Books: The Conquering French

THE BLUE HUSSAR (243 pp.)—Roger Nlmler—Julian Messner ($3.75).

A sound British critic has called 28-year-old Roger Nimier “one of the most brilliant writers in France,” but there must be a lot of shocked Frenchmen who wish he had never learned to write. At 20, in 1945, Nimier joined the French 2nd Hussar Regiment and wound up in Germany at war’s end. Five years later, in The Blue Hussar, he described French troops in action and occupation with a bite and candor that made most U.S. war novelists seem like self-pitying recruits. Now, even in a tasteless and jazzed-up translation, it is a novel that still manages to surmount the irritation it induces.

One irritant is the fact that The Blue Hussar’s characters take turns holding the stage, so that the story is served up like chunks hacked from a live eel. But the chunks keep squirming, and at the end they have almost grown together again. Author Nimier’s hussars are a rough, vulgar, boisterous lot with little in common except being French and in the same outfit. Politically, they are a mixed bag of Communists, Gaullists, Petainists and what not; some of them hate each other more than they hate the enemy. But in spite of their petty feuds and cynicism, most of them fight well. Author Nimier can write crackling scenes of ground combat, and he uses combat to expose the personalities of his men, not to show off his qualifications as a war novelist. But whatever they are, cowards or brave men, Nimier’s hussars live on the page, right up to the bullet that gets them.

As conquerors they make an unpretty lot. They rape and loot, lash naked women to tanks, destroy works of art, try to outdo their late conquerors. But like all occupiers, they soon find that their lives have been bound up with those of the occupied. Two hussars, Sanders and Saint-Anne, finally surrender unconditionally to a handsome, sensual girl named Rita. Sanders had met her in what was then a conventional way: he raped her. Sanders becomes Author Nimier’s prototype of the fundamentally good Frenchman gone wrong. He is cynical, bitter, confused; he is also a great reader and a lover of Mozart. Big and tough, he is a terror with his weapons or his fists. To Rita, whose husband is a prisoner of the Russians, Sanders is a find. But so is Saint-Anne, a shy, slender 18-year-old, who worships Rita as fervently as she uses him.

With its foul barracks language, its uninhibited love scenes and its overall air of don’t give a damn, The Blue Hussars is sure to repel a lot of readers. What it offers as a reward is Author Nimier’s talent for keeping people and action alive.