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Available
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Collection
Publication
NYRB Classics (2014), Paperback, 328 pages
Description
"Fear is a classic of war literature, a book to place on the shelf with Storm of Steel, A Farewell to Arms, and Going After Cacciato. Jean Dartemont, the hero of Gabriel Chevallier's autobiographical novel, enters what was not yet known as World War I in 1915, when it was just beginning to be clear that a war that all the combatants were initially confident would move swiftly to a conclusion was instead frozen murderously in place. After enduring the horrors of the trenches and the deadly leagues of no-man's-land stretching beyond them, Jean is wounded and hospitalized. Away from the front, he confronts the relentless blindness of the authorities and much of the general public to the hideous realities of modern, mechanized combat. Jean decides he must resist. How? By telling the simple truth. Urged to encourage new recruits with tales of derring-do service, Jean does not mince words. What did he do on the battlefield? He responds like a man: "I was afraid." Acclaimed as "the most beautiful book ever written on the tragic events that blood-stained Europe" for five years, prosecuted on first publication as an act of sedition, Fear appears for the first time in the United States in Malcolm Imrie's poetic and prizewinning translation on the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, the conflict with which the twentieth century came into its own. Chevallier's masterpiece remains, in the words of John Berger, "a book of the utmost urgency and relevance.""--… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member janerawoof
Wow!! This one is an unrecognized classic of the military novel genre that should be better known! Jean Dartemont, the eager young Frenchman, joins the French army in 1915 against the Germans. He is quickly disillusioned as to blind patriotism and to army life: there is no glory to be found here
We are taken through his whole military career from enlistment to the Armistice. It details Dartemont's coming upon dead Germans for the first time and his shock at how the bodies have been blown apart. In his first battle, in which he kills no one he is wounded enough to send to the hospital. Nurses there care for gruesome, grisly wounds and are disappointed there are no tales of glorious exploits. None of the patients have any to tell them. On convalescent leave, his father can't or won't understand the war from the common soldiers' viewpoint. Neither do civilians in general. Return to the front takes him either to the fighting or behind the lines as 'runner' [delivering messages under fire] or making and checking topographic maps and enemy positions, many times also under enemy bombardment. We were given an extended horrendous description of the Battle of Chemins de Dames. Letters home express what the home folks want to hear; they can't accept the soldiers' truths. As the war grinds wearily on, the despairing Dartemont writes:
"No end seems in sight. Every day men fall. Every day we have less trust in our own luck....[Some] old hands who have been there from the start believe themselves immune, invulnerable, but most believe any luck will turn....Here everything is planned for killing...and yet we want to stay alive....the horror of war resides in growing anxiety: continuation, repetition of danger." Death can be seemingly random.
This book is just as valid today as it was when it was written [1930]. I thought of Dartemont as an Everyman figure, a little man caught in brutality over which he had no control. The author pulled no punches in description; everyday events and fighting were not prettified, down to telling us about the soldiers' lice-ridden clothes and bodies. Dartemont's story and the emotions he and other soldiers feel and express so forcefully could be those of any soldier in any war; this novel just happens to be set in World War I. It is a powerful, savage anti-war, novel/memoir. It excoriates the brutal, rigid military system in toto and its hidebound officer hierarchy. Common soldiers give voice to their concerns. Even some few Germans chime in, with the same sentiments. Awarded the Croix de Guerre and made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, Chevallier drew on some of his own experiences; I'm sure that's why the insights and the 'action' were so unforgettable and so vivid. Some of the scenes were absolutely chilling and made my blood run cold.
