Flood Warning by Paul Berna

First published:La Grande Alerte, 1960; illustrated (English translation, 1962)

Type of work: Adventure tale

Themes: Nature, coming-of-age, and friendship

Time of work: An unusually warm and wet mid-twentieth century December and the following spring

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: The Chateau-Milon boys’ school in the Loire River Valley, France

Principal Characters:

• Vignoles, a loner and a dreamer
• Monsieur Brossay, the kind but firm headmaster of the school
• Monsieur Sala, a new teacher who has been discharged for his inability to control his students
• Chomel, the cowardly and cruel junior who is primarily responsible for Monsieur Sala’s dismissal
• Picard, the school glutton
• Charpenne, a sensitive student who spends his time dreaming about and writing sonnets to Monsieur Brossay’s daughter
• Vicomte Hubert Boisson De Chazelles, a proud aristocrat who has bounced from school to school and plans to escape from Chateau-Milon
• Job Trevidic, a local man who, along with his brother, performs various chores at the school

The Story

Although Flood Warning begins with a quiet schoolroom scene, the book is quickly permeated with an aura of tension, suspense, and increasing danger. During headmaster Brossay’s lesson about the dangers of nature, however, the lethargic seniors of Chateau-Milon boarding school for boys pay less attention to his wisdom than to their own plans, such as tomorrow’s soccer game, or the news that timid Monsieur Sala—Dubbed “Rabbits’ Eggs” for his shyness—has been dismissed because of one of Chomel’s pranks. Nevertheless, Vignoles, a senior whose sensitivity to the area has grown in the five years since he was left at Chateau-Milon by his wealthy but busy father, worries about the unusually warm December weather and the strangelooking sky.

After the day students go home, Monsieur Sala anxiously supervises what he believes to be his last study hall. Predictably, Chomel creates a disturbance, but almost simultaneously an even greater disturbance is caused by a gust of wind that shatters the window and, paradoxically, gives Monsieur Sala the courage to take control of the situation. That night in the junior dormitory, which Monsieur Sala oversees, Chomel prepares to torment the poor teacher one last time with a cherry bomb. After other students secretly switch the cherry bomb from Monsieur Sala’s bed to Chomel’s, however, its explosion is dwarfed by the powerful winds that send a huge branch crashing through one of the dormitory windows.

Suspense mounts as torrential rains fall all night, closing roads and isolating the school so that Monsieur Sala is forced to stay. Electrical power fails, floodwaters from the Authion River rise, and the seniors, led by Vignoles, fill sandbags and build a dam in the courtyard entrance. During one of the guard duties shared by the seniors and their teachers, local teacher Monsieur Juillet reveals that in the flood of 1820, everything in the area was covered except Merovee’s Tower at Chateau-Milon and the Arcy woods. Troops dynamite the Loire Rive dam to let the waters of the high Authion flow into the Loire—an action that could create even greater danger, as various tributaries flow into the Loire. At Chateau-Milon the water is already ten feet deep in the soccer field and has reached the top of the six-foot wall. While Monsieur Sala and Vignoles are on guard, the dam breaks, and the water creeps to the edge of the buildings.

The next morning, Monsieur Brossay evacuates the boys to the Arcy woods, but the upper road becomes covered in water before the evacuation of the last group— Vignoles, Monsieur Sala, Picard, Charpenne, Hubert Boisson de Chazelles, Chomel, and Job Trevidic. With the water rising to the second floor of the main building where they are, the boys consider various means of escape. After an unsuccessful attempt to build rafts, Vignoles and the others stretch ladders from their building across the yard to Merovee Tower. After testing the ladders, Vignoles sends Monsieur Sala across while he remains until last, forcing the hysterical Chomel to leave the doomed building just before the waters rush in.

Once in the tower, the group works its way up ahead of the waters. By the next morning, the rain has finally stopped, and Boisson de Chazelles navigates a loose canoe to the Arcy woods and then returns to get two of the others. The canoe gets lost in the fog, however, ending up at the rescue station of a nearby town, where the boys report the situation of the school. Rescue efforts in the woods and at the tower are successful with one exception: when the helicopter returns to get Monsieur Sala, he cannot be found.

When Monsieur Brossay and the others return to Chateau-Milon, however, they find Monsieur Sala safe in the tower, where he has remained to guard the school. The school is completely restored, and all the boys return for the spring semester. During their ordeal, many of the boys have developed their characters, growing up and learning to value the school and their friends, and Monsieur Sala has found a new courage as well as a lifelong home.

Context

Having published approximately twenty adventure tales for young people, Paul Berna is a major figure in children’s literature in France. Critics in the United States have applauded him not only for his ability to create taut, suspenseful tales but also for his authentic settings and realistic characters. Atmosphere is as essential as event in Berna’s mysteries, and Flood Warning compares favorably to such works as John Rowe Townsend’s The Intruder (1970), and Virginia Hamilton’s The House of Dies Drear (1968). Among Berna’s books that have received critical attention in the United States are The Horse Without a Head (1959), which was published in England as The Hundred Million Franks (1957); Threshold of the Stars (1961); Flood Warning (1963); The Secret of the Missing Boat (1967), which was given an award by the Mystery Writers of America; The Clue of the Black Cat (1965); and A Truckload of Rice (1970).

In its emphasis on suspense, setting, and character development, Flood Warning is in many ways representative of Berna’s work. Yet Flood Warning also contains a unity, an urgency, and an artistry unique to the work itself. The theme of the unleashed power of nature, which is introduced on the very first page, is central to the plot. The depictions of the historic tower and the landscape of the Loire Valley are vivid, and the description of the water as it rises darkly out of the night is so realistic that the reader almost feels drenched. As British poet and critic Stevie Smith writes, “It is the eeriness one remembers, . . . the eeriness and the creeping up.” Perhaps most important, however, is that in his characterizations Berna raises the level of Flood Warning from a suspenseful mystery to an authentic portrayal of how human beings encounter danger and how that encounter forever changes them. As M. W. Stoer states in The Christian Science Monitor, “The emphasis is not on material destruction, but, rather, on human re-construction.”