpacking, and taking inventory of their personal belongings. In Le Feu, for example, Barbusse dedicates an entire chapter to precisely such a ritual.96 So dense is ­Great War “thingism” that texts like Le Feu, Les Croix de bois, and Clavel soldat often leave the reader drowning in an excess of pro­cessable detail. Some G ­ reat War texts use the trope of the inventory or list to underline the incongruousness, inappropriateness, and lack of re­spect for h­ uman dignity of the trench world and the loss of bearings characters feel in that world. A common inventory places h­ uman beings alongside trench debris in a disturbingly ­matter-­of-­fact way. In one scene in Les Croix de bois, for example, the men, covered with dust and debris, are reduced to the level of ­things, while the men who have come before them and have died are reduced to just another item in a list of ruins: “In the dirt and debris, we had taken on the neutral complexion of ­these destroyed ­things . . . ​cadavers sticking out of the rubble, crushed stones, scraps of cloth, bits of furniture, soldiers’ backpacks, all the same, destroyed, the dead no more tragic than the stones.” 97 In a l­ater scene, when the men occupy a trench that has been dug over an older one, Sulphart and the men make use of the dead bodies that have been uncovered. In a morbid twist on Le Système D, Sulphart hangs his sack from a foot sticking out of the trench wall, and the machine gunners set up their equipment on the bloated belly of a German corpse.98 A similar scene occurs in Clavel soldat, when Clavel discovers that the hook from which he has hung his equipment is actually a h­ uman foot.99 The narrator of Clavel soldat uses abandoned equipment to suggest the blurred contours between ­people and ­things: “In the footpaths and thickets,

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in the fields we trample on backpacks abandoned by the wounded, black French packs and tawny German ones, on French kepis and German berets, on helmets, jackets, and greatcoats, cartridges, bayonets, military ID cards, bundles of letters . . .”100 ­Here the list serves to show the passage of huge numbers of ­human beings, but also to highlight the disorienting lack of bound­aries between friend and foe and between the living and the dead. The mixture of life and death is even more obscene in another passage from Clavel soldat in which the narrator describes the men wading in “this glue made of wet earth, excrement, and dead bodies.”101 The pervasiveness and promiscuity of death in such descriptions serve to deflate the traditional rhe­toric of the sacrosanctity and veneration of death and the dead. In death, as in life, one’s trench mates are, Clavel suggests, just part of a debased and debasing decor.

Alienation

In Clavel soldat, we see the progressive detachment of the protagonist from his surroundings, his loss of pity and mounting disgust, not just for the civilian population, but for his fellow soldiers. The picaresque soldier mantra of “­every man for himself” contained in the cook’s “my homeland is my hide” quip is, however, borne out in dif­fer­ent ways in dif­fer­ent texts.102 Few war­ time authors w ­ ere ready to have their characters practice the radical egotism and individualism they preached. In René Benjamin’s Gaspard, for example, the bonds of friendship among the men are strong. Gaspard is fiercely protective of his “copains” (pals), particularly his Pa­ri­sian ones, insisting that even war is not a strong enough force to destroy “sentiment.”103 In Gaspard, transcendence is imaginable even in the nightmarish world of the trench. It takes the form of friendship: “Me, when I’ve got buddies,” insists Gaspard, “it’s sacred.”104 Throughout the novel we see Gaspard comforting the wounded, sharing food with his friends, and even carry­ing his pal Burette, for whom he feels a “canine friendship,” from the battlefield to an ambulance ­behind the lines.105 The unlikely pairing of Gaspard and Burette is echoed in Les Croix de bois in the odd ­couple of Sulphart and Gilbert. Not only does Sulphart teach Gilbert the ropes, but he does small tasks for him, helping him carry his sack, scraping the mud from his leggings, and preparing his can of cassoulet. But this intimacy is not reserved only for close friends in Les Croix de bois. The men feel a sense of solidarity even with other French soldiers t­ hey’ve never

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met. In the chapter entitled “Le Fanion rouge” (The Red Pennant), the men watch helplessly as a soldier from another regiment lies trapped in no-­man’s-­ land with friendly fire coming down all around him. As he violently waves a red flannel b­ elt to signal to the French artillery to aim farther, he is hit by ­enemy machine-­gun fire. The narrator describes the men’s feelings of empathy and solidarity as they watch the scene unfold: “the deadly rattle [of the machine gun] hurt, cruelly hurt, as if it had wounded us all.”106 Clavel soldat is dif­fer­ent. Any notion of solidarity or community exists for André Clavel only among a tiny subset of unique individuals—­Clavel, Mourèze, Vernay, and their hy­po­thet­i­cal counter­parts worldwide—­men who manage to maintain some semblance of a critical spirit, doubt, or skepticism in a world full of dumb brutes, happy slaves, fools, and lunatics. Clavel soldat is exceptional in the radical alienation of its central protagonist. No poilu pre-­ Bardamu is brought as close as André Clavel to nihilism.107 Clavel has not only lost all pity for his fellow soldiers, but at times he feels downright hatred for them, calling them “bastards,” and declaring that he can no longer muster up any love for the masses.108 Clavel deflates any notion of community, describing soldier sociability as a kind of animal habit. It is not a sentimentalized affinity like Gaspard’s “canine friendship.” The men “­don’t care for one another,” Clavel observes; “they tolerate each other as a beast in a stable tolerates another beast that the master has placed [beside him].” Trench friendship is too lofty a term for the “flimsy camaraderie” that links the men in a modern army. This camaraderie is nothing more than the nonthinking “habituation” of beasts to one another.109 Writing as he was well before the advent of cogent theories of the absurd, Léon Werth’s diagnosis of mauvaise foi among French soldiers and French society in general and his construction of an intellectual form of heroism based on a constant refusal of lies and compromises is, as Martin Hurcombe points out with re­spect to a number of ­Great War texts, remarkably proto-­existentialist.110 It is, of course, also remarkably picaresque. Clavel’s intuitions about war and man’s complicity with the “order of war” ­will be pushed even further in postwar texts like Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, Giono’s Le ­Grand troupeau or Guilloux’s Le Sang noir. By the end of his ser­ vice in the First World War, André Clavel ­will resemble Céline’s Bardamu or Guilloux’s Cripure not only in his loss of faith in his fellow man, but also in his emotional state, which is somewhere near rock bottom. “To know,” Clavel muses ­toward the end of the novel, “that you can no longer expect

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anything from the men with whom you live, that you have nothing to give them, that they move like a herd,” answering only to force and authority, “what torture!” Clavel’s nihilistic thoughts are interrupted by an ironic torture of another sort, as a priest beats a trench rat to death with a “cudgel.”111 This image of bludgeoning recalls an earlier scene in which Clavel expressed his growing cynicism. The “inertia” of his comrades at arms makes him “hate them.” They have “killed his pity.”112 In choosing sides, Clavel has deci­ded, you’d have to be stupid not to align yourself with ­those who get other ­people to fight in wars. Why not arm yourself with a “nice cudgel,” since the men that do the a­ ctual fighting make it so easy to drive them off to war?113

Contempt for Life

In his 1921 pamphlet depicting a cynical trench rat named Ronge-­Maille (Mesh Gnawer), Lucien Descaves launched a scathing attack against h­ uman beings as warmongers with no re­spect for their fellow creatures or for the natu­ral environment, to which they had laid waste in their senseless slaughter of one another. The rat’s ­simple biological code is shown to be superior to man’s supposedly moral one. “Why,” Ronge-­Maille rhetorically asks, do men “seem to despise life so much?”114 A few years a­ fter the Second World War, Albert Camus made a similar diagnosis when he wrote that “the secret of Eu­rope is that it no longer loves life.”115 He took war as “­legal murder” to be the prime characteristic of his age. He condemned even more than murder itself the nihilism that had led men to place so l­ ittle value on h­ uman life and h­ uman dignity. When he looked around at the cosmic homelessness of his generation, he determined that such nothingness had to be transcended by the reaffirmation of a commitment to life. In the absence of some transcendental external power, Camus argued, one had to find the grounds for living in life itself. For most picaros, this “belief in the act of living” comes quite naturally. Camus, however, insisted it could be achieved only by “a desperate strug­gle.”116 For him, the only basis on which to recommit to life itself was through a recommitment to the life of ­others—­not just to one’s own life. Only in h­ uman companionship and ­human solidarity could life have any meaning. If we are ­going to defy the absurdity of existence, Camus argued, we have to do it together. As compelling as the picaresque mode and Le Système D w ­ ere for showing ­people how to “muddle through” the ­Great War, it did not prove to be a

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morally healthy strategy for dealing with the permanent crisis that the twentieth c­ entury turned out to be. Gaiety and good cheer as tactics of Le Système D, for example, did not age well, and figures like La Fouchardière fell from grace. During the Occupation, La Fouch’ chose to continue writing for Paris-­Soir, La Semaine, and L’Œuvre, papers that accepted the conditions of publication ­under German control. This choice, seen as a form of collaboration, doubtless has much to do with La Fouchardière’s erasure from literary memory in the second half of the twentieth c­ entury. One could argue that the form of oppositional patriotism he developed during the First World War did not translate well—­indeed, could be regarded as damning when reactivated during the Second World War. As Laurent Martin has argued, “the image of France facing the hardship of her times with eternal good humor could be seen as g­ oing in the direction of Pétainist propaganda.”117

The Second World War and the Souring of Le Système D

The arts and antics of Le Système D lost some of their luster during the Second World War. Historian Ian Ousby has described this period in France as “the golden age of Le Système D.”118 During the Occupation, Ousby insists, “law, regulation, bureaucracy and officialdom ­were forces to outwit—­ forces it had become a ­matter of pride to outwit—in the daily b­ attle to keep fed, clothed and warm.”119 Material hardships forced ­people to be creative in meeting basic needs for physical survival. ­These forms of débrouillardise (resourcefulness) are often cited in histories of the Occupation. Concocting “national tobacco” out of tobacco from cigarette butts mixed with herbs and grasses is one example. Cobbling together elaborate flowered and feathered hats or designing turbans to cover up a worn-­out perm is another. Making wooden heels when rubber ran out, converting bicycles into vélo-­taxis, or hanging out in cinemas and bank lobbies to keep warm: t­ hese are all examples of Le Système D—­the admirable, inventive kind, the G ­ reat 120 War kind. As Robert Gildea has argued, the “gray market” can also be considered a respectable form of débrouillardise. The spontaneous development of small-­scale barter economies could be seen as Gallic improvisation. It did no harm and allowed every­one to work around the inefficiencies of the official rationing system.121 The black market, of course, was another t­ hing entirely—­ especially the large, impersonal kind that resulted in huge profits for shop­

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keep­ers and dire shortages for customers. This was the dishonorable form of Système D analyzed so brilliantly by Jean Dutourd in his 1952 novel Au bon beurre. The black-­marketing Poissonard ­family in Au bon beurre ­waters down the milk they sell. They pass off rancid butter as fresh, charging exorbitant prices and claiming all the while that they are performing a civic duty. Such practices would be acceptable, even honorable, if directed against the Germans as outsiders and oppressors, but they are shameful, Dutourd suggests, when directed against one’s neighbors and compatriots.122 The Poissonard ­family degrades and perverts the poilu’s motto of “faut pas s’en faire” (­don’t worry) with their endless refrain “faut pas se gêner”—­which in this context means basically “­don’t worry your conscience over what you are d­ oing or lose too much sleep over it.”123 The Poissonards use the French knack for Le Système D as an excuse to exploit their neighbors and to show no mercy to ­those who ­don’t know how to se débrouiller. As Julie Poissonard puts it, “if we can ‘get by’ [se débrouiller] ­there’s no reason why o­ thers c­ an’t do the same.”124 ­Those who d­ on’t know how to adapt to the times are just “poires” and “gourdes,” dull-­witted suckers who deserve what they get.125 “The times are changing,” Julie reasons, and “you’d be quite wrong not to take advantage of the situation.”126 For some débrouillards, Dutourd suggests, the secret to success during the Occupation was adaptation at its most opportunistic—­with success being reserved for girouettes (weathercocks) like the Poissonards who know how to pick the winners and conform to the spirit of the times.127 And, of course, by the novel’s end the Poissonards have reinvented themselves as long-­time members of the Re­sis­tance. Not every­one was as successful as t­ hese fictional characters in keeping a clean conscience or ignoring the downside to Le Système D. In her 1962 memoir Divided Loyalties, Scottish expatriate Janet Tessier Du Cros remembers: “We w ­ ere all of us driven to some form of dishonest practice. It was no small hardship having to throw our moral scruples to the winds and s­ ettle down to a dishonest way of life, in full view of the ­children and in contradiction to all we w ­ ere striving to teach them. . . . ​­There was a haunting feeling that this was the thin end of a wedge and, as such, not a good ­thing for the nation.”128 Irène Némirovsky’s novel Suite Française, hidden in an attic ­until its publication in 2004, is unflinching in its development of the distinction

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between harmless and harmful forms of débrouillardise and in sounding the depths of French national character. The harmless form of Le Système D is that deployed by the many “­little guys” in the novel—­members of the working-­and lower-­middle-­classes who d­ on’t have the money to buy themselves extra food or special ­favors. They d­ on’t disdain the masses, but throw themselves in with their lot and rely on improvised moments of solidarity (clear-­eyed, unsentimental solidarity, but solidarity all the same) as another strategy of Le Système D. The dishonest kind of débrouillardise is that practiced by the esthete and unlikely débrouillard Charles Langelet, who tricks a young c­ ouple into leaving their car so he can steal their gas. It is that of Arlette Corail, who convinces her lover, Corbin, to ditch his two employees to make room in his car for her and her dog. The novel is built around alternating instances of harmful and harmless forms of débrouillardise, alternating anecdotes depicting the be­hav­iors of the rich and the poor, the self-­satisfied and the ­humble, the cynical and the compassionate. Alongside ­these distinctions are ­running comparisons between the war of 14–18 and the debacle of 1940. Of the central characters, the Michaud f­amily—­the c­ ouple Corbin leaves b­ ehind—­manages to resist the moral bankruptcy around them, muddling through the war as the novel’s only au­then­tic representatives of a certain good-­hearted spirit of resourcefulness and ­union sacrée of the ­Great War. And it is significant that, like many of the more sympathetic characters in Suite française, Maurice Michaud is a veteran of 14–18. The innocent form of Le Système D did more than help French p­ eople eat and stay warm during the Occupation. It gave them a way to imagine the endurance and survival of the French nation—to posit a continuity with the past and to imagine a common f­ uture that would be less bleak and less divisive than the pres­ent.129 This is the work that the Michaud f­ amily performs in Suite française. It is also the work that the figure of Charlot, Charlie Chaplin’s L ­ ittle Tramp, performs in the G ­ reat War and postwar French imaginary. As we w ­ ill see in the next chapter, Chaplin’s comedy set a course out of the dead end of le cafard and the cynicism suggested by dishonorable forms of Le Système D. Chaplin the filmmaker did what no other h­ uman being was capable of d­ oing. At a time when nations w ­ ere attempting to heal from one war while teetering on the brink of another, when Eu­ro­pean socie­ties ­were threatening to implode ­under the clash of vitriolic ideologies, Chaplin united the world in laughter.

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The First World War confronted Eu­ro­pe­ans with both the fantasy and the nightmare of the universal common man as modern hero. In his everydayness, he is not above the masses. But this means he risks being subsumed within them—­losing his unique identity as he, like the masses, is led into the homogenizing machines of war, work, and the State. The condition of the soldier, like that of the worker, would be the condition of ­every man and ­woman struggling to survive within a rampant and brutal industrial modernity. The nation, far from protecting the individual from the forces of modernity, would enact ­those forces upon him. While characters like Bardamu or Gus Bofa’s cafard victims in Malaises would be ground down by the cogs of the machine of modernity, the L ­ ittle Tramp would disrupt, if only temporarily, their turning. This is a point Chaplin made so vividly in Modern Times, a film released just a few years ­after Voyage au bout de la nuit and Malaises.

8. Charlie Chaplin’s ­Little Tramp

From the Art of Survival to the Survival of Art

During the First World War, many p­ eople went to the movies for the very first time in their lives. With the French film industry mobilized for the production of patriotic films and films d’actualités (newsreel footage), American films flooded French and Eu­ro­pean markets. Of the American films filling the gap in French production, Charlie Chaplin’s w ­ ere among the most popu­ lar. For many ­people, the very first flickering image they ever saw on a big white screen was that of Chaplin’s L ­ ittle Tramp. As munitions factories in Eu­rope bent technology to the destruction of the world, magic factories in California, led by a small man with a huge artistic sensibility, ­were using technology to create the world anew. For the time it took to watch a Chaplin one-­reeler, the big guns might go ­silent and man’s inhumanity to man give way to a glimmer of hope—­hope that humanity and its highest values might somehow survive the G ­ reat War. Despite material limitations, and even in the midst of what cinema scholars call a crisis of the French cinema industry, cinema-­going in war­time France was an extremely popu­lar pastime with soldiers and civilians, one that cut across classes, age groups, and genders. At a time when an enormous rift had opened between the combatant and civilian populations, cinema-­going represented an activity that could bring disparate groups together around a shared experience. ­After an initial shutdown at the start of the war, cinemas reopened in major cities all over France. Ticket sales in Paris jumped from 130,000 in November 1914 to over two million by October 1916.1 By 1917 the army had 198

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Figure 10. Charlie the Doughboy in Shoulder Arms (1918). Shoulder Arms © Roy Export S.A.S.

installed 1,200 mobile cinema units in billet towns across the war zone. In creating ­these mobile “Cinémas des Poilus,” the army officially recognized a trend that had begun with the first permissions in 1915: that of soldiers flocking to picture palaces during their leaves from the front. By bringing cinema closer to the soldiers, the army hoped to provide entertainment for the troops and boost morale. ­There was also a note of Le Système D to some soldiers’ experience of cinema. Near the front, movies w ­ ere shown on impromptu screens like bedsheets wherever space allowed—in barns, tents, even dugouts. 2

Entente joviale

In 1927, Henry Poulaille recalled the arrival of Charlie Chaplin’s films in France during the First World War. Soldiers in the trenches and civilians at home “went wild for Charlot.” “It was sheer madness,” Poulaille wrote. “­People shaved their mustaches like Charlot’s, he was all anybody could talk about.”3 French avant-­garde writers René Crevel and Blaise Cendrars also

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wrote about the fortuitous arrival of Chaplin’s films during the war, insisting in their separate ways upon the very specific historical context in which Charlot first captured the hearts and imaginations of the French p­ eople. Charlot had appeared, Crevel wrote, at a time when “we r­ eally needed [him].” 4 Blaise Cendrars went even further, arguing that if the French won the First World War, it was thanks to “Père Pinard” (cheap wine) and “Charlot.”5 A 1922 special issue of Le Crapouillot echoed this sentiment. It ­imagined a reception in honor of Charlot at the Elysée Palace. A drawing by Jean Oberlé shows then-­ president of the Republic Alexandre Millerand giving up his post to Charlot, as he tips his hat in thanks. A line of soldiers in the distinctive helmet of the poilu, faithfuls of Charlot, stand in formation in the background.6 An American journalist acknowledged the special significance of Charlot for war-­weary Eu­ro­pe­ans. Not only did Chaplin’s pictures “banish gloom from the trenches,” but they also “provid[ed] recreation for the saddened ­people of the countries at war,” especially the French. “ ‘Charlot,’ as he is known in France,” the author asserted, “has been a Godsend to the stricken French.”7 French surrealist Philippe Soupault, writing in 1931, insisted upon the timing of Charlot’s arrival and his meaning for a world in crisis. “Charlot is truly the hero for our time, a universal hero,” he argued, “a ­little guy who has managed to sum up and express the eternal anguish of t­ oday’s world.”8 The appeal of Charlot for French audiences has been linked to his ready assimilation with figures from the French cultural past: Molière, the sad clown Pierrot, “epileptic” ­music hall performers, or the film comedian Max Linder.9 But that appeal had just as much to do with filling a new imaginative need brought on by the war.10 If Chaplin’s films ­were so popu­lar, it was ­because his comedy resonated strongly with the picaresque ethos that was so pronounced during the war. Charlot arrived at precisely the moment when the French w ­ ere coming to terms with the gruesome realities of modern, industrialized warfare. His adventures provided a much-­needed respite from the horrors of the war. The experience of seeing a Charlot film would be a national experience—­one that could be shared by soldiers and civilians alike by virtue of a mutual identification with the figure of the ­Little Tramp. Of course, Chaplin’s success was, like the picaresque spirit, not limited to France. It was an international phenomenon. “For hundreds of millions of ­people on this planet,” André Bazin would l­ater write, Chaplin was “a hero like Ulysses or Roland in other civilizations.”11 The modern world had breathed painful new life into a dif­fer­ent old hero, the picaro, and that hero

