L’Appel du sol

The circumstances of the second half of 1914 had made awarding the Prix Goncourt difficult, if not impossible. On 31 October, meeting for the first time at the restaurant Drouant (until then they had lunched at the Café de Paris, avenue de l’Opéra), the Ten deliberated on the next award. On 19 December, having re-elected their board, they adopted the proposal of one of their members, Léon Hennique, and issued the following statement:

“The Académie Goncourt, unable without violating its statutes to allocate the amount of its annual prize to a national or literary relief fund, has decided not to award it in 1914. It has also considered the injustice of judging only works published up to the month of August, since many announced volumes, ready for publication, remained with the printer owing to the mobilization of authors and publishers. But what is deferred is not lost, and the reserved Prix Goncourt will not be merged with next year’s. Two prizes will be awarded in 1915.”

In the end, only one prize was awarded in 1915, to René Benjamin’s novel Gaspard; the two prizes the Academy had announced were postponed to 1916: Henri Barbusse for Le Feu and Adrien Bertrand for L’Appel du sol, the latter having been in competition with Maurice Genevoix’s Sous Verdun.

Jean Norton Cru, in Témoins, praised the strong, violent yet deeply humanist picture of the conflict given in Bertrand’s book:
“Adrien Bertrand had remarkable literary gifts (…). His death at twenty-eight is one of the cruellest losses literature suffered because of the war (…). His merit will help place the novel among the finest works of this genre written by non-combatant authors (…).”

Adrien Bertrand wrote his novel from his hospital bed, having contracted pulmonary tuberculosis from which he never recovered. The novel was serialized in the Revue des Deux Mondes beginning in August 1916, then published in book form in November; in December, the Goncourt jury’s double deliberation offered little suspense:

“In two ballots, the decision was confirmed by clear majorities: the 1916 Prix Goncourt was awarded to Barbusse by eight votes to two, and that of 1914 to Adrien Bertrand by nine votes to one, the dissenting vote being Octave Mirbeau’s, cast for Genevoix. To justify his vote, the normalien was hypocritically reproached for having chosen a title [Sous Verdun] that suggested he would be writing about the great battle of 1916, whereas his book recounted the fighting that took place in the Meuse from August to October 1914. April’s favorite had been overtaken by a shooting star and a dying man.” (Jean-Yves Le Naour, La Gloire et l’Oubli. Maurice Genevoix et Henri Barbusse, témoins de la Grande Guerre, Michalon, “Histoire,” 2020.)

A fitting copy: it belonged to his rival for the Prix Goncourt. Genevoix would win the prize himself nine years later, with Raboliot.

Jean Norton Cru, Témoins, pp. 88–90 and 578–580; Anthologie des écrivains morts à la guerre, I, 72; Talvart, I, 419.