The Soldier as Trench Animal Fables of the Battlefield Rat in French Novels of 1914–1918

During the First World War, the front line was the site of an unprecedented cohabitation of soldiers and animals. Among them, “pests,” especially rats, thrived at the banquet of war, while soldiers fought them and hunted them. However, in the novels of 1914–1918, acclimation and a remarkable level of fraternization are described, even becoming sincere friendship in Pierre Chaine’s Mémoires d’un rat (1917), in which the rat narrator becomes a messenger of pacifism.