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except that for the high officers, who grab it at the expense of the ranks. All to be found here in the trenches is only mind-numbing monotony and overwhelmingly, the desire to stay alive. Mostly the men are in a state of stasis waiting for the other side to start something. Fear, Anxiety, and Terror are Dartemont's constant companions, just as they accompany every other 'poilu' [common soldier]. We are taken through his whole military career from enlistment to the Armistice. It details Dartemont's coming upon dead Germans for the first time and his shock at how the bodies have been blown apart. In his first battle, in which he kills no one he is wounded enough to send to the hospital. Nurses there care for gruesome, grisly wounds and are disappointed there are no tales of glorious exploits. None of the patients have any to tell them. On convalescent leave, his father can't or won't understand the war from the common soldiers' viewpoint. Neither do civilians in general. Return to the front takes him either to the fighting or behind the lines as 'runner' [delivering messages under fire] or making and checking topographic maps and enemy positions, many times also under enemy bombardment. We were given an extended horrendous description of the Battle of Chemins de Dames. Letters home express what the home folks want to hear; they can't accept the soldiers' truths. As the war grinds wearily on, the despairing Dartemont writes:
"No end seems in sight. Every day men fall. Every day we have less trust in our own luck....[Some] old hands who have been there from the start believe themselves immune, invulnerable, but most believe any luck will turn....Here everything is planned for killing...and yet we want to stay alive....the horror of war resides in growing anxiety: continuation, repetition of danger." Death can be seemingly random.
This book is just as valid today as it was when it was written [1930]. I thought of Dartemont as an Everyman figure, a little man caught in brutality over which he had no control. The author pulled no punches in description; everyday events and fighting were not prettified, down to telling us about the soldiers' lice-ridden clothes and bodies. Dartemont's story and the emotions he and other soldiers feel and express so forcefully could be those of any soldier in any war; this novel just happens to be set in World War I. It is a powerful, savage anti-war, novel/memoir. It excoriates the brutal, rigid military system in toto and its hidebound officer hierarchy. Common soldiers give voice to their concerns. Even some few Germans chime in, with the same sentiments. Awarded the Croix de Guerre and made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, Chevallier drew on some of his own experiences; I'm sure that's why the insights and the 'action' were so unforgettable and so vivid. Some of the scenes were absolutely chilling and made my blood run cold.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Mercury57
The decades following the end of World War 1 saw a boom in publication of war literature and memoirs as survivors sought to make sense of the conflict and devastation. From the side of the perpetrators came the book that seemed to perfectly capture the extreme physical and mental stress felt by
A few years later, when Gabriel Chevallier, an infantryman in the French army, published his own account in Fear the reaction was rather different. The novel drew upon Chevallier's own experiences to present a damning indictment of the war that challenged the view it was a heroic, redemptive endeavour. Chevallier was decorated for his services on behalf of his country; receiving both the Croix de Guerre and Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur. But in his novel he admits he was afraid. "To have written about the war without writing about fear, without emphasising it, would have been a farce. You do not spend time in places where at any moment you may be blown to pieces without experiencing a degree of apprehension," he explained later.
Fear made such uncomfortable reading that on the eve on the next major conflagration, the author voluntarily withdrew the novel from circulation. It was not the right time, he said, to warn that war was "a disastrous venture with unforeseeable consequences."
Fear challenged French citizens to rethink their collective attitude to the war. Instead of depicting a hero, Chevallier presents a soldier who openly admits he shirked his duties whenever he could. Jean Dartemont is no patriotic warrior. He is a student who was rushed into a uniform and swiftly despatched to the front with little training and inadequate weapons. On the front line in some of the worst battlefields of the war, he huddles in a trench trying to avoid anything that would bing him into direct engagement with the enemy. His over-riding feeling is one of fear that he will be killed or wounded. For a nation wanting to hear only of brave feats, fear is an incomprehensible reaction. Dartemont sees it not as a weakness however, but a natural response.
Fear isn't something to be ashamed of; it is a natural revulsion of the body to something for which it wasn't made. ... Soldiers know what they're talking about because they have often overcome this revulsion, because they've managed to hide it from those around them who were feeling it too. ... For even when our bodies are wriggling in the mud like slugs and our mind is screaming in distress, we still sometimes want to put on a show of bravery...
Dartemont partly ascribes this desire to keep up the pretence to a need to maintain public morale. Writing to his sister, he admits however that everything he commits to paper is false because those back home would simply not understand the truth:
>... we write letters filled with suitable lies, lies to 'keep them happy'. We tell them about their war, the one they will enjoy hearing about, and we keep ours secret.