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was embodied in the comedy of Charlie Chaplin. Like the picaro, Chaplin’s ­Little Tramp had learned to content himself with “provisional solution[s],” exhibiting “fabulous ingenuity in the immediate circumstance.”12 Chaplin is a power­ful example of the survivor b­ ecause he is “never at a loss in any situation,”13 and displays “unlimited imagination,” even—­a nd perhaps especially—­“ in the face of danger.”14 Indeed, Bazin observed, the “gesture of brushing aside danger is one of a number of gags peculiar to Charlie.”15 Charlot, the early film critic Pierre Leprohon wrote, “accepts with a disconcerting resignation the most agonizing situations.”16 Jean Cocteau famously described Chaplin as “Esperanto laughter,” a modern “guignol” who appealed to “all ages” and “all p­ eoples.”17 During the war, laughter was impor­tant for keeping up morale. For some, it was even seen as a moral obligation, a patriotic duty, and a contribution to the war effort. At the same time, the French ­imagined a par­tic­u­lar inflection to this laughter as distinctly their own. Lightness, gaiety, and a carefree attitude ­were, in this vision, national character traits of the French p­ eople in par­tic­u­ lar. For the French, laughter was i­magined as a way of participating in an ­imagined cultural community of gouailleurs, cheeky funnymen with a quick wit and a refusal to take life’s hardships too seriously. But Chaplin’s films offered more than mere laughter. His vulnerable vagabond was compelling ­because, at a time of unimaginable hardship and sadness, he managed to survive in a hostile and unpredictable world. He was the “man on the street,” but also a man “of the streets,” a homeless, wandering outsider forced to contend with the same heartaches and humiliations that filmgoers, particularly soldiers, w ­ ere encountering in their own lives. Chaplin’s 1915 The Tramp was particularly popu­lar with French audiences. It opens with a solitary tramp wandering the open road. A fast-­moving car threatens to run him over, forcing him to jump aside. The l­ ittle fellow then does every­thing in his limited power to reestablish his equilibrium and his dignity, including dusting off his shabby clothes with the fastidiousness of a dandy. In the first frames we see a vulnerable h­ uman body confronted with the power and speed of the modern machine. The fields, taverns, public parks, and other spaces linked up by the road the Tramp travels w ­ ill be just as dangerous. ­These ­will be spaces, like the open road, where the ­Little Tramp ­will have to contend with the blind forces of chance and, in the person of a band of thieves, of ­human malice. But ­those forces, as inexorable as they may seem, ­will not get the better of him.

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The Tramp ­will not win the affections of Edna or find a permanent home on the farm. But his spirit w ­ ill not be broken. The film ends as it began, with the Tramp back on the road, seen this time from b­ ehind as he walks, shoulders slumped, away from the camera. Lest the audience think that the “­little fellow” has been defeated by disappointment and depression, or that he ­will be overcome with bitterness and become a bandit himself, he suddenly perks himself up, gives his small frame a ­little shimmy, and strides off ­toward the horizon at as fast a clip as his duck waddle w ­ ill allow. A person can survive the brutalizing forces of modernity, Chaplin’s films suggested, without becoming a brute himself. At stake in the twin mythologies of the ­Little Tramp and the Infantryman that would emerge from the first years of the G ­ reat War was the construction of a modern vernacular of heroism as humanism. The Tramp would represent “the very figure of humanity,” not just in war­time, but in modern times.18 As Chaplin himself l­ ater put it, “We must laugh in the face of our helplessness . . . ​or go insane.”19

The Chaplin Cure

When ­people talked about Charlot, both during the war years and a­ fter, it was with undertones of having witnessed the miraculous. Chaplin’s films had, it seemed, worked won­ders on war-­weary souls. In a 1920 article in the French arts and culture paper Comœdia, for example, critic J.-­L . Croze cited a letter he had received from a w ­ oman who was “proud to be French and the m ­ other of a soldier.” The ­mother described the tonic effect during the war of Charlot on a “neurasthenic friend” who was despondent over the fate of her POW son. The friend’s doctor had advised her to “get a change of air,” so the “proud ­mother” had taken her to see Charlot. “When a Charlot film was playing, I would take her and I saw her poor face smile,” the “proud m ­ other” wrote triumphantly as proof that one “must love Charlot.” As ­mothers of soldiers, such female Charlot fans or “Charlottes” ­were held up in Croze’s article as model Frenchwomen and figures of authority, not to be confused with the frivolous, entertainment-­hungry female cinema-­goers so often condemned by soldiers and critiqued in the mass press. 20 The Chaplin Press Books in Montreux, Switzerland, have a bounty of articles from American and British sources describing war w ­ idows and bereft ­mothers, ­sisters, and ­daughters forgetting their sorrows while watching Chaplin’s “­little fellow” dance across the screen. 21 They are full of clippings

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about soldiers seeing Chaplin films in training camps at home, in dugouts at the front, in billets ­behind the lines, and in hospital wards and on transport ships. Charlie Chaplin shorts ­were even projected on the ceilings of military hospitals, it was reported, so that soldiers who ­were too ill or wounded to sit up could watch them from their sickbeds. 22 In his illustrated memoirs From Mud to Mufti (1919), British officer-­ cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather captured the quasi-­Messianic import of the figure of the ­Little Tramp. Bairnsfather recalled the popularity of Chaplin’s films among the machine gunners he was training for combat in France. A ­ fter long days of training, the men would spend all of their f­ ree time distracting themselves in the nearby town. An almost “solid mass of soldiers” would work their way to the “gaudy fronted cinemas with ‘Charlie Chaplin’ posters,”23 Bairnsfather remembered. Bairnsfather inserts a silhouette of Chaplin’s Tramp into the text, the caption reading “A Chaplain to the Forces that would have been welcome.” Bairnsfather had turned to Chaplin during the war to express a similar sentiment. In a cartoon from The Bystander reproduced in the collected volume Fragments from France, Bairnsfather i­ magined a devastated landscape of duckboards, barbed wire, and jagged tree trunks. On the horizon in no-­man’s-­ land can be made out the tiny silhouette of the L ­ ittle Tramp, his cane pointed to the sky. The caption reads “C3. C.C., The Last Man.” The grade C3, usually reserved for men unfit for ser­vice, is ­here replaced with the initials of the one man who could miraculously remain standing a­ fter such a heavy bombardment. 24 A British officer was quoted in a 1918 newspaper article as saying in reference to Chaplin: “He made us laugh when it often seemed that nothing ­else could.”25 The “artistic antics” of this “movie clown,” a British attaché to the United States reported, are “reproduced in scores of improvised theaters on ­every front,” providing “healthy laughter that served as the antidote to the grisly horrors of the ­battle fields and the grinding monotony of the trenches.”26 Some civilians in the United States did not like Chaplin’s comedy, considering it too vulgar. What­ever t­ hese p­ eople might think, another article insisted, ­there was not a “soldier in France who does not look upon him as a godsend in dark days, a w ­ holesome relief from infinite boredom and ­ ittle Tramp was even prescribed sometimes unimaginable misery.”27 The L as a cure for shell shock. The Chaplin Press Books are full of anecdotes—­ framed as firsthand, eyewitness accounts—­depicting soldiers recovering their

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speech, their hearing, or their ability to walk from laughing at a Chaplin film.28 Even just looking at a photo of the Tramp might, in the experience of one army psychologist, bring a patient back to ­mental health. 29 The “idea” ­behind Chaplin’s comedies of a figure who is “utterly helpless” but “always triumphant” is an “extravagance,” one columnist conceded. But “plea­sure in this sort of extravagance is not only consistent with sanity: it is the mark of sanity.”30 The embrace of Charlot by soldiers and civilians is documented in ­Great Britain, the United States, and France. Like soldier-­novelists Henri Barbusse and René Benjamin, and like cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather, Chaplin received fan mail from soldiers. Allied soldiers on all fronts identified with the L ­ ittle Tramp. A widely cited report claimed that the British high command had deci­ ded to require soldiers to wear full length mustaches b­ ecause the toothbrush mustache’s widespread association with a “motion picture comedian of vogue among troops serving on practically all fronts” could be seen as “subverting the dignity of His Majesty’s troops in the field.”31 A popu­lar war­time song in Britain, “The Moon Shines Bright on Charlie Chaplin,” i­ magined Charlie Chaplin as a soldier soon to be sent to the Dardanelles.32 Soldiers used the L ­ ittle Tramp as a talisman and mascot. British soldiers dragged cardboard cutouts of him out to the trenches, it was reported, while one French flying squadron painted the name Charlot (and a caricature of the ­Little Tramp) on the side of one of their planes.33 According to a YMCA worker in charge of recreation for the allied armies, “All of the picture shows are good . . . ​but Charlie Chaplin is the [soldiers’] favorite. When the word comes down the line that a Charlot (as Charlie is known in France) is to be run the Yankees, Poilus, and Tommies link hearts and arms and hit the trail for The White Screen.”34

Charlot français

In France, news of Charlot traveled by word of mouth as the first soldiers went home on leave. According to veteran Blaise Cendrars, writing in the mid1920s, ­these soldiers came back to the trenches “ruddy” with excitement about Charlot and his misadventures—he was all anybody at the front could talk about.35 One day when Cendrars was looking particularly scruffy—­“dirty, nasty, with a two-­month-­old beard, pants ripped by barbed wire,” he remembered, a group of “joyeux artilleurs” (merry artillerymen) compared him to

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Charlot. Cendrars recalls longing to see for himself “this new Poilu who had the front in stitches.”36 For Cendrars, the ever-­resourceful vagabond was a kindred spirit of the French Infantryman. Cendrars went even further, arguing that Charlot was “born at the front,” that he “was French,” and that if the Germans lost the First World War it was ­because “they d­ idn’t meet Charlot in time.”37 Cendrars’s self-­portrait as a scruffy, unkempt soldier is consistent with many other literary and cartoon portraits of the poilu and his improvised sartorial embellishments. An early British portrait of the “piou-­piou,” as the French Infantryman was called in the first months of the war, even compares the French soldier, clad at the time in traditional red pants and blue coat, as a “tramp.” His “blue overcoat, buttoned ­behind the knees, is too heavy; his trousers . . . ​are too baggy . . . ​and the ­whole of him is usually slouchy and rather dirty.” And yet, “the piou-­piou does not seem to care.”38 What made Charlot so endearing was that he combined this French-­style insouciance and “deliberate casualness” with a punctiliousness that re­imagined even the shabbiest clothes as the attire of a gentleman. Tugging on his tight-­fitting vest and brushing off his battered bowler, the Tramp asserted his self-­re­spect and his refusal to be diminished by his circumstances, even if his circumstances ­were diminished. Long before Shoulder Arms (1918) was released, writers and cartoon artists had fantasized about how the L ­ ittle Tramp—­“ helpless” but always “triumphant”—­would fare in the trenches. Knowing full well how horrific the slaughter was did not keep ­people from imagining the resilience Charlie would display as a doughboy. An American cartoon from 1915 entitled “If Charlie Chaplin Goes to War,” showed Chaplin bounding across a crowded picture frame full of pot-­bellied German soldiers. Three are in the corner blinded by pies in the face, and three more are convulsed with laughter. The Kaiser is trampled ­under Charlie’s feet, and his son’s neck has been caught in the crook of Charlie’s cane, an upraised pie making its way ­toward his face.39 La Baïonnette, the same satirical magazine that published stories by Roland Dorgelès and cartoons by Gus Bofa, devoted an entire March 1917 issue to the elaborate development of the theme Charlot correspondant de guerre (Charlot War Correspondent), illustrated by the graphic artist Cami. That La Baïonnette would single out Charlot for a full sixteen-­page issue tells us something about the space he occupied in the French imaginary and about the appeal he had with both soldiers and civilians. Charlot’s adventures, La

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Baïonnette insisted, would contribute in their own way to the war effort, since they would bring joy to readers and “carry a bit of gaiety to our dear Poilus.” 40 The adventures themselves had l­ittle to do with the typical comic situations found in Chaplin’s films. Instead, they used the popu­lar figure of Charlot and his iconography as a pretext for an extended lambasting of the newspaper industry. The implicit theme of Charlot’s adventures in Charlot correspondant de guerre is the same blurred line between fact and fiction that drove the literary poilu Clavel to the brink of cognitive breakdown. At the same time, Cami’s text situates Charlot on the side of the French soldier in a face-­off with the Kaiser. The story ends when Guillaume asks Charlot to crown him emperor of the world, extending in his hand a gold crown topped with the point of the German helmet. A tiny Charlot, mounted on a gigantic chair, gives the Kaiser a terrific blow with his mallet, driving the inverted crown point-­first into the Kaiser’s skull. The image of Charlot with his famous mallet bopping the Kaiser over the head anticipates by almost a year the dream sequence of Charlot taking the Kaiser prisoner in Shoulder Arms (1918) and the final sequence of Chaplin’s war loan film The Bond (1918). This fund-raising film ends with the L ­ ittle Tramp wielding a g­ iant “Liberty Bonds” mallet and pummeling the Kaiser to the ground. The extreme vio­lence of t­hese cartoons should come as no surprise, not only given the norms of war culture, but also given the nature of Chaplin’s early comedies. Before he definitively took on the persona of the harmless “­little fellow,” Chaplin had played drunks, swells, con artists, philanderers, and other mean-­spirited bullies who slapped, kicked, pushed, and punched their way through a vicious world by being vicious themselves. In Chaplin’s early (Keystone and Essanay) comedies, Charlot exhibited the same cocky aggressiveness and the same unsentimental drive for survival exhibited by the men in Barbusse’s Le Feu and, ­later, by Bardamu’s homicidal doppelgänger Robinson. Only ­later would the “hard-­boiled” Charlie give way to the sentimental ­Little Tramp. In The Tramp (1915), The Immigrant (1917), and the ­later First National films, Charlot resembles René Benjamin’s Pa­ri­sian snail merchant with the heart of gold, Roland Dorgelès’s scoffing but generous Sulphart, or Pierre Chaine’s morally decent Juvenet. T ­ hese characters combine a plucky per­sis­tence in the face of adversity with a soft spot for ­those less fortunate than themselves.41 Like Švejk, Charlot also confounds his superiors as he seems incapable of making himself useful or efficient in any of the jobs he is given—­baker,

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floorwalker, waiter, janitor, man-­of-­all-­work. Like Bicard’s and Švejk’s verbal eccentricities, Charlot’s idiosyncratic movements and attire represent an expression of personal freedom within an oppressive hierarchy. Like Bicard, Charlot w ­ ill always get the best of the policeman or the snobby waiter, just as the literary and cartoon poilu ­will always have the last word against his punctilious sous-­officier (NCO). Like his poilu counter­parts in trench newspapers and soldiers’ novels, Charlot incarnated for the French an irreverence and rebelliousness in the face of authority that aligned him with the French Revolutionary tradition and set him apart from the disciplined, hierarchy-­ loving German ­enemy across no-­man’s-­land. Jean Cocteau’s postwar reading of Shoulder Arms (Charlot soldat) drew upon such ste­reo­types, which w ­ ere widespread within French war culture. He described the film as an apt “fable of the war,” highlighting in par­tic­u­lar the famous scene in which Charlot, disguised as a tree, goes on a reconnaissance mission ­behind ­enemy lines. One by one, a band of German soldiers are knocked senseless by a frenzied Charlot who appears to be as much taken by surprise as they are. For Cocteau, this scene provided a perfect example of the victory of “nimbleness” or légèreté over “dull-­wittedness” or lourdeur. Cocteau tacitly reproduced a common war­time opposition between French brains and German brawn, placing Charlot squarely on the side of Frenchness.42

Charlot Soldat: Cinematic Complement to Le Feu

Charlot soldat was released in France in 1919, the same year as the publication of Roland Dorgelès’s Les Croix de bois and Léon Werth’s Clavel soldat. 43 It was regarded by many French critics not only as Chaplin’s best film, but also as the best film made about the war, far superior even to France’s homegrown war film, Abel Gance’s J’accuse, released the same year. A year a­ fter Charlot soldat’s release, the trench newspaper turned arts and culture paper Le Crapouillot ran a special issue on cinema that included a three-­page article on Charlot by editor-­in-­chief and war veteran Jean Galtier-­Boissière. In his article, Galtier-­Boissière praised Charlot soldat, calling it “the only good film made about the war,” and insisting upon the “unmatched realism” of the film’s depiction of the trenches.44 In this he echoed an earlier Crapouillot review in which Dominique Braga had called Abel Gance’s J’accuse “a masterpiece of bad taste,” while waxing lyrical about Charlot soldat. “Charlie

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Chaplin, won­der of won­ders,” Braga had written, “has given us the first accurate film about the war without ever having been ­there.” 45 Many French film scholars writing ­after Braga and Galtier-­Boissière see the success of Charlot soldat in France as comparable to that of Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu—­and this despite the fact that it was filmed in California by a man who had not fought in the war.46 In par­tic­u­lar, Pierre Leprohon, writing in 1935, called attention to the realism of Charlot soldat, its depiction of “the boredom, the sadness, the dirtiness” of the trench experience, and not just the “mortars” and “attacks.” For Leprohon, Chaplin’s comedy had managed to capture “the disgust, the monotony, the hours of waiting for who knows what . . .” 47 Charlot soldat, he suggested, was both realistic and unrealistic. Chaplin was surely poking fun at the “bourrage de crâne” in the US media, which exaggerated the heroism of the doughboy and the stupidity of the Hun. Charlot soldat showed “the ­whole war,” the “true one and the false one, the one in the trenches and the one [­imagined by ­people] in the salons.” 48 “Anybody but [Chaplin],” Leprohon continued, “would have fallen into [the trap of] bad taste, would have offended ­people’s sensibilities . . .” But this was not the case. Instead, “Every­body understood Charlot!” 49 Shoulder Arms captures in two reels all of the aspects of the G ­ reat War picaresque ethos developed by the authors in this study—­the mixture of adventure time and everyday time, the antics of Le Système D, the exercise of animal and humanistic instincts, the mass illusions of bourrage de crâne, involuntary heroism, the comedy of in­de­pen­dence and of re­sis­tance to militarization, the combination of phlegm and flair, and the vulnerability of the soldier to le cafard. In his review of Charlot soldat, Jean Galtier-­Boissière highlights many of ­these ele­ments, which are common to many soldiers’ depictions of the experience of war. Readers of French ­Great War novels such as Le Feu, Les Croix de bois, Gaspard, or Les Mémoires d’un rat would have recognized the common tropes described by Galtier-­Boissière when he wrote, for example, that Charlot made all the typical “blunders” of the “bleus” (fresh recruits) and engaged in the “customary dé . . . ​brouillages” (resourcefulness) of the “squad-­family.”50 Faithfuls of Le Canard enchaîné would have been sensitive to the scenes Galtier-­ Boissière took in Charlot soldat to be “satire of journalistic skull-­stuffing,” poking fun at “war as certain civilians ­imagined it.” Galtier-­Boissière invoked the figure of the involuntary hero, familiar to readers of Scipion Pégoulade or

