Fear

INTRODUCTION. THE IMPERATIVE NEED

‘THE YELLOW LIGHT OF A DAY that seemed to falter as if it too was struck by horror, illuminated a lifeless, soundless battlefield. It was as if everything around us and off into infinity was dead, and we did not dare raise our voices. It felt as if we had come to some place in the world which was part of a dream, that had gone beyond all the limits of reality and hope.’

The ‘we’ refers to French soldiers (poilus, not officers) serving in the trenches. The ‘place’ is near Douai in Flanders. The horrific experiences related in this book were lived almost a century ago. 1914–1918. The book itself was first published in 1930. My guess is that it took several years to write because indignation — more often than not, and contrary to what one might expect — slows writing down.

What this written book achieves, however, is of the utmost urgency and relevance today. As a graphic day-to-day account of survival, pain and death in the trenches, dugouts and saps, it is unique and almost insupportable, and, at the same time, it is about something more: about the endless outrages which separate official bulletins (and then History books) from the millions of maimed and lost lives on the killing fields.

Its fury is directed against the deliberate and manufactured ignorance existing between speeches and bloodshed. The ignorance not of those on the ground and under fire, but of the war leaders and decision-making commanders.

Most rulers lie, yet lies are less shocking, less corrosive than the chosen, cultivated ignorance Chevallier addresses here. This ignorance denies the reality of anything which provokes pity. It is an error to think of such war leaders (or, today, economic strategists) as pitiless; they are abject. And this is what we have to learn and act upon. They are abject.

At the literary checkpoints this book probably claimed to be a novel. It isn’t. A memoir, then, for Chevallier himself served in the trenches. It isn’t a memoir. A passionate plea, then, plea for pacifism. Again it won’t pass. It’s a book without papers. Consisting of what? A chorus of voices. It’s a choral work. The voices have come together to break a silence, the silence of deliberate ignorance, and to fill it with stories and descriptions and remarks and confessions until now unheard. This book, wonderfully translated, is like a choral avalanche of anger, pity and hopes deferred. I can think of three other books which are comparable avalanches: Tolstoy’s Resurrection, Victor Serge’s Years Without Pity and Andrei Platanov’s Chevengur. Such great books wait a long while before being finally admitted for what they are.

When I write that, I think of my father reading this book, which he never did. He endured four years in the trenches with the British infantry. I was born eight years after the end of the war. But the war was part of the map with which I tried to find my way about, during my early childhood, my adolescence, and later too. The war marked an area on that map which covered one of the extreme limits of human experience, close to the tragic, unanswerable, but, unlike the tragic, silent and perhaps futile.

My father talked about the experience of those four years to nobody. Or anyway that was my impression. In my presence he would sometimes finger and look at his mementos: a field compass, a revolver, some trench maps, a few letters and lists, some machine-gun rounds, the ring of a hand grenade. Sometimes he named them but said no more. The rest was indescribable, and the fact that I was a child, to whom so much was still indescribable, made this sharing natural and possible.

When I was nearly fifty, I wrote a poem about the battlefields of Ypres, which are about sixty miles to the north of Douai. I gave it to my father. He read it — he did not read many poems — he looked at me, he lowered his eyelids, then he nodded, folded the paper in four and slipped it into his pocket.

Base: fields whose mud is waterlogged

Perpendicular: thin larches

planted in rows

with broken

branches

Horizontal: brick walls the colour of

dead horses

Sinking: lower

and lower

houses with dark windows

Sometimes a wall is white-washed

a rectangle of dead lime

under the indifferent clouds

Here all poultry should have webbed feet

At dusk drowned soldiers cross the field to steal chickens

Through base

perpendicular

and horizontal

there is order:

the order of split wood

broken branches

walls the colour of dead horses

and roofs fallen in

There is no way out except across

Nothing reaches any heaven from here

Between earth and sky there is

a transparent canopy

plaited from cock crows

and the cries of soldiers

This book consists of the chorus of the cries of those soldiers. And I believe that if my father had read it and heard the silence filled, he would have been confirmed by the declared pain and anger, by the raised voices and by the imperative need for us today to learn from them.

John Berger

John Berger’s poem appeared in his Pages of the Wound: Poems, Drawings, Photographs, 1956–96, Bloomsbury, 1996.