The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  In December, Germaine Berton was finally brought to trial. Her attorney, Henry Torrès, compared her to Charlotte Corday.13 Appalled by a “Fascist” organization that spewed venom and ran riot with virtual impunity, she had aimed her weapon at the leader of a violent gang, not at the “glorious soldier.” Torrès told the jurors that if Berton were found guilty after Villain had walked free, they would judge Plateau’s corpse more important than Jaurès’s. It was a crime of passion.

  Snapshots of the Surrealists (who took the liberty of including Picasso and Freud) garlanded around a mug shot of Germaine Berton, the assassin of Marius Plateau, a prominent member of L’Action Française. This display appeared in the first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste, December 1, 1924.

  The jury deliberated for only thirty-five minutes before reaching its verdict. Like Henriette Caillaux and Raoul Villain before her, she was acquitted of murder. L’Action Française declared the next morning, in its Christmas Day issue, that Plateau had been assassinated a second time, by eight bourgeois warped by anarchists who scorned all the values the bourgeoisie held dear.14 Political murder had been legitimized. L’Action Française predicted that in due course the state would go further and bestow official honors upon sluts who killed heroes. Defenders of public order were therefore justified in administering justice as they saw fit. “While revolutionaries say the same thing,” wrote the editors, “they neither do nor mean the same thing, for their violence is in the service of disorder rather than order, in the service of theft rather than property, in the service of anarchy rather than authority, of the foe rather than the fatherland.”

  Honors were indeed bestowed upon Germaine Berton, not by the state but by young artists and poets who flocked together in the name of “Surrealism” and, one year after Berton’s trial, founded a review, La Révolution Surréaliste, the first issue of which pays homage to the murderess. Assembled around her mug shot, like children of a Lombrosian matriarch, are identity photos of the group (with Sigmund Freud and Picasso thrown in for good measure). The collective caption is a line from Baudelaire’s preface to Les Paradis Artificiels: “Woman is the being who projects the deepest shade and the brightest light into our dreams.”15

  1Vigo was of Catalan origin. Almereyda may have sounded Catalan but was apparently intended to be an acronym containing the words “la merde.”

  2Poincaré denied that these meetings ever took place. In April 1928, when Maurras published this “témoignage,” Poincaré was hoping to be reappointed prime minister, with a coalition cabinet. Barrès had died five years earlier.

  3The full name of the party was Radical-Socialist. In the twentieth century its members were usually referred to as Radicals, though none were any longer politically radical.

  4A splinter group led by Lenin called for revolution.

  5Clemenceau, nicknamed “the Tiger,” would have welcomed almost any pretext to discredit a significant rival in the Radical Party. During his tenure as prime minister, beginning in November 17, he helped bring Joseph Caillaux to book.

  6The indictment stated that Germany could count on Caillaux, throughout the war, to promote a “premature” peace agreement the terms of which would have been unfavorable to France. Testimony was given by the French mistress of a German spy, who claimed to be a carrier pigeon for correspondence between Caillaux and her lover. Caillaux was amnestied in 1925 and reelected to the chamber.

  That Caillaux was the best financial mind in politics did not make him any friends when, as minister of finance during the war, he originated the tax on income in France.

  7Journalists dubbed it “le complot des panoplies.” Complot is a plot or conspiracy, and panoplie, an ornamental display of weapons.

  8“Their nature” presented a problem after the war in the form of children conceived by Frenchwomen who had been raped by German soldiers. There were those who characterized such children as genetic foes smuggled into France in French wombs and fated to corrupt the purity of the race. The issue was hotly debated.

  9In the course of a long, distinguished political career, which began in 1906, Briand held twenty-five ministerial portfolios and presided over eleven cabinets as premier. He was largely responsible for implementing the law separating church and state, but also, two decades later, for reestablishing diplomatic relations with the Vatican. He and Jaurès, who were of one mind in founding the French Socialist Party, parted ways before the war when Briand introduced legislation that led to a three-year draft. His principal achievement during the war was the close economic and military cooperation of the Allied powers. With the American secretary of state Frank Kellogg, he coauthored a manifesto in 1928—the Kellogg-Briand Pact—committing its fifty-seven signatories (the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Weimar Germany, Italy, and Japan among them) to renounce aggressive war as an instrument of national policy.

