Two other themes were frequently encountered in Great War literature. The first is that of the "silence of the permissionnaire", an expression borrowed from Jean Paulhan's Les Fleurs de Tarbes ou la Terreur dans les Lettres (1941). It's an obligatory part of war books, since leave almost always results in a fiasco, at least in literature. In many accounts, the best moment of leave is the one before arrival. Furlough is an ambivalent moment, as evidenced by a letter from Alain in 1915: "Eight days' furlough is like a man being hanged twice." It seems that, in literature, leave is almost always unhappy, except in the case of Cendrars, who recounts his first leave at Chabanais in July 1915.
At once luminous and sombre, "perme" is an omnipresent obsession in the letters. The discovery of the rear, where life goes on as before, gives the leave-holder a sense of unreality, and sometimes the idea of death, as in Montherlant's Le Songe . Leave confirms the misunderstanding that war has created almost everywhere, particularly between men and women, and between the front and the rear. On leave, the soldier discovers that his wife, mother and sister have become emancipated since they replaced him in the fields, the factory or the office, and the reunion is never easy. Jules Romains speaks of "a Freemasonry of men at the front" and of the warrior's very ancient "state of mind" that isolates him from the rest of society.
During leave, the experience of the front is even more inconceivable than in the trenches, because its abomination is unmentionable or shameful, and the freemasonry of the combatants is strengthened. Paulhan, who in Le Guerrier appliqué was already sensitive to the difficulty of recounting, returns to this in a chapter of Fleurs de Tarbes, entitled "L'homme muet", where he interprets the "silence of the permissionnaire" of the Great War both as a symptom of language sickness in general and as a specificity of war or post-war neurosis. He develops an intuition present in many writers, such as Céline in Voyage au bout de la nuit: "We each went back to the war. And then things happened, and more things, that are not easy to recount now, because those of today would no longer understand them." The permissionnaire's silence is the only possible reaction to the paradox of war, which is the powerlessness of testimony.
