Adventure classics -- Walking away from a war

A Fable

by William Faulkner

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There are a bunch of great stories struggling to emerge from William Faulkner’s monumental 1954 anti-war novel, A Fable. There’s the story of a failed French mutiny followed by scapegoat executions. And the story of underhanded political maneuvering to prolong the war. And soldiers who bet their lives (or at least their life insurance) to a shady ex-jockey. Even--my favorite--a nugget of story straight out of Faulkner’s home territory of fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, about that same shady jockey, a black preacher and a stolen three-legged racehorse. Unfortunately, these great stories are swamped by a barrage of allegory and stream of consciousness that, as one reviewer wrote, “results in the reader becoming unconscious.”

But if I’m wild about allegory and stream of consciousness (not to mention amazingly convoluted sentences), why am I reading Faulkner in the first place? Because he’s Faulkner, due a debt of gratitude for at least half a dozen towering novels, for being one of the few U.S. Southern writers of his generation to tackle racial issues, and for language that has influenced the likes of the late Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who once took his family on a tour of Faulknerian sites.

And because I really wanted a nonsectarian story about World War I for this centennial year of the beginning of the war the world once hoped would end all war. Except that it didn’t, leaving Faulkner, a World War I veteran himself, to begin writing A Fable as the world watched the death struggles of the Battle of the Bulge in the war that followed.

The central incident of A Fable is based loosely on the executions for mutiny of four French soldiers in World War I, whose regiment refused to make a hopeless assault. Another Great War veteran, Humphrey Cobb, used the same incident in his 1935 novel, Paths of Glory (later adapted into the 1957 Stanley Kubrick film of the same name).

In Faulkner’s hands, the alleged ringleaders of the mutiny grow in stature, becoming
avatars of Christ and his disciples, sacrificed to the gods of war. True to his allegorical antecedents, the central mutineer, Corporal Stefan, gathers a band of twelve followers and spends the three years of war prior to the mutiny proselytizing not only Allied soldiers, but the German troops they face across the trenches. When the corporal’s French regiment refuses to fight, their enemies also stop. The mutiny spreads up and down the lines as British and American troops also stop fighting, joined sympathetically by the Germans. For one shining May afternoon in 1918, the war ceases.

But not for long. “We did it,” the generals rejoice as conflict resumes. “No barrage by us or vice versa to prevent an enemy running over us with bayonets and hand grenades or vice versa, but a barrage by both of We to prevent naked and weaponless hand touching opposite naked and weaponless hand. . . Not only you and I and our tight close jealous unchallengeable hierarchy behind this wire and our opposite German one behind that one, but more. . . .”

(That last sentence is only a fragment of the actual Faulkner version. And about that stolen racehorse story? Sorry, you’ll have to dig that one out on your own. Flip about a third of the way through A Fable to begin the excavation.)

For a more gracious assessment, I enjoyed the discussion at Entry 24: “A Fable” by William Faulkner (1955) at “The Pulitzer Blog,”
http://thepulitzerblog.blogspot.com/.  And for a recent and approachable novel about the aftermath of a British execution in World War I, I highly recommend Elizabeth Speller’s The Return of Captain John Emmett.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics concludes a May of historical fiction with Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk.)

Adventure classics -- A thousand chances to die

All Quiet on the Western Front

by Erich Maria Remarque

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After his first battle, young soldier Henry Fleming in last week’s Adventure classic, Red Badge of Courage, still had the will and intellect to rail at God and fate. After two years of war, the young soldiers of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front can only endure.

“No soldier outlives a thousand chances,” muses twenty-year-old Paul Baumer, the twenty-year-old protagonist. “But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.”

Baumer’s luck, as we know, will run out a month before the armistice that ends the First World War, “on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.” But until that day, Baumer will keep us terrified, cheering, crying, and sometimes laughing with him and his comrades in what has been called the greatest war novel -- more accurately, the greatest anti-war novel -- of all time.

Remarque -- originally named Erich Paul Remark -- relied on his own experience as a German soldier to craft his semi-autobiographical novel. As biographer Hilton Tims relates in Erich Maria Remarque: The Last Romantic, Remarque’s family was originally from Alsace. But they had crossed the border into western Germany more than century before Erich’s birth in 1898, Germanizing the spelling of their family name along the way to “Remark.”

Like his novel’s protagonist Paul Baumer, Tims writes, Remarque, sent to the front in 1916, was an unwilling recruit, “one of the fast-growing corpus of conscription-age German teenagers disenchanted by the duration of the war and the horror stories filtering back from the front line.”

Those who survived would return to a home changed beyond recognition.

“But what will really happen when we go back?” one of Paul’s companions wonders during the war’s final year.

“It will go pretty hard with us all,” says Kropp, the one designated early in the novel as “the clearest thinker among us all, and therefore only a lance-corporal.” “The war has ruined us for everything.”

So it would prove for the Heimkehrer, Tims writes, “the young ‘homecomer’ serviceman returning to a defeated, sullen homeland which felt betrayed by the armistice and in its frustration regarded the innocent soldier as a symbol of the betrayal.”

The Nazis would later ban Remarque’s books and send him fleeing across the German border to Switzerland and later to the United States, his former antagonists. Left behind was the question Kropp asks, what would have happened “if twenty or thirty people in the world had said No (to war).” And Paul’s answer: “But they damned well said Yes.”

Remarque’s books and Tims biography are readily available at
www.amazon.com/.

(Next Wednesday: Adventure classics turns from stories of young protagonists to an October of Halloween horror, with Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera.)