War Games Margaret R. Higonnet (bio) As wars go, none of them, in retrospect—including the First World War—seem very funny. In his chapter “Oh what a funny war,” Paul Fussell calls it instead a “tragic satire” whose irony rests (as in all wars) in the disproportion between means and ends (6–7). 1 The Great War, however, has been viewed by historians as a particularly painful and futile sequence of events that marked a dramatic rupture in European culture. The massive losses of the war—including a single “Day of Harvest” at Tannenberg (August 28, 1914), when thirty-thousand Russians and thirteen-thousand Germans died, and July 1, 1916, when sixty-thousand British soldiers were crushed at the Somme—seemed unspeakable to many survivors. Former combatants’ efforts to express their wrenching experiences reinforced the literary tendency to use formal fragmentation, irony, and themes of alienation, which have become the hallmarks of modernism. Although irony might be an apt vehicle of expression for this war, humor and playfulness, in principle, seem less appropriate. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. “War is very ugly.” Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Jean sans pain, histoire pour tous les enfants, illustrated by Picart-le-Doux (1921). The kind of children’s book most honest in its response to the war, one might argue, is exemplified by the postwar pacifist picture book Jean sans pain [Jean Without Bread], which was written by the communist author Paul Vaillant-Couturier. 2 In this fable, which continues to retain a bitter resonance for modern readers, the innocent orphan Jean, who is abandoned and starving, is guided by animal helpers across the social landscape to the battlefront in a journey that fiercely indicts war-mongering capitalist profiteers. What Jean sees—boldly illustrated by Picart-le-Doux—teaches him that “[c]’est très laid la guerre” (war is very ugly; 36) (see Figure 1). A precursor of Saint-Exupéry’s “little prince,” this child hero ironically escapes war by passing into the symbolic peace of death and the fraternal experiments of countries lying to the East. During the war, when the costs of war—such as the absence of fathers and brothers, the displacement of refugees, or the shortages of food—should have been most palpable, many children’s books addressed the [End Page 1] topic playfully. It is this puzzle of the playful depiction of war that I address here through an examination of several French comic strips and illustrated books. I start from the question of how this dehumanizing and costly war could find comic expression in picture books. The issue presents a limit case—close to a taboo—for the study of humor and children’s literature, as war involves not simply death but death multiplied by millions. The second question is how a woman writer or illustrator might represent the complex experiences of war as it is considered one of the most highly gendered domains of life, and how can she frame that distant and ugly war for little girls living at the home front? For my examples, I turn not only to the patriotic escapades of the Pieds Nickelés and Bécassine, whose figures in comic books were immensely popular when they first appeared and are still available in print, but also to forgotten, elegant picture books by Marthe Serrie-Heim, Charlotte Schaller-Mouillot, and Lucie Paul-Margueritte. How is it possible for these works to unite the adult world of war with the world of children’s play? One obvious and troubling nexus is the ritual and ludicrous side of war. After all, strategists play “war games” to prepare their tactics. According [End Page 2] to the German theorist Carl von Clausewitz, war is the pursuit of political goals “by other means” (91). Although war is a form of team contest that has symbolic stakes, many games likewise symbolize or mime war: in chess, for example, the elimination of the opponent’s “men” and the capture of the “king” are the goals. The deceptive blurring of lines between war and “play” serves propaganda purposes. 3 During World War I, combat was represented to adults and children as a sport...
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Jan 1, 2002
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