Behind the Front

INVASION--Maxence van der Meersch--Viking ($3).

Most of the novels about the World War, from Andreas Latzko's Men in Battle (1930) to Humphrey Cobb's Paths of Glory (1935), have been in terms of frontline fighting. To such outstanding exceptions as John Dos Passos' Three Soldiers and Arnold Zweig's Case of Sergeant Grischa was added this week Author van der Meersch's Invasion--the first novel to show what the War was like for civilians caught behind the German lines. Invasion's scene is the district around Lille, in northern France, a narrow strip between the Belgian border and the trenches of the Western Front. In that crowded industrial area, in 1914, were three towns, a dozen villages, hundreds of thousands of people. Invasion's principal characters number more than 50, represent every type of noncombatant, every fortune of war. In 707 pages Author van der Meersch tells their grim four-year tale, from the first days of the invasion to the final German retreat.

Jean Sennevilliers, after his mobilization orders came, worked most of the night at his quarry and did odd jobs around the house, then caught the last train out of Lille. It was months before his family learned that the train had been attacked by Uhlans and Jean killed. Fannie, his wife, had a German soldier billeted in her cottage, and at last, because it seemed the natural thing to do. she let him take her husband's place. Then the German went to the trenches to be killed, and when Fannie bore his baby the village was willing to let her starve. Jean's brother Marc, a stalwart priest, got his atheist friend Gaure, a chemistry professor, to help him rig up a homemade wireless, to get news of the outside world. Before they knew it, both were involved in a far-flung spy system. Gaure was caught, tortured, shot. Later on Marc was arrested too, but only for running an illicit printing press. He and one of his partners, Hennedyck, a manufacturer who shut down his mill rather than let the Germans get his textiles, were sent to a German prison. Alain Laubigier refused to register with the authorities, led the life of a hunted criminal till he ended up in a labor battalion. Judith Lacombe fell in love with the German soldier who raped her, turned sullen prostitute when he went away.

As the days of the occupation lengthened, food supplies dwindled, in spite of foreign relief. "A stranger would have fancied himself among a population of ascetics. Everywhere there were symptoms of an appalling state of malnutrition: sties, boils and pimples, cases of jaundice and of scab, scales between the fingers, scurvy of the gums, dry abscesses on necks and behind ears." At first there were ways of getting enough food: if you were a woman, and young, or if you were rich enough to buy from smugglers. Author van der Meersch implies that the Belgians were comparatively well off, had plenty to eat. German policy in Belgium was conciliatory, in occupied France, punitive.

There was no news except the official German bulletins. Families whose fathers and brothers were with the French armies had to wait sometimes two years for news of their death. These French people did not know until the War was practically over what a poilu was. Able-bodied men were liable for service in labor battalions far from home or just behind the front. Everyone had to have identification cards, stamped periodically. Those who were caught without went to jail. Patriotic citizens refused to trade with the Germans, but few were pure patriots. Many a burgher lined his purse and kept a clear conscience by dealing through an agent. Anonymous letters of accusation against fellow-Frenchmen were so common they were posted on bulletin boards by the Ger mans, with the inscription: "This is how the French treat their fellow-countrymen."

As food supplies shrank to nearly nothing, "the inhabitants of these occupied territories reverted to a state of savagery, a sort of primitive civilization, in which each individual, according to his taste, his knowledge, and his resources, made, exchanged, and consumed what he could." The winter of 1917 was so cold that the sewers froze, flooded the streets. For fuel the poor had to use their furniture, finally even the doors and stairways of their houses. One benefactor got the idea of dredging up coal-dusty mud from the bed of the canal, handing over this slimy substitute to anyone who would cart it away.

The physique and morale of the invaders, caught in the same steel trap as the French, began to waste away. The Sennevilliers lime-kilns were converted into incinerators for dead bodies, clipped together in naked bales of four. The kilns were served by a prison camp of madmen guarded by cripples. "They could be seen any day at their task, stopping suddenly to salute empty space, or tearing their hair and groaning."

When the Germans at last retreated and the first English troops appeared it was like the beginning of the world, but the countryside looked more like the end of one--"the ruins of their dead industries, fifty percent of their people destroyed by consumption, starvation, and cold, their grass-grown streets, their peeling housefronts, their dwellings without furniture or doors, without windows, without light, without warmth!" But it had been an industrial, productive land; soon factories were rebuilding, mills once again breathing out smoke. In the first flush of victory there was a flurry about "traitors" and "dealers with the enemy," but with returning prosperity the War was forgotten. Even the heroes--and there had been some--were forgotten. "One can't, as people began to say, be grateful for ever."

The Author. Maxence van der Meersch is a native of Roubaix, one of the occupied towns he writes about. He still lives there, with his wife and six-year-old daughter. He was seven when the German invasion engulfed his town, eleven when it ebbed. After the War he finished his education at nearby Tourcoing and the University at Lille, where he took degrees in law and literature. He won two national prizes for writing before he was 20, published five shorter novels before Invasion. His businessman father acts as his literary agent. Invasion (published in France in 1935) made a stir, was touted for the Prix Goncourt but did not get it. Author van der Meersch won the prize the following year with his next book, L'Empreinte du dieu, not yet translated.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.