First World War

The First World War is present less as a narrated campaign than as an inherited history carried by damaged bodies, remembered scenes, and stories told to the next generation. Etienne LeBlanc’s account of service beside Henri LeBlanc gives the war its most intimate form: the nightly work of signalmen, the terror of exposure under flares, and the scripts that helped two brothers endure until morning. Crazy Harold Bazin, a veteran living in Saint-Malo, supplies a second, starkly physical trace of the conflict. Together these fragments place the novel’s later war in a longer history of violence and survival.

Signalmen in the illuminated trenches

Etienne LeBlanc recounts his wartime service to Marie-Laure LeBlanc while explaining the history of the recordings and radio programs made with his brother. Before the war, Henri LeBlanc had been celebrated for his voice, and the brothers had hoped to record and sell children’s programs. Etienne LeBlanc wrote science scripts for Henri LeBlanc to perform; Daniel LeBlanc, still a boy, sometimes came to listen. The war interrupted that shared work and made the brothers signalmen, responsible for connecting rear command positions to officers at the front with telegraph wires.

The danger of that duty is concentrated in the nightly flares. Enemy pistol flares, called very lights, hung briefly beneath parachutes to expose possible targets. Soldiers within their glare froze, while repeated bursts could turn the night stark with magnesium light. In that suspended brightness, the only sound might be the flares fizzing before a sniper’s bullet crossed the darkness and struck the mud. The signalmen stayed close together, but proximity could not always overcome terror: Etienne LeBlanc says that at times he became unable to move any part of his body, even his fingers or eyelids.

Henri LeBlanc’s voice as shelter

When Etienne LeBlanc was paralyzed by fear, Henri LeBlanc stayed beside him and whispered the science scripts they had recorded. He repeated them through the night, as though the familiar words could weave a protective screen around the brothers until morning. The scripts had begun as a creative collaboration and a hoped-for livelihood; in the trenches they became an improvised means of enduring the hours of danger. The same material thus connects the brothers’ civilian hopes with their service at the front without suggesting that the war erased their earlier bond.

The account ends with the blunt fact that Henri LeBlanc died. Etienne LeBlanc’s recollection therefore carries both the practical history of their service and the loss that followed it. When he tells Marie-Laure LeBlanc about his brother, he is not offering a general military chronicle: the remembered flares, the paralysis, and the whispered scripts make the war legible through one relationship and through the particular ways the brothers tried to keep one another alive.

A veteran in Saint-Malo

The First World War also appears in the figure of Crazy Harold Bazin, who lives in an alcove behind the library and receives food from Madame Manec and Marie-Laure LeBlanc. A veteran, he has lost his nose, left ear, and eye to shellfire and wears an enameled copper mask over half his face. His presence turns the consequences of a past war into part of the ordinary landscape of Saint-Malo: the damaged veteran is not encountered on a battlefield but among the people to whom food is being delivered.

Crazy Harold Bazin tells Marie-Laure LeBlanc stories about Saint-Malo’s ramparts and the attackers they have kept out over the centuries. Those stories range across many eras and should not be mistaken for a specific account of the First World War. His veteran status and shellfire injuries, however, make him a direct human remainder of that conflict. The juxtaposition is significant: a city’s long defensive legends coexist with the bodily evidence borne by one of its residents.

The First World War and the later conflict

The novel’s central occupation-era events belong to a later war. Under German occupation, a notice orders Saint-Malo’s residents to surrender their radio receivers, while a letter from Frau Elena describes the criminalization of listening to foreign broadcasts in Germany. Daniel LeBlanc is arrested outside Vitré while traveling toward Paris, and the German interrogators deny him access to paper, linens, and a telephone. Later, residents of Saint-Malo face evacuation orders and the detention of men between sixteen and sixty. These episodes are not part of the First World War; they establish the distinct later conflict in which the novel’s principal action unfolds.

Against that later chronology, the earlier war supplies a measure of what violence leaves behind. Etienne LeBlanc remembers fear and the death of his brother; Crazy Harold Bazin’s face bears the physical consequences of shellfire. The First World War is therefore a remembered and embodied past within the novel, not its main battlefield setting. Its significance lies in the way one war’s losses remain present in civilian life while another war imposes its own dangers, restrictions, and separations.