Rats

Rats recur as a concentrated image of human vulnerability in a world of war and want: people are trapped, driven into flight, or reduced to scavenging, while the animal comparison exposes the thinness of the boundary between civilized conduct and desperate survival.

The Closed Gate

After Ferdinand Bardamu has marched with his regiment through streets where civilians cheer and throw flowers, the celebration drains away. Rain comes; the crowds dwindle; the music stops. When he realizes the soldiers are alone and tries to leave, the civilians’ gate has already been quietly shut. The men are “caught like rats.” The simile turns the transition from public patriotic spectacle to military captivity into a blunt reversal: the soldiers once displayed to the crowd as defenders are now enclosed and powerless, with no meaningful choice about remaining in the war.

The image’s force lies in its plainness. Rats are not romanticized as brave or noble; they are creatures caught in a trap. Applied to the regiment, the comparison strips away the pageantry that had accompanied its departure and reveals the coercion beneath it. The crowd’s disappearance and the closed gate make the soldiers’ isolation concrete: they have been separated from civilian life and folded into a system that can carry them toward danger without asking their consent.

Flight from the Burning Ship

Later, the narrator describes men in wartime as trying to escape “like smoke-maddened rats” from a burning ship. The phrase extends the earlier image from physical entrapment to collective psychological crisis. The men have no general plan and no faith in one another; fear, which the narrator calls a different kind of madness, governs their efforts to survive. The simile makes flight urgent but not liberating: a rat can rush from fire without knowing where safety lies, just as these soldiers flee without a shared route or reliable trust.

This recurrence links bodily danger to the breakdown of social bonds. The narrator wonders what Princhard may have devised to protect his vulnerable organs, but the surrounding men do not ask one another how they might survive. In a world of “idealistic absurdities” and bellicose slogans, self-preservation becomes private improvisation. The rat image gives that condition a visible shape: collective motion without solidarity, escape without assurance of an exit.

Scavenging at the Hospital

At the military hospital, the comparison shifts from soldiers trapped by the war to impoverished invalids living beside them. When the old men learn that the soldiers will share the bastion’s relative comfort, they detest the newcomers, yet still beg for tobacco crumbs from the soldiers’ windowsills and stale bread fallen beneath their benches. At meals, they press their parchment-skinned faces against the mess-hall windows and peer in “like covetous rats.” Their resentment and need coexist; hunger draws them toward the very men they dislike.

The detail of the scraps matters. The old men are not presented as abstract embodiments of misery but as people competing for tobacco and fallen bread, their access to comfort defined by what others leave behind. One of them, Père Birouette, sings songs from his own day for tobacco and will do anything the soldiers ask except pass the hospital morgue. The men exploit that fear as a joke, leading him toward the door and watching him run away, griping; afterward he is absent for at least two days. The nearby morgue, which is never idle, makes the hospital’s casual cruelty inseparable from its daily proximity to death.

Meaning and Recurrence

Across these scenes, Rats mark different forms of constrained existence: the regiment is trapped behind a gate, soldiers flee a burning ship in panic, and invalids compete for the smallest leftovers. The recurring image narrows the distance between people ordinarily separated by rank and circumstance. Soldiers and hospital residents alike inhabit conditions in which survival can mean confinement, blind flight, or scavenging; none of these forms promises dignity or safety.

The animal image also sharpens the novel’s irony. Public enthusiasm surrounds the regiment at first, but once the crowd disperses, the soldiers are simply caught. At the hospital, the appearance of shared institutional care coexists with resentment, deprivation, and a practical joke built around a man’s terror of the morgue. Rats therefore do more than signify fear: their repeated presence exposes the material pressures and social arrangements that turn human beings against one another, even as they struggle to stay alive.