Elementary forms of war literature : letter, diary, notebook, photograph

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The letter is the elementary form of war literature. Jean Norton Cru regretted that there were so few correspondences among the three hundred books listed in his Witnesses (1929). Two scenes are omnipresent: the distribution of letters and their dispersal among the corpses on the battlefield.

Mail delivery. At the front, the mailman is a formidable and feared figure. Barbusse also likens him to a storyteller, a sort of rhapsode or itinerant reciter who serves as a conduit between the front and the staging area, bringing news from the cantonments and headquarters. The ritual of distribution is a crucial part of the day. Letters are kept, reread and sent back, to prevent them from being forgotten, because soldiers are, as Barbusse puts it, "machines for forgetting".

The scattering of letters around corpses on the battlefield. Letters from slain enemies are part of the spoils of war, along with identity papers and photographs, when the pockets of the dead are searched. Barbusse, with his documentary mania, sends German letters to his wife, translating them. The same sort of scene can be found in Genevoix or Montherlant, who despises the letter because it deviralises the warrior by tying him to the rear and to women. For them, the letters that flutter about after the battle are like the souls of the dead that escape. Mention of the letters that continue to arrive for those killed is also an obligatory tableau, in Dorgelès and Barbusse in particular. The leitmotif of the suffering letters is death.

A final aspect of letters is the exchange in which they participate. Norton Cru considered them to be the most faithful testimonies of the war to the newspaper, the literary concern being absent, or at least less so than in other genres. Yet we know that the addressee is always partly the author of the letter. After a disastrous assault, Dorgelès wrote very different accounts of the event to his mother and his mistress on the same date, seeking to appease the former and worry the latter, and doubtless lying to both, to one by discretion or ellipsis and to the other by exaggeration or hyperbole. We could quote Norton Cru's own letters to his sisters, brothers and mother, in which we find very different versions of each event.

In addition to distributing and reading letters, postcards often depict the reading of newspapers. Newspapers are read collectively and publicly, a typical scene, noted for example by Jean Paulhan in Le Guerrier appliqué. Newspapers are always evoked with the soldiers' ambivalence towards them, an exacerbation of our ordinary reaction to the press. We can't do without newspapers, and we hate their lies. Barbusse calls the journalists taken to the front by Philippe Berthelot, a senior Foreign Affairs official, "trench tourists", an expression used in Le Feu. We depended on newspapers, which we distrusted at the same time.

The expression "bourrage de crâne" ("brainwashing"), coined during the Great War, captures this ambivalence. Proust, in Le Temps retrouvé, observes, however, that the victims of the press are consenting: "... the real stuffing of the skull is done to oneself by hope, which is a kind of self-preservation instinct of a nation, if one is really a living member of that nation". Brainwashing, according to Proust (who was at the back), is therefore indispensable.

After letters and diaries come notebooks, the third basic form of war literature. In August 1914, we didn't leave with books in our musette, since the war was supposed to be short, but we did leave with a notebook in our pocket; in every family, the war notebooks begun on August¹, 1914 are kept with the letters. We'll be writing letters every day, just as we did at the start of the war.

A study could be made of the instruments used for all this writing, alluded to in Barbusse's correspondence (his "aquatic pen", which he also called "water-pen", probably Waterman). Paulhan, in Le Guerrier appliqué , mentions the purchase of a penholder and a "folding inkwell" at his billet. Alongside this equipment, the camera was also a formidable documentation tool. Cendrars and Barbusse both had one at the front. The latter called it "Pige-Tout" in his correspondence with his wife. Notes were taken everywhere, including with the "Pige-Tout".

The pen and the camera evoked the illusion of democracy in the trenches, the supposed social melting pot that marked the abolition of class boundaries at the front. Indeed, war literature had an impact on the populist literature of the interwar period. Drieu la Rochelle, a private ^1stclass at the Battle of Charleroi, had a "tampon", like a non-commissioned officer, because the mobilized bourgeois still paid for domestic service. But no social category was more wiped out than the young "normaliens" who had passed the competitive examination between 1910 and 1913 (50% killed). Polytechniciens were much more spared, because they were in the artillery (the proportion of deaths in the infantry was a quarter of soldiers, a third of officers, but half of young Normaliens). Barbusse's concern was not to look bourgeois in the trenches, but writing, keeping a notebook, was undeniably a sign of class.

Genevoix describes a rare moment of domestic sweetness in October 1914, in an occupied house where a little intimacy can be reconstituted. He fills in his notebook. This reunion with oneself in the midst of war is possible for those who take notes, who have a pen and who isolate themselves in writing. Letters and notebooks: these are the rudiments of wartime literature.