On les aura!

On les aura! is a brief expression of defiance whose meaning in the narrator’s wartime memories grows through repetition: first a fellow soldier offers it as consolation after an injustice, and later the narrator’s mother sobs its English equivalent across a telephone line. The phrase remains in the narrator’s heart as an emblem of elementary courage and the possibility of a future victory greater than the immediate struggle.

First Hearing: Consolation After Humiliation

The narrator first hears the expression from a French soldier after an outcome that, he is told, has been carried out according to the rules. The soldier cannot readily put sympathy into words; after watching the narrator lie on his back, he tells him not to let the setback get him down, then adds On les aura! The remark is striking precisely because it is so ordinary and so ill-fitted to the narrator’s expectations.

Until then, he had assumed that a French soldier would use the phrase only about the Germans, not about the French Army. Its unexpected direction sharpens his sense of betrayal: he feels neither hatred nor resentment, but an overpowering desire to vomit. He tries to take refuge in thoughts of the Mediterranean and its pretty girls. The contrast between the soldier’s simple encouragement and the narrator’s nausea makes the phrase less a confident forecast than a small gesture offered amid disillusionment.

The Phrase Across the Telephone Line

The expression returns during a telephone conversation with the narrator’s mother. He remembers their exchange as a succession of cries, sobs, and sounds beyond articulate language. When silence seems to have swallowed the line and the country with it, the last comprehensible words to reach him are the distant, sobbing “We’ll get them!” The English version makes the recurrence audible while preserving its plain, almost childlike force.

The words do not erase the anguish of the call. They emerge only after speech has failed, and their distance and broken delivery belong to the memory as much as their defiance does. In this second occurrence, the phrase is not a soldier’s attempted consolation but the final intelligible message the narrator receives from the narrator’s mother in that moment.

A Cry That Outlasts the War

The narrator calls the words foolish, yet also recognizes in them the most elementary and naïve form of human courage. Their apparent simplicity is central to their power: the phrase does not explain the pain or promise an immediate victory, but it persists when the speakers can say almost nothing else. The narrator says that this cry sank deep into his heart and remains there, making the phrase a personal inheritance as well as a wartime refrain.

Its final significance reaches beyond the immediate conflict. The narrator imagines that the courage contained in the cry will survive him and that humanity will someday achieve a victory far greater than anyone can imagine. On les aura! thus joins private suffering to a forward-looking hope: first spoken as encouragement after a humiliation, it returns through a mother’s grief and endures as faith in a larger human victory.