BOOK.~
253
of her screws need tightening, mimic the soft cries of intercourse that
Fougueux overhears at home. The engineer overcomes his impotence
in the army, significantly enough during the German breakthrough:
the machine has been destroyed.
But by that time Fougueux has ceased to matter and his symbolic
victory, coincident with the actual defeat of society, occurs as an anti–
climax. Lt. Vernier takes over and it is through him that Comfort passes
judgment on the society and the war that he has been documenting.
Vernier emerges from the French disaster an anarcho-pacifist. It is the
dutiful citizens "who are making the world a desert." In their obedience
to the state they become lunatics who do the dirty work of history with
a sense of the highest moral duty. "A Pole is being beaten-we rush
to help him, and every foot we put down goes smack into some innocent
person's face."
If
a man is to remain sane-and the few sane men are
the world's last hope-he must disassociate himself from the state and
from violence. Vernier, like Hemingway's hero in the last war, makes a
separate peace. But in occupied Paris he lets himself be dragged back
into the dirty work-he participates in the dynamiting of a troop train.
This, like all acts of violence, results in the useless murder of innocents,
no soldiers having been aboard.
About the best thing that can be said for Comfort's brand of paci–
fism is
L~at
it acknowledges the momentum of violence. He does not
argue that a war, once it has begun, can be stopped by any of the
known pacifist techniques. But this merely indicates the greatest weak–
ness of his pacifism and what it is that makes it worthless as practical
politics. The state is something to be ducked, rather than changed; war
is a thing to be avoided, rather than destroyed-and it is the individual,
the solitary self, who alone is sane, who is to do the ducking and the
avoiding. All else is lunacy. Whatever its attractions as a personal atti–
tude, this tends to reduce politics to draft-dodging.
The weakness of his political position is, I think, more than any
other factor responsible for Comfort's failure to maintain throughout
the novel the weighted specific documentation that he brings to the
description of factory life. When he enters an upper-class drawing room,
or attends a military reception, he is no longer so sure of the social evil
as he is among the monsters of modern technology. In the railroad yards, _
in the slaughter house, among the mills and furnaces the facts are plain
and the rqoral is obvious: anarchism is the only possible attitude toward
the utter mechanization of life. And here, to drive home his point, he
describes every conceivable mechanical and industrial motion: trains,
cranes, planes, wheels, belts, shuttles, etc., etc., and even natural and
household objects are introduced to complete the catalogue of human
bewilderment. (These rhythms converge in a particularly dizzy passage
where Fougueux visits the girl with whom he is attempting intercourse).
The results of so much motion are most commonly observed on board
