It Was the War of the Trenches

AUTHOR: Tardi, Jacques

ARTIST: Jacques Tardi (illustrator); Ian Burns (letterer); Brittany Kusa (letterer); Gavin Lees (letterer)

PUBLISHER: Casterman (French); Fantagraphics Books (English)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION:C’était la guerre des tranchées: 1914-1918, 1993 (English translation, 2010)

Publication History

Born in 1946 in Valence, France, Jacques Tardi began his career by drawing for the French comics magazine Pilote, which is most famous for Asterix (1959-2010) and Lucky Luke (1946- ). Tardi went on to draw for the more radical, adult-oriented Métal Hurlant, co-founded by Moebius (also known as Jean Giraud) in 1975. An award-winning comics creator, he has attracted the attention of European comics theorists such as Thierry Groensteen, author of Tardi (1980). Tardi is known for writing and drawing several series, including Les Aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-sec (1976-2007; The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec), and for adapting stories by the surrealist crime-fiction writer Léo Malet into the Nestor Burma (1982-2000) volumes.

First published in 1993 by Casterman as C’était la guerre des tranchées: 1914-1918, the graphic novel published in English as It Was the War of the Trenches combines two narratives; the opening nineteen-page story was created during the 1970’s and published in 1984 by Imagerie Pellerin as Le Trou d’obus (The Bombshell Crater). Like all of Tardi’s works based on World War I, It Was the War of the Trenches is inspired by the experiences of his grandfather. The historian and World War I specialist Jean-Pierre Verney collaborated with Tardi on the final version of the novel.

Plot

A foreword by Tardi precedes the first section of It Was the War of the Trenches, clarifying that the book is a protest against war rather than a historical or even chronological account of World War I. Consequently, there is no protagonist; the narration follows the final moments of several soldiers, their commonality being their unwilling participation in the war. Most of the soldiers are essentially types, resembling one another both in their physicality, being men of a similar age, and temperamentally, with their antiwar stances and fear of death. Other individual traits are rarely highlighted. Consequently, their distinguishing features are their actions and experiences.

The first section concentrates on Binet, beginning with a panel showing his corpse and proceeding to alternate between his immediate past on the battlefield and his previous, ordinary civilian life in an apartment house in Paris with advertisements painted over its front. While camping near a village, Binet watches a dogfight with a local boy. The same night, he is haunted by grotesque nightmares as he worries about Faucheux, sent to an outpost that had stopped communicating. Binet decides to search for him alone; he not only finds him dead, but also loses his own life in the firing. In a twist on the last page of the first section, the narrator is revealed to be a soldier who appears after his comrade mistakenly kills the village boy.

The second section, separated from the first by a two-page commentary by Tardi, has its narration divided among several soldiers. The story begins in 1916 and alternates between a French and a German soldier relating the death of a soldier; it then shifts to 1914, as Lafont, sitting in the trenches, recounts the day of immobilization and the destructive collective hatred aroused by the lack of patriotic display. Lafont’s death in a blast is followed by the even briefer story of Gaspard, who, unlike the others, dies from eating rats in 1917. A 1916 military charge is shown, during which the narrative voice is replaced by patriotic quotes from Abbot Sertillanges and General Rebelliot. The charge continues for three pages, coming to a standstill when most of the members of the Third Company are killed by a bomb, fired not by the Germans but by the French; later, the remaining members of the Third Company, rendered almost identically, are court-martialed and shot.

In another scene showing the death of a soldier, the narrative captions by Soufflot tell of his own survival and the death of his friend Grumeau. Huet’s guilt-ridden story is next, after which a longer set of events are focalized through the injured Mazure in 1914. Seeking refuge in an abandoned church, Mazure is taken prisoner by Werner, a German soldier. Both realize the interchangeability of their situation, and while Werner is immediately shot by the French soldiers who discover them, Mazure is killed after facing the military court.

A scene opening in 1916 begins with the narrator, Ducon, landing in the entrails of a dead German soldier following an explosion. The grotesque imagery extends to further detailed scenes of death and destruction on the battlefield and in the villages, where Ducon sees another soldier die in an explosion. After a two-year leap, the story of Bouvreuil is told. A blacksmith who spent his spare time in the army forging knickknacks out of metal debris, Bouvreuil also corresponds with his wife, Edith, giving readers their only glimpse of a soldier’s relationship beyond the war front. Injured and trapped by barbed wires, Bouvreuil is finally shot by his friend Prunier out of mercy. An explosion of poisonous gas kills and injures more soldiers, returning the narrator to the hospital bed from which he began telling the story.

In the remaining twelve pages, a tirade against the war lists the casualties, weapons used, and nations involved, thus revealing the primary purpose of the graphic novel. The book is accompanied by a filmography and bibliography, listing the key literary and cinematic works on World War I.

Characters

•Binet is a private in the French army.

•Faucheux is Binet’s companion.

•Village boy is a child who watches a dogfight with Binet and later loses his life while wearing Faucheux’s uniform.

•Unnamed soldier-narrator is a member of Binet’s company and tells Binet’s story.

•Lafont is a soldier who recounts the immobilization frenzy.

•Gaspard is an unpopular soldier with an insatiable appetite.

