A Fable

“The slight gray man with a face wise, intelligent, and unbelieving, who no longer believed in anything but his disillusion and his intelligence and his limitless power.”

In a bureaucratic sense, the marshal is the most powerful character in the novel. His power and his intelligence have disillusioned him of his belief in the importance of the war, but also inform him that he can do nothing but continue in the same manner. For all his power, he has stopped believing in the glory of war, but also in one man’s power to bring about an end to the war.

“The faces of four mountain men in a country which had no mountains, of peasants in a land which no longer had a peasantry; alien even among the other nine among whom they were chained and shackled.”

Among the 13 men who inspire the sudden false armistice, the diverse backgrounds of the “four mountain men” (16) suggests a broader humanity to the quest for peace. Notions of War and Peace are not limited to France or Western Europe but are fundamental to the entire human condition.

“A slight woman, not much more than a girl, who had been pretty once, and could be again, with sleep and something to eat and a little warm water and soap and a comb.”

The difference between a desperate, struggling person and a pretty person is reduced to the bare essentials of life. Food, sleep, water, and personal hygiene separate a struggling person from someone beautiful, but this is exactly what the war has taken away. Civilians have been separated from the necessities of life, denied the ability to life in anything other than desperation.