One disconcerting aspect of Great War literature is its fantastic side, characterized as much by incomprehension and confusion on the battlefield as by the paradoxical sense of vacation, fair and carnival experienced by the combatant.
In Les Poissons morts (1917), a work severely criticized by Norton Cru for treating the war "like a big joke, a grotesque farce", Pierre Mac Orlan introduced what he called "social fantasy" into the war novel, comparing, for example, the infantryman known as the "biffin", a term originally used to designate the ragpicker, to the wandering Jew. Thibaudet, too, remained insensitive to the fantastic aspect of the novel of destiny, a category he condemned wholesale, since it is without heroes, energy or initiative, but with victims: "To abandon oneself to a destiny," he wrote in the NRF of April 1920, "to follow, to be a drop of water in the current."
A major figure in the novel of war as a novel of destiny, the individual renouncing himself in the group, is that of the mess, which explains the fatalism of the biffin. The soldier, who doesn't understand a thing, experiences war as a mess and a lottery. In Le Trésor de la langue française, under the word "pagaille", the second example is borrowed from Cendrars: "La pagaïe? But it's when events overwhelm the regulations laid down in a well-policed state that has left nothing to the unforeseen"(La Main coupée). The word, which comes from the sailors, quickly became a term used by the poilus. It was spotted by Albert Dauzat in L'Argot de la guerre in 1918 and by Gaston Esnault in Le Poilu tel qu'il se parle in 1919. From 1916 onwards, the term appears in many war stories, with the epithets "effroyable" or "extraordinaire".
War is a mess, a great confusion, which introduces the second ubiquitous figure of the mental confusion of the man lost in the shuffle: Fabrice at Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Parme, a novel whose first part is the model for the novel of destiny or mess, and whose second is the prototype for the novel of will. Norton Cru, however, argued against the conventional wisdom that the beginning of La Chartreuse de Parme is the definitive realistic representation of war as experienced by the trooper lost on the battlefield, running hither and thither without understanding, unaware of the tactical and strategic purpose of the action of which he is a pawn. According to Cru, Fabrice is a child; his heroism is bookish, naive and foolish, followed by disillusionment.
