Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 1338

The intuition about mankind conveyed in these opening pages is of crucial importance for understanding the remainder of the text ; ;

and we must attend to it more closely than has usually been done.

What does the narrator see and what does he feel??

A good many pages of the first section are taken up with an account of the dogged determination of the prisoners to write to their wives and families -- even when it becomes clear that the Germans are simply allowing the letters to blow away in the wind.

Awkwardly and laboriously, in stiff, unemotional phrases, the soldiers continue to bridge the distance between themselves and those they love ; ;

they instinctively struggle to keep open a road to the future in their hearts.

And by a skillful and unobtrusive use of imagery ( the enclosure is called a `` Roman-camp stockade '', the hastily erected lean-to is a `` Babylonian hovel '', the men begin to look like `` Peruvian mummies '' and to acquire `` Gothic faces '' ), Malraux projects a fresco of human endurance -- which is also the endurance of the human -- stretching backward into the dark abyss of time.

The narrator feels himself catching a glimpse of pre-history, learning of man's `` age-old familiarity with misfortune '', as well as his `` equally age-old ingenuity, his secret faith in endurance, however crammed with catastrophes, the same faith perhaps as the cave-men used to have in the face of famine ''.