The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (review)

Leonard Smith reassuringly concludes his excellent little study of French soldiers’ Great War writings by declining to propose a replacement “metanarrative” for a discarded one of tragedy and victimization (p. 202). He assures the reader that French war memoirs and novels were not uniform products of machine-age war but individual voices describing a range of experiences and expressing conflicting moral attitudes. In other words, we can use war literature to learn what Great War soldiers did and how they thought about it—and we can do so without grappling with “metanarrative.”

Smith’s study focuses on four themes in French war literature: rites of passage (mobilization, combat, and reintegration into civil society); “mastery” of war’s defining experiences (death, mutilation, killing); soldiers’ “consent” as an explanation for their continued participation in the four years of slaughter; and novels as the preferred medium for bringing closure to wartime trauma.

Smith’s chapter on rites of passage begins with predictable themes. Mobilization brings both separation from civilian society and certification of manhood. The initiation to war is frightening, painful, and sometimes even mutilating, but it makes boys into men and men into warriors. Survival, moreover, is its own triumph. While the themes are predictable, such is the enormity of the Great War that actual rites of passage do not fall into conventional patterns. Each of the examples Smith describes seems particular to an individual rather than representative of any universal experience. Indeed, twice he notes that wartime rites of passage shifted the focus from group to individual (pp. 35–36), that “liminality brought individuality back to center stage” (p. 42). Thus, these are not true rites of passages which, as Smith notes “were collective…and their meanings were understood in advance by both the initiates and the broader society” (p. 60).

Just as the rites of passage were ambiguous, the fighting itself was too awful and overwhelming to allow the development of a uniform narrative. Indeed, Smith argues, “in creating themselves through stories of death, mutilation, and killing, narrators and narratives produced not mastery but a fascinating textual world of contradictions, ambiguities, and peculiarities” (p. 62). The result of these “endlessly inventive attempts” is a fascinating puzzle for the historian (p. 62). Particularly interesting is Smith’s observation that Great War memoirs are remarkably silent on the matter of killing (p. 90). The fact of such reticence is clearly important in its own right, but it does not encourage those of us hoping to find in the war literature a better understanding of how the soldiers fought.

Smith’s study of “consent” continues his long-term project of replacing the soldier as victim with the soldier as a conscious member of the political community of the Third Republic. The poilu’s commitment to the cause reflected “a powerful combination of republican logic and nationalist affect” (p. 125). One cannot help but be moved by Smith’s description of the pride evinced by the survivors of one unit at a decoration ceremony at Verdun in June 1916.

The last chapter suggests how the novels of the interwar period closed out the war in such a way as to silence the many conflicting voices of the wartime literature. Sadly for our understanding, the war had been reduced to a tragedy suffered by its participants mostly in silence.

This is not an easy book, but no one should be put off by Smith’s language of témoignage and “temporality.” Lucid prose renders complex arguments accessible and the text a genuine pleasure to read. That one finishes it with questions merely acknowledges the inherent intractability of the Great War. Thanks to Smith’s Embattled Self we may, however, tackle that conflict with a greater confidence in our sources.