The Art of Reading a Military Report

The title of the piece is as brittle as a burst of machine gun fire on the tiles of a roof: Journal of Marches and Operations of the Fourth Cuirassiers During the Campaign Against Germany from September 2 1939 to June 25 1940. A brochure of one hundred pages, printed in Bergerac in the first months after the armistice.

The chronicle recaptures, almost hour by hour, the military exploits of the Fourth Cuirassier Regiment.

Reading it elicits a disturbing feeling: though everything is well-recorded, dated, and localized, the narration’s distant chill gives the troops’ movements an immaterial appearance, almost dehumanized.

“Wednesday May 22. Bombardment of the line by enemy artillery…. Friday May 24. Captain Miquel, from the E.-M. of the 1st D.L.M., gives the order to retreat north, Canal de la Haute-Deule…. Sunday May 26. At nightfall, the Regiment moves into Annœullin. Situation unclear. The infantry abandons Carvin.”

Even when this telegraphic style mentions acts of heroism, the suffering of the wounded, and the death of fighters, there is still a sense of unreality, as if the writer of the document had intended it for a circle of initiates from which we are excluded. “Saturday May 18. Only Brigadier-Chief d’Ormesson’s tank was able to leave Jolimetz…. Thursday May 23. The P.C. of the Regiment received a serious dive bomb bombardment in Farbus. Several trucks and cisterns of fuel caught fire. Captain Henry saves an ammunitions truck during the bombardment despite the grave danger presented by the nearby fire … Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel is called to the P.C. of the Division at 20:30 to take command of all the tanks, Lieutenant-Colonel Pinon having been seriously injured…. Wednesday June 12. Violent anti-tank weapon response impossible to detect due to the configuration of the terrain. Sub-lieutenant Legendre gets out of his tank to liaison on foot with the D.P.s; he is shot at close range …”

This is a way of writing that, we must admit, is not particularly seeking a great degree of empathy from its readers. From time to time, though, these arid lines light up with the name of “Officer Cadet Schreiber” (the rank of lieutenant will come later) and the story regains vitality, for beyond its sentences I hear Jean-Claude’s voice, I make out his smile: “Tuesday May 28. Thanks to a bold reconnaissance mission by Officer Cadet Schreiber, the colonel was able to locate the position of the Vandières squadron in the Mounts of Flanders.”

Sometimes a section will awaken a personal memory in me, the shadow of another war—far less glorious—under the Afghan sky; one that taught me what could be hidden behind the frosty neutrality of a formal military report, behind observations like the one I am rereading in the Journal of Marches: “Saturday June 22. Sergeant Chalverat’s tank is destroyed and in flames. The crew could not be pulled out.”

In order to understand these words, one must imagine a beautiful summer evening, somewhere not far from Parthenay, gardens in bloom, the shady coolness of the waters of the Thouet … and without any intermediate scene, in this same idyllic décor, the definition of hell appears: the turret of a burning tank and three young men, dead or just shell shocked, their bodies destroyed or only riddled with minuscule shots, enough to kill. One of the tank drivers may still be alive; he is trying to forge a path through the smoke, the blood, the ripped flesh, the jagged steel. An inch or so of armored plating separates him from the pleasant sunset; he has time to see the sky through the turret opening, to cling to its burning metal … but the fire is already seizing him, devouring his face, setting his body alight, transforming him into a torch.

Such is the true sense of the chaste and austere military wording: “the crew could not be pulled out.”

Jean-Claude was not present at this tank battle (he had lived through and would live through many others). He had just been evacuated to a hospital after being wounded in the leg. His first war was coming to an end.

There still remained in him the certainty that he had to tell about what he had seen so often, to make people understand that the hell poets speak about could sometimes unfold in the middle of a radiant June evening, and that at dawn, while the flames were dying down over the shells of the armored tanks, the birds would peacefully take up their songs once more. And that in this world there was, therefore, a force, a principle, a superior will that made it possible for hell, evil, and death to take on this extreme banality. He thought about it, became lost, and then couldn’t find the words to express these realities, which were so obvious and so complex. Perhaps there was something to be said after all for the language in the Journal of Marches, for its bare and anesthetizing severity: “the tank is destroyed and in flames.” Period, new paragraph.

How else was one to accept the death of those young men burned alive under that beautiful sky turned pink by the setting sun, and who was there to blame? And how could other people be told about the physical truth of their death? And afterward, how was one to keep living without becoming a cynical boor, an unfeeling human automaton? How can a person not lose all reason after having spent time in the banality of hell?