  In the parliamentary muddle of the 1920s, ideologies were at a discount. Briand the maverick served as premier of a Chamber of Deputies with a conservative majority. Several years later, Poincaré the conservative served as premier of a leftist chamber. Though Radicals were not the only pragmatists, they were radical in this respect, if in no other.

  10Never forgotten by anti-Dreyfusards, among many other grudges, was Clemenceau’s role in the publication of Zola’s letter to the French president, accusing the military brass of a conspiracy to frame Dreyfus. As editor in chief of L’Aurore, it was he who splashed it over the front page and gave it the title “J’accuse.”

  11In the Ruhr, more than seventy thousand workers, most of them staging slowdowns, were evicted to provide living quarters for labor imported from France and Belgium; 130 civilians had been killed during the invasion.

  12Marcel Cachin was a founder of the PCF (Parti Communiste Français). The case against him rested upon this letter, dated January 13, from the executive committee of the Third International: “In view of the extreme gravity of the situation in Europe, which threatens the working class with frightening new calamities, and as well the decisions taken by The Hague about strikes in time of war, the executive committee of the Third International … proposes that the French Communist Party immediately engage in talks with our representatives about common measures to be undertaken to prevent a new war. As representatives, the executive committee appoints: Clara Zetkin, Cachin, Neubold, and Radek.… We request that you send an immediate answer to Moscow and information through the German Communist Party, the French Communist Party, and the French CGTU [Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire].”

  13Charlotte Corday, a young Norman noblewoman, assassinated the Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat in 1793, at the height of the Terror.

  14The vote had been eight to four. Unanimity was not required under French law. What made the acquittal all the more embittering to Léon Daudet was the suicide several weeks earlier of his fourteen-year-old son, Philippe. The boy ran away from home, not for the first time, and, after trying to board a ship at Le Havre, returned to Paris. At the anarchist newspaper Le Libertaire, he told an editor, without identifying himself, that he was prepared to kill for the cause and, among possible victims, named his father. Le Libertaire gave him no encouragement. With the police in hot pursuit, Philippe, who had somehow acquired a pistol, blew his brains out in the backseat of a taxi. Daudet denounced first the Germans, then the police for having conspired to murder him and accused the taxi driver of being an accomplice. The taxi driver, Charles Bajot, sued him for slander and won. In 1925, Daudet was sentenced to five months in prison and ordered to pay a large fine. These punishments didn’t stop his accusations.

  15“La femme est l’être qui projette la plus grande ombre ou la plus grande lumière dans nos rêves.”

  · PART TWO ·

  November 11, 1918. Silence descended on the front. That afternoon, Premier Georges Clemenceau entered the National Assembly at four o’clock to read the Armistice agreement, whose terms included the requirement that German troops evacuate France, Belgium, Lux
embourg, and Alsace-Lorraine within a fortnight or face imprisonment. A rapturous crowd in the courtyard of the Palais Bourbon greeted the old man. Tens of thousands mobbed Paris’s great squares, reveling as church bells tolled and artillery boomed. A multitude of Allied flags unfurled from windows all over the city, like glad rags draped over widow’s weeds. Students paraded from the Latin Quarter to the Arc de Triomphe, dragging a captured German cannon and hurling derision at the kaiser, who was an exile in Holland by then. Clemenceau had no sooner read the fifty-fifth and final article of the agreement than legislators adjourned with a hearty rendition of “La Marseillaise.”

  In the trenches, reactions were often mixed. “News of the Armistice did not spark the enthusiasm one might have expected,” wrote Adam Frantz, chief medical officer of the French army’s Twenty-third Infantry Regiment. “Was it that four years of warfare had blunted all our feelings? Did men understand that success, however great, could never compensate for the atrocious losses we had suffered? Was it rather that in his unconscious wisdom the ordinary grunt realized that neither nations nor men would profit from the great, cruel lesson?”

