Roger Vailland: School days during war

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

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Roger Vailland
La Fête
Translated by Peter Wiles

…during the First World War and from his classroom at the elementary school in the Rue des Feuillantines, in Paris, they could hear the rumble of artillery on the Somme front. Men’s flesh was being mutilated within earshot; the maimed bodies were taken to hospitals in the country; at times the doctors amputated without anesthetic – this he knew. He…thought (these were topics on which circumstances then compelled schoolboys to reflect) that when war wounds became too painful you passed out; that there were drugs that put you to sleep; that in the last resort you could always take advantage of the orderly’s inattention to kill yourself and so escape the pain.