Word: larsan
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These thoughts, with all their eloquence -and all their exaggeration-express the theme of the book, which is mostly a monologue in which one dedicated professional soldier slowly, agonizingly discovers that he can no longer fight his country's colonial wars. Jean de Larsan comes from a family of soldiers. Like many a French officer, he saw war as a duty, a form of chivalry, a mystique in which obedience was the key to honor. Now he finds that he can no longer obey. He had been a genuine hero, one of the few French officers who fought...
Anger & Pride. Then came Indo-China. There, once questioning an intelligent, Paris-educated national who was now fighting for the Communist Viet Minh, Larsan heard a criticism of France that was hard to deny: it was "too generous with us and too hard . . . too intelligent and too stupid." France was perfectly willing to pass on its culture, but Frenchmen were never really willing to accept natives as equals, and so, as in all colonial rule, "a moment comes when there's too much accumulated anger on one side and too hard a carapace of pride on the other...
Indo-China taught Larsan that it is better for a soldier "not to know too much of what goes on below the surface," but his own trouble as a soldier was that he had become a thinking and feeling man. His personal crisis came in Algeria, where he found war no longer an honorable profession but a vicious police action. He conceded that the rebels were murderous, but could not justify to himself committing murder in vengeance. When he sees his own men wiping out whole villages of unarmed civilians, he protests; by that time, it is perfectly plain...
...Larsan's answer, and an unconvincing one, is familiar in France; it is essentially the same as Voltaire's advice to his countrymen in Candide to cultivate their own garden. Says Larsan: "I think I shall even start keeping bees again; the Larsan hills are rich in wild flowers and used to be famous for their bees. I shall sell honey and sweetness to the world . . . You see, I'm a real deserter...
...cast as finally arranged, follows: Rouletabille, Y. Buhler, Unc. Larsan, R. H. Bassett '20 Robert Darzac, P. K. Fisher '20 M. Stangerson, F. C. deWolf '18 Sainclair, I. G. Williams '20 M. de Marquet, P. V. Donovan '18 Le Pere Jacques, P. Ayme-Martin, 1L Arthur Rance, C. L. Larrabee '19 La Souris, G. Baker '20 Maleine, J. B. Fenno '21 L'Avocat, J. B. Fenno '21 Bernier, H. Teplow '20 Un Huissier, H. Teplow '20 Brigadier, M. Cowley '19 Le president des Assises, N. Thayer '21 Mathilde, Margaret Carver, 1918 Edith Rance, Marian Graves, 1918 La Mere Bernier, Mary...