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Private Bicard, when he called Charlot, victim of his own feigned bravery, a “hero in spite of himself, like so many ­others!”51 Fans of Poulbot’s cartoons would have recognized the gamin de Paris in Galtier-­Boissière’s literary genealogy for Charlot. From Victor Hugo’s cocky and resourceful Gavroche, Charlot had inherited the gritty pragmatism, “the physical flexibility, the gift of the gab, the insolence, the audacity, and the ­couldn’t-­care-­less attitude.”52 He also had the same “big heart” as Gavroche. From Don Quixote, Charlot had taken “his idealism, his touching naïveté, his crazy recklessness,” and his “love of illusions.”53 Galtière-­Boissière singled out one stock scene—­mail call—as particularly poignant in its depiction of a disappointed and depressed (“cafardeux”) Charlot overcome with feelings of solitude and sadness.54 Readers of Private Bicard ­will recall that it was the sight of a dead soldier clutching a letter in his hand that caused the usually buoyant Bicard to shed his one tear of the war. The ­Little Tramp mobilized in Charlot soldat marches to his own beat—­a point made clear in the film’s opening scene, as the new recruit cannot quite seem to pull his feet in straight and ends up waddling through basic training. In this scene, we see a tiny, skinny Charlot flanked by tall, athletic figures. Charlot tries his best but fails miserably to correspond to the ideal of the competent and confident soldier. His ineptitude in bearing arms is matched only by his awkwardness, as he is caught up in a choreography for which his steps are hopelessly out of time. So depleting is his attempt to conform to military discipline that the new recruit collapses in exhaustion ­after the opening scene, curling up on his cot u­ nder the breezy cover of the training ground tent. Like Švejk, Charlot is an unassimilable force of anarchy, but unlike Švejk, Charlot is not feigning compliance while inwardly bucking the system. Charlot’s failure as a soldier does not stem from disobedience or any po­liti­cally aware refusal to adapt to the rules. It stems from a sincere, almost constitutional inability to be militarized. An intertitle shifts the action to the front, as we follow Charlot “over ­there.” What follows are a series of stock episodes common to many G ­ reat War soldier narratives: boredom in the trenches, mail call, dreaming of home, ­going over the top. It is only l­ater that the film w ­ ill take plot turns available only in the most fantastical serial novels of the time—­sending Charlie ­behind ­enemy lines and into close contact with none other than the Kaiser himself. The logic of the action ­will become increasingly far-­fetched as the awkward recruit plunges deeper and deeper into his dream state—­a state the viewer

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­ ill only recognize as such in the film’s closing scene. Within the dream sew quence, the viewer witnesses the seasoning of the new recruit as he is transformed from a bumbling and awkward outsider to a swaggering and triumphant hero and darling of the squad. When he first gets to the front, the new recruit still has some trou­ble controlling his body in space. In several scenes we see Charlot do b­ attle with the dugout as he charges head first only to be sent stumbling backwards as his ­rifle, held sideways, or his enormous backpack, block his passage. Once divested of all of this bulky equipment, however, the tiny soldier begins to adapt admirably well to conditions in the trench. He has come prepared for the incommodities of trench life. From his waist hangs a cheese grater. It is with a certain domestic satisfaction that Charlot hangs his cheese grater on the wall at just the right height to indulge in an almost feline moment of back-­ scratching. Around his neck, Charlot carries a mousetrap. The cheese grater and the mousetrap point obliquely to the presence of lice and rats in the trench, thus acknowledging the hardships of the trench, while putting them to comic use. When the rest of the men receive packages but he does not, Charlot w ­ ill console himself by shrugging his shoulders and snacking on the cheese from his trap, nibbling it with his front teeth and personifying for a brief moment the trench rat. This cheese motif w ­ ill be continued when Charlot fi­nally receives his misplaced package of what appear to be dog biscuits and a round of cheese so repulsive that he is forced to put on his gas mask and lob the offensive substance across no-­man’s-­land into the German trench. Of course the mousetrap has a more sinister side. The meta­phor of the trap—­with its connotations of deception, vulnerability, and misfortune—­ represents the disillusionment the soldier ­faces in the debased trench world. The contrast is too stark between the degrading entrapment of the trench and the promise of mobility, discipline, and decorum suggested in the opening scene of parades and maneuvers. The trap introduces the notion of sudden, violent, random death—an idea that is reinforced during the squad’s first attack, when the unlucky Charlot, whose dog tag is number 13, flips a coin to mea­sure his chances of survival as the squad prepares to go over the top. His attempts to work up the courage to do his duty—­throwing back his shoulders and slapping his chest—­only result in more bad luck, as he breaks the pocket mirror he had just used to compose himself for his heroics. Again, the soldier’s fear is dealt with comically. In a half beat his attitude switches from the bravado of the warrior e­ ager to be the first over the top to the obsequi-

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ousness of the valet, courteously motioning for the soldier ­behind him to take his place at the front of the line. Charlot reveals his softer, sentimental side in the deep sigh he heaves as he consoles himself for not receiving any mail. He reads a comrade’s letter over his shoulder—­head cocked to the side, tender eyes following line by line. This is the kind of moment to which Chaplin would refer years l­ater in an interview with Le Petit Provençal in which he explained “Why I chose as a type the déshérité (underprivileged one) of the world.” In this scene as in many ­others in his oeuvre, Chaplin explained, the ­Little Tramp makes do with “secondhand pleasures,” the kind stolen by “poor dogs.” The resignation Chaplin describes in this interview, that of “the poor,” also applies to the poilu: “With the calm resignation of the poor I accept my fate without joy,” but also, it must be said, without hatred or despair.55 Unlike Scipion and Švejk, who wear a mask, the Charlot of the last years of the war, the Charlot of the Mutual and First National films, is a completely unified public and private self. Despite his pranks, impersonations, and clever tricks, his vulnerable core—­sincere, sentimental, spontaneous—­a lways shines through. He teaches us that even in times of turmoil, crisis, and hardship, we have the ­human capacity to preserve sentiment and resist hardness and cynicism. Chaplin ­doesn’t wallow in sentimentality. He lingers on the mail-­call scene just long enough to remind us of the fragile psychological state of the soldier and his vulnerability to le cafard. The instincts of Le Système D soon kick in, and the l­ittle Infantryman collects himself to do ­battle with another source of cafard: the ele­ments. A common motif of soldier narratives—­the incessant rain and mud of the trenches—­gives rise to a highly parodic scene. As their dugout fills with ­water, the men go about their usual activities, including preparing for bedtime. Charlot’s bunk is completely submerged. As if accustomed to such conditions, he fluffs his waterlogged pillow, stretches out on his bunk, pulls the soaked covers up to his neck, and prepares for sleep. It is only a­ fter he lies down completely that he realizes special arrangements ­will have to be made for breathing and grabs the nearby phonograph horn for use as a snorkel. The men behave as if this aquar­ium world is perfectly normal and not particularly bothersome. It even pres­ents certain advantages, as when Charlot sends waves across the surface of the ­water to silence a snoring bunkmate. The deadly diluvial horrorscape of so much G ­ reat War fiction—­Barbusse wrote that “hell is ­water”56 —is si­mul­ta­neously evoked and

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contained. We laugh at the antics of the men at the same time that we shudder at the sight of the black w ­ ater that has reduced them to drenched tufts of hair and precariously breathing f­ aces. The stock attributes of the Infantryman—­resilience, adaptability, good cheer—­are paraded and parodied in Charlot soldat. As Charlot’s dream continues, the soldier grows increasingly self-­assured, as when he returns from the squad’s first assault having single-­handedly captured thirteen German prisoners. In a scene calling attention to the preposterousness of overblown military exploits celebrated in the papers, Charlot explains that he was able to capture all thirteen by “surrounding them.” Back in the trench, Charlot has become master of the situation, nonchalantly holding a beer ­bottle over the parapet to open it and a cigarette to light it, all the while exaggeratedly chewing his lunch, stretching, and swaggering. He demonstrates his marksmanship by recording downed Huns on a slate—­barely taking aim. He parodies war­time insults that Germans ­can’t fight and that killing them is child’s play. The scene delivers two punch lines. First, when an invisible German shoots back, Charlot has to revise his tally, erasing a tick from the score column. Next, Charlot shoots up at the sky overhead, marking down a score. This raises the possibility that Charlot had been shooting down birds and not ­enemy soldiers the w ­ hole time. When Charlot learns that the mission for which he has just volunteered is dangerous, his shoulders slump as he realizes what he’s gotten himself into. He tries to wiggle out of his new role, offering the job to his comrades in his place. The ­Little Tramp thus resembles a long line of fictional poilus, comic heroes who never fail to do their duty, even if it is sometimes despite their better judgment or their best attempts to save their precious hides. In perhaps the most famous scene of the film—­the one that Cocteau saw as the triumph of nimbleness over flat-­footedness—­Charlot has set off on the mission for which he had foolishly volunteered. He is dressed in an elaborate, ridiculously stiff costume that makes him look like a tree. Wide-­ eyed and afraid but always the trickster, Charlot ­can’t resist taking the initiative to poke a German soldier in the ­behind. He bops three more soldiers on the head and then bops four more, saving his trench mate (played by Chaplin’s b­ rother Syd) from a German firing squad. Charlot then eludes his pursuers by shimmying through a pipe, leaving his costume b­ ehind a­ fter luring a fat German soldier into following him and, of course, getting stuck.

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The final scenes of the film stage a long-­awaited encounter between Charlot and the Kaiser, one that had been played out in print media before being played out on the screen. “The two best-­known persons in the world to-­day,” one journalist wrote, “are the Kaiser and Charlie Chaplin, the poison and the antidote, the figure of tragedy and the figure of comedy.”57 If the Kaiser was “the g­ reat blood-­spiller,” another journalist wrote, Chaplin was “the ­great laugh-­maker.”58 Within a culture of death and mourning, Chaplin embodied vitality and a stubborn, unshakable love of life. The Kaiser and German militarism w ­ ere the ­great destroyers of the world, and Charlie Chaplin, with the help of his screen persona the ­Little Tramp, was the g­ reat creator—­taking the raw material of a world in homicidal ­free-­fall and turning it into a work of art.

The Survival of Art

In his study of picaresque narratives, Stuart Miller pauses to consider Thomas Mann’s 1954 unfinished novel Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. What Miller says about Felix Krull applies to Chaplin’s comedy: it “celebrates the triumph of imagination over experience more than the submission of the individual personality to chaos.”59 Felix Krull, like Chaplin’s work, stands out in the picaresque tradition ­because of this emphasis on the picaro as an artist and a man of imagination.60 As Robert Torrance puts it, “in contrast to the hard-­boiled picaro of Spanish tradition, who learns dissimulation through disenchantment and employs it as a calculated technique of brute survival, Felix [Krull] exults from earliest childhood in ‘the in­de­pen­dent and self-­sufficient exercise of [his] imagination.’ ” 61 Felix Krull’s life, like Charlot’s, is never r­ eally in danger. The stakes of survival lie elsewhere—in the unfettered exercise of the imagination despite the material limitations set by experience. A French reviewer of Chaplin’s 1921 masterpiece The Kid (Le Gosse in French) placed laughter on the side of imagination and creation. The “laugh” provoked by Le Gosse is, the reviewer suggested, an “admirable victory of spirit over ­matter.” The man capable of provoking such laughter, the article continued, “­isn’t just a clown, even if g­ reat, but rather a marvelous poet, an incomparable teacher of philosophy.” 62 Charlot represents a position or structural relationship between the individual and the world. 63 That position is not one of outright revolt or

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rebellion. Instead it is one of dogged refusal—­refusal to accept defeat or give in to dismay. In his description of his screen persona, Chaplin refused to see the “­little fellow” as a victim. Yes, he was “a poor l­ ittle soul, timid, scrawny, malnourished,” but he actively “defied destiny and adversity.” “When his hopes, dreams, and aspirations evaporate into futility and nothingness,” Chaplin wrote, “he simply shrugs his shoulders and turns his heels.” 64 The ­Little Tramp turns his heels away from the past and ­toward the ­future. He reconstitutes dreams, hopes, and beauty from the futility and nothingness of modern life. In laughing at his condition and making the world laugh with him, the Tramp gives the viewer intimations of immortality. For the “picaresque hero in general,” writes Robert Alter, laughter “amounts to a courageous affirmation, almost a form of devotion.” Through laughter, the picaro refuses “to become anything less than the observer, the appreciator, the enjoyer, anything less than the man who is capable of the miracle of daily rebirth.” 65 Chaplin waddling down the road and into the horizon, on his way to his next adventure, embodies the “unique ability of the [picaro] to wake ­every day as though it ­were the first day of his life.” 66 Only the artist can wake ­every day and find in the banal decor and dull routine of modern life the raw material for something surprising and new. Only the artist can resist the destruction of the world by engaging in endless acts of creation. Writing in 1918, Louis Delluc described the way a kind of poetry of Le Système D was inscribed at the very heart of Chaplin’s comedy. His films, Delluc wrote, “are a hallucinating series of laughter-­inducing inventions that he forms out of objects that he finds close at hand.” 67 This is the princi­ple ­behind Chaplin’s gags: the endless repurposing of everyday objects for comic effects that are at the same time cinematographically stunning works of art. For surrealist writer and artist Max Jacob, “the immortal Charlot” transforms real­ity into nothing less than a “miracle.” 68 This “jovial bricoleur” si­mul­ta­neously reveals the ugliness of the world and teaches us to look beyond it.69 Charlot defies the solitude to which a cruel world has condemned him, and his prodigious imagination fills his lonely nights. No more beautiful example exists than the famous scene from the Gold Rush (1925) ­after Charlot has been stood up by the dance hall girls he has invited to his tiny shack for New Year’s Eve dinner. The ­Little Tramp falls asleep, imagining himself entertaining his guests with the dance of the dinner rolls—­one of the most magical moments in Chaplin’s entire repertoire.

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It is not surprising that Chaplin’s appeal continued far beyond the war years. He had re-­enchanted a war-­weary world through the new medium of cinema, and he would go on to use that medium to cry out against the world’s next war. His long and rich artistic c­ areer would remain staunchly committed to life and to ­human dignity. In a ­century that ­really needed him, his œuvre argued for the survival of the spirit—of poetry, of art, and of love. In t­ hose moments when real­ity lets us down, the L ­ ittle Tramp still reminds us to imagine—­against all odds—­a world worth living in.

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Notes

Preface 1. Winter, cited in Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 10. 2. Buzzell, My War, 278. 3. Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, 10. 4. Buzzell, My War, 15. 5. Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, 6–7. 6. Buzzell, My War, 210. 7. And not necessarily to the picaresque genre, as proposed by Brandon Lingle. 8. Guillén, “­Toward a Definition,” 99, 105. 9. For more, see Murphy, “Gavroche and the ­Great War.” 10. Buzzell, My War, 13. 11. Buzzell, My War, 306. 12. Cook, “Anti-­heroes,” 174. 13. Barbusse, Le Feu, 54.

Introduction 1. McNeil, The Grotesque Depiction of War, 85. 2. Bjornson, The Picaresque Hero, 28. 3. The term “hard-­boiled” is from Robert Torrance, The Comic Hero, 260. 4. Parker, Lit­er­a­ture and the Delinquent, 103. 5. This is a point that Leonard Smith makes in his study of soldier firsthand accounts, The Embattled Self. 6. The Oxford University Press has devoted an entire series to what it calls “The Greater War.” Volumes in the series recognize a wider territorial and

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chronological scope to the war than do traditional studies. http://­ukcatalogue​ .­oup​.­com​/­category​/­academic​/­series​/­history​/­tgw​.­do. 7. Smith, The Embattled Self, 8. 8. Stern, cited in Kovach, “Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk as a Picaresque Novel,” 251. 9. Bjornson, The Picaresque Hero, 214. 10. Sieber, The Picaresque, 6. 11. McNeil, The Grotesque Depiction of War, 85. 12. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, 62–63. 13. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, 61. 14. McNeil, The Grotesque Depiction of War, 85. 15. Spadaccini, “Estebanillo González and the Nature of Picaresque ‘Lives,’ ” 219. 16. Spadaccini, “Estebanillo González and the Nature of Picaresque ‘Lives,’ ” 217. 17. Bjornson, The Picaresque Hero, 135. 18. Bjornson, The Picaresque Hero, 135. 19. Werth, Clavel soldat, 295. 20. See Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. Among other ­things, brutalization leads ­people to justify war and to grow indifferent to h­ uman suffering and death. 21. Grimmelshausen, The Runagate Courage, 69. Cited in Parker, Lit­er­a­ture and the Delinquent, 95. 22. Vollmann, “Afterword,” Journey to the End of the Night, 452. 23. The direct lines of influence among t­hese texts cannot be precisely determined. Hašek may have read Simplicissimus and had certainly read and been deeply influenced by Dickens’s peripatetic (if not strictly speaking picaresque) Pickwick Papers. See Kovach, “Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk as a Picaresque Novel,” and Stern, “War and the Comic Muse.” Günter Grass had read Grimmelshausen’s works and had even made Grimmelshausen a character in one of his books. See Chrystel Pinçonnat et al., Échos picaresques dans le roman du XXe siècle, 66. 24. Kovach, “Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk as a Picaresque Novel,” 254. 25. Alter, Rogue’s Pro­gress, 33–34. 26. “Soldiers of the Year II” refers to the volunteer citizen army of the French Revolution that came to France’s defense at the famous 1792 ­battle at Valmy, turning back the advancing Prus­sians. For more on the soldat de l’an II, see Gildea, The Past in French History, 134–141. For the term “culture of defeat,” see Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat. 27. Smith, The Embattled Self, 108.

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2 8. Winter, “P vs. C,” 4. 29. Smith, The Embattled Self, 125. 30. Winter, “P vs. C,” 4. 31. Rémy Cazals and Frédéric Rousseau, 14–18: Le Cri d’une génération, 145, cited in Leonard V. Smith, “The ‘Culture de guerre’ and French Historiography of the G ­ reat War of 1914–1918,” 1974. One of the overlooked questions in recent polemics about “coercion” versus “consent,” Jay Winter, John Horne, and Leonard Smith argue in The Legacy of the G ­ reat War, is that of soldier “endurance”—­which allows for general “ac­cep­tance” of the war “to be combined with ele­ments of refusal.” See Horne and Smith, “The Soldier’s War,” 109. 32. For more see Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience. 33. Purseigle, “Beyond and Below the Nations,” 99. 3 4. Cited in Becker, La Guerre et la foi, 15. Cited in Smith, “The ‘Culture de guerre’ and French Historiography of the G ­ reat War of 1914–1918,” 1970. 35. Smith, The Embattled Self, 125. 36. Purseigle, “Beyond and Below the Nations,” 114, 103. 37. Purseigle, “Beyond and Below the Nations,” 102. 38. The theory of modes I am using comes from Wicks’s article, “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative.” Wicks borrows heavi­ly from Scholes’s “­Towards a Poetics of Fiction.” See also Scholes, Structuralism in Lit­er­a­ture. 39. Parker, Lit­er­a­ture and the Delinquent, 110. 40. Miller, The Picaresque Novel, 133.

Chapter 1. A Literary War 1. For shifting attitudes about military aviation, see Morrow, “Knights of the Sky.” 2. Barrès, Preface to Avec Charles Péguy de la Lorraine à la Marne, and “Un Témoin Raconte.” 3. Armes blanches such as swords and bayonets ­were thought by some to be nobler, more elegant, and, by extension, more French than the industrial, anonymous bullets and mortars of World War I. Armes blanches operate in the epic world as semi-­anthropomorphized concretizations of the warrior’s courage. The sword often has a name and even projected personality traits. Think of Durandal and Joyeuse in La Chanson de Roland, or of Act I, scene 4, of Le Cid, where Don Diègue addresses his sword: “Passe, pour me venger, en de meilleurs mains.” Corneille, Le Cid, 50.