•Huet is a soldier haunted by the possibility of having killed a Belgian woman and her child, used as human shields by the Germans but nonetheless shot at by the French army.

•Helmut is a notorious German sniper who is never shown from the front and who kills Huet.

•Ackermann is a soldier killed by Helmut while trying to remove Huet’s body from the barbed wire beyond the trenches.

•Mazure is a French soldier who meets a German soldier, Werner, while seeking refuge in an abandoned church. Both are eventually killed by the French.

•Ducon is a soldier who describes his own and his comrades’ traumatic experiences in the longest section of the book.

•Bouvreuil is a creative blacksmith whose regular letters to his wife, Edith, are narrated in detail.

•Prunier is a friend of Bouvreuil who shoots him out of mercy and is last shown shouting for help amid the wreckage of an explosion.

Artistic Style

Tardi’s works are almost always situated in the belle époque and the first half of the twentieth century. While many of his works are vividly colored, It Was the War of the Trenches is in black and white. This befits the somber theme of the book, even though Tardi’s other works on the war are colored. Complementing the nightmarish content of the scenes, color is replaced by strong chiaroscuro effects. The increasingly macabre imagery also differs starkly from the often humorous noir atmosphere of his works not set in the belle époque.

Moebius’s influence on Tardi is particularly evident in the dynamic page layouts and the frequently curvilinear panel shapes that alternate with the regular row-long panels. However, Tardi’s panels distinguish themselves from Moebius’s radical forms by emphasizing the action over the ornamentation.

The layout is more consistent in the second section of the graphic novel, with each page typically divided into three rows. Aside from creating a rhythmic reading pace, the division into three parts alludes to both the French flag and the Christian holy trinity. The panel variations, including the varying dramatic foci, recall the cinematic tool of shifting viewpoints.

Similarly, the deliberate distance between the events and the narration is made obvious in the first section, in which the narrator likens the war to a theater experience. The soldiers are rarely seen from a perspective closer than medium range. There is a lack of smooth transitions between the panels, making each panel resemble a photograph or a film still, in keeping with the book’s themes of recording and remembering.

Themes

The documentary mode of the visuals and narration emphasizes the story’s incorporation of a major event ensconced in collective memory. This is also supported by the accurate visual details and quotations of prominent political and literary figures of World War I.

The book’s central theme is the horror of war and the inexcusability of the extensive human suffering and costs involved. The protest against warfare is realized by the detailed depictions of death and destruction. The word-image narration is also marked by other concepts that come to the forefront during war, such as dehumanization, lack of individuality, and the human tendency toward brutality seen in the modern era.

The emptiness of patriotism is also evident from the beginning, via Binet’s remarks, and is later emphasized through the juxtaposition of excerpts from patriotic speeches with images of dying soldiers. The soldiers’ stories beyond the front lines are rarely elaborated upon, and the frequent transitions between narrators and years emphasize the soldiers’ commonalities as unwilling participants destined to lose their lives in a senseless war. The fact that some of the soldiers are killed by their own countrymen exacerbates the absurdity of the situation. Likewise, the guilt and pangs of conscience that soldiers such as Huet and Ducon are unable to overcome link collective suffering with collective responsibility, which is also underscored in most of the narrators’ direct statements to the reader.

Impact

Tardi is one of the exemplary artists whose work simultaneously displays the influence of and subverts the tenets of Belgian artist Hergé’s clear-line style of art. In addition, It Was the War of the Trenches exemplifies the move away from brief, lighthearted comics toward longer narratives that explore serious themes. At more than 120 pages, the graphic novel is almost triple the length of the typical French comic book.

It is significant that almost a decade separates the creation of the two sections of the book and that this time period corresponds roughly to the zenith of the alternative comics movement and the popularization of the term “graphic novel.” Consequently, It Was the War of the Trenches exemplifies the use of comics as a medium of protest, breaking away from the conventional formats of comic books characterized as graphic novels.

This change within the work of Tardi is highlighted by not only a more symbolically dense artistic style but also the inclusion of quotes from literary works such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey to the End of the Night, 1934) and Gabriel Chevallier’s La Peur (1930; Fear, 2009) and from contemporaneous patriotic speeches. Similarly, the second section of the graphic novel also employs visual symbols, predominantly that of Christ on the cross. Functioning as an ironic complement to the Abbot’s words, additional Christian allusions include the blood-stained shirt, reminiscent of the Veil of Veronica, held up on the book’s penultimate page. Notably, despite the destruction shown in the beginning of the book, the first onomatopoeic instance is Binet’s scream during his nightmare. The avoidance of this comics convention is yet another indicator of the gravity of the subject matter. In retrospect, the book, with its weighty content and multilayered visual and verbal techniques, can be seen as a predecessor of later graphic novels with rebellious and journalistic strains, such as Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1996) and Emmanuel Guibert’s The Photographer (2009).

Further Reading

Folman, Ari, and David Polonsky. Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story (2009).

Guibert, Emmanuel. Alan’s War: The Memoires of G.I. Alan Cope (2008).

Manchette, Jean-Patrick, and Jacques Tardi. Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot (2011).

Bibliography

Beaty, Bart. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990’s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

Screech, Matthew. Masters of the Ninth Art: Bandes Dessinées and Franco-Belgian Identity. Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 2005.