  Word of the Armistice was as baffling to those infantrymen as a sudden reprieve to lifers long removed from the outside world. “We did not cheer, but just stood, stunned and bewildered,” wrote Sergeant Walter Sweet of the Monmouthshire Regiment, who heard a fellow survivor say, “To think that I shall not have to toddle among machine guns again and never hear another shell burst. It is simply unimaginable.” What was to become of the soldiers in peacetime? “We have lived this life for so long. Now we shall have to start all over again.” Colonel Thomas Gowenlock, an intelligence officer in the American First Division, observed that many soldiers believed the Armistice to be a ruse, or a restorative halt in a hundred years’ war. There was no celebration on November 11. “As night came,” he later recalled,

  the quietness, unearthly in its penetration, began to eat into their souls. The men sat around log fires, the first they had ever had at the front. They were trying to reassure themselves that there were no enemy batteries spying on them from the next hill and no German bombing planes approaching to blast them out of existence. They talked in low tones. They were nervous. After the long months of intense strain, of keying themselves up to the daily mortal danger, of thinking always in terms of war and the enemy, the abrupt release from it all was physical and psychological agony. Some suffered a total nervous collapse.… Some fell into an exhausted sleep. All were bewildered by the sudden meaninglessness of their existence as soldiers—and through their teeming memories paraded that swiftly moving cavalcade of Cantigny, Soissons, St. Mihiel, the Meuse-Argonne and Sedan. What was to come next? They did not know—and hardly cared. Their minds were numbed by the shock of peace. The past consumed their whole consciousness. The present did not exist and the future was inconceivable.

  Having been “demobbed” and shipped back to England, Private John McCauley of the Second Border Regiment found himself swallowed up in the maelstrom of cheering crowds and blaring bands. “Such courage and nerve as I possessed were stolen from me on the blood-drenched plains of France,” he wrote. “The trenches in Flanders helped make me a weakling. They sapped my courage, shattered my nerves and threw me back into a ‘civilised’ world broken in spirit and nerve. They might as well have taken my body, too.”

  Or at least his tongue, for McCauley was not alone in feeling unable to communicate on any meaningful level with compatriots who had never visited that foreign country called the front, where combatants divorced from civilization—Germans, French, English, and Americans alike—shared a primitive language conjugating slaughter and mercy.16 When Lance Corporal Thomas Owen lay wounded in the rat-infested slime of a trench overrun by Germans, he was nursed by the enemy that had almost killed him. “I cannot say how far I walked. I passed a first-aid post in an old trench, but they waved me off despairingly. They had too many to see to. Stretcher bearers passed me, carrying a pole, with a blanket slung to it, and inside an agonized bundle of broken humanity—blood trickling and dripping from the pendulous blanket.” At another first-aid station he fell into the arms of a sad-eyed, black-bearded man who whispered, “Armes Kind” (poor child), removed his tunic, leather jerkin, and cardigan, and patched him up. “Truly the quality of mercy is not strained. I had none of his tongue, nor he of mine, but he gave me a drink of warm coffee from a flask, and his hands were as tender as a woman’s as he bandaged me.… A prisoner indeed; receiving succour from a man whose countrymen I had blazed at in hate but a while ago.”

  Several months before the Armistice, nineteen-year-old Gustav Regler, the future novelist and comrade of Arthur Koestler’s, was carried off a field of corpses near the Chemin des Dames and woke up in Laon Cathedral, where the wounded lay side by side on pallets lining the vast nave. It soon became apparent that his physical wounds were more easily remedied than the psychological. Unable to talk, he was transported to a psychiatric hospital in Germany, whose director, a Dr. Schomberg, took it upon himself to speak for him. The mute later quoted his spokesman in a remarkable memoir entitled The Owl of Minerva: “I would like to send you home but you don’t want to go. If you did you’d be able to speak. You want to go back to the front because you think you’re a deserter. And you want to stay here because you know what the world looks like outside. You want to leave and not to leave. But you won’t admit this to yourself, and so your tongue is crippled, because you can’t say two such different things at the same time.” There was no way back to the front, Schomberg continued. “This is a place from which one goes to a new life or else into total darkness.… You don’t want to be a deserter? We are all deserters, all shams, more or less, throughout our lives. We lie to ourselves. Only one part of you despises war. I have read your diary. You will volunteer for other wars as senseless as this one. But so long as you remain here with me there is no war, and no laurels either. Only donkeys eat laurels.”

