Word: larteguy
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...ideological military tradition of modern France; the conception of himself as a latter-day Louis XIV bulks larger in him than the Army thought when it helped bring him to power in May, 1958. The Centurions clearly sides with the army (against Gaullist-Louisism): for M. Larteguy, the revivification of the French army has a much more specific ideological purpose than re-capturing la gloire...
...cover calls it "the sensational bestselling French novel about their paratroops in Indo-China and Algeria," it only describes Indo-China after the defeat at Dien-Bien-Phu, and deals with the Algerian campaign in a curious (and not very exciting) fashion, as though the French army there were Larteguy's model army...
...group of soldiers it follows from an Indo-Chinese prison camp, to a leave in Metropolitan France, and finally to action in Algeria. These conversations sound totally abstracted from reality, because the milieu to which they refer -- and which gives them meaning -- is not described in the novel. Larteguy neither describes the military frustrations of the Army, nor evokes the corrosive feeling of futility which has eaten away its pride and sense. All this -- like feeling for the historical significance the Army's plight -- is assumed in the reader...
...What Larteguy substitutes for a sense of reality is (as I suppose he intended it) a sense of exaltation, induced by being in the presence of men," his soldiers. In his view, the Army's critics are dead wrong when they say that the military has isolated itself from the French reality. Rather, France herself has grown unreal, and failed to face the issues...
...awareness of the real issue, Larteguy says in effect, is gained on the battle-field (or in the prison camp). For his characters, the indoctrination and intellectual forced-feeding to which their Viet captors subject them is kin of ordeal by fire, which burns away all illusions, and leaves them damned with the urgent, but incommunicable vision of truth. So, for example, Colonel Raspeguy (in a sense, the novel's central character), during his home leave (in a sense, the central part of the novel), when asked to describe his experiences, reflects...