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4. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 129. 5. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 128. 6. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 128. 7. Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 79. 8. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 101, 243–244. Fussell, following Frye, The ­Great War and Modern Memory, 313. 9. Chaine, Les Mémoires d’un rat, 82. 10. Barbusse, Le Feu, 356. 11. See Harvey, A Muse of Fire. 12. For more on biographical form and the novel, see Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 77. 13. Barbusse, Le Feu, 358. 14. Blackburn, The Myth of the Picaro, 20. 15. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 13. My emphasis. 16. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 165. 17. In French texts, soldiers speak with the nonstandard accent of the Pa­ri­sian faubourien or the Ch’timi from the north. In British texts, the Tommy speaks with the cockney accent of the working-­class Londoner. 18. Dorgelès, Croix de bois, 85. 19. Wilson, “The Soldier Who Made the Empire Laugh,” 621. Cited in Bairns­ father, The Bairnsfather Case, 140. 20. Olivier Casabielhe, cited in Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 109n2. 21. Hynes, A War I­ magined, xii. 22. Smith, The Embattled Self, 151. 23. Smith, The Embattled Self, 9. 24. Christopher Isherwood, cited in Fussell, The ­G reat War and Modern Memory, 24. 25. Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory, 5. 26. Cobley, Representing War, 126. 27. Cobley, Representing War, 144. 28. Cobley, Representing War, 141. 29. Cobley, Representing War, 131–132. 30. Cobley, Representing War, 142. 31. Cobley, Representing War, 136. 32. Cobley, Representing War, 135. 33. Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory, 207. Cited in Cobley, Representing War, 136. 34. Cobley, Representing War, 131–132.

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35. Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 153. 36. Cobley, Representing War, 134; “kernel of selfhood” in Bjornson, Picaresque Hero, 214. 37. Cobley, Representing War, 126–27. 38. Cobley, Representing War, 141. 39. Smith, The Embattled Self, 56. 40. Smith, The Embattled Self, 61. 41. Cobley, Representing War, 135. 4 2. Horne and Smith, “The Soldier’s War,” 109. 43. Alter, Rogue’s Pro­gress, 9. 4 4. Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory, 15. 45. Smith, The Embattled Self, 49. 46. Smith, The Embattled Self, 61. 47. Smith, The Embattled Self, 53, 58. 48. Smith, The Embattled Self, 79. 49. Smith, The Embattled Self, 90. 50. Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 17. 51. Smith, The Embattled Self, 121. 52. Smith, The Embattled Self, 111. 53. Smith, The Embattled Self, 106. 54. Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 73. 55. Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 83. 56. Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 104. 57. Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 49. 58. Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 66. 59. Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 71, 116. 6 0. Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 49. 61. Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 45. 62. Wicks, “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative,” 246. 63. Auerbach, cited in Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 83. 64. Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory, 8. 65. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 5. 66. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 5. 67. Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 17. 68. Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory, 336. 69. Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory, 338. 70. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 115. 71. Keylor, “The Legacy of the ­Great War,” 632.

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Chapter 2. Tactics of the Foot Soldier Epigraph: Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 206. Parts of this chapter appear in “A Brief History of Le Système D,” Con­temporary French Civilization 40, no. 3 (2015). 1. Torrance, The Comic Hero, 276. 2. Bloom, “Volume Introduction,” The Trickster, xv. 3. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 37. 4. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 26. 5. Torrance, The Comic Hero, viii. 6. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, 12–14. 7. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 18. 8. Alter, Rogue’s Pro­gress, 127–128. 9. Alter, Rogue’s Pro­gress, 128. 10. Alter, Rogue’s Pro­gress, 130. 11. The verb débrouiller, for clearing up something that is disorderly, confusing, or embrouillé, had been around since the sixteenth c­ entury. Se débrouiller came much l­ater. See “Brouiller,” in Alain Rey et al., Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, and “Débrouille,” and “Débrouiller,” Le ­G rand Robert, Online. 12. “Débrouillard,” Le G ­ rand Robert, Online. 13. De Coubertin, “Olympisme et utilitarisme,” 72. See also Heck, “Making Debrouillards.” 14. Cited in Heck, “Modern Pentathlon and the First World War,” 91. 15. “Débrouille,” Le G ­ rand Robert, Online. 16. “Se Démerder,” in Alain Rey et al., Dictionnaire historique. 17. Sainéan, L’Argot des tranchées, 109. 18. Sainéan, L’Argot des tranchées, 143. 19. Miller, The Picaresque Novel, 37. 20. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 206. 21. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 206. 22. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 207. From Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-­ century version of the folktale “Le Petit Poucet” (­Little Thumbling or Hop’o-­My Thumb). 23. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 84. 24. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 206–207. Emphasis mine. 25. Cocteau, “Malentendu,” 111. 26. Griffiths, The G ­ reat War, 217. See also Laparra, La Grande débrouille. 27. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 205.

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28. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 84. 29. Radiguet, “Untitled cartoon,” La Baïonnette, 118. 30. Éon, “Un Débrouillard,” 114. 31. Éon, “Un Débrouillard,” 114. 32. Curnonsky, “Arguments dinatoires,” 122. 33. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 117. 34. Éon, “Un Débrouillard,” 114. 35. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 23. Dorgelès was a contributor to La Baïonnette. 36. Éon, “Un Débrouillard,” 114. 37. Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler, 137–138. 38. Poulbot, “Untitled,” La Baïonnette, cover illustration. 39. Villemot, “Les Élégants,” 115. 40. Barbusse, ­Under Fire, 13. 41. Barbusse, ­Under Fire, 14. 4 2. Barbusse, ­Under Fire, 14. 43. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 6–7. 4 4. Éon, “Un Débrouillard,” 114. 45. Radiguet, “Untitled cartoon,” La Baïonnette, 118–119. 46. Dorgelès, Le Cabaret de la belle femme, 99. 47. Dorgelès, Le Cabaret de la belle femme, 101–102. 4 8. Bofa, “Untitled cartoon,” La Baïonnette, Numéro spécial “Le Système D . . . ,” 126. 49. Bofa, “Untitled cartoon,” La Baïonnette, Numéro spécial “Le Système D . . . ,” 126. 50. Henriot, “Untitled cartoon,” 119. 51. Henriot, “Untitled cartoon,” 119. 52. Éon, “Un Débrouillard,” 114. 53. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 115. 54. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 116. 55. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 116. 56. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 100. 57. His C’est pour la France or For France: Some En­glish Impressions of the French Front contained illustrations by the famous British illustrator and creator of “Old Bill,” Bruce Bairnsfather. 58. Dawson, For France, 95. 59. Dawson, For France, 96. 6 0. Dawson, For France, 96.

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61. Dorgelès, Le Cabaret de la belle femme, 48. 62. Chaine, Les Mémoires d’un rat, 82. 63. Chaine, Les Mémoires d’un rat, 99. 64. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 159–160, 205–206. 65. For more on trench newspapers, see Audoin-­Rouzeau, Men at War. 66. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 101. Barbusse, Le Feu, 63. 67. Anon., “Pe­tites industries sur le front.” 68. Dawson, For France, 88. 69. In this sense, trench handi­work resembles the practice of the “perruque” described by De Certeau as a way in which the worker gets the better of his employer by effectively stealing com­pany time to perform work for his own profit. “[Working] with [the institution’s] machines and using its scraps,” De Certeau argues, “we can divert the time owed to the institution.” De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 27. 70. Audoin-­Rouzeau and Becker, La Grande Guerre: 1914–1918, 47. 71. Sainéan, L’Argot des tranchées, 41. 72. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 100. 73. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 91. 74. Dorgelès, Le Cabaret de la belle femme, 213. 75. Barbusse, Le Feu, 146. The same sentiment is expressed by Demachy in Le Cabaret de la belle femme, 213. 76. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, 16. 7 7. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, 16. 78. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, 16. 79. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, 16. 80. Reed-­Danahay, “Talking about Re­sis­tance,” 224. 81. Sainéan, L’Argot des tranchées, 143. 82. Sainéan, L’Argot des tranchées, 109. 83. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 100. 84. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 101. 85. Faïno, “Untitled cartoon,” 124. 86. Dorgelès, Le Cabaret de la belle femme, 39. 87. Dorgelès, Le Cabaret de la belle femme, 133. 88. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 25. 89. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 26. 90. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 25. 91. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 54.

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92. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 206. 93. Dorgelès, Le Cabaret de la belle femme, 42. 94. Dorgelès, Le Cabaret de la belle femme, 46. 95. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 83. 96. Dorgelès, Le Cabaret de la belle femme, 61. 97. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 66. 98. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 207. 99. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 135. 100. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 70. 101. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 70. 102. Dorgelès, Le Cabaret de la belle femme, 64. 103. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 239. 104. See for example Bardamu’s impassioned patriotic speech aboard the Amiral Bragueton in Voyage au bout de la nuit, 157–161.

Chapter 3. Georges de la Fouchardière Epigraph: Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 89 ; Barbusse, Le Feu, 58. Parts of this chapter appeared in Libby Murphy, “Newspapers, Novels, and the Comic Book War,” in France and its Spaces of War: Experience, Memory, Image, Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Daniel Brewer, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 193–209. ­Those parts are reproduced ­here with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. 1. See Blackburn, The Myth of the Picaro, 3–25. 2. Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus, 126–127. 3. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 47. 4. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 48. 5. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 47. 6. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 48. 7. “Bourrage.” Le G ­ rand Robert. 2014. Online. 8. “Bobard.” Le ­Grand Robert. 2014. Online; “Bobard,” in Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 42–43; and “Bobard,” in Sainéan, L’Argot des tranchées, 133. 9. “Canard,” Le G ­ rand Robert, Online; “Canard,” in Sainéan, L’Argot des Tranchées, 138. 10. “Bourrage, bourrer le crâne” in Esnault, Le Poilu tel qu’il se parle, 102. 11. “Bourrage,” Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé, Online; “Bourrage” in Esnault, Le Poilu tel qu’il se parle, 102.

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12. “Bourrage,” Le G ­ rand Robert, Online. 13. Cited in “Bourrage,” Le G ­ rand Robert, Online. 14. Cited in “Bourrage,” Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé, Online. 15. La Fouchardière, “Quelques recettes de cuisine,” 2. 16. The pro-­Catholic, pro-­military L’Écho de Paris saw its readership steadily rise during the war, reaching the half-­million mark around 1916. See Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, 3:428. 17. Smith, “The ‘Culture de guerre’ and French Historiography of the ­Great War of 1914–1918,” 1967. 18. Le Canard acknowledged its alliance to L’Œuvre by including it in its list of “patriotic papers.” This list was published in the February 27, 1918 edition. See Martin, Le Canard enchaîné ou les Fortunes de la vertu, 73. 19. “Le sous-­marin démontable,” August 9, 1916, Le Canard enchaîné, 3. For L’Œuvre’s slogan, see Livois, Histoire de la presse française, 2:402. 20. Levitch, “Young Blood,” 169n6. 21. Soldier-­novelist Pierre Chaine, author of Les Mémoires d’un rat, had also frequented artists and writers from la Butte. 22. Le Canard enchaîné got off to a rocky start, producing issues beginning in August 1915, but not launching in earnest u­ ntil July 1916. Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, 3:439. Martin, Le Canard enchaîné ou les Fortunes de la vertu, 76–77. 23. Le Crapouillot was published once a month and sold 1,500 copies an issue at the height of its war­time success. Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, 3:439. 24. Manevy, La Presse de la IIIe République, 150. 25. Martin, Le Canard enchaîné ou les Fortunes de la vertu, 76–77. 26. Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, 3:428. 27. Douglas, War, Memory, and the Politics of Humor, 3. 28. Of the oppositional papers, L’Œuvre and Le Canard enchaîné, which shared the same presses and many of the same columnists, w ­ ere the most influential. L’Heure, another left-­leaning oppositional paper, was perhaps the most radical. 29. Manevy, La Presse de la IIIe République, 123. 30. Barrès, Chronique de la grande guerre, 129–131. 31. Barrès, Chronique de la grande guerre, 125, 139. 32. Barrès, Chronique de la grande guerre, 128. 33. The term “rossignol du carnage” is from pacifist writer Romain Rolland. See Field, British and French Writers of the First World War, 48.

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34. For the Dada trial, see Motherwell, ed., The Dada Paint­ers and Poets, 116, 184–185. For Le Canard’s skull-­stuffer referendum, see Douglas, War, Memory, and the Politics of Humor, 52–53. 35. Montfort, “Le Journalisme et les journalistes,” 339. 36. Egen, Messieurs du Canard, 72. 37. Douglas, War, Memory, and the Politics of Humor, 103–104. 38. “Le prix du pâté,” 1. 39. Barbusse, Lettres de Henri Barbusse à sa femme, 136. 40. Barbusse, Le Feu, 57–58. 41. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 48. 42. La Fouchardière and Bringer, Scipion Pégoulade, 1. All subsequent references are indicated parenthetically within the text. 43. Ad for Scipion Pégoulade, Le Canard enchaîné, March 7, 1917. 4 4. Ad for Scipion Pégoulade, L’Heure, March 12, 1917. Given its serial publication and subsequent publication as a freestanding volume, we can assume that the novel found a certain readership. It was well known enough to show up in Jean Vic’s multivolume bibliography of G ­ reat War writing, and it gets a mention from Albert Schinz in his 1920 study French Lit­er­a­ture of the ­Great War. By October 1917 L’Illustration writer Henry Cossira considered Scipion Pégoulade recognizable enough to be used in a description of a soldier of remote Polish origin serving in a com­pany of mostly Polish volunteers in the French army. This “strapping fellow” from Montpellier, the article explained, had complained of the replacement of wine rations with tea “in a [Provençal] accent that would make Scipion Pégoulade himself jealous.” 45. The eponymous hero takes his name from the legendary Roman general Scipio the African, considered one of the ­great commanders of military history. The title character’s f­ amily name, Pégoulade, is the name of a character from Tartarin sur les Alpes (1885), a sequel to Tartarin de Tarascon (1872). A survivor of the shipwreck of the Médusa, Pégoulade is himself a teller of tall tales, endlessly recounting his harrowing experience at sea, never mentioning that he was only six months old at the time of the events. Daudet, Tartarin sur les Alpes, 88. 46. La Fouchardière and Bringer, Scipion Pégoulade, 105. 47. La Fouchardière and Bringer, Scipion Pégoulade, 59, 136, 155, 170. 48. La Fouchardière and Bringer, Scipion Pégoulade, 120. On pp. 130–131, La Fouchardière and Bringer reproduce the same Barrès parody as in “Kitchen ­Recipes.” 49. La Fouchardière and Bringer, Scipion Pégoulade, 162.

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50. For more, see “Unstuffing Skulls: The Canard versus the Mass Press,” in Douglas, War, Memory, and the Politics of Humor, 51–70. 51. “Introduction,” Georges de la Fouchardière, Le Bouif tient. 52. In 1913, a theatrical adaptation of The Cobbler’s Crime ran through ninety-­ seven per­for­mances at the Théâtre de Cluny. In the 1920s the Bouif franchise underwent a ­whole series of cinematic adaptations. “Introduction,” La Fouchardière, Le Crime du Bouif. 53. La Fouchardière, “ ‘J’ai dit,’ ” 4. See also La Fouchardière, “La Grande Pitié de M. Barrès,” 1.

Chapter 4. The Comedy of In­de­pen­dence Epigraph: La Fouchardière, “Présentation du Bouif,” 2; Hašek, “Preface,” 1. 1. La Fouchardière, “Présentation du Bouif,” 2. 2. La Fouchardière, “Présentation du Bouif,” 2. 3. Godin, “Georges de la Fouchardière (1874–1946),” 393; Egen, Messieurs du Canard, 72; Parrott, Jaroslav Hašek, 122; Parrott, “Introduction,” vii–­xxii, viii, ix; Ambros, “The ­Great War as a Monstrous Carnival,” 230. 4. Parrott, Jaroslav Hašek, 75. 5. Parrott, “Introduction,” xvii. 6. Alfred Bicard first appeared in 1911 in a tongue-­in-­cheek detective novel, Le Crime du Bouif (The Cobbler’s Crime), and Hašek’s Josef Švejk appeared in 1911 in a series of short stories published in Karikatury. Some of ­these early Švejk stories w ­ ere published in 1912 in a collection entitled The Good Soldier Švejk and Other Strange Stories. Parrott, “Introduction,” ix. 7. Parrott, “Introduction,” xii. 8. Parrott, Jaroslav Hašek, 104. The Švejk stories ­were published two years ­after the reluctant soldier Hašek, who had been drafted into the war, allowed himself to be taken prisoner by Rus­sian soldiers in September 1915. Between 1921 and 1923, the year of his death, Hašek worked on the novel that would become The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War. Hašek died before completing the fourth and final volume. La Fouchardière, meanwhile, continued the adventures of Alfred Bicard well into the postwar period in novels such as Le Bouif errant (1927; The Wandering Cobbler), Le Bouif chez mon curé (1928; The Cobbler and My Priest), and La Fille du Bouif (1928; The Cobbler’s ­Daughter). Like British cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather’s cartoon character Old Bill, La Fouchardière’s Alfred Bicard jumped from the page to the stage to the screen in films such as Le Crime du Bouif (1922), a film

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adaptation of The Cobbler’s Crime, La Résurrection du Bouif (1922; The Cobbler’s Resurrection), and the successful six-­part cinematic adaptation of Le Bouif errant (1928; The Wandering Cobbler). “Introduction,” Georges de la Fouchardière, Le Crime du Bouif. 9. Georges Hautot also produced the poster art for Barbusse’s Le Feu and Pierre Chaine’s Les Mémoires d’un rat. He was a regular contributor to L’Œuvre, Le Rire, and Le Rire rouge. See Beaupré, “Ecrire la guerre,” and Autrive, “Georges Hautot.” Not all Bicards look like Hautot’s. In drawings, most likely by Gassier, in Le Canard enchaîné, Bicard looks meaner and leaner than he does in Hautot’s drawings. 10. Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk, 99, 283, 45. 11. La Fouchardière, Bicard dit le Bouif, 55. 12. La Fouchardière, Le Crime du Bouif, 115; Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk, 459. 13. “G. De la Fouchardière,” in Georges de la Fouchardière, Bicard dit le Bouif. 14. Parrott, “Introduction,” The Good Soldier Švejk, xx. 15. We know that Hašek was familiar with The Pickwick Papers, ­because he borrowed the title “The Pickwick Club” for a satirical article in the journal of the Czech Association in Rus­sia. Parrott, “Introduction,” xii; La Fouchardière acknowledges his debt to Dickens in “La Présentation du Bouif,” 2. 16. Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk, 3. 17. Parrot, Jaroslav Hašek, 77. 18. Bowen, Enter Rabelais, Laughing, 6. See also Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk, 215–216. 19. La Fouchardière, “Présentation du Bouif,” 2. 20. La Fouchardière, Le Crime du Bouif, 6. Le Bouif’s nickname derives from his tattered shoes and is a reference to the old adage that cobblers and their ­children are “the worst shod.” 21. La Fouchardière, Le Crime du Bouif, 25. 22. La Fouchardière, “Présentation du Bouif,” 2. 23. Abel, French Cinema, 224, 227, 565. 24. For the trope of the buttock wound in René Benjamin’s Gaspard, see Smith, The Embattled Self, 51–52; in Genevoix’s Ceux de 14, see Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, 181. 25. This is a typical Bouif malapropism—he replaces the balné of station balnéaire or seaside resort with the vulné of vulnérable. 26. Douglas, War, Memory, and the Politics of Humor, 105.

