Review: C’était la guerre des tranchées by Jacques Tardi (Casterman, 1993)
Jacques Tardi’s C’était la guerre des tranchées is a classic of the wartime graphic novel genre. It draws on the experiences of the author’s grandfather, who served in World War I with the French army.
Tardi chose to forego a more traditional format in which there is a clear beginning, middle/climax, and end in favour of a collection of unrelated vignettes. As he writes in his introduction, “This is not a ‘historical’ work. This is not a story about the First World War in comic form. This is a collection of stories without chronological order… In the awful ‘fairy tale’ of war, there are no heroes, no protagonists.”
Because of this lack of protagonists, we never get to build relationships with anyone in particular. The men have names, but their faces are often forgettable (though that might be due to my faceblindness) and the names, together with the dates inscribed at the beginning of each segment, only serve to faintly distinguish their story from the next person’s. All these storytelling choices obscure the individuality and uniqueness of the soldiers as well as the time and place. Faucheux, Bouvreuil, Lafont and all the others could be anyone, anywhere, at any point between 1914 and 1918. This, I think, is Tardi’s point: while the benefit of hindsight allows us to see the bigger picture, a soldier of the time (in his depiction, anyway) lived from hand to mouth, his existence reduced to mud, barbed wire, rats, and, finally, death.
C’était la guerre des tranchées reminds me very much of All Quiet on the Western Front in that it focuses on the stories of those who died rather than those who survived. Tardi, however, eschews the elegiac quality of Remarque’s novel for righteous anger. Indeed, while Remarque prefaced his book by essentially disavowing any political motive (“This book is neither an accusation nor a confession. It is only an attempt to tell the story of a generation that was destroyed by war…”), Tardi takes a clear stand against war — both the Great War specifically and all war in general — and isn’t afraid to express his opinion of the pointlessness of the bloodshed or the incompetency of leadership during this conflict. Yet while the monochromatic drawings make these points in the starkest way, the unrelenting misery means that I’m not eager to reread this book at all. Although I found it more effective than many movies at recreating the atmosphere of the trenches and the vicissitudes of trench life, it contains no moments of beauty (however brief), no heroes, and no hope.
Non-European troops appear only at the very end of this book in the summary of the conflict. Although I thought it was a shame that there were no segments with Asian or African soldiers, I can appreciate that Tardi would not want to presume to speak for them. Their inclusion here seems mainly intended to foreshadow the colonial conflicts of the later twentieth century, especially in Algeria and Vietnam.
Superficially, the art reminded me of Otto Dix’s Der Krieg series. Dix is sharper, more visceral, and more confrontational — unsurprising given that his art reflects his personal experiences. Time and distance soften Tardi’s vision of the war. Thus, while C’était la guerre des tranchées is less intense and less intellectually challenging than Der Krieg, it is probably better suited to reaching a casual or even unsuspecting audience.
Would I…
…read it again? In case it wasn’t obvious, no.
…read another book by the same author? Maybe.
…recommend it? Perhaps paradoxically, yes. I think it could be a good introduction to the war for older children/young teenagers, particularly in a classroom setting that could present each story as a standalone (rather than overwhelm the reader with a whole book of misery) and allow for guided discussion.
