In line with Duhamel, who challenged the idea of a new literature and a new man born of war, Thibaudet wrote in La NRF in January 1922: "We often complain that the Great War has not yet produced the immediate literature we expected." Since immediacy means the absence of mediation or intermediary, Thibaudet, a disciple of Bergson, was thinking less of an instantaneous literature, devoted to contemporary events, than of a raw literature, a literature of testimony. The critic recalls that just before the war, there was a polemic about "immediate literature", championed by the Abbaye group around Duhamel and Jules Romains, anxious to give immediate expression to reality as opposed to discursive or analytical literature. Paradoxically, according to Thibaudet, immediate literature requires a "lapse of time", "shadow, mystery, silence", to become a reality. Indeed, it took a long time for it to appear in French literature, unlike English literature, which succeeded early in providing an immediate expression of the war experience.
According to Thibaudet, "almost all war literature derives from two types: that of Servitude et grandeur militaires and that of the naturalist novel; the book of individual moral meditation, and the slice of life". So, on the one hand, there's the book of moral considerations on war, generally written by an officer, and on the other hand, the naturalistic narrative, written by a soldier. Thibaudet looks forward to the emergence of a third type of novel, which would be this immediate literature. In his view, it is the corporal, the level of command immediately in contact with the soldiers, who is "the best situation to experience the whole life of the army" and to "render this living military energy in a book".
This thesis on the war novel was first put forward by Thibaudet in 1920. He contrasted the novel of destiny (the novel of the mass, à la Zola) with the novel of the will (the novel of the individual, à la Stendhal). It could be said that, between the novel of destiny and the novel of the individual, there would be room for the novel of the corporal. Thibaudet's intuition (he himself was a corporal) seems to be confirmed by the fact that all the major novels about the Great War were written by corporals, such as Céline, Drieu la Rochelle, Cendrars, or even Paulhan, a sergeant, who makes the hero of Le Guerrier appliqué a corporal.
The abundance of writings on and during the Great War is staggering. No other historical event has unleashed as much literature as this one - not to mention the fourteen volumes of Barrès' chronicles, Norton Cru's review of three hundred books, the five-volume anthology of dead writers published between 1924 and 1926, or the two thousand pages of Thirty Years of French Life, Thibaudet's major work written between 1914 and 1918. There are several reasons for this immense output. The first was the prolonged duration of the war. All observers point out that a lot of writing was done in the cantonments, but also in the trenches.
