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Heldenangst (1930)

by Gabriel Chevallier(Favorite Author)

4.25 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

9059362659 (ISBN13: 9789059362659)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Cossee

review 1: This is not really a novel, it is a memoir. But that makes it a much better book. It follows the wartime experience of a young man who enlists, along with hundreds of thousands of other young Frenchmen when war breaks out and what happens to him throughout the next four years. Written by Chevallier a decade after his time on the front line, it is much more riveting as a true account than as a narrative. Like many other chronicles of the time it reveals the deep divide between the soldier on the line and everyone else -- civilians, politicians and high ranking officers. This narrator is a bit different in that he almost immediately pushes against the military culture. But in the end he does serve and fight and even kill. But his main concern, like most of the men on... more the western front, was staying alive. Chevallier wants us to know that the main emotions they felt was fear. He. shows how distant the men were from the political conflicts that caused the war, how they fought for one another and why they never hated the enemy. The battle plans made no sense, the slaughter demoralized them and in the end, they prayed for a war- ending injury. To be dead was not to be a hero. It was to be forgotten and disregarded. This is what happens when you walk past corpses for weeks on end and can never account for why some live and some do not. All in all it is a valuable reminder of the toll war takes on the young men who must serve.
review 2: An honest accounting of the war. It lacks the moral vacillation of Remarque. It's evident that even twelve years after the war's end, Chevallier was still filled with indignation at those who had done so much to insure the war would happen and then did so little to stop it. And he begins to get at something that WWI gave the world a great insight into: war is not an aberration of industrialized society, it is the apex of industrialized society. Anyone with an interest in the war should read this book. less

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