Review - It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi

Art Spiegelman has sabotaged this review. I’m looking over the outside of my lovely new purchase and, to my delight, there’s a little blurb on the back by him recommending this graphic novel; rare praise indeed from the man who wrote Maus.

However, it’s also irritatingly accurate praise. He doesn’t just stick to calling ‘astounding’ or anything so simple, he makes the kind of comments that you know anyone who gives a damn about comics can pick up on and understand…which as I say, sabotages the actual need for a review, as his is as good a one as any. However, for the benefit of you who haven’t seen the back-cover or wonder if what he said there was truthful, I decided to be redundant and do one anyway. So, cold and tired and feverish, I sat down in the perfect mood to read Jacques Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches.

To begin with, the first thing that struck me about this little slice of World War I was the narration of the piece. I was not expecting such a candid ‘Tell don’t show’ style of narration in a comic so highly lauded and I found it somewhat removed me from the passion of the story...at least, this is what I first thought. My mistake really, because it was that sense of detachment that the narrative was trying to foster; there is no use in getting attached to men who are going to die on the next page, or just the next panel- oftentimes without warning. The grim reality of the images usually has no time for fancy allegory or flair, the inked blacks, whites and greys feeling quite at home in a comic where everything would just be variations of brown anyway… The mood is captured within the first few panels, straight to the point, and can be summed up as so: ‘Shells fall, people die.’

                And there’s such a bitterness about that summation which just keeps on coming back, over and over again. Every story in this collection slaps you in the face with how everyone doesn’t want to be there but gets on with the job anyway, panels of people saying they don’t want to do something even as they’re doing it- a strange but totally understandable consequence of war because as Tardi writes; ‘…where war is concerned it always comes down to stupidity’.

So the machine grinds on and every misery you expect is put out there…but unlike in something like Maus, Tardi’s work almost laughs at the carnage. Cold, black humour suffuses the pages, executed simply through an acknowledgement over how impossible that horror is to quantify; throwing up propaganda slogans during hopeless charges, referencing French Revolution ideals of Libetere, Equalite and Fraternitie regarding mass conscription, and, in a late example, throwing hard numbers of misery at you (accompanied by a soldier clutching his head, screaming).

‘And the cost? Cannons, shells, etc.? 2,500 billion Francs! For that price, every inhabitant of Europe – not to mention the Russians – could’ve been given a small four-room house…But, y’know, numbers!...’

‘But, y’know, numbers!’ about sums it up; a mocking exclamation (as a lot of the exclamation marks are in here) that if it’s too big to grasp it’s silly to try. And it is. The only thing left to do is shrug, in that very French way.

That is, perhaps, an accurate summation of the reading experience as well. The first story you sense he’s just trying to get into the swing of things, the panel layout is a little more creative, some curiously shaped shell-like curves, establishing the mood of the piece and a curious mix of detached 3^rd and 1^st person, getting a little Heart of Darkness in people within the story telling it…then it takes a break into an actual short story…and then after that brief respite it’s as if you’re hammered from there to the end of the book. The pace is absolutely relentless- not like any other comic I’ve read- with three panels a page you just keep marching on, shells dropping all around, people dying every other page, with no distinction over when one story ends and another begins beyond your own common sense telling you if it has or not (and sometimes the date changing). Often in this text do soldiers not even know which way they are facing or whose trench they’re in, and so it feels when you’re reading it; the dates provided that tell you the ‘when’ quickly fade from memory, the imagery is obscured and muddy and what you can see is, usually, what you’ve seen before; dead bodies, barbed wire, and artillery shells going off. 

                At the end of it, I found myself taken through it at such a speed (all in one sitting) that I could barely remember specifics. The narratives, on reflection, were not as important as the mood they created. Same with the places. Same with the charges. Even the characters only stick because nearly always their names were capitalized, as if Jaques wanted you to see them out above the mire of corpses he was depicting…Bidet, Bouvreuil, Huet, Mazure….I may as well be listing ingredients for a sandwich for all they mean to me.

                However…a work is to be judged on if it succeeds in getting its point across, so don’t think I’m being down on It was the War of the Trenches simply because I was mildly depressed and still cold when finishing it. It didn’t have the surprise and the shock of other more sensational war comics, and in the end it was better served without them; the dour, humourless humour and bleak prospects that saturated the book did a much better job of conveying the scale of feeling than any amount of viewpoints or BBC Documentaries about the Somme ever did. As well it should considering the size of the film and bibliography noted at the end of the work, something which offers an explanation over how accurately and completely it managed to capture the mood, even if a lot of the events were fiction (it's never made clear what is fact or not).

                In the end, you’ve been bombarded so thoroughly by the three-panel shelling that like the soldiers within, you just can’t shrug it off apathetically anymore. It’s just miserable…but satisfyingly so, and because of this Jaques Tardi has done a wonderful job of extending a sliver of empathy and understanding toward a war that everyone overlooks and nearly everyone alive no longer remembers. I’m glad its taken so long to be translated if only for that kind of timing, because though you might not take much from It Was the War of the Trenches or be able to have long discussions about it, you won’t forget it either; and this matter isn’t one we should be forgetting about at all.