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27. Chaplin took a similarly comic jab at thermal spa culture that same year in The Cure (Charlot fait une cure, 1917). 28. Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk, 83. Chaplain Otto Katz is a converso of sorts since, by faith, he is a Jew and not a Christian. 29. La Fouchardière, Bicard dit le Bouif, 55. 30. La Fouchardière, Le Bouif tient, 33. 31. La Fouchardière, Le Bouif tient, 33. 32. La Fouchardière, Le Bouif tient, 34. 33. Torrance, The Comic Hero, 259. 34. Parrott, Jaroslav Hašek, 108. 35. Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk, 209. 36. Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk, 76. 37. Torrance, The Comic Hero, 10. 38. Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk, 44. 39. Torrance, The Comic Hero, 10. 40. Hašek, “Preface,” The Good Soldier Švejk. 41. Parrott, “Introduction,” The Good Soldier Švejk, xviii. 4 2. Chaplin, My Autobiography, 227.

Chapter 5. Animal Instincts Epigraph: Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 273–274. 1. Walter, ed., The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, 48. 2. Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory, 247. 3. Fussell, The ­Great War and Modern Memory, 252, 312; Dittmar, “Of Rats and Soldiers,” 625. 4. Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory, 235. 5. Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory, 241. 6. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, 50. 7. Dittmar, “Of Rats and Soldiers,” 626. 8. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, 68. 9. Maiorino, At the Margins of the Re­nais­sance, 22. 10. Serres, The Parasite, cited in Maiorino, At the Margins of the Re­nais­sance, 148. 11. Faulkner, The Reivers, 121, cited in Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, 60. 12. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, 72. 13. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, 61.

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14. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, 62. 15. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, 68. 16. See Rasson, “14–18: Le Point de vue de l’animal,” “L’Élu et la bête,” “Quand l’animal se révolte,” and Bonadeo, “The Animal Within.” 17. Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus, 115. 18. Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus, 123, 117. 19. Benjamin, Gaspard, 257. 20. Benjamin, Gaspard, 257. 21. Benjamin, Gaspard, 259. 22. Maiorino, At the Margins of the Re­nais­sance, 28. 23. Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler, 24. 24. Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler, 132. 25. Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler, 129. 26. Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler, 132. 27. Alter, Rogue’s Pro­gress, 30. 28. Lesage, Gil Blas, 32, cited and trans. in Alter, Rogue’s Pro­gress, 21. 29. The term “hard-­boiled” is from Torrance, The Comic Hero, 260. 30. Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, 6. 31. Pinçonnat et al., Échos picaresques dans le roman du XXe siècle, 38. 32. Barbusse, ­Under Fire, 353. 33. Werth, Clavel soldat, 340. 34. Werth, Clavel soldat, 340. 35. “Soldiers of the Year II” refers to the volunteer citizen army of the French Revolution that came to France’s defense at the famous 1792 ­battle at Valmy, turning back the advancing Prus­sians. This ­battle and its volunteer citizen-­ soldiers initiated a long, quasi-­mythical tradition of nineteenth-­century revolutionary patriotism carried notably in the slogan “la patrie en danger.” For more, see Gildea, The Past in French History, 134–141. 36. Werth, Clavel soldat, 341. Translation adapted for clarity. 37. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 102. 38. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 102–103. 39. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 103. Dittmar, “Of Rats and Soldiers,” 626. 40. Descaves, Ronge-­Maille vainqueur, 1. Picaresque mice and rats have taken their place alongside exemplary mice and rats in Western lit­er­a­ture since antiquity. Rat ingenuity and intelligence are developed in satirical tales that draw parallels between animal and ­human socie­ties, such as the fables

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of Aesop and Jean de la Fontaine. The nineteenth c­ entury had its own illustrious rats, such as “Le Rat philosophique,” depicted in Stahl and Grandville’s La Vie privée et publique des animaux (1840–1842), a popu­lar animal-­based version of the midcentury physiologies. In this short text, the older, wiser Ronge-­Maille reminds his suicidal protégé Trotte-­Menu of the resiliency and resourcefulness of his species—­teaching him that however daunting the traps life sets for him, the rat w ­ ill more often than not find a way to wiggle his way out alive. 41. Descaves, Ronge-­Maille vainqueur, 21. 4 2. Descaves, Ronge-­Maille vainqueur, 4. 43. Descaves, Ronge-­Maille vainqueur, 3. 4 4. Descaves, Ronge-­Maille vainqueur, 10. 45. Descaves, Ronge-­Maille vainqueur, 7. 46. Stallybrass and White, “The City,” 147–148. 47. See, for example, Darmon, “L’Hystérie germanophobe,” in his Vivre à Paris pendant la Grande Guerre, 123–146. See also Becker, “Postface,” 69–70. 48. See, for example, Bérillon’s La Bromidrose fétide de la race allemande and La Polychésie de la race allemande. 49. For their part, the Germans also referred to German infantrymen as pigs—­ front pigs or Frontschweine. ­There was, however, nothing derogatory in this term. Like poilu, it was a term of endearment and re­spect that stressed familiarity. 50. Un militaire, “Pires que les Boches; ce sont les rats!,” 1. 51. Le Rat-­à-­poil, November 1915, 3–4. The title “Rat à poil” is a play upon the French expression “à poil,” meaning naked, or, in the case of the trench rat, “skinned.” The title may also be an ironic evocation of the nineteenth-­ century character Ratapoil developed by Honoré Daumier in a series of lithographs and sculptures in 1850 and 1851. Daumier’s Ratapoil was a fanatical supporter of Napoleon III, an avid militarist and imperialist. The common noun ratapoil was used to describe a narrow-­minded or shortsighted militarist. Le ­Grand Robert, Online. 52. Un militaire, “Pires que les Boches; ce sont les rats!” 1. 53. La Direction, “Chers lecteurs,” Le Rat-­à-­poil, 1. 54. Benjamin, Gaspard, 47. 55. Barbusse, Lettres de Henri Barbusse à sa femme, 24. 56. Barbusse, Lettres de Henri Barbusse à sa femme, 138. 57. Barrès, “Le Poilu tel qu’il parle,” 1. 58. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 29.

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59. See Brown, “Dog Narrative.” 6 0. The famous animal illustrator Benjamin Rabier, who would go on to create the Vache qui rit (Laughing Cow) cheese logo, published Flambeau, chien de guerre in 1916. This text was re-­edited by Tallandier in 2003 with an afterword by Annette Becker. See also Chenu, Totoche, prisonnier de guerre; “Héros à 4 pattes,” La Baïonnette; and Mackenzie, “Wild Life in the Trenches” and “Dogs in Warfare.” 61. Miller, The Picaresque Novel, 113. 62. The “Debout les morts” legend, first propagated by Lieutenant Jacques Péricard, was codified by him at the behest of Maurice Barrès, who wrote the preface for Péricard’s 1916 Debout les morts! Souvenirs et impressions d’un soldat de la Grande Guerre (Get up, dead men! Memories and Impressions of a Soldier in the G ­ reat War). According to the legend, Péricard, having lost half his men in a deadly offensive against German lines, launched a ­battle cry of “Debout les morts!” Wounded soldiers, barely able to move, rallied to the cry. Their souls ­were joined by the souls of the dead, causing a ­great upsurge of collective energy and allowing the men to charge forward against the ­enemy. 63. This “time of calamity and fear” is reminiscent of the ultimate meta­phorical mousetrap in early Spanish picaresque lit­er­a­ture—­the Inquisition. For the Inquisition as mousetrap, see Blackburn, The Myth of the Picaro, 44. 64. For more on rats and tortured rats in modern war lit­er­a­ture, especially lit­ er­a­ture of the Vietnam War, see Dittmar, “Of Rats and Soldiers.” 65. Bjornson, The Picaresque Hero, 216. 66. Bjornson, The Picaresque Hero, 217. 67. Miller, The Picaresque Novel, 30. 68. Alter, Rogue’s Pro­gress, 19. 69. Alter, Rogue’s Pro­gress, 20. 70. Alter, Rogue’s Pro­gress, 19. 71. Alter, Rogue’s Pro­gress, 27.

Chapter 6. Phlegm Meets Flair 1. Illustrators began to see their work supplanted by that of photog­raphers. L’Illustration, a long-­time leader in the illustrated press, found itself in competition with newly created photographic magazines such as J’ai vu, Sur le vif, and Le Miroir, which famously offered to pay “what­ever it takes for photographic documents relating to the war.”

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2. Cook, “Anti-­heroes of the Canadian Expeditionary Force,” 176. 3. Gosling, Brushes and Bayonets, 12. 4. Hammond, The Big Show, 237. 5. Holt and Holt, In Search of the Better ’Ole, 49. 6. Bairnsfather, From Mud to Mufti, 22. 7. Bairnsfather, From Mud to Mufti, 22–23. 8. Bairnsfather, From Mud to Mufti, 24. 9. Bairnsfather, From Mud to Mufti, 23. For “ ’cutest,” see “cute,” meaning “acute, clever, keen-witted, sharp, shrewd,” in Oxford En­glish Dictionary. Online. 10. Bairnsfather, From Mud to Mufti, 24. 11. Bairnsfather, From Mud to Mufti, 24. 12. Gosling, Brushes and Bayonets, 13. 13. Holt and Holt, In Search of the Better ’Ole, 47. 14. Holt and Holt, In Search of the Better ’Ole, 87. 15. Gosling, Brushes and Bayonets, 8. For more on Bairnsfather’s popularity, see Cook, “Anti-­heroes of the Canadian Expeditionary Force,” 171–193. 16. Holt and Holt, In Search of the Better ’Ole, 53. 17. Holt and Holt, In Search of the Better ’Ole, 63. 18. Holt and Holt, In Search of the Better ’Ole, 63. Bairnsfather’s cartoons w ­ ere reproduced in the official French army publication Le Bulletin des Armées (Holt and Holt, In Search of the Better ’Ole, 64). 19. Holt and Holt, In Search of the Better ’Ole, 76. 20. Gosling, Brushes and Bayonets, 15. 21. Timmers, “The Propaganda Poster,” 110. 22. Hardie and Sabin, War Posters, 8, 16, 17. 23. Timmers, “The Propaganda Poster,” 110, 113. 24. Gosling, Brushes and Bayonets, 11. 25. For more on the role of cartoonists in reflecting popu­lar opinion, see Walker, Daily Sketches. 26. Goebel, “Chivalrous Knights versus Iron Warriors,” 95. 27. Goebel, “Chivalrous Knights versus Iron Warriors,” 95. 28. Owen, Collected Letters, 422, cited in Kerr, “­Brothers in Arms,” 533. 29. Wilson, “The Soldier Who Made the Empire Laugh,” 621. 30. Wilson, “The Soldier Who Made the Empire Laugh,” 621. 31. Wilson is referring to H. G. Wells’s popu­lar war novel Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916). 32. Car­ter, “Foreword to the Fourth Volume,” in Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, 2.

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33. In “An In-­fringe-­ment” (Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, vol. 7), Bert, Old Bill, and a clean-­shaven, smiling Tommy are standing in a trench that has just been bombed. ­Behind them fly bits of duckboard and huge chunks of dirt. Bert holds his fin­gers, tips down, u­ nder his nose, replicating Bill’s signature walrus mustache. Oblivious to the chaos around them, Bill sternly admonishes Bert, “Look ’ere. Bert, if you wants to remain in this ’ere trench be’ave yerself.” Bill asserts his authority, despite the obvious fact that t­ here might soon be nothing left of “this ’ere trench.” 34. In “No ‘Light’ Call” (Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, vol. 7), Bert and Bill are standing in a trench. Bill is barely looking over his shoulder, and neither soldier looks particularly frightened as a German soldier with a gas mask on lunges over the parapet with arms outstretched. All Bill can muster in response is “Bert, ’ere’s the man about the gas.” 35. Hammond, The Big Show, 236. 36. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 37. This statement echoes the sentiment expressed by Vivian Car­ter, in his editor’s foreword to the second volume of Fragments from France: “It hardly needs nowadays to be pointed out that it is a fixed condition of the national life that wherever Britons are working together in any common object . . . ​they must never appear to be regarding their occupation too seriously.” Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, 2:4. 37. Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, vol. 5. The full caption reads: “Now, then, you two, ­there’s nothing more till 4.30 (Old Bill is not g­ oing to the Zoo again).” 38. Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, vol. 3. 39. See another “Leo Maritimus” drawing of Old Bill in Bairnsfather, Bullets and Billets, 281. The handwritten caption reads: “Full of determination and plum and Apple.” The typed caption below reads: “First Discovered in the Alluvial Deposits of Southern Flanders. Feeds Almost Exclusively on Jam and ­Water Biscuits. Hobby: Filling Sandbags, on Dark and Rainy Nights.” 40. In The Big Show, Michael Hammond draws attention to Old Bill’s “stasis,” comparing it to Chaplin’s kinetic “energy” (242). 41. Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, vol. 6. As much good-­ humored fun as Bairnsfather and o­ thers might poke at the members of the original British Expeditionary Forces who fought in Flanders in the first months of the war, the debt owed to them was universally acknowledged. 4 2. The original song lyric read: “Old soldiers never die/They just fade away.” 43. Cook, “Anti-­heroes of the Canadian Expeditionary Force,” 175.

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4 4. Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, vol. 7. 45. “Criticisms of the Films; The Better ’Ole,” The Bioscope, April 25, 1918, p. 27, cited in Hammond, The Big Show, 241. Old Bill’s is a quiet, passive heroism of a new and endearing kind. 46. Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, vol. 5. Old Bill has turned his kitchen upside down chasing his grand­son Harold with a chair. The caption reads: “No! This i­ sn’t an air-­raid bomb bother. Only his grand­ son Harold, aged eight, has just asked Old Bill what he did in the g­ reat war.” 47. Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, vol. 5. Old Bill has taken his son (or grand­son) to the zoo. They stop while Bill pokes an animal in a cage with his umbrella. It is a naked, crouching, humiliated Kaiser. The caption to “Old Bill’s War-­A im” reads: “To live to see a day like this.” 4 8. Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, vol. 7. Old Bill has dozed off in an easy chair. His feet are propped up, and a sign above his head reads, “Peace on Earth Goodwill ­Towards Men.” Juxtaposed is a shadowy image of Bill chest high in the mud with a bombed-­out landscape around him. 49. Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, vol. 7. “Where did ye get that, Bill?” Bill’s wife asks him, pointing to a crown. “I ’ad it off a King.” 50. Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, vol. 7. Bill says to Maggie in reference to their son Douglas, who is digging an unexploded shell out of the old battlefield they are visiting: “Stick yer ’at pin into Douglas, Maggie. I’ve known them ­things to go off before now!” A sign reads: “Visitors may poke and stir the mud but at their own risk.” 51. Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, vol. 7. Bill, a “passenger to peace,” stands in an overcoat and hat, with umbrella in hand, as the vari­ous boxes and military gear he is shipping home lie strewn about him. The caption reads, “ ‘Struth!” 52. Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, vol. 7. In brackets is the date November 11, 1918. 53. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 37–38; cited in Hammond, The Big Show, 237, and Fuller, Troop Morale, 147. 54. Gosling, Brushes and Bayonets, 8. As we w ­ ill see l­ater, similar labels w ­ ere applied to Charlie Chaplin a­ fter the war. 55. Dawson, Some En­glish Impressions, 92. 56. Dawson, Some En­glish Impressions, 107.

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57. Emanuel, “The Humor of T. Atkins.” 58. Fuller, Troop Morale, 145–146. 59. Robertshaw, “ ‘Irrepressible chirpy cockney chappies’?” 285. 6 0. Robertshaw, “ ‘Irrepressible chirpy cockney chappies’?” 277. 61. Robertshaw, “ ‘Irrepressible chirpy cockney chappies’?” 286. “Pack up your trou­bles in your old kit bag/And smile, smile, smile.” 62. W. D. N., “Le Piou-­Piou.” 63. Hardie and Sabin, War Posters, 16, 35. 64. Hardie and Sabin, War Posters, 35. 65. As Claudio Guillén has argued, the picaresque mode need not be restricted to the novel. The “picaresque myth [influences] other arts,” both narrative and pictorial. Claudio Guillén, “­Toward a Definition of the Picaresque,” 71–106, 104. 66. See S­ ullivan, “Ribera’s Clubfooted Boy: Image and Symbol.” 67. See Ressort, Écoles espagnole et portugaise, cata­logue du département des peintures du musée du Louvre, and Xanthe and Cherry, Murillo. 68. Janin, “Le gamin de Paris,” 165. 69. Janin, “Le gamin de Paris,” 164. 70. Janin, “Le gamin de Paris,” 164. 71. With the widespread practice of book illustration in the nineteenth c­ entury, the pictorial and narrative picaresque modes coincide. Through dialogue and images, readers could “hear” the distinct voice or accent of the child picaro at the same time as seeing his likeness. According to Frédéric Chauvaud, by the last third of the ­century, the figure of Gavroche was firmly anchored in the French collective imaginary. As one mea­sure of Gavroche’s popularity, Chauvaud points to the entry on Gavroche in the 1874 edition of Pierre Larousse’s ­Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle. Chauvaud, “Gavroche et ses pairs.” 72. Hugo, Les Misérables, 477. 73. Hugo, Les Misérables, 477. 74. Daudet, “Gaspard.” Critics from all points on the po­liti­cal and cultural spectrum praised Gaspard. 75. Aigrain, “Trois lauréats du Prix Goncourt,” 242. 76. Schinz, “Some War Novels with Soldiers as Heroes,” 381. 7 7. See also Eugène Cadel’s cartoon entitled “En pays envahi” (In invaded territory), which features Le Boche (The German Soldier) asking, “So, y­ ou’re not g­ oing to school?” to which “Le Gamin” (The Kid) retorts, “So, ­you’re not ­going to Paris?” Cadel, “En pays envahi,”102.

