Ten Minutes of Anthrax!: Some Notes on French Combatant Trench Scripts of the First World War

I

Before we raise the curtain, which is noticeable by its absence . . .

--Marcel Astruc and Léon Bruele. Songs! Armaments!
Performed February 1916 at a site which the censor forbids us from naming

In September 1914, Paris shut down, while in the squares and marketplaces of Bordeaux, war brought carnivalesque "binges and banquets." One hundred thousand French government and press employees and their entourage descended on the city and, during a glorious autumn, filled the restaurants and cafés to bursting. "Well, buddy," commented a local restaurateur to a Parisian exile in a tone of half commiseration, half encouragement, and southern humor, "you've got a war up there!"

The First World War began in August 1914 on the Western Front as a war of rapid movement, but by mid-November of that same year, at the end of the first battle of Ypres, it had shifted character. Though massive battles (the Somme, Passchendaele, and Verdun) were later waged, they were intermittent. Instead, continuous small-scale attacks in which movement was measured in yards rather than miles became the routine warfare of a static trench existence. This was a large part of the total war experience for most soldiers during the following four years.

The front is not a fixed line, yet it is a clear one: arriving there, the soldier separates from the world behind. Gone is a life lived in rooms and the clothing that accompanied it, gone the body language lived in such clothes and such rooms. Gone are the hours of the day made familiar by their occupations and preoccupations, gone the dense patterning of civilian laws. Here there are almost no changes from the regulations that governed the medieval soldier: there is no disobedience, no desertion, no taking unauthorized leave, no changing sides, no sleeping on watch, no betraying the password, no selling arms, no brawls, no conspiracy. All this made for a process of militarization, primarily dependent on an ambience different enough and often distant enough from the home front to justify reference to a "society of soldiers"--a world of men. Departing for the front, whether voluntarily or not, the soldier passed a checkpoint of talk and messages that left him marginalized, more dependent on the military society he joined. There were local issues, local reactions. There was soldier-talk. There was staying alive. Front and home front--the soldiers said that going on home leave was like being hanged twice: impossible to go back, and then impossible to come back. The war front, then, was the only place left where you could get away from the war.

This war front, the Western Front of World War I from 1914 to 1918, is my research site: 475 miles of two roughly parallel trench systems (as in any war, ours and theirs), separated by a no-man's-land that varied from a thousand yards to as narrow as five yards, a feat of landscaping that theoretically allowed one to walk below ground from Belgium to Switzerland. Add the many access trenches and backup trenches built to hold these four hundred miles on both sides, and you arrive at twenty-five thousand miles, a trench long enough to circle the world. On this stage, twelve million men were positioned.

It was in this world that the French poilu, or foot soldier, wrote and performed his trench scripts: works "with cannons for music, the front for decor," ¹ often "written and performed in two days, and played at the theatre of operations . . . at six kilometers from the front, in a village heavily bombarded." ² Writing and performing under such duress, or even in the relatively more quiet zones where the "live and let live" principle prevailed, the soldier did not write polemics; though his performance was political, he studiously avoided politics. He was...