Five Soldiers

This novel, published in 1954, describes, as the title suggests, five soldiers, one from each of the five nationalities represented in post-war Berlin. In five separate sections, the lives of each soldier is traced through the First World War to the end of the Second World War (October 1945). Each of the five soldiers is given the same surname in the relevant language: Krieger, Warrior, Guerrier, Voin and Fighter. In the devastated German capital the five soldiers are spending a night in the cellar of a ruined building along with a teenaged orphan called Otto.

The author, Paul Vialar (born 18 September 1898), grew up in Paris. He served as a soldier during the First World War and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. His first novel was published in 1931. He won the prestigious Prix Femina for his third novel, La Rose de la mer. In addition to more than 30 separate novels, he wrote three distinct series of novels consisting of a total of 28 volumes. He also wrote poetry, drama and works of non-fiction. Among his early plays was Les hommes ceux de 14-18, which was written as a tribute to his comrades a few years after the war. One critic described it as “the most lively, most versatile and most accurate synthesis of war that one could imagine”. A screen adaption of the play was broadcast on French television in 1964 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of war.

A young François Guerrier, the French soldier featured in the novel, is told by a soldier on leave from the Western Front of the realities of the First World War:
“You have 20 chances in a hundred of coming through and then perhaps with the loss of an arm or a leg. In any case, unless one is nothing but a brute, the immense disgust that I and many like me feel and which makes life utterly purposeless, condemning us to do to the end of our days like men who exist in a living death, only leaves room in us for a vast, irremediable, barren grief at the uselessness of our life. There is something great, indeed, in accepting the sacrifice. But there is something so ignoble and so base in war that the sacrifice becomes a caricature of itself. You've got to know what war is.”