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78. Audoin-­Rouzeau, La Guerre des enfants, illustration pages. 79. Chevrel, “Poulbot, Montmartre et les gosses,” 21. 80. As early as 1910 the common noun “les poulbots” had begun to be used to describe Poulbot’s drawings of Montmartre street urchins and, more generally, to replace the common noun “gavroche” as the “character type of a working-­class or poor child of Montmartre.” “Poulbot,” Le ­Grand Robert, Online. 81. Bellanger et al., Histoire Générale de la Presse Française, 3:428. 82. Chevrel and Perrier, “La Grande Guerre,” in Chevrel et al., Poulbot affichiste, 39. 83. Audoin-­Rouzeau, La Guerre des enfants, 174. For more, see Pignot, La guerre des crayons. 84. Chevrel and Perrier, “La Grande Guerre,” 34. 85. Pomarède, “Un dessinateur de la ‘vie moderne,’ ” 14. 86. See Silver, Esprit de Corps, Levitch, “Young Blood,” and Baker, “Describing Images of the National Self.” 87. Hardie and Sabin, War Posters, 17. 88. Hardie and Sabin, War Posters, 18. 89. Levitch, “Young Blood,” 161. 90. Levitch, “Young Blood,” 158. 91. Hardie and Sabin, War Posters, 35. 92. Poulbot, Des Gosses et des bonhommes. 93. Audoin-­Rouzeau, La Guerre des enfants, 147. 94. Audoin-­Rouzeau, La Guerre des enfants, 156, 165, 174, 197, 200. Audoin-­ Rouzeau concludes that while the child-­hero fantasy was mobilized in ­Great Britain and Germany, France represents a special case, in which the line separating childhood and adulthood was the least substantial. 95. Digeon, La Crise allemande de la pensée française, 62. 96. Digeon, La Crise allemande de la pensée française, 60. 97. Audoin-­Rouzeau, La Guerre des enfants, 149. 98. We see this in pronatalist discourses pointing to the alarming discrepancy between French and German birthrates. 99. For more see Ozouf, L’École, l’Église, et la République, 1871–1914. 100. Poulbot (1879), Dorgelès (1885), Mac Orlan (1882), Bofa (1883). 101. Pomarède, “Un dessinateur de la ‘vie moderne,’ ” 16. 102. Pomarède, “Un dessinateur de la ‘vie moderne,’ ” 12. See also Hewitt, “Images of Montmartre in French Writing,” and Hewitt, “Shifting Cultural Centers in Twentieth-­Century Paris”; Chevalier, Montmartre du plaisir et

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du crime; Siegel, Bohemian Paris; and Lanoux, “Trois personnages en quête d’une bohème.” 103. Hewitt, “Images of Montmartre in French Writing,” 129. 104. Delaporte, “Le dessinateur de presse, de l’artiste au journaliste,” 30. 105. Lanoux, cited in Hewitt, “Images of Montmartre in French Writing,” 129. 106. Robichon, Poulbot, 17. 107. Tarrit, Poulbot, gosse de Montmartre, 29. 108. Hewitt, “Images of Montmartre in French Writing,” 139. 109. Chevalier, Montmartre du plaisir et du crime, cited in Hewitt, “Shifting Cultural Centers,” 33. 110. Tarrit, Poulbot, gosse de Montmartre, 102. 111. Cavanna, “Préface,” 7. 112. Hal Roach’s The L ­ ittle Rascals (also known as Our Gang) was a series of American film comedy shorts from the 1920s and  30s about a gang of ­children growing up in a poor neighborhood. 113. For more on the exploitation in war­time posters of “existing mentalities” and “cultural traditions,” see James, “Introduction,” 19–20. 114. In Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, Simone de Beauvoir recalls being told she looked like “an adorable l­ittle patriot” in the “horizon blue” military coat her m ­ other had made for her (30–31). 115. Timmers, “The Propaganda Poster,” 112. 116. For a thorough treatment of German atrocities in World War I, see Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914. 117. The previous examples are all from Poulbot, Des gosses et des bonhommes (1916). Bairnsfather’s, and Bairnsfather-­inspired cartoons occasionally appeared in La Baïonnette. Poulbot may have been aware of Bairnsfather, and he may have taken inspiration from Old Bill for cartoons like this one depicting poilu phlegm. 118. Robichon, Poulbot, 66. 119. Robichon, Poulbot, 66. 120. This language is from the nomination letter written by the Société des humoristes, which is cited in Robichon, Poulbot, 67. 121. Laphin, “Le Dessinateur Poulbot.” The precise adjectives are “souffreteux” (puny) and “déluré,” which can mean both resourceful and sassy or impertinent. 122. Laphin, “Le Dessinateur Poulbot.” 123. Bill Mauldin would ­later write that he had heard that General Patton called him the Bruce Bairnsfather of the Second World War, and that he (Patton)

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“­hadn’t liked Bairnsfather e­ ither.” Cited in Holt and Holt, In Search of the Better ’Ole, 202. 1 24. Robb, British Culture and the First World War, 182.

Chapter 7. Le Cafard Epigraph: Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 183. 1. Lagarde and Pollaud-­Dulian, “Le Salon de l’araignée.” 2. Delaporte, “Gus Bofa et le ‘Salon de l’araignée’ (1920–1930),” 15–19. The word is not Bofa’s directly, but that of his friend and colleague Jean Galtier-­Boissière, reflecting the sentiments of Bofa in his veto of Poulbot’s nomination. 3. Lagarde and Pollaud-­Dulian, “Le Salon de l’araignée”; Delaporte, “Le Dessinateur de presse, de l’artiste au journaliste,” 32. 4. Delaporte, “Le Dessinateur de presse,” 33. 5. Hewitt, “Images of Montmartre in French Writing,” 134. 6. Le Naour, “Laughter and Tears in the G ­ reat War,” 269. 7. Pollaud-­Dulian, “D’un pessimisme, l’autre.” 8. Ad, Automobiles Charron Ltd, 1911. 9. Ad, Automobiles Charron Ltd, L’Illustration, May 28, 1910. 10. Ad, Automobiles Charron Ltd, Le Monde Illustré, May 21, 1910. 11. Pollaud-­Dulian, “D’un pessimisme, l’autre.” 12. Pollaud-­Dulian, “D’un pessimisme, l’autre.” This vogue begins in 1894 with the founding of Le Rire. 13. Pollaud-­Dulian, “D’un pessimisme, l’autre.” 14. Goyou Beauchamps, “Gus Bofa,” 17. 15. Levitch, “Young Blood,” 147, 145. 16. Levitch, “Young Blood,” 169n6. See Tillier, “La Revue satirique, objet hybride.” 17. Baker, “Describing Images of the National Self,” 25–26. 18. Maveyraud, “Drôle de Gus.” 19. Marcel Capy’s round-­faced, jovial soldiers appear in issues of La Baïonnette such as Le Pinard, Les Gendarmes, or Les Mécanos. 20. See, for example, the full-­page comic strip by Gus Bofa describing the exploits of the débrouillard in La Baïonnette’s February 24, 1916, special issue on Le Système D. 21. Emanuel, “The Humor of T. Atkins.” 22. This portrait appears in Bofa, Le Livre de la guerre de cent ans.

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23. Like Benjamin Rabier and Francisque Poulbot, Bofa liked drawing animals and ­children. They are exempt from the harshness of his critique and often share the same stunned, gaping eyes as some of his soldiers. They are condemned to live in a world whose cruelty they do not understand. 24. Such blurring of distinctions between friend and foe was uncommon in war culture. 25. Bofa, “Les Mains en l’air.” 26. Bofa, Chez les Toubibs. 27. Bofa, Chez les Toubibs. 28. Charensol, D’une rive à l’autre, 223, cited in Hewitt, “Images of Montmartre in French Writing,” 134. 29. In this re­spect, it is useful to remember that Gus Bofa, like Francisque Poulbot, was lifelong friends with Roland Dorgelès, whose own work can be situated somewhere between that of t­ hese two graphic artists in terms of tone and outlook. 30. Mac Orlan, cited in De Crécy, “Préface.” 31. Mac Orlan, cited in De Crécy, “Préface.” 32. Hewitt, “Images of Montmartre in French Writing,” 135. 33. Bofa, “Le Cafard.” 3 4. “Le Cafard,” Le ­G rand Robert, Online. The poem is entitled “La Destruction.” 35. Huot and Voivenel, Le Cafard. This volume was preceded by a study of courage in 1917. 36. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 54. 37. Sainéan, L’Argot des tranchées, 55. 38. See “Le Cafard” in Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 53–55; Sainéan, L’Argot des tranchées, 54, 55, 137; Le ­Grand Robert, Online; and Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé, Online. 39. Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé, Online. 40. Sainéan, L’Argot des tranchées, 54. 41. Galopin, Les Poilus de la 9e (Paris: Albin Michel, 1916) 6, 16. Cited in Sainéan, L’Argot des tranchées, 55. 4 2. Déchelette, L’Argot des poilus, 55. 43. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 26. 4 4. Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, 138. 45. Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, 199. 46. Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, 10. 47. Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, 359.

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4 8. Vollmann, “Afterword,” 452. 49. Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, 243. 50. Gorki, “Rapport au Premier congrès des écrivains soviétiques,” 194. 51. Grimmelshausen, The Runagate Courage, 69. See also Parker, Lit­er­a­ture and the Delinquent, 95. 52. Barbusse, Le Feu, 279. 53. Barbusse, Le Feu, 276. 54. Barbusse, Le Feu, 361. 55. Barbusse, Le Feu, 282–283. 56. See Mosse, Fallen soldiers. 57. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 101. 58. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 143. 59. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 144. 6 0. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 73. 61. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 74. 62. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 77. 63. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 77. 64. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 84. 65. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 251. 66. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 146. 67. Parts of this section appear in Murphy, “Newspapers, Novels, and the Comic Book War.” 68. Werth, Clavel soldat, 114. 69. Werth, Clavel soldat, 114. 70. Rieuneau, Guerre et Révolution dans le roman français, 178. 71. Norton Cru, Témoins, 656. 72. Galtier-­Boissière, “Léon Werth,” 5–6. 73. Galtier-­Boissière, “Léon Werth,” 5. 74. Galtier-­Boissière, “Léon Werth,” 5. 75. Galtier-­Boissière, “Léon Werth,” 6. 76. Galtier-­Boissière, “Léon Werth,” 6. 7 7. Galtier-­Boissière, “Léon Werth,” 5–6. 78. Werth, Clavel soldat, 46, 255. 79. Werth, Clavel soldat, 348. 80. Werth, Clavel soldat, 295. 81. Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory, 79. 82. Werth, Clavel soldat, 102.

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83. Werth, Clavel soldat, 42, 48, 78–79, 107, 164, 168, 178, 201, 209, 213, 216, 221, 227, 228, 230, 231, 247, 259, 267, 268, 274, 280, 291, 304, 308–309, 313, 322, 328–329, 330–331, 337, 351, 352, 363, 364. 84. Maiorino, At the Margins of the Re­nais­sance, 60. 85. Maiorino, At the Margins of the Re­nais­sance, 60. 86. Maiorino, At the Margins of the Re­nais­sance, 61. 87. Werth, Clavel soldat, 13, 87, 365. 88. Werth, Clavel soldat, 116. 89. Werth, Clavel soldat, 12. 90. Werth, Clavel soldat, 178. 91. Werth, Clavel soldat, 142. 92. Werth, Clavel soldat, 143. 93. Werth, Clavel soldat, 356–357. 94. Werth, Clavel soldat, 375. 95. Maiorino, At the Margins of the Re­nais­sance, 61. 96. Larcher writes of le barda in Les Croix de bois, 54. 97. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 156. 98. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 210, 160, 163. 99. Werth, Clavel soldat, 240. 100. Werth, Clavel soldat, 64. 101. Werth, Clavel soldat, 142. 102. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 23; Barbusse, Le Feu, 54. 103. Benjamin, Gaspard, 30. 104. Benjamin, Gaspard, 31. 105. Benjamin, Gaspard, 96. 106. Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 40. 107. In few early ­Great War texts is the reader made privy to so many changing perceptions, fears, and fantasies of the soldier at war. The hundreds of interior monologues in Clavel soldat anticipate the first-­person narratorial rant of Bardamu in Voyage au bout de la nuit. 108. Werth, Clavel soldat, 302. Loosely translated for the sake of clarity. 109. Werth, Clavel soldat, 247. 110. A point Martin Hurcombe also makes in Novelists in Conflict with re­spect to several combat novels. 111. Werth, Clavel soldat, 341. 112. Werth, Clavel soldat, 248. 113. Werth, Clavel soldat, 227.

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114. Descaves, Ronge-­Maille, 10. This text was written in 1917 but not published ­until 1921. 115. Camus, The Rebel, 305. 116. Lewis, The Picaresque Saint, 28. 117. Martin, Le Canard enchaîné ou les Fortunes de la vertu, 207. ­Until he received fresh scholarly attention in 2001 and 2002 with the resurgence of interest in Le Canard enchaîné, La Fouchardière was remembered primarily by cinema historians—as the author of the novel La Chienne, adapted for the screen by Jean Renoir in 1931 and again in 1945 as Scarlet Street by Fritz Lang. 118. Ousby, Occupation, 126. Parts of this section appear in “A Brief History of Le système D,” Contemporary French Civilization 40, no. 3 (2015). 119. Ousby, Occupation, 132. 120. For examples of Occupation Système D and débrouillardise, see Gildea, Marianne in Chains; Perrault, Paris sous l’Occupation; Pryce-­Jones, Paris in the Third Reich; and Veillon, La Mode sous l’Occupation. 121. Gildea, Marianne in Chains, 97. 122. Gildea, Marianne in Chains, 405. 123. Dutourd, Au bon beurre, 114, 116. 124. Dutourd, Au bon beurre, 53. 125. Dutourd, Au bon beurre, 59. 126. Dutourd, Au bon beurre, 114. 127. The term “girouettes” is from Jean Galtier-­Boissière’s Dictionnaire des girouettes. 128. Cited in Ousby, Occupation, 135. 129. Gildea, Marianne in Chains, 410. Chapter 8. Charlie Chaplin’s L ­ ittle Tramp Parts of this chapter w ­ ere originally published as “Charlot français: Charlie Chaplin, the First World War, and the Construction of a National Hero,” in Con­ temporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites, Volume 14, Issue 4, edited by Roger Celestin and Eliane DalMolin (September 2010), pp. 421–429. 1. Darmon, Vivre à Paris, 321. 2. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 7 (“Dugouts into Movie Theaters,” The Baltimore American, October 6, 1918). 3. Poulaille, Charles Chaplin, 119. 4. René Crevel, “Untitled,” In Charlot, Le Disque vert. 5. Cendrars, “Untitled,” In Charlot, Le Disque vert, 78. 6. Kerdyk, “Crapouillotons,” 19.

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7. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 5.1. No author, date, or publication title available. Copyright reads “Underwood and Underwood.” 8. Soupault, Charlot, iii. 9. For Pierrot, see Chaffiol-­Debillemont, “De Gaspard Deburau à Charlie Chaplin.” For “epileptic” per­for­mance, see Rae Beth Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis. 10. Charlot, the L ­ ittle Tramp, was legible as a twentieth-­century embodiment of the nineteenth-­century figure of the sad clown Pierrot, made most famous in the 1830s by Théâtre des Funambules performer Jean-­Gaspard Deburau. Deburau had played the roles of “the bashful lover, the awkward thief,” and the “unheroic soldier,” roles that would resurface in the work of Charlot. For Deburau roles, see Chaffiol-­Debillemont, “De Gaspard Deburau à Charlie Chaplin,” 207. 11. Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin,” 327. 12. Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin,” 328. 13. Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin,” 328. 14. Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin,” 330. 15. Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin,” 330. 16. Leprohon, Charlot ou La Naissance d’un mythe, 94. 17. Cocteau, “Carte blanche,” 94. 18. Jacques de Baroncelli, Comœdia, July 7, 1926, cited in Chevalier, Charlie Chaplin, 71. 19. Chaplin, My Autobiography, 303, cited in Woal and Woal, “Chaplin and the Comedy of Melodrama,” 8­ . 20. J.-­L . Croze, “Restent les femmes, les ‘Charlottes’ . . .”; for a negative vision of female movie-­goers, see Boutet de Monvel and Arnoux, “Les Femmes obsédantes.” 21. See, for example, Chaplin Press Books, vol. 4 (“Charlie Chaplin’s Bit, Egyptian Gazette, Lady Admirer’s Letter,” May 20, 1918); vol. 8 (“Chaplin at the Front”). 22. Cover, Illustrated London News, August 10, 1918; Chaplin Press Books, vol. 8 (Cover, Illustrated London News, New York, August 24, 1918), Chaplin Press Books, vol. 10 (Cover, Photoplay Magazine; “Put Picture on Ceiling for Wounded Soldiers in Cots”; “Back to Amer­i­ca”). 23. Bairnsfather, From Mud to Mufti, 71–72. 24. Bairnsfather, “The Bystander’s” Fragments from France, 5:27. 25. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 7 (October 12, 1918, “How Chaplin Is Working for Our Khaki Boys”).

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26. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 8 (The Sioux City Sunday Journal, August 12, 1917). 27. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 8 (St. John Ervine, “Charlie Cheers Them Up. How the ­Great Film Actor Is ­Doing His Bit”). 28. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 4 (“Dumb Soldier Speaks. Result of a Charlie Chaplin Turn at Selby Picture House. Gassed at Hill 70”; “Chaplin Works a Cure”; L.R., “Charlie Chaplin. Should He Enlist in the Army? What His Friend Says. Cardboard Figures Potted by the Germans.” L.R. is likely Langford Reed). For more, see Hammond, The Big Show. 29. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 5.1 (“Charlie Chaplin as Latest Cure for Shell Shock,” December 23, 1917); vol. 4 (“­Don’t Use Tonics—­Look at Chaplin Photo Cards and Laugh and Get Well”). See also Hammond, The Big Show, 177–178 and 228–238. 30. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 4 (Alpha of the Plough, “On Charlie Chaplin,” The Star, Tuesday 29th, 1915). 31. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 5.2, “Charlie Chaplin vs. Sir John French,” no author, newspaper title, or date available. 32. Hammond, The Big Show, 233. 33. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 4 (“A Wooden Effigy of Charlie Chaplin,” December 1915; Langford Reed, “Charlie in the Trenches!”). The airplane photo was shown during the conference panel “The Tramp in Historical Context” at the Tramp 100: The Birth of the Tramp Cele­bration, Cineteca di Bologna, Bologna, Italy, 25–28 June, 2014. 3 4. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 7 (“Chaplin a Favorite with Our Boys in the Trenches,” Baltimore American, October 6, 1918). 35. Cendrars, “Untitled,” 78. 36. Cendrars, “La Naissance de Charlot,” 126. 37. Cendrars, “La Naissance de Charlot,” 125, 127. 38. Newton, “Le Piou-­piou,” October 31, 1914. 39. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 4 (“If Charlie Chaplin Goes to War”). 40. “Charlot, correspondant de guerre,” La Baïonnette, advertisement, 175. 41. They ­were direct inheritors of the spirit of Victor Hugo’s lovable street urchin Gavroche. 4 2. Cocteau, “Carte blanche,” 94. 43. October 20, 1918, in the United States, and April 20, 1919, in France. 4 4. Galtier-­Boissière, “Charlot,” 13. 45. Braga, “Deux films de guerre,” 13. 46. Leprohon, Charlot ou La Naissance d’un mythe, 94; Martin, Charlie Chaplin, 70.

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47. Leprohon, Charlot ou La Naissance d’un mythe, 94. 4 8. Leprohon, Charlot ou La Naissance d’un mythe, 96. 49. Leprohon, Charlot ou La Naissance d’un mythe, 92. 50. Galtière-­Boissière, “Charlot,” 13. 51. Galtière-­Boissière, “Charlot,” 14. 52. Galtière-­Boissière, “Charlot,” 12–13. 53. Galtière-­Boissière, “Charlot,” 13. 54. Galtière-­Boissière, “Charlot,” 14. 55. Chaplin, “Pourquoi j’ai choisi comme type ‘Le déshérité du monde.’ ” In Larcher, Charlie Chaplin, 22. 56. Barbusse, Le Feu, 352. 57. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 10. G. A. Atkinson, “The Humour of Charlie Chaplin and a Sentence for the Kaiser.” December 6, 1919. No publication title available. 58. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 8 (“Cheero Charlie!” May 5, 1918). 59. Miller, The Picaresque Novel, 133. It is for this reason that Felix Krull is excluded from Miller’s restrictive definition of the picaresque. He considers the novel “comic,” and not “picaresque.” I argue that it belongs on the comic end of a picaresque spectrum. 6 0. For more, see Alter, Rogue’s Pro­gress, 127–128. 61. Torrance, The Comic Hero, 260. 62. Chaplin Press Books, vol. 14.4 (“Charlie Chaplin et ‘Le Gosse,’ ” Le Petit Journal). 63. Mitry, Tout Chaplin, 13. 64. Chaplin, “Pourquoi j’ai choisi.” 65. Alter, Rogue’s Pro­gress, 132. 66. Alter, Rogue’s Pro­gress, 132. 67. Delluc, cited in Simsolo, “Chaplin et ses images,” 34. 68. Delluc, cited in Simsolo, “Chaplin et ses images,” 35. See also Abel, “The Contribution of the French Literary Avant-­Garde,” 27. 69. Drésa, “Au cinéma: Leur Charlie et Notre Charlot,” 17.

