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

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 ^1st class 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.