Boris Vian: I come here to offer you a brand-new modern war

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

French writers on war and peace

Boris Vian: It’s our job to make war, not to choose the enemy

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Boris Vian
The Generals’ Tea Party
Translated by Simon Watson Taylor

PLANTIN: …what is the ideal consumer?

AUDUBON (thinks, then his face lights up as he exclaims): The army!

PLANTIN: Right! The army presents this essential advantage, Audubon: it is the consumer who pays the army, and it is the army which consumes. Whence a permanent imbalance alone allows us to achieve balance. Because, as any dunce can understand, it’s impossible to achieve a balance unless there’s an imbalance to start with.

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AUDUBON: I was A.D.C. to the G.I.C. at G.H.Q. Ah, what happy memories those times bring back to me. The Somme in springtime. Verdant Verdun.

PLANTIN: God help the army of today. I come here to offer you a brand-new modern war and all you can do is to bleat about the one before bloody last.

AUDUBON: I know of no general who has ever encouraged his country to go to war.

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MOTHER: And may one ask what it’s all about, this war that’s going to get all your uniforms grubby once again?

AUDUBON: Oh, I won’t go out very much, you know…it’s the soldiers who will do the actual fighting….

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LAVESTE: Are the posters ready?

JUILLET: What posters?

LAVESTE: The mobilization posters.

AUDUBON: Oh dear, yes! The posters! We simply must have some posters. What a nuisance. Oh, there must be some left over from 1939.

DUPONT: Posters are absolutely necessary. “Your country needs you.”

JUILLET: Yes, but those mobilization posters only rake in a bunch of amateurs.

LAVESTE: Oh, what a damn nuisance this war is….

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JUILLET: …there’s not a tank today which can stand up to the latest anti-tank weapons, so what’s the point of building them? The old ones will be quite good enough for our purposes – no point in wasting money. But it’s the industrialists who make all the decisions in these matters; we’ll work it out with them.

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AUDUBON: …With all these wars we’ve been having lately, people are becoming rather bored with the idea. We’ve just got to think up some really original gimmick. What’s the word I’m looking for?…Euh…yes, propaganda, that’s what we need – propaganda.

JUILLET: Well, we can count on the journalists for that, they always support us. They have always reserved their largest headlines for us. The bigger the headline the fewer the words they have to write underneath it.