Ferdinand Bardamu and Robinson

Ferdinand Bardamu and Robinson first meet as soldiers wandering through a dark, deserted town, and their brief encounter gives shape to a relationship founded less on solidarity than on a shared wish to survive. Robinson’s frank fear and refusal of the war articulate an impulse Bardamu recognizes in himself; their attempted movement toward safety brings them together for one night, but does not free either man from the conflict.

Identity and First Encounter

Bardamu comes upon Robinson when a change in the darkness ahead makes him call out. The stranger answers in a deep, hoarse voice and warns him not to shout. Bardamu can make out a foot soldier whose cap peak is cracked in what he calls a “goodbye to the army” style. The moment stays in Bardamu’s memory: Robinson emerges from the grass like a target in a shooting gallery. Bardamu is holding a revolver and admits that, for almost no reason, he might have fired. The encounter begins not with recognition or ease but with the possibility of violence.

Robinson asks whether Bardamu has seen the Germans. Bardamu says he has come to see them, and Robinson identifies himself as a reservist. The distinction matters to Bardamu, who has so far been among regular soldiers and has never met a reservist during the war. Although he cannot see Robinson’s face, he hears something sadder and, to him, kinder in the man’s voice. That impression makes him trust Robinson a little—a small but consequential opening between two men surrounded by danger.

A Shared Rejection of the War

Robinson makes his intention plain: he is fed up and means to get himself captured by the Germans. When Bardamu asks how he plans to manage it, Robinson has no method worked out; he simply says he will surrender. He is frightened, he explains, and considers the war stupid. The Germans have done nothing to him, so he sees no reason to fight them. His reasoning is not a political program or a claim to courage. It is a direct refusal to turn an unfamiliar enemy into a personal one, and a wish to escape being killed.

Robinson recounts how his regiment was scattered after French sharpshooters mistakenly fired on his company. The company had arrived three hours earlier than expected; tired and caught by surprise, the sharpshooters riddled the men with bullets. Bardamu already knows this kind of disaster because he has experienced it himself. The account makes their meeting more than a conversation between strangers: each recognizes in the other a soldier caught in the war’s chaotic violence, where men can be shot by their own side through error as readily as by the enemy.

In the confusion, Robinson saw his chance to leave. He encountered his captain dying beside a tree, vomiting, bleeding, and calling for his mother. Robinson says that as he passed he told the captain to shut up and cursed his mother. He treats the moment as a rare opportunity to speak openly to a superior, even as he remembers the captain’s helpless death. To get away more quickly, he threw his pack and gun into a duck pond. He explains that he does not take to killing people, has never learned to fight, and even in civilian life avoided arguments: he disliked work as an engraver and preferred selling evening papers in a quiet neighborhood around the Bank of France, Place des Victoires, and Rue des Petits-Champs, rarely going beyond the Rue du Louvre. The remembered details give Robinson’s flight a civilian scale; for him, leaving the battlefield continues a lifelong preference for avoiding conflict.

Moving Through the Night Together

Once Robinson has spoken, Bardamu finds himself intensely interested in how a man might get captured. He would like Robinson to explain why he too cannot bring himself to make war, but Robinson offers no theory; he keeps saying only that he is fed up. Their common ground is therefore practical and incomplete. Neither claims to understand the other fully, yet each recognizes the other’s reluctance to fight.

They assess their chances while looking toward the silent, luminous city as if consulting cards, then set off toward the railway tracks. The horse following them clops so loudly that it drowns out other sounds. Robinson is counting on night to protect them, and the pair walk down the middle of the street without trying to conceal themselves, almost as if they were drilling. Their exposed, orderly progress contrasts with the danger surrounding them: they look harmless, like soldiers returning from leave, while the city and the possibility of capture remain uncertain.

As they move, Robinson tells Bardamu about the 1st Hussars, captured in Lille after marching into town unaware that the Germans had surrounded them. The story makes capture sound like luck: a whole regiment, including its colonel, walked into a trap. For Robinson, becoming a prisoner is not merely surrender but a chance event that might interrupt the war’s claim on him. The two men have little control over what happens next, and their talk of luck registers how narrowly survival seems to depend on circumstances beyond their command.

Temporary Companionship and Parting

The men do not find a secure route out. The mayor of Noirceur presses them to leave, as Major Pinçon does, insisting that their duty is to clear out. Against those demands, Bardamu and Robinson have only their wish not to die or be burned alive, a feeling they cannot openly present as an argument in wartime. They drift through deserted streets instead. Bardamu reflects that everyone he has met that night has bared his soul; Robinson’s blunt account has made the two soldiers’ exchange part of a wider encounter with fear and vulnerability.

Robinson regrets that Bardamu is not German. Had Bardamu belonged to the enemy, Robinson says, he would have taken him prisoner and solved the problem. Bardamu turns the thought around, joking that if Robinson had captured him, the Germans might have awarded him the French Military Medal under some German name. The humor does not remove the danger; it exposes the absurdity of a war in which the men would prefer the opposing side to help them stop fighting. With no one willing to take them prisoner, they sit on a park bench and open the can of tuna Robinson has been warming in his pocket since morning. Gunfire sounds far away, and Bardamu can only wish that both sides would remain at that distance and leave them alone.

At the edge of the town, dawn appears as a long gray-green line over the hill. Robinson asks whether they will come back the next night. Bardamu rejects the premise, teasing him for thinking like a general; neither can plan beyond the immediate danger. Robinson says he thinks only about not getting killed, and that one more day is one more day. They wish each other luck and separate, each returning to his own war. Bardamu later acknowledges that much happened after this meeting, though it is difficult to recount for people who would no longer understand it. The encounter supplies no escape or lasting resolution, but establishes Robinson as the first fellow soldier whose fear and rejection of the war Bardamu can recognize as his own.