Jules Romains' Verdun (1938), which was not written in the trenches, is a good summary of the balancing act between the doldrums and the laughter of the trenches. He attributes the doldrums to "fathers of families" and the laughter to "young beings", who, he says, "don't think about the future" and "don't have easy pity": "They know how to be ferocious while laughing." This ferocity of laughter is interesting.
We have distinguished between nervous gaiety before the attack, elation during the action, the laughter of the survivor, retrospective laughter or the irony of history, and yellow laughter or black humor. For laughter in action, Genevoix, in Sous Verdun (1916), evokes the "beneficial contagion" of elation, joy and laughter in the midst of the Battle of the Marne on September 10, 1914. He also describes the great laughter of the survivors. Barbusse explains post-battle laughter as "the feast of survival", and Dorgelès insists on terminal laughter: "... and we laughed all the same". Black humor, the last stage of war laughter, is presented by Jules Romains as a conjuring rite at the moment of fear. The aforementioned doctors Louis Huot and Paul Voivenel noted that there was little or no singing in the trenches and billets in 1918, and that soldiers' gaiety was less visible than at the beginning. They called the new laughter of 1918 "cold ironist laughter".
After the novel of destiny, the novel of passivity, the war novel has been analyzed as a novel of will or adventure, following Thibaudet's distinction. There are also books that belong to this sub-genre, even if posterity has preferred the other, notably the pacifist literature that portrays soldiers as victims. all intellectuals," wrote Huot and Voivenel, "thanks to war have tasted the voluptuousness of action War had created what they called an "aristocracy of risk". War brought another kind of freedom, an unusual, insolent freedom that resulted from the loosening of habitual social and moral constraints, from the lifting of prohibitions. It's a state that sociologists since Durkheim have called anomie, in which people are left to their own devices and disoriented, because family and social ties have unraveled. This explains a number of the excesses that accompany the action: looting, rape, summary executions. Bardamu sums up this anomic freedom, found throughout the literature of the Great War, in Voyage au bout de la nuit : "... there was no one left to watch over us! Just us, like married people doing dirty things when everyone else has gone".
