The opening passage-rats, head, corpse, and all-comes, unsurprisingly in its effect, though surprisingly in its existence, from Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose newly discovered novel, “Guerre” or “War,” has just been published, in France, by Gallimard. A more intense realization of the horrors of the Great War has never been written, and the passage makes other famous descriptions of the trenches seem arty and unrealized: Hemingway in “A Farewell to Arms,” self-consciously poetic Remarque in “All Quiet on the Western Front,” quietly polemical. The soldier, who seems to have internalized, permanently, the noise of the cannons, wanders through a field of death in desperate search of friendly troops.
In the first pages of the book, we lie alongside corpses, while a soldier-who will prove to be the consciousness of the narrative-his ear stuck by blood to the soil and his head shaken by the sounds of explosions, wonders if his wounded arm is even still attached to his broken body nearby, two rats rustle through the rucksack of another corpse in search of food.
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