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A review by ethancf
It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi
5.0
You know those Twilight Zone endings where the happy ending is within sight and gets yanked away at the last second? Time to read at last, and then your glasses break?
This book is 120 pages of vignettes with those endings. Just callous stupidity, futility, and cruelty from start to finish. Most anti-war narratives take a different tack - they'll focus on how it's the politicians/generals/elite's fault, how war makes a select few rich, or go for a general "war is hell" theme. Tardi dips into all of those, but the recurring theme through everything is just how stupid the entire enterprise is.
See, in those other anti-war themes, you still have a plucky hero to root for, one who emerges from the hell that is war, you still have cool explosions and exciting action sequences. You can make an anti-war message as profound as you want, but at the end of the day, how many people forget everything that happens after the first half of Full Metal Jacket? To borrow a meme, how many people consume an anti-war story and go, "Wow, Cool Robot!" How many anti-war stories still end in triumph for our protagonists?
It Was the War of the Trenches avoids having a plucky protagonist. Its vignettes bounce from character to character, and not one of them gets a happy ending. Most of them die horribly. The lucky ones have to listen to or watch their friends die painfully. A lot of these vignettes end rather unceremoniously; at a point where you think you might be getting to a point in the book where "oh, *this* is the protagonist, the rest was just intro,"....that character dies. There's no fun explosions, no cool action panels - everything is filthy, and dangerous, and there's no rest. There's no point to any of the conflict, not a single victory is won, and everyone is stupid, incompetent, or clueless - making it one of the most effective anti-war pieces of media I've ever seen.
This book is 120 pages of vignettes with those endings. Just callous stupidity, futility, and cruelty from start to finish. Most anti-war narratives take a different tack - they'll focus on how it's the politicians/generals/elite's fault, how war makes a select few rich, or go for a general "war is hell" theme. Tardi dips into all of those, but the recurring theme through everything is just how stupid the entire enterprise is.
See, in those other anti-war themes, you still have a plucky hero to root for, one who emerges from the hell that is war, you still have cool explosions and exciting action sequences. You can make an anti-war message as profound as you want, but at the end of the day, how many people forget everything that happens after the first half of Full Metal Jacket? To borrow a meme, how many people consume an anti-war story and go, "Wow, Cool Robot!" How many anti-war stories still end in triumph for our protagonists?
It Was the War of the Trenches avoids having a plucky protagonist. Its vignettes bounce from character to character, and not one of them gets a happy ending. Most of them die horribly. The lucky ones have to listen to or watch their friends die painfully. A lot of these vignettes end rather unceremoniously; at a point where you think you might be getting to a point in the book where "oh, *this* is the protagonist, the rest was just intro,"....that character dies. There's no fun explosions, no cool action panels - everything is filthy, and dangerous, and there's no rest. There's no point to any of the conflict, not a single victory is won, and everyone is stupid, incompetent, or clueless - making it one of the most effective anti-war pieces of media I've ever seen.