It Was the War of the Trenches

In this post I will share my thoughts and opinions on “It Was the War of the Trenches,” a haunting graphic novel by French author-illustrator, Jacques Tardi. Like many other graphic novels, “It Was the War of the Trenches” features multitudes of violence and gore. For some, violence is part of the appeal of graphic novels. In “It Was the War of the Trenches” however, violence is not glorified. Instead, violence is used to emphasize the importance of human life, and to portray horrors that Tardi believes can never be repeated.

To summarize the graphic novel, “It Was the War of the Trenches” is a story about French soldiers on the front lines of the first World War. It is a grim and dark depiction of the war. There are countless impact craters, barbed wire, mud, ruined countrysides, and corpses. There is  no main protagonist; each chapter revolves around a different soldier and the things they faced. Each chapter is non-chronological, which I thought was effective in that it takes away predictability, and focuses on the moments the soldiers die or face the ultimate tests of survival.  The only plots in the story that actually matter are in each respective chapter. This keeps things varied and interesting (in a morbid way). "It Was the War of the Trenches" functions like a collection of short stories, sharing the same setting of World War One.

Compositionally, the graphic novel has an interesting arrangement. Each chapter starts of with a block of text giving historical information about the war, and Tardi's personal opinions on them . Many of the pages are not split by many panels (three was the average I found), although there are some exceptions. A panel which I thought stood out from the others was on page 20. Here there is a boy who has taken a dead French soldier’s uniform. The boy charges across No-Man’s-Land and is killed by German soldiers. What I thought was most interesting about this scene was the contrasting inclusion of a skeleton with eyes in the middle panel. It’s as if death is directly staring at the reader; like it's telling them that no-one is invincible in life. Additionally, this is the only moment in the graphic novel where there is German being spoken. I thought this was because Tardi wanted to show that it was not just the French who felt afraid and guilty to kill. It was on all sides.

Artistically, Tardi draws many skeletons with their eyes intact, or the skeletons as having expressions. This could serve to give them relatable facial characteristics: that of anguish, agony, fear. Skeletons having eyes gives the story a touch of surrealism-- what did the soldiers see, what was just their nightmares?.

The story is full of moments of symbolic imagery, most notable that of religious icons. One which I thought was the most significant, was on page 32. Here a soldier kneels next to a statue of christ outdoors (In what was once a graveyard? It has certainly been ruined by the war) to pray. Jesus has fallen from the statue and has his arms stretched out towards the ground, and the base of the statue is riddled with bullet holes. As the soldier prays, he triggers a trap hidden in the mud, killing him. This is without a significant remark by Tardi. This shows a sort of "If there's a God why would he do this to us" mentality. The irony of dying while praying shows a very agnostic approach by the author towards religion.

Tardi uses violence as less of an entertainment medium and more of a storytelling element. Most of the violence in the story is based on shock-factor. There are moments where soldiers take bullets to the head, fall on the battlefield, or die from their wounds, but most of the gore comes from people and animals that are already dead. The massive amount of corpses that litter the pages of the story arguably is to make the reader feel uncomfortable. In doing so, Tardi shows that war (and the first World War in particular) should not be as romanticized as it should be. The arrangement of corpses in the pages is eerie and macabre, and I believe it is Tardi trying his hardest to get these horrors across to the reader.

Additionally in the foreword, Tardi mentions the purpose of the story. “This is not the history of the first World War told in comics form, but a non-chronological sequence of situations, lived by men who have been jerked around and dragged through the mud, clearly unhappy to find themselves in this place… Whose overarching desire is to return home.” I think this important in informing the reader on the purpose of the graphic novel, as not necessarily as an entertaining gore-fest but more of something that you have to put down every now and then and say “damn, that’s depressing.” Because “It Was the War of the Trenches” Is not a happy read. It should be approached the same way a book such as “Lord of the Flies” should be; a well-constructed, powerful example on the human condition and why we do what we do when the situation calls for it.

In conclusion, I believe Tardi's purpose in publishing "It Was the War of the Trenches" was to stress a desire for peace; that the millions of lives lost in the first World War in France and other nations have left a hole that has frankly affected us into the present day-- how many achievements and memories can never come to be because of the generations lost? We can never truly know this answer, but Tardi wants something as grand-scale and horrific, so anti-human, to never happen again. It is through the inclusion of violence and its advertisement to the reader that Tardi gets this message across.