"They attacked without barrage, without machine-guns, without shooting. All the ground was swept clean before them. Nothng but the dead, torn-up earth, villages on fire. A horse, all entangled in its reins, had gone crazy and danced in a meadow. The enemy trickled out of holes and emerged from the valleys on to the large unfurling plain that goes towards Bailleul."
If I thought Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way was an unremitting read, nothing prepared me for Jean Giono's To the Slaughterhouse (Le grand troupeau), which was published in 1931, but not translated into English until 1969. Giono spent most of his life in Manosques, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. He left school early to help with family finances but was a voracious reader with a particular interest in the classics. He was called up to fight in the First World War and his experiences made him a lifelong and ardent pacifist, all of which comes through quite clearly in To the Slaughterhouse, a story with a distinctly nightmarish quality to it.
Reading the Barry novel was an emotionally draining experience, and while the imagery in To the Slaughterhouse was perhaps at times even more graphic, I still felt at arm's-length during the majority of the story, which is in a way a redeeming quality. I also felt very ambivalent towards it initially. The book opens in a small village in Provence where a herd of sheep runs unattended as nearly all the young men have been called to fight in the war. Mostly it is only women, the very old or very young who are left to look after things and it's apparent that the animals, with no one to take care of them, are suffering.
The story centers around the villagers, in particular one extended family--Julia, her husband Joseph, his younger sister Madeleine, their father Jerome and Madeleine's lover, Oliver. Joseph has been fighting and Oliver is preparing to leave, while the women and rest of the families make do as best they can. The chapters alternate between the battlefield and life in the village. Giono is unsparing in his descriptions of the horrors of trench warfare and how the fighting devours everything in its sight--men, animals and land spitting it all back out broken, maimed or dead. He also portrays the far reaching effects on the people left behind. Their fears, loneliness and yearnings, all a different kind of suffering.
Although it is one story that Giono is telling, the chapters felt almost episodic like short stories. The result is less a cohesive linear story than a series of striking impressions. The impact is not lessened, but as brutal as the battlefield scenes were, it never felt emotionally manipulative. Giono does not sentimentalize anything about the war but he creates a vivid picture of it. For me it was an often challenging story between the punishing descriptions and the writing style. I feel as though I should have read it closer. His prose calls for careful reading. The descriptive nature slows things down, and often things are internalized. It sometimes felt disorienting the switch between time and place and character, but ultimately it was a good reading experience.
While last month's A Long Long Way ended on a bleak note, To the Slaughterhouse ends surprisingly happy and optimistic despite the horrors that Giono relates. Considering his strong anti-war message in the novel and his belief in pacifism after the First World War, I wonder what it must have been like for him to live through the horrors of yet another war on French soil. Giono went on to work in a bank after the war but eventually took to writing full time. He died in 1970.
Moving on to WWII, the next book up for the Literature and War Readalong is Coventry by Helen Humphreys.
You can read Caroline's thoughts on the book here.