Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Sunday, January 11, 2015

Freedom of Expression: France, 1915

A century ago France – and all of Europe - was engaged in a war of tragic and epic proportions, the consequences of which we are still dealing with today if you look to the Middle East. Even though the man in uniform was like an anonymous being (where no one effectively belonged to themselves) one still finds an intense “freedom to criticize” in a number of war narratives.[1]  One of the most profound such narratives, written from the French perspective, is the recently translated World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas – Poilu (a derisive term for the common soldier). The writings of Louis Barthas, a barrelmaker by trade, can be read in conjunction with the autobiographical novel of Englishman Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and with Richard Stumpf’s World War One diary of a German seaman.[2]

Each of these accounts deals with the loss of the individual, the sense of war community (which occurred sometimes across the lines and rather often in opposition to the officer class) and the recovery of “independent action”.[3] In some cases independence was achieved by the mere act of keeping a diary in the face of a seaman’s “undeviating routine” only to be lost in the midst of malnourishment, naval mutiny and revolution.[4] Or in Sassoon’s case independence was achieved by “acting on behalf of soldiers” and by publishing his objections to war in The Times of London – for which he received treatment for “shell shock”.[5]

Here is an excerpt from the Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas which also gives ample voice to “moral distress,” the spirit of searing war criticism, and action taken on behalf of other soldiers.  It is a good example of freedom of expression in France in the year 1915, maintained in the muddied and miserable trenches of war – and against orders.

     To my physical distress was added moral distress.  This order to put men to work, to throw them out of their shelter, into the mud, the gloom, the storm, the icy water, these forty men already frozen right through, filled my head with storms of rage, of hate-filled anger against these inhuman orders.

     My decision was made. I would defy the captain’s and the commandant’s orders.  The men would stay in their shelter.  But maybe tomorrow I would be arrested for refusing to obey an order, and dragged before a court–martial.  They could even be scoundrels enough to have me shot, as an example.

     No, not that.  They won’t get me. Crazy thoughts invaded my brain.  Before dying I would go back to the captain’s lair and skewer him with my bayonet like an ill-behaved beast. Then I thought about how, at the bottom of the staircase, candles wouldn’t stay lit, and no one dared go sleep down there, preferring to pile up on the stairs.  Well I would go down there, and by tomorrow I would likely be asphyxiated.  That would be a nice, painless death, the end of this cruel life. The thought of my loved ones did not hold me back.  I had long given up any hope of seeing them again. [6]




[1] Louis Barthas, Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918, tr. Edward M. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 167.
[2] See the Afterword in Ibid., p. 390.  See Sigfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.  First published 1930.  See also Richard Stumpf., War, Mutiny and Revolution in the German Navy: The World War I Diary of Seaman Richard Stumpf. Ed and tr. Daniel Horn. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1967. 
[3] See the chapter in Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, pp.198-244.
[4] See Stumpf’s diary, War, Mutiny and Revolution in the German Navy, p. 321.
[5] Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, p. 209, p. 244.  See also Pat Barker, Regeneration. New York: Plume, 1993.
[6] Louis Barthas, Poilu, p. 133.

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