Drieu la Rochelle's apology for action contains a threat to the future, to peace. His phraseology recalls Joseph de Maistre (purification by blood), Nietzsche (the will to power) and Barrès (the cult of the ego). This had worrying consequences for peace. As early as 1917, the threat was already there: a good part of the poems inInterrogation is devoted to the preparation of peace. The focus shifts from war to the post-war era as the pursuit of an armed society, the apology of big industry, and soon the "fascist socialism" that Drieu would defend in the 1930s. This early prophecy of Drieu's predates the positions he took in the 1930s, and even Jünger's texts such as Le Travailleur (1932). This announcement of an armed peace also stems from the fear that demobilization will occur as pacifists would wish. Drieu is clearly one of those warriors who aspire to a revolution that continues the war (war and revolution are one and the same for him).
In his second collection, Fond de cantine, published in 1920 by the NRF, Drieu demands loyalty to dead friends(Métempsychose) as a duty imposed on veterans to fight against the fall into the state of peace and democracy, easy living and moral mediocrity, a decadence opposed to the archetype of virtue represented by war. All of Drieu's poems from 1917 and 1920 are potentially there. Later, in a review of Remarque'sÀ l'ouest rien de nouveau in 1929, he was to denounce this moment of warlike exaltation, which he would describe as intellectual lyricism, an exaltation of the will to power. In La Comédie de Charleroi, a narrative conceived as a palinody of his youthful poems, the denunciation of trench democracy is no less present, as is the criticism of modern warfare shamefully "laid low". The warrior mystique is the same, as is the intellectual's self-hatred and desire to be a leader: "What suddenly sprang up? A leader. [...] A leader is a man in his prime; a man who gives and takes in the same ejaculation. I was a chef." This sexual erethism is common to both Jünger and Montherlant, and the intoxication of this ecstatic moment will persist in Drieu, who always associates war with love and revolution, whereas pacifism is seen by him as a state of depression.
There is, however, another side to Drieu's war texts, for he is one of the few to have spoken so well of fear. The same pages that exalt action describe the "colic of fear". Drieu was forever marked by a scene that recurs in all his texts and constitutes a second initiatory moment: the fear linked to bombardments and a shell falling nearby: "A cry from behind, ah, that first human cry of war This primitive cry, torn from him at Verdun in 1916, runs through all his work, particularly La Comédie de Charleroi. Drieu la Rochelle (like Montherlant - for we must be fair about him - or even Cendrars, Genevoix, Alain or Paulhan) has always maintained an ambivalence and tension between the will to power and the admission of weakness, between eternal chivalric warfare (Charleroi) and industrial, democratic warfare (Verdun).