  Young André Breton, who was to confer, in the Surrealist movement, poetic dignity on the images and nightmares of the shell-shocked soldiers he attended as a male nurse at a psychiatric center near the Chemin des Dames and as a medical student at Paris’s Val-de-Grâce hospital, mourned the loss of two voices in 1918. Only hours before the Armistice, Guillaume Apollinaire, a poet revered by the avant-garde, fell victim to the flu pandemic. Several months later, Breton received what proved to be letters of farewell from a beloved army friend named Jacques Vaché, for whose air of dandified invulnerability and murderous volleys of black humor he professed the greatest admiration. “Your letter finds me in a terrible slump,” Vaché wrote on November 14, 1918. “I am empty of ideas and ring hollow, more than ever no doubt the unconscious recorder of many things, all balled up.… I’ll leave the war quietly gaga, like one of those splendid village idiots, perhaps.… Dear friend, how am I to survive these last few months in uniform (I’ve been assured the war is over)? I’m really at my wits’ end. What is more, THEY are distrustful. THEY suspect something. Will THEY lobotomize me while they still have me in their grasp?” In January 1919, Vaché—whom Breton portrayed forever after, idolatrously, as a cross between Beau Brummel and Arthur Rimbaud—overdosed on opium in a Brussels hotel room.

  There was no generic equivalent in French to the English “shell shock” or the German Kriegsneurose. The language did not legitimate a psychiatric disorder that exempted the traumatized soldier from a holy war, a war waged in defense of civilization.

  16“We seemed, as we moved up the road, to have left behind us the last link of the chain which had connected us with civilisation. From now onward we were in a world apart, where men moved openly only by night, where the scream and bursting of shells, and the rifle fire, fitful and desultory, were the only interruptions to an unearthly silence—a desolate, scarred world, the playground of Death itself,” wrote Corporal George Foley, Sixth Somerset Light Infantry.

  CHAPTER 7

  Scars of the Trenches

  While alm
ost all French writers bowed to the law of this war and made themselves its apologists, we, who were not yet old enough to bear arms, or who reached that age only because the murderous conflict lasted as long as it did, we spurned the Sacred Union, which reached into the domains of thought and creation.

  —LOUIS ARAGON

  Peace ruins people.

  —PIERRE DRIEU LA ROCHELLE

  While Barrès, Maurras, and their confrères had sounded the call to arms, like the graybeards in Giraudoux’s Tiger at the Gates who send young Trojans off to die for Helen, the future standard-bearers of Surrealism fought for “Marianne.” They survived with wounds that never ceased to fester.

  André Breton was a first-year medical student in 1916, writing poems under Rimbaud’s spell, when, as noted above, the army sent him to a work at a psychiatric center within earshot of the front. It was a brief internship but pivotal, not least because his exposure to the panic attacks of traumatized soldiers coincided with his introduction to the thought of Sigmund Freud.1 In 1917, at the Val-de-Grâce hospital in Paris he encountered Louis Aragon, a medical student his own age who had returned from a tour of duty with the Croix de Guerre. On their days off, they took long walks through Paris (memorialized several years later in Aragon’s strolling narrative Le Paysan de Paris) or made the rounds of literary haunts. Holding court at the Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain with a bandage wrapped over the hole that had been drilled in his skull to remove shrapnel, and surrounded by worshipful young writers, was the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

  André Breton, left, still in uniform, with Théodore Fraenkel, who participated in Dada japes after the war while attending medical school.