558
PARTISAN REVIEW
thing in Vigny's
Servitude et Grandeur Militaires;
he is close to the
romanticism of Crane and strikes the European as very American of
its period. He describes an initiation. And there is another point to
note when we consider where Mr. Faulkner's historical compulsion has
taken
him
in this book. It is this. The tragedy of the First World War
lay in the conjunction of mass slaughter with the feeling of meaning–
lessness. The war was felt to be an outrage committed inexplicably
against each human person. This could not be said or felt of the
Second World War and it cannot be said of the warlike state of the
world today, for our wars are revolutionary and revolutions have mean–
ing. They are also fought by technicians and technicians are notoriously
absorbed in their work and are morally segregated and sustained by it.
They may become traitors; they will never mutiny-and mutiny is
Mr. Faulkner's subject. The truly symbolical figure of our time
is
the
traitor or divided man, not the mutineer; it is Judas not Christ.
A
Fable
is
a fantasy natural to a past dispensation. The novel ends, with
unconscious literary 'placing' in the now barren ceremony at the Arc
de Triomphe before the tomb of the unknown soldier. One might say
that the 1914 war was the final gift of European culture to America.
It is rarely easy to disentangle the narrative of Mr. Faulkner's
novels. We can simplify it however. When the book opens we are in
the penultimate phase of the 1914 war. Hardly any Americans have
arrived. There is a mutiny in the French army. It is a protest on the
part of the ordinary human being against the terror and misery of the
trenches. Why not make a simple act of will and just refuse
to
go on?
The mutiny is seen as a rumor, a mystery which has, as it turns out,
been fomented by a corporal from the Middle East who has acquired
French nationality and who has twelve secretive assistants, one of whom
eventually betrays him. The story opens wonderfully with the arrival
of the arrested men at Headquarters. Presently the disgraced general
in command hands over his sword and the disaffected regiment is un–
loaded into a prison camp. They will be shot. The population is divided
between its own desire for peace and its
~nger
at the rebellion. In the
meantime there is a false armistice and the Germans have been con–
tacted. Another regiment (I believe I am right in saying: one can never
be sure of one's facts after reading Mr. Faulkner), setting out
to
emu–
late the doctrine of non-resistance, is shot up by its own guns. Mr:.
Faulkner's business is to take the situation at all levels, though not in
the rule of thumb manner of realism, and to explore the conflict be–
tween the moral claims of war as an exorable but pitying institution
and the anguish of man, to put man's need of hierarchy against the