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Index

Note: An “f” following a page number indicates a figure. 239n117; graphic style of, 168, 169; overviews, 70, 137; Poulbot and, 50, 151; special issues, 164f, 170–171; Le Système D and, 13, 48–50, 51, 52. See also Bofa, Gus; débrouillards (démerdards) Bairnsfather, Bruce and Old Bill (character): La Baïonnette and, 239n117; Bofa’s character compared, 172; British identity and, 136, 141, 145–147, 161, 235nn36,40,41; Chaplin and, 203, 235n40; fan mail and, 204; films and, 228n8; heroism and, 140, 141, 143–145, 161, 236n45; overviews, 15, 16, 139, 140–142; Poulbot and, 239n117; resignation and, 138–139, 138f, 143–144; survival and, 142–147, 235nn39,42; work-­evasion and, 139–140 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 19, 24, 184 Barbusse, Henri, 12, 180, 204. See also Le Feu Barrès, Maurice, 18, 70, 73–77, 74f, 81, 83–85, 90, 123–124, 131. See also L’Écho de Paris Bazin, André, 200–201 Becker, Jean-­Jacques, 27–28 Benjamin, René, 25, 117, 123, 206. See also Gaspard (Benjamin) “Better ‘Ole” (Bairnsfather), 138–139, 138f The Better ‘Ole (film), 145 Bicard, Alfred (character), 76, 169, 228n8, 229n9 Bicard dit le Bouif, Poilu de deuxième classe (Private Bicard, aka the Cobbler) (La Fouchardière), 89–90, 92, 95–106, 207, 209. See also Le Bouif tient

Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (The Adventurous Simplicissimus) (Grimmelshausen), 6, 64–66, 93, 116–117, 128, 130, 218n23 the absurd, xii, xv, 35–36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 192–193. See also insanity academicians, 18, 65, 67, 70, 73, 76, 81, 84, 102, 103, 104, 120 alienation, existential, 15–16, 163–197, 191–193. See also le cafard (trench depression); homelessness All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) (Remarque), 3, 6, 25, 27, 61, 120, 129, 178 Alter, Robert, 7, 35, 44, 108–109, 118, 135, 214 animality, 14, 38, 113–136, 115, 123–124, 166–167, 192. See also “dog narratives”; rats (mice) and rat traps Au bon beurre (Dutourd), ­195 Audoin-­Rouzeau, Stéphane, 154, 238n94 authority and discipline: Bicard dit le Bouif and, 92, 95, 96, 99–100; Chaplin and, 206–207; Cobley on, 30–31; combat and, 42; gamin de Paris and, 149; Good Soldier Švejk and, 95; La Fouchardière and, 76, 91–92, 95–96; re­sis­tance to, 30–31, 43–44, 59–63, 143, 224n69. See also victimization La Baïonnette (magazine): allied soldiers and, 169; Chaplin and, 205–206; contributors to, 151, 163, 166, 167, 205,

269

270 Bjornson, Richard, 5, 125, 130 Bofa, Gus, 12, 15, 16, 52, 53f, 70, 155, 162–178, 197 le Bouif (character), 229nn20,25. See also Bicard dit le Bouif, Poilu de deuxième classe (La Fouchardière) Le Bouif tient (The Cobbler Holds On) (La Fouchardière), 89, 97f, 104–105 bourrage de crâne. See skull-­stuffing Braga, Dominique, 207–208 bricolage (makeshifts), 6, 50–51, 54–57, 89, 118, 129. See also cleverness and imagination; Le Système D Bringer, Rodolphe, 78. See also Scipion Pégoulade (La Fouchardière and Bringer) Britain, 9, 10, 26, 204, 205 British identity, 15, 18, 169, 235n36. See also Bairnsfather, Bruce and Old Bill (character); cockney British trench poetry, 2–3, 113–116, 122, 126 brutality: Bofa on, 172; Clavel soldat and, 185, 186, 188; Croix de bois and, 182, 183; enfant-­héroïque versus, 154; Le Feu and, 182–183; Germans and, 31, 121, 158–159; Good Soldier Švejk and, 109; Mémoires d’un rat and, 14, 127, 129, 130, 133, 135, 136; the picaresque and, 4, 6, 181–182; poulbots and, 158–159; rats and, 120; soldier novelists and, 67–68. See also alienation, existential; le cafard (trench depression) Bullets to Billets (Bairnsfather), 141 bureaucratization, 14, 108–112 El Buscón (The Swindler) (Quevedo), 1, 7, 23, 30, 46, 118, 147 buttock wound trope, 229n24 Buzzell, Colby, xii–­xvi, xvii The Bystander (magazine), 139, 142, 203. See also Bairnsfather, Bruce Le Cabaret de la belle femme (Dorgelès), 12, 21, 51–52, 54–55, 59–60, 61–62. See also Dorgelès, Roland le cafard (trench depression): Bicard dit le Bouif and, 100–101; Bofa and, 162, 163, 170–171, 172, 175–178, 197; Chaplin and, 100–101, 202–203, 208, 209, 211; Clavel soldat and, 185–187, 189; episodic

index narrative and, 186–187; French identity and, 147; overview, 15–16, 176–178; picaresque immunity and, 162; Voyage and, 178–181. See also insanity Cami, 205–206 Le Canard enchaîné (The Chained Duck) (trench newspaper), 58, 67–77, 78, 86, 90, 91, 167, 208. See also La Fouchardière, Georges de Capy, Marcel, 169, 240n19 Car­ter, Vivian, ­142 Catch-22 (Heller), xiii, xiv, 6, 12, 31–32, 62 Céline, Louis-­Ferdinand, xiii–­xiv, xv, 6, 15, 27. See also Voyage au bout de la nuit Cendrars, Blaise, 35, 199–200, 204–205 Chaine, Pierre, 72, 112, 226n21. See also Les Mémoires d’un rat Chaplin, Charlie: Bairnsfather and, 203, 235n40; comedy and, 112, 197, 202–204, 211–212, 214, 230n27; Gavroche and, 246n41; heroism and, 111–112, 200–201, 208–209, 210–211, 212, 245n10; Mémoires d’un rat compared, 206, 208; Old Bill compared, 235n40; overviews, 16, 198–216, 199f; rat traps and, 119–120, 210; satires of power and, 25; as shirker, 78; Le Système D and, 49, 211–212, 214. See also Charlot soldat (Shoulder Arms) (film) Charlot soldat (Shoulder Arms) (film), 16, 25, 49, 100, 112, 119, 199, 205–208, 211. See also Chaplin, Charlie ­children, 154–155, 238n94, 241n23. See also Poulbot, Francisque cinema-­viewing, 198–199, 203, 244n117 civilians: Bairnsfather and, 141; Le Canard enchaîné and, 71; Clavel soldat and, 189; comedy and, 34–35; in “Un débrouillard,” 51; experiences of, 42; French identity and, 11; Mémoires d’un rat and, 126–127, 132–133; poulbots and, 153–154; skull-­ stuffing and, 208–209; soldiers and, 17, 24–25; war culture and, 68. See also academicians; fleur au fusil trope; mass media; shirker civilization, 11, 69, 74, 162, 182 classes, socio-­economic, 24–25, 145, 157–158, 174–175, 183 Clavel soldat (Werth), 5, 6, 12, 15, 16, 119, 129, 184–193, 207, 243n107

Index cleverness and imagination (ingenuity): Chaplin and, 201, 213; Cobley on, 29–32; Mémoires d’un rat and, 128–129; the picaresque and, 30; poulbots and, 154, 158, 159; Scipion Pégoulade and, 81. See also bricolage; débrouillard (démerdard); le filon; handicrafts; intelligence; Le Système D clothing, 51, 94, 95, 143, 156, 157, 201, 204–205, 212, 229nn20,25 Cobley, Evelyn, 29–36 cockney, 16, 31, 137, 138, 142, 146, 147, 220n17 Cocteau, Jean, 47, 201, 207 Collectif de Recherche Internationale et de Débat sur la Guerre de 1914–1918 (­Great War International Research and Debate Collective) (CRID), 9 colonial wars, 186 comedy: Bofa and, 172; British identity and, 146–147; le cafard and, 177, 184; Chaplin and, 112, 197, 202–204, 211–212, 214, 230n27; Cobley and, 30, 31; equilibrium and, 44; everyday time and, 19; Le Feu and, 77–78; French identity and, 146–147, 194; of in­de­pen­dence, 91–112; Mémoires d’un rat and, 125, 128, 135, 136; morale and, 140; overview, 12–13; the picaresque and, 31, 247n59; Poulbot and, 166; rat traps and, 119–120; soldier-­novelists and, 34–35. See also entertainment of readers; irony and satire common man: Bairnsfather and, 141–142; Bicard dit le Bouif and, 95–106; Chaplin and, 213–214; conformity and, 109–110; described, 94, 95, 96–97; French identity and, xv, 111; Good Soldier Švejk and, 91, 93–95, 111; heroism and, 16, 18, 43–44, 89, 92–93, 110–111; industrial modernity and, 197; the picaresque and, 1, 14; propaganda and, 76–77. See also everyday life; The Tramp (film) community, 10, 11, 17, 36, 38, 92, 130, 181, 201. See also friendship Comœdia (newspaper), 202 The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (Mann), 12, 213, 247n59 con men, 42, 58, 60, 81, 82–83 consent, 9, 27, 37, 68

271 contempt for life or fellow man, 13, 77, 179, 193–194 Contemptibles, Old, 137, 140, 144 Coubertin, Pierre de, 45, 145 Courteline, Georges, 155 Le Crapouillot (newspaper), 70, 185–186, 200, 207–208, 226n23 creature comforts, 44, 51–55, 134, 142, 167, 190–191, 210 Crevel, René, 199–200 CRID (Collectif de Recherche Internationale et de Débat sur la Guerre de 1914–1918) (­Great War International Research and Debate Collective), 9 Le Crime du Bouif (The Cobbler’s Crime) (La Fouchardière), 89–90, 95–106, 228nn52,6,8 Les Croix de bois (The Wooden Crosses) (Dorgelès): La Baïonnette and, 49; Bofa’s cartoons compared, 170; Bouffioux (character), 60–61; bricolage and, 51; brutalization and, 182, 183; Chaplin compared, 206, 208; Clavel soldat compared, 187; débrouillard morality and, 52–54, 53f; Demachy (character), 21, 49, 57; embuscade and, 57; le filon and, 60; handicrafts and, 56; as historical testimony, 26; mass media and, 187; morbid bricolage and, 55–56; release of, 207; sarcasm and, xv; satires of power and, 25; solidarity and, 191–192; survival and, 183–184; Le Système D and, 49; thingism and, 190; on waiting, 163. See also Dorgelès, Roland Croze, J.-­L ., 202 Cru, Jean Norton, 25–26, 27, 28, 185 culture, French, 11. See also French identity and selfhood; war culture cynicism, xii, 6, 13, 15, 82, 107, 116, 120, 124, 135, 157, 161, 162, 178, 179, 183, 193, 196, 211 Dawson, A. J., 54, 56, 146 “Debout les morts!” (“Rise Up, You Dead!”) (legend), 172, 233n62 débrouillards (démerdards): in La Baïonnette, 48, 49–50, 51–52, 53f, 59, 169–170, 171, 240n20; Bofa and, 52, 53f, 164f, 169–171,

272 débrouillards (démerdards) (continued) 240n20; Croix de bois and, 54; se débrouiller described, 44–48, 222n11; the démerdard described, 44, 48–50; Diplôme des débrouillards and, 45; Gaspard and, 149–150; Mémoires d’un rat and, 129; morality and, 51, 52–54, 53f, 58–59, 193–194, 195, 196; Occupation and, 194–196; Scipion Pégoulade and, 89; Shoulder Arms and, 16. See also clothing; creature comforts; le filon; Le Système D De Certeau, Michel, 43–44, 56, 224n69 Déchelette, François, 46–47, 47–48, 57–58, 59, 65–66, 177, 178 dehumanization. See brutality démerdards. See débrouillards depression. See le cafard Descaves, Lucien, 120–121, 193. See also Ronge-­Maille vainqueur (Victorious Mesh-­Gnawer) desertion (or not), 10, 61, 84, 105 Dickens, Charles, 94, 146, 148, 218n23, 229n15 Digeon, Claude, 154 dignity. See heroism, dignity, honor and re­spect disillusionment, 3, 6–7, 26, 32–34, 109, 186, 210. See also le cafard (trench depression) documentary style, 26, 27, 29–31, 34 “dog narratives,” 124, 125 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 94, 209 Dorgelès, Roland, 70, 155, 167, 241n29. See also Le Cabaret de la belle femme; Les Croix de bois Douglas, Allen, 71, 75, 105 Duhamel, Georges, 66, 173 Dutourd, Jean, 195 L’Écho de Paris (newspaper), 18, 67, 68, 69–70, 71, 73, 76, 226n16 elegiac frameworks, 9, 41–42, 114, 115, 122 embuscade. See shirker (civilian embusqué) Encore des gosses et des bonhommes (Poulbot), 151 entertainment of readers, 31–32 epics, 17–18, 18–19, 20 episodic plots, 19, 20–21, 32–37, 38–39, 128, 184–185, 186–187, 209–213 Estebanillo, 5

index evasion, 57–59, 116, 139–140, 235n36. See also le filon; shirker (civilian embusqué) everyday life: Chaplin and, 208, 214; death and, 19; described, 32; heroism and, 43; industrial modernity and, 197; the picaresque and, 184, 188; Poulbot and, 156; World War I and, 10. See also common man; Le Système D; ­temporality eye-­witnesses. See soldier eye-­witnesses and novelists faire, ne pas s’en (­don’t worry) (slogan), 153, 170, 195 Le Feu (­Under Fire) (Barbusse): bricolage and, 50–51; brutalization and, 182–183; Chaplin compared, 206, 208–213; documentary style of, 26, 27; episodes and, 19–20; handicrafts and, 56; Hautot and, 229n9; industrialized warfare and, 125; La Fouchardière compared, 77; mass media and, 187; prizes for, 75; rats and, 119, 123; sarcasm and, xv; satires of power and, 25; shirkers and, 57–58; skull-­ stuffers and, 77–78; survival and, 34; Le Système D and, 13; thingism and, 190. See also Barbusse, Henri le filon, 57, 58, 59–63, 134. See also evasion fleur au fusil trope, 27, 28 Les Fleurs du mal (Baudelaire), 176 For France, Some En­glish Impressions of the French Front (Dawson), 54 fragmentation, 19. See also episodic plots Fragments from France (Bairnsfather), 140, 142, 203, 235n36 France, Anatole, 112 France and the French, 7–12, 15, 27. See also French identity and ­selfhood Franco-­Prussian War, 8, 45, 73, 154 French identity and selfhood: armes blanche and, 74, 219n3; authority and, 92; Barrès and, 74; Bicard dit le Bouif and, 98, 109; cartoons and, 15; Chaplin and, 200, 201, 204–205, 207; Clavel soldat and, 186, 191; comedy and, 146–147, 194; common man and, xv, 111; débrouillards and, 47–48, 49, 196; episodic plots and, 32; gamin de Paris and, 149; Gaspard and, 150; heroism and, 8, 16, 18, 74–75, 101–106; industrialized warfare and, 7; Mémoires d’un rat and,

Index 128, 130, 133; the picaresque and, xv, 10–11; poulbots and, 136, 149–150, 152, 157, 161; soldier-­writers and, 35; Le Système D and, 15–16, 181; war culture and, 69; wit and, 146, 147. See also patriotism and anti-­militarism friendship, xvi, 130, 191–192 From Mud to Mufti (Bairnsfather), 139–140, 203 funny man/loustic (character type), 21, 90, 164f, 170, 171, 184, 201 Fussell, Paul, xii, 19, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 39, 41, 115, 135, 186 Galopin, Arnould, 177–178, 208–209 Galtier-­Boissière, Jean, 70, 185–186, 207, 208–209, 240n1 gamin de Paris (street kid), 15, 148–149, 150, 161, 209 Gance, Abel, 207 Gard, Roger Martin du, 20, 27 Gaspard (Benjamin), 25, 117, 123, 149–150, 170, 191, 208, 229n24 Gassier, H. P., 70, 75, 229n9 Gavroche (character), 149–150, 209, 237n71, 246n41 Germans (Boches): aesthetics and, 152; Barrès on, 124; Bicard dit le Bouif and, 98, 103; Bofa and, 168–169, 172; brutalization and, 31, 182; Cami and, 206; Chaplin and, 207, 212; Clavel soldat and, 186; Front­ schweine and, 232n49; Kultur and, 11, 69, 72; La Fouchardière and, 68, 194; poulbots and, 154, 158–159, 160f; Poulbot’s style and, 168; rats and, 121–122; satirists, 93; Scipion Pégoulade and, 86; skull-­stuffing and, 67–68; ste­reo­t ypes of, 47, 121–122 Gibbs, Philip, 39 Gil Blas (Lesage), 14, 21, 46, 118, 126, 135, 136 Gil Blas (magazine), 93 Gildea, Robert, 194, 218n26 Giono, Jean, 27, 191 Gold Rush (film), 214–215 The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War (Hašek): Bofa compared, 169; Chaplin compared, 206–207; common man and, 91, 93–95, 111; le filon

273 and, 60–61; heroism and, 95, 106–112; insanity and, 6; overviews, 12, 14, 93, 218n23, 228nn6,8, 229n15; Le Système D and, 104–105; veteran/recruit and, 21 Gorky, Maxim, 180 Le Gosse (The Kid) (film), 213 Les Gosses dans les ruines (Gsell), 160 Des Gosses et les bonhommes (Poulbot), 151, 158 gouailleur (wisecracker), xv Grass, Günter, 6, 12, 218n23 Graves, Robert, 31 Grimmelshausen, Johann Jakob Christoffel von, 218n23. See also Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus; Die Landstörtzerin Courasche Guillén, Claudio, 237n65 Hamilton, Ian, 145 Hammond, Michael, 235n40 handicrafts, 56–57, 224n69 Hardie, Martin, 147 Hašek, Jaroslav, 93–95, 228n8. See The Good Soldier Švejk Hautot, Georges, 79f, 94, 97f, 169, 229n9 Heller, Joseph. See Catch-22 Henriot (cartoonist), 52 heroism, dignity, honor and re­spect: animality and, 124; anti-­heroes, xvi–­xvi, 16, 25; Bairnsfather on, 140, 141, 143–145, 161; Barrès on, 18, 74–75, 123, 124; Bicard dit le Bouif and, 95, 96, 97–98, 99, 101–106, 102, 109–110; Bofa and, 174–175; bureaucracy and, 108–112; Cabaret de la belle femme and, 61; Camus on, 193; Chaplin and, 111–112, 200–201, 204, 205, 208–209, 210–211, 212, 245n10; ­children and, 154–155; civilians and, 23, 24, 25; Clavel soldat and, 5, 6, 16, 190–192, 191; common man and, 16, 18, 43–44, 89, 92–93, 110–111; enfant héroïque type, 16, 78–79, 79f; epics and, 17–18; Estebanillo and, 5; Faivre’s war bond poster and, 74–75; as filon, 63; Franco-­Prussian war and, 8, 45; French identity and, 147; of Germans for German infantry, 232n49; Gil Blas and, 131; Good Soldier Švejk and, 95, 106–112; “The Hero in Spite of Himself” trope, 16, 78–79, 79f, 209;

