Primer for Combat

primer for Combat is the first book written about the fall of France which conveys a sense of reality to those who were not caught in that disaster.

Kay Boyle is neither a journalist nor a political polemist. She does not think that the ability to use a typewriter and to record what she sees can be called writing. She believes that even the cataclysmic dislocation of a great orderly nation in the space of a few weeks should be described with care. In other words, Kay Boyle remains as much of an artist in this book as in those she wrote in more tranquil times about less dramatic subjects.

And through all her experience, Kay Boyle remains what Rebecca West would call an “idiot, from the Greek root meaning a private person,” while men are afflicted with “lunacy,” which makes them so “obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight.” They see the “outline of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.”

Primer for Combat is a novel in the form of a diary. It covers about one hundred days, from the twentieth of June to the second of October in 1940. These hundred days are probably the most horrible that the French have ever lived through, both as “private persons” and as a nation, if it can be said that the French did live at all during that period. Most of the story lakes place in a small village called Pontcharra in Haute-Savoie. It describes what happened to the people there, what they said, what they thought, and how they tried to adapt themselves or to resist.

A love story runs through the book. An Austrian ski-instructor, whose outstanding feature seems to be his remarkable golden hair, is in love with Phil, the American woman who writes the diary. She wants to get him out of the Foreign Legion to America to escape the Nazis, but he has a French wife, who is a niece of Pétain, and his wife thinks he might as well use this protection and stay in France. In spite of the appeals of Phil and freedom, the ski-instructor apparently decides that it will be less trouble to follow his wife’s advice. The whole affair is lamentable, and one wonders why both these exceptional women waste so much love over this ineffectual hero.

But this love story is not important. The value of Primer for Combat is in the numerous unforgettable scenes and characters it describes, and in its authenticity. It will not satisfy those whose maudlin nostalgia for France makes them revel in a kind of falsified picturesqueness. They are in no danger of having seen that for the last time: it can always be reconstructed for them with Hollywood technique. Kay Boyle speaks only of a small corner of France, and of a few people of France, and her book is short. Hut nothing better has been written on France since the Germans got there. R.DE R.DES.