Army of Shadows

"Well, Kessel was a writer and war correspondent who, when France was defeated in 1940, went over to London and joined the Gaullist Resistance, the Free French. Army of Shadows, written in 1943, is the book that made him famous and is still regarded as one of the greatest novels about the Resistance. The other thing for which he’ll always be remembered is the hymn of the Resistance, ‘Le Chant des Partisans’, that everybody in the Resistance used to sing – and, incidentally, was sung by a French military band this summer at the London memorial celebration of de Gaulle’s famous speech from a BBC studio in 1940. It was a wonderfully moving moment. Army of Shadows really takes you to the heart of what it is to be in the Resistance and one of the book’s greatest characteristics is that it celebrates the anonymous heroes, the ordinary man or woman who hides an allied airman, carries a suitcase from one town to another… It’s absolutely gripping too, very cinematic – in fact, it was made into a very successful film by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1969. About halfway through the book it stops being a story about the different characters and becomes almost like jottings by the main character, the Resistance leader Philippe Gerbier, and you see everything through his eyes: the Germans and the Vichy police squeezing the Resistance more and more. You see his world gradually disintegrating; all the people he works with are being arrested, tortured and killed, and he tells it all. He himself is nearly captured countless times and the novel makes you feel what it’s like to lead this life, to have that kind of extraordinary pressure. He is a composite character, based on several people Kessel knew. When he was in London with the Free French he used to fly missions across to France, taking agents over and then picking them up, so he knew these people. In 1943 and 1944, the life expectancy of the agents flying over and being parachuted into France was very, very low. The probability was that they would be caught within 24 hours. But they kept going. Kessel vividly portrays their wonderful spirit – they believe they are going to win even if they themselves are not going to survive; they believe the Resistance is a sacred cause. The other thing that comes out is that political difference doesn’t matter – workers, peasants, young and old, Communists, landowners, people who love the Republic, monarchists, all put their differences aside in order to fight this battle. And so, even though this is a kind of adventure story written by a novelist, what you get out of it as well is the real Gaullist idea of what the Resistance philosophy is – that when your country is under occupation and you’re fighting to free it, everyone is in it together. There is also a universality about the Gerbier character: there were people exactly like him in 19th-century Poland, in occupied Europe during the Second World War, in modern liberation struggles such as in Ireland, South Africa, and Palestine."