American Expeditionary Forces

The American Expeditionary Forces are a wartime military presence in Paris, where their nurses are quartered at the Hôtel Paritz and Lola oversees a hospital food service for them. Their place in the novel extends beyond the army itself: through Bardamu’s experience of war and later work, the narrative connects military mobilization to institutions that monitor, classify, and make use of vulnerable bodies.

Presence in Wartime Paris

Lola belongs to a group of nurses assigned to serve the American Expeditionary Forces, and the group is housed at the Hôtel Paritz. She is placed in charge of supplying Paris hospitals with apple fritters, a role she carries out through hired cooks and the daily tasting of their deliveries. The detail gives the military presence a civilian and domestic face, but the service is also woven into a city organized around the war.

Bardamu’s relationship with Lola unfolds against the pressure of returning to military duty. He is recovering and wants to avoid the front, while Lola is committed to helping the war effort. His own experience has made him distrustful of heroic rhetoric, so her service does not persuade him to embrace the cause. Instead, their differing orientations expose the strain war places on private life.

War, Patriotism, and Confinement

Bardamu’s fear of the front is treated not simply as a personal failing but as a condition that authorities attempt to manage. After he becomes ill and delirious, officials debate whether he is an anarchist or genuinely mentally ill; they ultimately place him under observation. He and other wounded men are lodged at a secondary school in Issy-les-Moulineaux, where silent male staff watch them and seek to obtain confessions of impaired patriotism. The institution presents itself as a place of care, yet its scrutiny is directed toward determining whether the men can be returned to the demands of war.

The observation period leads to further official sorting: men may be sent to an asylum, back to the front, or, in some cases, to a firing squad. In the hospital, the same logic appears through paperwork, identification tags, and restrictions accompanying leave. Bardamu experiences the men as counted and enrolled among those expected to return to the front, while civilian and medical staff remain outside that immediate danger. The novel thus places military discipline within a broader administrative system that can pursue a soldier even when no battlefield is in view.

The Language of Military Duty

A professor’s account of patriotism presents it as the highest moral principle and as a truth of the heart, one that should make soldiers abandon self-preservation. The formulation clarifies the ideological pressure surrounding military service: obedience and sacrifice are praised as proof of virtue, while practical intelligence is cast as an impediment. Bardamu’s narrative resists that account by keeping attention on fear, bodily vulnerability, and the institutional consequences of being judged insufficiently patriotic.

His early image of society as a galley also connects labor to war. Ordinary people, he argues, pull at the oars below deck while their masters remain above; when war comes, those same workers are summoned to fight. The image makes military service part of a class structure in which the burden of danger falls on people with little influence or protection. The American Expeditionary Forces are not shown directing this critique, but their Paris presence belongs to the wartime setting through which Bardamu measures the gap between patriotic claims and lived exposure.

From Military Discipline to Industrial Discipline

The novel’s institutional pattern continues in the Ford factory, where Bardamu seeks employment after his wartime experiences. During the medical examination, an assistant tells him that his poor health is no obstacle because the work requires no particular health, and a doctor warns him that thought and imagination are unwanted: the factory needs workers who perform instructed movements. Bardamu accordingly resolves to appear as a quiet drudge.

The factory’s machinery overwhelms speech and bodily independence. Men are assigned to machines in groups, and Bardamu describes the workers as becoming machines within a building whose vibration reaches from their ears to the soles of their feet. This episode is not an action by the American Expeditionary Forces; it is a civilian counterpart to the novel’s account of wartime management. In both settings, institutions reduce individuals to bodies to be examined, classified, and put to use, while the narrative preserves the fear and exhaustion that official language suppresses.