Another figure in the war novel as a novel of destiny is the Senegalese riflemen, often mentioned, but only fleetingly, and at greater length in La Randonnée de Samba Diouf (1922) by the Tharaud brothers. Their presence is conveyed through clichés such as indiscipline, cruelty, courage and gaiety, for example in Barbusse, Dorgelès, Paulhan and Drieu la Rochelle. We admire the real soldiers, but insist on their difference. Exoticism always prevails in their description, except in Bakary Diallo's Force-Bonté (1926), whose title alludes to General Mangin's La Force noire (1910).
Many words entered the French language during the war, such as pagaille, bourreur de crâne and barda. Many of these words were introduced by the African Army. Dauzat's Argot de la guerre (1918) focuses on them, such as cafard or barda (which gave rise to Bardamu in Voyage au bout de la nuit).
Cafard" is a characteristic feature of war as a paradoxical vacation period. This feeling is linked to the immobility of the front, and is widespread in the barracks and billets. Cafard" refers to sadness, boredom, melancholy, hellish monotony, spleen, dark thoughts. For Baudelaire ("La destruction", Les Fleurs du mal), the word doesn't yet mean dark thoughts, but bigot, hypocrite, sneak. The spread of the word cafard, in the sense of melancholy, is contemporary with the Great War. Both meanings, hypocritical and melancholy, derive from the cockroach, a black animal that shuns light. Also called "Saharite", "Biskrite", "Southern neurosis", the cockroach is omnipresent in the literature of this war.
In the spring of 1918, two literate military doctors, Louis Huot and Paul Voivenel, published a book entitled Le Cafard. Is the cockroach a real morbid entity, or is it indiscipline, or is it simulation? The authors argue, against the majority of doctors, for the existence of the cockroach, born, according to them, in 1916, following stays in the trenches. They distinguish between two types of cockroach: normal, which manifests itself as either despondency or grumpiness, and abnormal, which causes desertion. According to them, cockroaches have always existed, and they take as an example of an ancient cockroach that of Achilles in theIliad. Used by veterans turned writers such as Bernanos, Duhamel, Montherlant, Céline, Roger Martin du Gard and Aragon, the word is immensely present in the literature of the interwar period.
