French Army

The French Army becomes Anthony’s chosen exit from Heillange: a promise of movement, discipline, and a new identity at the moment he sees few other futures for himself. He approaches enlistment with fantasies of combat and seeing the world, while his mother anticipates the dullness of barracks life. A meniscus injury soon ends his service, turning the institution he had imagined as a way forward into a brief, abruptly closed route away from home.

Recruitment and the promise of escape

In March, during a school career fair in Metz, Anthony encounters the army’s recruitment booth among presentations for technical diplomas, engineering qualifications, and universities. He takes a prospectus and speaks with a cheerful blonde woman in uniform. She gives him a CD showing a marine, a submariner, a helicopter pilot, and jungle-warfare training in Guyana. The images offer a vivid alternative to the daunting choices he knows little about; the army appears to make an unfamiliar world available in concrete, visual forms.

Anthony signs his enlistment papers in April. By the time he turns eighteen in May and passes the technological baccalauréat in June, he has already settled the immediate question of what comes next. He is due to leave on July 15, the day after the narrative follows him through July 14. Enlistment is not presented as the culmination of a clear professional plan. It is a decision made amid uncertainty, and its fixed departure date gives that uncertainty a direction.

The army’s appeal is personal as well as practical. Anthony sees himself as one of many poor young people who have not been happy at school, setting out to make his way, learn to fight, and see the world. He also wants to become the kind of man he thinks his father would recognize. His enthusiasm draws on the action films he has watched, which have helped shape his expectation that military life will involve combat and exotic experience. For him, service offers both a chance to leave and a script for becoming an adult.

Expectation and domestic resistance

Hélène does not share Anthony’s heroic picture. She laughs at his ambitions and recalls the boys she has seen enlist hoping for combat and adventure, only to return disgusted by discipline that is bureaucratic and nitpicking. In her view, many never leave their barracks except to drink bad beer in small-town bars. Her response punctures the glamour of the recruitment images without changing Anthony’s decision: mother and son read the same institution through sharply different expectations.

That difference surfaces in their physical interaction as well. Anthony spreads his arms and tries to stop her; Hélène irritably shoos him away. She dislikes his weightlifter appearance, with his beefy arms held out from his body, and hopes the army will know what to do with him. His body, which he regards as evidence of new strength, looks to her like an awkward problem for the institution to manage. The moment compresses their disagreement: Anthony imagines the army will give his body purpose, while Hélène suspects it will impose a reality less impressive than his fantasy.

Injury and the end of service

Anthony’s military career is cut short by an injury sustained while playing soccer after class. A damaged meniscus first seems manageable. He spends a week in the infirmary with his knee bandaged, taking Doliprane, bored and in constant pain. When a nurse finds him unconscious and tangled in his sheets on the floor, he is prescribed codeine; the medication lets him read magazines without becoming nauseated.

After returning from leave, the chief doctor examines him and orders him sent back to France for immediate surgery at the Saint-Mandé military hospital. The doctor’s rough manner toward his staff contrasts with the consequential efficiency of his decision: Anthony undergoes the operation and then completes six months of physical therapy. He is sent back to Germany, but further fitness tests establish that there is no point in continuing his service. The sequence replaces the promised training and mobility with an injured knee, treatment, rehabilitation, and assessment.

Discharge and what the army leaves behind

Anthony receives the news in a small office from a civilian-clothed official: he will be paid for his two years and can go home. At the time, he takes the arrangement as a good deal. On a gray, chilly day at a German train station, he has a check for nearly twenty thousand francs and his possessions in a duffel bag. The destinations displayed there—Dortmund, Munich, and Poland—do not appeal to him. He must pass through Paris on his way home to Heillange, but postpones deciding whether to return immediately.

The army has thus provided Anthony with an exit from home, but not the transformation he imagined. The service that promised combat and a wider world ends not in a chosen return but in medical discharge, compensation, and an unresolved journey. His decision to enlist also carries a more intimate purpose: he wants to put hundreds of miles between himself and his father, and regards the army as somewhere he can hide, with orders to follow. Against that wish, his departure marks the end of the protection he associates with being a minor. The institution briefly supplies a structure for moving into adulthood, but injury sends him out of it before that passage can settle into a new life.