Bardamu enlists in the army

Bardamu enlists in the army not after a settled patriotic conviction but in a startling reversal, as a regiment passes the café where he and Arthur Ganate have just made peace. Moments earlier, Bardamu has described workers as oarsmen trapped in a galley, made to labor below deck while their masters enjoy themselves above and then summon them to fight. Yet when the regiment appears, he rises, declares that he will see whether his own argument holds, and joins it. The enlistment turns a political conversation into an irreversible departure: before long, the civilians have vanished, the cheering has stopped, and the recruits are shut in together.

The Argument Before Enlistment

Bardamu and Arthur first clash over politics and duty. Arthur identifies himself with the established order and says he would be ready to shed his blood if his country asked. Bardamu’s answer imagines society as a galley: workers strain at the oars and receive hardship in return, while those above them enjoy comfort. In wartime, the masters summon the workers, urge them to attack an enemy, and dress the demand for sacrifice in patriotic language. Bardamu’s account makes enlistment look less like a free choice than the final command in a hierarchy of labor and power.

The argument does not end in a lasting rupture. As war approaches without the two men fully recognizing its imminence, the discussion exhausts Bardamu; he is also nettled by a waiter’s implication that he has tipped poorly. He and Arthur make up and agree about almost everything. That reconciliation makes the next turn more abrupt: the enlistment does not follow a decisive victory in their debate, but interrupts a moment of restored friendship and apparent agreement.

The Regiment and the Impulse to Join

A regiment marches past the café, led by a colonel on horseback. Its organized movement and commanding appearance provoke a response that overturns Bardamu’s immediately preceding critique. Enthusiasm carries him to his feet. He tells Arthur he will go and see whether things are really as he has described them, then hurries to enlist. The stated impulse is both a challenge to his own argument and a response to the spectacle before him; the evidence does not resolve the contradiction into a single, settled motive.

Arthur calls after him, telling him not to be a fool. Bardamu is hurt by Arthur’s reaction, but it does not stop him: he falls into the regiment. He has only time to call back before the column turns the corner and leaves him marching behind the colonel and the band. The account presents enlistment as an action taken at speed, before reflection can catch up with its consequences.

From Public Acclaim to Confinement

At first, the march passes through crowded streets. Civilians and their wives cheer the soldiers and throw flowers from terraces, stations, and churches. The visible welcome thins as the march continues and rain begins; eventually there are no spectators and no cheers, only the soldiers in their rows and the silence left by the stopped music. Bardamu recognizes that the scene has changed and considers leaving.

That possibility closes when the civilians’ gate is quietly shut behind the column. The recruits are caught together, and the outwardly voluntary gesture of enlistment becomes confinement. The contrast between the cheering crowd and the closed gate gives the episode its decisive turn: Bardamu can march away from the café, but he cannot simply reverse the choice once the regiment has absorbed him.

War’s Meaning and the Aftermath

In retrospect, Bardamu describes enlistment as entry into a horror he could not have imagined before leaving Place Clichy. He sees himself caught in a mass flight toward collective murder and calls the experience a loss of innocence about war. The recognition grows from participation: what had been an argument about workers, masters, and patriotic appeals now has him inside the machinery those arguments anticipated.

The army’s response to his subsequent breakdown further complicates the meaning of enlistment. After he falls ill and is described as delirious and driven mad by fear, authorities debate whether he is an anarchist who should be shot or a supposedly insane man who should be confined. He is placed under observation at a secondary school in Issy-les-Moulineaux, where soldiers whose patriotism is considered impaired are watched and pressed to confess. Bardamu observes that people who claim sanity can control the definition of madness through their nerve and majority status. His enlistment has thus led not to the heroic identity promised by public enthusiasm but to institutional suspicion of the fear that war produces.

A later patriotic lecture to Bardamu exposes the language that gives enlistment its official justification. The professor names patriotism and glory as the highest concepts, and argues that soldiers under fire abandon self-preservation in favor of the nation. Bardamu’s experience supplies the counterpoint: the choice to join began in an impulsive encounter with a regiment, while its consequences included terror, confinement, and the prospect of renewed exposure to the front. The episode makes enlistment a hinge between public performance and private fear, and between a critique of sacrifice and the narrator’s own sudden participation in it.