This admission of the inadmissible is what makes this novel so different. For much of the novel, Chevallier follows the trajectory we've seen in many other works depicting the war: the call up, the carnage at the front, injury, recovery and a return to the front. Dartemont begins the novel as a naive young man, rather inept as a solider and particularly bad at marching. As he digs trenches and runs orders from commanders safely ensconced in headquarters far behind the front line, he has ample time to reflect on the ineptitude of the officers. His injury and hospitalisation provide a welcome, though temporary respite from the carnage he witnesses every day. By the end of the novel he has lost all hope.
I have fallen to the bottom of the abyss of my self, to the bottom of those dungeons where the soul’s greatest secrets lie hidden, and it is a vile cesspit, a place of viscous darkness....I am ashamed of the sick animal wallowing in filth that I have become.
Chevallier said in the preface to a 1951 edition that his novel was not written to serve as propaganda. But in lifting the veil on the reality of war and the effect on the individual of decisions made in pursuit of idealogy, it still resonates today.
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soldiers on the front line. Erich Maria Remarque, a veteran himself, became viewed as a spokesman for his generation with his realistic depiction of trench warfare in All Quiet on the Western Front. Told from the perspective of young German soldiers, it struck a chord with those who had experienced the same conditions and the feelings of depression on return to civilian life. Within 18 months of publication it had been translated in 22 languages.A few years later, when Gabriel Chevallier, an infantryman in the French army, published his own account in Fear the reaction was rather different. The novel drew upon Chevallier's own experiences to present a damning indictment of the war that challenged the view it was a heroic, redemptive endeavour. Chevallier was decorated for his services on behalf of his country; receiving both the Croix de Guerre and Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur. But in his novel he admits he was afraid. "To have written about the war without writing about fear, without emphasising it, would have been a farce. You do not spend time in places where at any moment you may be blown to pieces without experiencing a degree of apprehension," he explained later.
Fear made such uncomfortable reading that on the eve on the next major conflagration, the author voluntarily withdrew the novel from circulation. It was not the right time, he said, to warn that war was "a disastrous venture with unforeseeable consequences."
Fear challenged French citizens to rethink their collective attitude to the war. Instead of depicting a hero, Chevallier presents a soldier who openly admits he shirked his duties whenever he could. Jean Dartemont is no patriotic warrior. He is a student who was rushed into a uniform and swiftly despatched to the front with little training and inadequate weapons. On the front line in some of the worst battlefields of the war, he huddles in a trench trying to avoid anything that would bing him into direct engagement with the enemy. His over-riding feeling is one of fear that he will be killed or wounded. For a nation wanting to hear only of brave feats, fear is an incomprehensible reaction. Dartemont sees it not as a weakness however, but a natural response.
Fear isn't something to be ashamed of; it is a natural revulsion of the body to something for which it wasn't made. ... Soldiers know what they're talking about because they have often overcome this revulsion, because they've managed to hide it from those around them who were feeling it too. ... For even when our bodies are wriggling in the mud like slugs and our mind is screaming in distress, we still sometimes want to put on a show of bravery...
Dartemont partly ascribes this desire to keep up the pretence to a need to maintain public morale. Writing to his sister, he admits however that everything he commits to paper is false because those back home would simply not understand the truth:
>... we write letters filled with suitable lies, lies to 'keep them happy'. We tell them about their war, the one they will enjoy hearing about, and we keep ours secret.
This admission of the inadmissible is what makes this novel so different. For much of the novel, Chevallier follows the trajectory we've seen in many other works depicting the war: the call up, the carnage at the front, injury, recovery and a return to the front. Dartemont begins the novel as a naive young man, rather inept as a solider and particularly bad at marching. As he digs trenches and runs orders from commanders safely ensconced in headquarters far behind the front line, he has ample time to reflect on the ineptitude of the officers. His injury and hospitalisation provide a welcome, though temporary respite from the carnage he witnesses every day. By the end of the novel he has lost all hope.
I have fallen to the bottom of the abyss of my self, to the bottom of those dungeons where the soul’s greatest secrets lie hidden, and it is a vile cesspit, a place of viscous darkness....I am ashamed of the sick animal wallowing in filth that I have become.