274 heroism, dignity, honor and respect (continued) Hurcombe on, 192, 243n110; La Fouchar­ dière and, 76, 91–92, 106–107; Mémoires d’un rat and, 112, 126–127, 131–133, 134, 135; obscenity of t­ hings and, 190; Old Bill and, 143, 236n45; the picaresque and, 14, 25; Scipion Pégoulade and, 61, 78, 83, 89, 110; Shoulder Arms and, 16; Simplicissimus and, 65–66, 130–131; Le Système D and, 11–12, 43–44, 48–50. See also common man; patriotism and anti-­militarism; shirker Hervé, Gustave, 75 L’Heure (newspaper), 76, 90, 226n28 Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane. See Gil Blas (Lesage) L’Historial de la Grande Guerre (Péronne), 9 homelessness, existential, 37–42 Les Hommes de bonne volonté (Men of Good ­Will) (Romains), 20, 27 honor. See heroism, dignity, honor and re­spect; morality Horne, John, 219n31 “Hors d Œuvre” (La Fouchardière), 76 Hugo, Victor, 149–150, 209 Hurcombe, Martin, xii, xv, 19, 26, 32, 35–36, 37, 40, 192, 243n110 Hynes, Samuel, 26–27 identity. See British identity; French identity and selfhood illusion, 64, 85. See also skull-­stuffing (bourrage de crâne) L’Illustration (magazine), 137, 151, 160, 227n44, 233n1 imagination. See cleverness and imagination (ingenuity) The Immigrant (film), 206 immunity, picaresque, 7, 162 industrialized warfare, 7, 10, 11, 15, 18–19, 72, 125, 197, 200 ingenuity. See cleverness and imagination innocence, 6, 27, 28, 29, 39, 148, 149 insanity, 6, 105–106, 109, 110, 112, 121, 127–128, 177, 178–180, 204. See also the absurd; le cafard (trench depression) intelligence: animal instincts and, 117; Mémoires d’un rat and, 133; rats and, 116, 231n40; Scipion Pégoulade and, 81;

index skull-­stuffing and, 65–66; war culture and, 70, 189. See also bricolage; cleverness and imagination (ingenuity); débrouillard (démerdard) Iraq war, xi, xii, xii–­xvi, xvii irony and satire: Bairnsfather and, 145; Bofa and, 15, 70, 166; le cafard and, 15; combat and, 42; con­temporary, 71; Estebanillo and, 5; everyday time and, 19; French paradigm and, 10; Fussell on, 28–29; Gil Blas and, 135, 136; meaning versus, 36; Mémoires d’un rat and, 126, 131, 135–136; “Old Bill” and, 143; the picaresque and, 12; poulbots and, 159; power and, 25. See also La Baïonnette (magazine) and other publications; comedy J’accuse (film), 207 Jacob, Max, 214 Janin, Jules, 148 Le Journal (newspaper), 58, 151, 166, 167 journalism. See mass media Journée du poilu (Poilu Day), 123–124, 151 Journey to the End of the Night (Céline). See Voyage au bout de la nuit joviality, 16, 67, 106, 109, 124, 169, 170, 199, 214 Kahn, Albert, xi Keylor, William, 42 The Kid (Le Gosse) (film), 213 Kipling, Rudyard, 141, 142 Lada, Joseph, 94, 169 La Fontaine, Jean de, 121 La Fouchardière, Georges de, 12, 13–14, 21, 67, 68, 71–78, 89–95, 111, 194, 244n117. See also Bicard dit le Bouif and other works Die Landstörtzerin Courasche (The Runagate Courage) (Grimmelshausen), 5, 6–7, 21, 181 Laphin, André, 160–161 Lazarillo de Tormes (anonymous), 1, 7, 21, 30, 118, 130, 147, 181, 188 Leblanc, Maurice, 72 Leprohon, Pierre, 208 Leroux, Gaston, 72 Lesage, Alain-­René, 14. See Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (Lesage)

Index letters, 100–101, 142 Levitch, Mark, 152, 168 Lewis, Wyndam, 143, 145 Linder, Max, 200 Lintier, Paul, 33 ­Little Tramp (character), 16, 82, 100, 112, 167, 196–216, 245n10. See also Chaplin, Charlie; The Tramp (film) Les Louistics, 164f, 170, 171 Lupin, Arsène (character), 72 Machard, Alfred, 160 La Machine à galoper (La Fouchardière), 94 Mac Orlan, Pierre, 155, 171, 175, 178 Maiorino, Giancarlo, 117, 188, 190 Malaises (Bofa), 175–176, 197 Mann, Thomas, 12, 213, 247n59 man on the street. See common man Maréchal, Maurice, 68, 69–70. See also Le Canard enchaîné (newspaper) Martin, Laurent, 194 Mary, Jules, 72 M*A*S*H (tele­vi­sion series), 6 Le Massacre des innocents (Machard et Poulbot), 160 mass media: Bicard dit le Bouif and, 102–103; Le Bouif Tient and, 106; Chaplin and, 205–206, 207–208; Clavel soldat and, 188–190; Croix de bois and, 187; disruption of, 69; Le Feu and, 65, 187; Good Soldier Švejk and, 108; La Fouchar­ dière on, 67; Mémoires d’un rat and, 187; patriotism and, 69, 226n18; Scipion Pégoulade and, 78, 83, 87–89; then and now, xi–­xiii, 71; war culture and, 68–71. See also La Baïonnette and other magazines; propaganda; skull-­stuffing master/apprentice, 139 Le Matin (newspaper), 68, 71–72, 122 Mauldin, Bill, 15, 161, 239n123 McNeil, David, 4 meaning, 36–38, 42, 176. See also contempt for life or fellow man; homelessness, existential; survival medicine and hospitals, 173–174, 203–204 Meeker, Joseph, 5, 58, 116 Les Mémoires d’un rat (The Memoirs of a Rat) (Chaine): background, 125; bricolage and, 55; Chaplin compared, 206, 208;

275 characterization and, 14; cleverness and, 128–129; on death, 19; Anatole France and, 112; friendship and, 130; Hautot and, 229n9; heroism and, 126–127, 131–133, 134, 135; insanity and, 127–128; irony and, 135–136; mass media and, 187; morality and, 132, 133–134, 136, 206; points of view and, 21; rat traps and, 128–129; resignation and, 134–135; satire and, 126; temporal and narrative dissolution and, 184–185 memory, 25–28, 29, 41–42, 135 mercenaries, 4, 5 metanarratives, 3, 26–27 mice. See rats (mice) and rat traps militarization, 14 Miller, Stuart, 30, 213, 247n59 Les Misérables (Hugo), 149–150 Mis­tin­g uett (character), 83, 85, 87 modernism, 29, 36, 39 Molière, 78, 200 monsters, 178–179 Montmartre, 154–155, 157, 165. See also Poulbot Francisque “The Moon Shines Bright on Charlie Chaplin” (song), 204 morality: animal nature and, 116, 117; débrouillard and, 58–59; Gil Blas and, 131; Mémoires d’un rat and, 132, 133–134, 136, 206; Montmartre and, 156; Occupation and, 195–196; the picaresque and, 16; rats and, 121; Simplicissimus and, 130–131; Le Système D and, 193–194; Voyage and, 180 Mosse, George, 182 ­Mother Courage and her Chidren (Brecht), 6 muddling through, 47, 103. See also débrouillards (démerdards); survival; Le Système D Murillo, Bartolomé, 147–149 Les Mystères de New York (The Mysteries of New York) (cinematic serial), 71–72 My War: Killing Time in Iraq (Buzzell), xii–­xvi, xvii Napoleonic legend, 8, 80 Napoleonic wars, 20 nationalism. See French identity and selfhood; patriotism

276 Némirovsky, Irène, 195–196 1930s, 3, 25–28, 26, 27 Notbehelfe (makeshifts), 47 Oberlé, Jean, 200 Occupation, 194–196 odd ­couples, 15, 21, 101, 139, 146, 191 L’Œuvre (newspaper): Barbusse and, 78; collaboration with Germans and, 194; fake news and, 70, 71; Hautot and, 229n9; influence of, 226n28; La Fouchardière and, 76, 78, 194; serial novels and, 72, 77, 78, 125. See also Chaine, Pierre; La Fouchardière, Georges de Old Bill (character). See Bairnsfather, Bruce and Old Bill “On les aura!” (Faivre war bond poster), 18, 74–75 Owen, Wilfred, 141 Oxford Book of En­glish Verse, xii pacifism, interwar, 28 Paris, 8, 93, 128, 150. See also Montmartre Paris-­Soir, 194 Parker, Alexander, 14 Parrott, Cecil, 110 passivity. See resignation the pastoral, 115, 126 patriotism and anti-­militarism: armchair, 34, 65, 68, 69–70, 76, 126; Bicard dit le Bouif and, 97–98, 102–103, 103–104; Bofa and, 155, 172, 175; Le Canard enchaîné and, 70, 72–73; c­ hildren and, 154–155; Good Soldier Švejk and, 108; La Fouchardière and, 76, 194; mass media and, 69, 226n18; mythical tradition of, 231n35; Poulbot and, 155, 160; Scipion Pégoulade and, 78, 86; serial novels and, 72; skull-­stuffing and, 69–70 Péguy, Charles, 18 La Pe­tite semaine (newspaper), 167 Le Petit Journal (newspaper), 68 Le Petit Parisien (newspaper), 68, 189 photo­graphs, xi, 233n1 physical comforts. See creature comforts the picaresque: appeal of, 20–22; British, 136; brutalization and, 181–182; Cobley and, 30; comedy and, 31, 247n59; common man and, 1, 14; etymology of term, 4; Gallic, 7–12, 14, 118, 124–125,

index 130; genre-­based conception of, 30; influence of, 1–2, 7, 38–41, 237nn65,71; mousetraps and, 117–121; rats and, 115–116, 126; survival and, 1, 2, 3–4, 39–40, 115–116; temporalities of industrialized warfare and, 18–19, 184–187; textuality and, 188; war and, 3–7; World War I and, xiv–­x vi, 7; World War II and, 12 picaresque immunity, 7, 162 picaros, xiv, xvii, 1, 4, 7, 10, 11, 21, 24 Pickwick Papers (Dickens), 94, 218n23, 229n15 Pilgrim’s Pro­gress (Bunyan), xii, 19 poetry, 3, 29, 41, 86, 141 “poilu,” 11, 123–124 Les Poilus de la 9e (Galopin), 177–178 posters, war bond, 18, 65, 74–75, 79f, 137, 141, 147, 150–151, 152, 157 Poulaille, Henry, 199 Poulbot, Francisque, 15, 50, 136, 149–162, 153f, 164, 165, 209, 238n80, 239n117, 240n1, 241n29 power, 25. See also authority and discipline prison trope, 61, 110 “Private Perks” (song), 146 propaganda: allied, 15, 47, 54, 56, 98, 140, 146, 148; Le Canard enchaîné and, 72–73; by common men, 76–77; French humor and, 194; Les Mémoires d’un rat and, 14; Poulbot and, 152. See also mass media; patriotism and anti-­militarism; posters, war bond “Les Propos du Bouif” (The Cobbler’s Ramblings) (La Fouchardière), 90 Purseigle, Pierre, 10–11 Quevedo, Francisco de. See El Buscón Rabelais, François, 94, 106 Rabier, Benjamin, 126, 233n60 ratapoil, 232n51 Le Rat-­à-­poil (The Skinned or Naked Rat) (trench newspaper), 122, 232n51 rats (mice) and rat traps: Bairnsfather and, 139; Chaplin and, 119–120, 210; Clavel soldat and, 186, 192; contempt for life and, 193; “Desert Rats,” 123; Gavroche and, 149; Germans and, 121–122; the

Index picaresque and, 115–116, 117–121, 126, 233n63; real­ity of, 120; survival and, 125; Vietnam War and, 233n64; in Western lit­er­a­ture, 231n40. See also Les Mémoires d’un rat (Chaine) realism: Chaplin and, 207–208; Cobley and, 31; heroism versus, 18; Mémoires d’un rat and, 127, 130, 136; mutineers and, 10; poilus and, 34. refugees, 87, 157, 161 religion, 1, 10, 14, 40, 96 La République de Montmartre (charitable organ­ization), 156 resignation: Bairnsfather and, 138–139, 138f, 143–144; coercion versus consent and, 219n31; Mémoires d’un rat and, 134–135; “Old Bill” and, 142–143; the picaresque and, 1, 2, 4, 9–10; poulbots and, 152–154, 153f resilience, 4, 7, 15, 16, 47, 97, 135, 136, 205, 212, 232n40. See also cleverness and imagination (ingenuity); débrouillards (démerdards); survival; Le Système D re­spect. See heroism, dignity, honor and re­spect Revue des Deux Mondes (periodical), 189 Ribera, Jusepe, 148 Le Rire (magazine), 155, 167, 229n9, 240n12 Le Rire rouge (magazine), 70, 137, 151, 229n9 Rivière, Jacques, 10 the road, 19, 24–25 Romains, Jules, 20, 27 romance, 18–19 Ronge-­Maille vainqueur (Victorious Mesh-­Gnawer) (Descaves), 120–121, 193, 232n40, 244n114 The Runagate Courage (Die Landstörtzerin Courasche) (Grimmelshausen), 5, 6–7, 21, 181 Rus­sian soldiers, 169 Sabin, Arthur, 147 Sainéan, Lazare, 45–46, 57, 177 Salon de l’araignée, 163–165, 240n1 Salon des humoristes, 151, 155, 165, 208 sarcasm. See irony and satire Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 36

277 satire. See irony and satire “saving one’s hide” (skin), 16, 102, 123, 174, 186, 191, 212 scata­logical humor, 46, 106, 159. See also débrouillards (démerdards) Schinz, Albert, 150, 227n44 Scipion Pégoulade (La Fouchardière and Bringer): authority and, 95; common man and, 106–110; heroism and, 106–107, 108, 110; overviews, 77–89, 227nn44–45; plot of, 79–88; poster for, 79f; scata­logical humor and, 106 selfhood. See French identity and selfhood La Semaine, 194 sentimentality: Bofa on, 169, 176; Le Bouif and, 103; British advertising and, 141; Chaplin and, 112, 206, 211; mass media and, 72; Mémoires d’un rat and, 125, 136; Murillo and, 148; Poulbot and, 15, 166 serial novel genre, 32, 71–72, 77, 78, 88, 89, 209, 227n44. See also La Fouchardière, Georges de; Les Mémoires d’un rat; Scipion Pégoulade shellshock, 128, 203 shirker (civilian embusqué), 57–58, 78, 87–88, 107, 154, 186 Shoulder Arms (Charlot soldat) (film). See Chaplin, Charlie Sieber, Harry, 4 Silver, Kenneth, ­152 skull-­stuffing (bourrage de crâne): Barrès and, 70; Le Canard enchaîné and, 58, 67–68, 69–70, 71, 72–73, 73f; Chaplin and, 208–209; Clavel soldat and, 188–190; described, 65–68; l’Écho de Paris and, 67, 68, 69–70; Le Feu and, 77–78; La Fouchardière and, 67, 73–75; Mémoires d’un rat and, 131; Salon de l’araignée and, 165; Scipion Pégoulade and, 78, 83; serialized, 71–73; war culture and, 68–71. See also La Fouchardière, Georges de Smith, Leonard V., 3, 8–9, 10, 26, 27, 29, 33, 34, 35, 37, 69, 217n5, 219n31 soldier eye-­witnesses and novelists (“Récits de Combattants”), xii–­xiii, 26, 28, 67–68, 72, 178, 207. See also Barbusse, Henri and ­others; documentary s­ tyle soldier- ­on-­leave characters, 21

278 “Soldiers of the Year II,” 8, 218n26, 231n35 Soldiers Three (Kipling), 141, 142 solidarity, 22–24, 191–192, 193 solitude, 22–24 Soupault, Philippe, 200 Le Sourire (magazine), 70, 155, 167 Spanish Golden Age picaresque, 1, 14, 19, 25, 64, 93, 118. See also Lazarillo de Tormes and other works spy fever, 78, 98–99 Stendhal, 20 stomach remedies, 86 street kid (gamin de Paris), 15 Suite française (Némirovsky), 195–196 survival: affirmation of life and, 33; of art, 198–216, 215; Bairnsfather and, 142–147, 235nn39,42; Bofa and, 170; brutalization and, 181; cartoons and, 136; Chaplin’s films and, 16, 201–202, 203, 206; Clavel sodat and, 186; cleverness and, 30; Croix de bois and, 183–184; epics and, 17; episodic plots and, 32; French and, 7; French picaresque and, 11–12; heroism and, 18; La Fouchardière and, 90; as meaning, 38; Mémoires d’un rat and, 131–133, 132, 135, 136; the picaresque and, 1, 2, 3–4, 39–40, 115; poulbots and, 157; rats and, 115–116, 122–123, 125; Smith on, 34; trenches and, 14; Voyage and, 180–181. See also bricolage; le filon; immunity; muddling through; picaresque; rats (mice) and rat traps; resignation; resilience; Le Système D The Swindler (El Buscón) (Quevedo), 1, 7, 23, 30, 46, 118, 147 Le Système D: Bicard dit le Bouif and, 105; birth of, 11–12; Bofa’s cartoons and, 169–170; bricolage and, 55–57; le cafard and, 117, 177; Chaplin and, 208, 211–212, 214; common hero and, 43–44; creature comforts and, 44, 51–55; Croix de bois and, 184; described, 13, 42, 46–47; French selfhood and, 15–16, 181; Gavroche and, 149; heroism and, 48–50; Mémoires d’un rat and, 129, 135; obscenity of t­ hings and, 190; rats and, 122; sartorial, 50–51; survival and, 13, 124; Voyage and, 179; World War II and, 194–195. See also

index bricolage; cleverness and imagination; débrouillards (démerdards); le filon Tardi, Jacques, 168, 208 témoignage, 27 temporality, 7, 18–20, 36, 184–187, 208. See also episodic plots Téry, Gustave, 71, 77. See also L’Œuvre The Bystander (magazine), 139, 142, 203. See also Bairnsfather, Bruce Les Thibault (The Thibaults) (du Gard), 20, 27 ­things, obscenity of, 190–191 Thirty Years War, 5–6, 7, 65, 181 time, 19, 113, 186–187, 188, 208 Times Literary Supplement, 141 The Tin Drum (Grass), 6, 12 Tommies. See British identity Torrance, Robert, 44, 110, 181, 213, 217n3 tragedy (metanarrative), 28–30, 41–42 The Tramp (film), 201–202, 206 trenches, 13, 14, 19, 113–136 trench newspapers, 122, 177, 207, 232n51. See also Le Canard enchaîné ­ nder Fire (Barbusse). See Le Feu U United States, 140, 204, 208 Varlot soldat (Daeninckx), 168 Vauquois, 128 Verdun, 27, 128, 131–132, 140, 172 veterans/recruits, 21, 130 victimization, 9, 26–28, 30, 44. See also resignation La Vie des martyrs (Duhamel), 173 Vietnam war, 123, 233n64 Villemont, Jean, 50 Voyage au bout de la nuit ( Journey to the End of the Night) (Céline): brutalization and, 186, 197; le cafard and, 178–180; Catch-22 compared, xiii, xiv; Chaplin compared, 206; Clavel soldat compared, 187, 192, 243n107; Cobley on, 31; existential sickness and, 176; heroism and, 25; language and, 126; odd c­ ouples and, 21; overviews, 20, 27; patriotism and, xv; the picaresque and, 12, 15, 31; publication

Index of, 27; rat traps and, 118–119; satires of power and, 25; Tardi and, 168 war, 3–7. See also industrialized warfare war culture: animality and, 124; Bofa and, 169–170; British, 26; context and, 2–3, 40–41; intelligence and, 70, 189; La Fouchardière on, 68, 88–89; Poulbot and, 158–159; soldier-­writers and, 178. See also heroism, dignity, honor and re­spect; mass media; skull-­stuffing (bourrage de crâne); victimization

279 Werth, Léon, 5, 6, 12, 15, 16, 162. See also Clavel soldat Wicks, Ulrich, 38, 219n31 Wilson, James Steuart, 141–142 Winter, Jay, 8–9, 40, 219n31 ­women, 6, 104, 134, 186, 202–203 World War II, xiii, 8, 12, 15, 59, 123, 125, 161, 194–195, Bill. See also Catch-22 (Heller); Mauldin, Bill zeppelins, 152, 153f