The Ardennes is a war landscape in Ferdinand Bardamu’s account, first encountered on a night ride by a small party of horsemen. Its darkness makes the men’s exhaustion and isolation palpable, while later reflections connect the region to a wider world in which poor people are sent toward danger and privilege offers routes of escape.

The Night Ride

Bardamu recalls the party as four horsemen making enough noise to be heard from miles away. The men carry a month’s worth of sleepiness, he says, along with the weight of their equipment. Yet the darkness makes their progress feel less like an approach toward an identifiable destination than movement through a blank space: Bardamu cannot see anything in the distance, and jokes that the Germans might be afraid of them—or might simply refuse to hear them.

The men around him are largely silent. They come from the ends of Brittany and, as Bardamu describes them, have learned what they know in the army rather than at school. He tries to start a conversation with the man beside him, Kersuzon, by pointing out that they are now in the Ardennes and asking whether he can see anything. Kersuzon replies that it is as black as an asshole. The exchange ends there: the landscape provides no view, and the conversation no opening into companionship.

A Landscape of Exposure

The Ardennes belongs to the novel’s wartime geography, where visibility and safety are uncertain and ordinary men are exposed to violence. Bardamu’s joke about whether the Germans can hear the party turns the ride into a question of vulnerability as well as direction. The riders are conspicuous in their noise but blind in the night; they advance without knowing what, if anything, is waiting ahead.

That scene’s physical darkness resonates with Bardamu’s later account of military life as a system that directs poor men toward danger. He says that he lacked the indispensable connections needed to stay out of the war, and that the people he knew were poor people whose deaths interested no one. His recollection of the Ardennes’ silent soldiers thus sits within a broader portrait of men whose class position leaves them exposed while others can seek shelter or influence.

Recalled Across the War

The Ardennes is not revisited in the supplied account as a developed settlement or a sequence of later local events. Its significance comes instead from the way the novel’s retrospective narration places the night ride beside other experiences of wartime exhaustion, fear, and hierarchy. In a later hospital episode, wounded men gain visits from socialites and political figures once they become presentable, while the institution turns patriotic feeling into a public spectacle. The contrast sharpens the Ardennes scene: there, the soldiers are tired, nearly mute, and lost in darkness; later, their suffering can be reframed for visitors as a story of heroism.

Bardamu also recalls how little he understood the social order that governed the colonial passage he later undertook. On the ship, he says, he did not know that an unknown civilian who had paid his own fare might be treated with suspicion, while military and bureaucratic arrangements marked other passengers as entitled to travel. Read alongside these episodes, the Ardennes is one early point in a continuing geography of unequal exposure: military service, class, and access to connections help determine who is made vulnerable, and how that vulnerability is interpreted afterward.