Chevallier said in the preface to a 1951 edition that his novel was not written to serve as propaganda. But in lifting the veil on the reality of war and the effect on the individual of decisions made in pursuit of idealogy, it still resonates today.
Show Less
LibraryThing member TimBazzett
Gabriel Chevallier's FEAR was first published in 1930, but wasn't translated from the French into English until 2011. I read the NYRB edition and John Berger's introduction tells us that the book was 'suppressed' during the Second World War, because of its ultra-negative attitude towards war.
"But remember this: your future old age depends on whatever helps you run. Agility is the best weapon of any clear-thinking, well organised infantryman, when things don't quite turn out the way the general imagined ... While you are affecting your strategic withdrawal, at the double, if your flies let you down and your trousers drop around your ankles, then you're well and truly collared by the comrades from Berlin."
And, a bit later -
"I have a single idea: get through the bullets, the grenades, the shells, get through them all, whether victorious or defeated. And moreover, 'to be alive is to be victorious.' This was also the sole idea of everyone around me ... I remember that I am twenty years old."
Chevallier's description of trench warfare is thorough and graphic, as he describes the trials, the tedium and the terror of sudden shelling, and worst of all, the 'over the top' advances. He also gives us a peek at the role of religion in the ranks, in an exchange between Dartemont and the unit chaplain, a priest who tries to justify the killing in war. But Jean is having none of it, and finally leaves, noting -
"Alas, God's ministers are just as much in the dark as we are ... As soon as you start to use your reason, to look for a rainbow, you always run up against the great excuse, mystery. You will be advised to light some candles, put coins in the box, say a few rosaries, and make yourself stupid."
The narrator also considers the question of self-mutilation (i.e. shooting oneself or each other in the hand or foot) to escape the front-lines, noting that -
"Soldiers talk plainly of these things, without approving or condemning, because war has accustomed them to seeing what is monstrous as natural. To them the greatest injustice is that others dispose of their lives without asking them, and have lied to them in bringing them here. This legalised injustice cancels out all morality ... They declare, without the slightest trace of shame, "We're only there because we don't have any choice.'"
There is an interesting segment which talks of a French platoon who was "on good terms with the enemy." They would exchange bread and tobacco with each other and would commune from the trenches across no-man's land in a friendly manner. But when the word got out, an inquiry was ordered, and some French NCOs were court-martialed and reduced in rank.
"The fear seemed to be that the troops would come together to end the war, overruling the generals. Apparently this outcome would have been something terrible. Hatred must never diminish. That is the order. But in spite of everything we are losing our appetite for hatred ..."
Reading FEAR in the mids of the current pandemic, I found it odd and interesting that the flu epidemic of that era, which supposedly was instrumental in ending the war, is barely mentioned. Near the end of the story, Dartemont comments -
"We were struck by a flu epidemic and a lot of men were evacuated. I had an attack myself. On the evening we were being relieved, fever took hold of me, and as I was leaving the trench, my legs gave way. Luckily I found a cart that brought me here. I've just spent four days flat on a straw mattress, not eating."
And that's pretty much it. Nothing more is said of the flu epidemic. Dartemont made it through the war - four years of it - both as a front-line soldier, and, after a serious shrapnel injury and a months-long recovery in a hospital, as a 'runner' for the company commander, a 'dug-in' job, comparable to the 'pogues' and 'remf's" of later wars.
Fear and self-preservation as prime motivating factors for the infantryman are certainly well-represented in Chevallier's novel. And, as an anti-war tome, perhaps it is best summed up in these lines -
"Let me give you the balance sheet of this war: fifty great men to go down in the annals of history; millions of dead who won't be mentioned any more; and one thousand millionaires who lay down the law. A soldier's life is worth about fifty francs in the wallet of some fat industrialist in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Vienna or anywhere else ... Human stupidity is incurable."
