La Mort de près

Late in life, Maurice Genevoix, by then a respected regionalist writer and Permanent Secretary of the Académie française, felt the need to return to the death he had encountered, so distant yet so close, on three occasions in the Meuse between August 1914 and April 1915.

In the summer of 1971, as the third volume of his Bestiaire was about to appear, Genevoix wrote a short book in a few weeks: La mort de près. This little-known but essential text reads as a tightly focused echo of the narratives of Ceux de 14, marked by the same restrained emotion and sensory precision characteristic of Genevoix’s style. Joseph Kessel wrote to him: “I was deeply moved. The witness, the professional, the friend — all these figures within me shower you with praise and thank you” (letter to Genevoix, 29 July 1972, no. 123 of the BHVP exhibition, 1991).

Death brushed past Genevoix at Les Éparges, a hill in the Meuse contested with the Germans. It happened several times: first in September 1914, when a shell fragment struck him in the stomach and knocked him down. He had seen his men continue the charge as he was pulled to safety under a beech tree; haunted by the image of a comrade he had passed moments before, holding his own entrails before collapsing, he felt his stomach — he was unharmed. The projectile had glanced off a steel button and the buckle of his belt. The same thing happened again three months later, when a shell exploded a few meters away, tearing the two soldiers beside him to pieces: “I was still unharmed. It took only a few moments for the world to reconstitute itself, in all its hideousness and barbarity.” The third time, decisive, came on 25 April 1915 — the last day recounted in Sous Verdun. Three bullets, fired by the same German soldier: two tore through his left arm, one passed through a lung. “Not for a moment, except in the daze of the shock […] did I lose consciousness. […] I suffered greatly. The sense of danger surged over me, overwhelmed me, grew more acute.” Stretcher-bearers carried him back behind the firing line, despite shells that shattered the beech trees of the Hauts de Meuse all around them. It took an arduous eleven-hour journey to reach a hospital in Verdun. He remained there for seven months and was declared 80 percent disabled, having permanently lost the use of his left hand.

From the library of Maurice Genevoix at “Les Vernelles,” with bookplate.