FEAR is certainly genuine-seeming and well-written, and yet it was, for me, something of a slog. And I'm not really sure why. Maybe something was lost in translation. But I will, nevertheless, recommend it highly for war lit enthusiasts. (three and a half stars)
- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA
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Indeed, Chevallier's overriding message in this highly autobiographical novel is that fear and survival are the infantryman's most constant thoughts. Early on, he gives us an image of his narrator, Jean Dartemont, checking and tightening all the straps and fastenings on his kit, saying - "But remember this: your future old age depends on whatever helps you run. Agility is the best weapon of any clear-thinking, well organised infantryman, when things don't quite turn out the way the general imagined ... While you are affecting your strategic withdrawal, at the double, if your flies let you down and your trousers drop around your ankles, then you're well and truly collared by the comrades from Berlin."
And, a bit later -
"I have a single idea: get through the bullets, the grenades, the shells, get through them all, whether victorious or defeated. And moreover, 'to be alive is to be victorious.' This was also the sole idea of everyone around me ... I remember that I am twenty years old."
Chevallier's description of trench warfare is thorough and graphic, as he describes the trials, the tedium and the terror of sudden shelling, and worst of all, the 'over the top' advances. He also gives us a peek at the role of religion in the ranks, in an exchange between Dartemont and the unit chaplain, a priest who tries to justify the killing in war. But Jean is having none of it, and finally leaves, noting -
"Alas, God's ministers are just as much in the dark as we are ... As soon as you start to use your reason, to look for a rainbow, you always run up against the great excuse, mystery. You will be advised to light some candles, put coins in the box, say a few rosaries, and make yourself stupid."
The narrator also considers the question of self-mutilation (i.e. shooting oneself or each other in the hand or foot) to escape the front-lines, noting that -
"Soldiers talk plainly of these things, without approving or condemning, because war has accustomed them to seeing what is monstrous as natural. To them the greatest injustice is that others dispose of their lives without asking them, and have lied to them in bringing them here. This legalised injustice cancels out all morality ... They declare, without the slightest trace of shame, "We're only there because we don't have any choice.'"
There is an interesting segment which talks of a French platoon who was "on good terms with the enemy." They would exchange bread and tobacco with each other and would commune from the trenches across no-man's land in a friendly manner. But when the word got out, an inquiry was ordered, and some French NCOs were court-martialed and reduced in rank.
"The fear seemed to be that the troops would come together to end the war, overruling the generals. Apparently this outcome would have been something terrible. Hatred must never diminish. That is the order. But in spite of everything we are losing our appetite for hatred ..."
Reading FEAR in the mids of the current pandemic, I found it odd and interesting that the flu epidemic of that era, which supposedly was instrumental in ending the war, is barely mentioned. Near the end of the story, Dartemont comments -
"We were struck by a flu epidemic and a lot of men were evacuated. I had an attack myself. On the evening we were being relieved, fever took hold of me, and as I was leaving the trench, my legs gave way. Luckily I found a cart that brought me here. I've just spent four days flat on a straw mattress, not eating."
And that's pretty much it. Nothing more is said of the flu epidemic. Dartemont made it through the war - four years of it - both as a front-line soldier, and, after a serious shrapnel injury and a months-long recovery in a hospital, as a 'runner' for the company commander, a 'dug-in' job, comparable to the 'pogues' and 'remf's" of later wars.
Fear and self-preservation as prime motivating factors for the infantryman are certainly well-represented in Chevallier's novel. And, as an anti-war tome, perhaps it is best summed up in these lines -
"Let me give you the balance sheet of this war: fifty great men to go down in the annals of history; millions of dead who won't be mentioned any more; and one thousand millionaires who lay down the law. A soldier's life is worth about fifty francs in the wallet of some fat industrialist in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Vienna or anywhere else ... Human stupidity is incurable."
FEAR is certainly genuine-seeming and well-written, and yet it was, for me, something of a slog. And I'm not really sure why. Maybe something was lost in translation. But I will, nevertheless, recommend it highly for war lit enthusiasts. (three and a half stars)
- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA
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Awards
Scott Moncrieff Prize for French Translation (Winner — 2012)
Language
Original language
French
Original publication date
1930
2011 (English translation)
Physical description
336 p.; 5 x 1 inches
ISBN
1590177169 / 9781590177167
Local notes
French title: La Peur