In the novel, this reconstruction takes the modest form of forming a guerilla army under Raspeguy to fight the Algerian rebels. Applying what they learned from the Communist Viets, with a violence inspired by disgust at the Metropolitan France where they spent their leaves, they succeed in stemming the F.L.N. tide. The novel ends on this optimistic note, but before the Fifth Republic and the institution of the Gaullist liberation policy.
M. Larteguy's argument, revolutionary though it is meant to sound, is a familiar one. If anything, that is its strength: The Centurions is a call for a radical defense of the old values. The Communists have remembered what we have forgotten; if we rededicate ourselves to the ideals of strength, independence, self-reliance, we can destroy them and thereby save ourselves. Indeed, we will have saved ourselves by the rededication itself.
Larteguy is probably right on military grounds. The day of Napoleonic Grande Armee has passed; the French experiences discussed in The Centurions prove it, and the United States is learning the same thing today in Viet-Nam.
But his contention that a revolutionized Army is the key to a new Revolutionary France is wide of the mark. Sartre's contrary theory of involution--that the desperation and violence of the Army is corrupting whatever survives of a healthy France--is, I think, more accurate. Perhaps Larteguy is just when he blames domestic decadence for the impotence of the Army in the colonies; but he does not convince me that it can and must therefore save France.
In fairness, I should say that I doubt anybody could sell me on such a theory. But if anyone could, it certainly wouldn't be Larteguy. The problem, as I suggested above, is that The Centurions is a very bad novel. Larteguy has allowed his venomous feelings towards France and his intoxication with the military to overwhelm his book.
It lacks balance and control, and its characters, who describe one another as complex and rich personalities, come off as stereotypes.
Perhaps in an effort to give them life, Larteguy has granted them all rich and complex lives; but the effect of this maneuver is simply to show up the author's romanticized psychology. In point of fact, The Centurions almost emerges as an argument for more and better sexuality. The identification of "real men" with strong sexuality is not silly, but it makes funny reading in what is otherwise a propagandistic tract.
The book's total reliance on dialogue tends, actually, to convince the reader that the Army's critics are right: that the Army has removed itself from reality. For the conversations seem suspended in a theoretical and emotional world of their own, to which we are denied entrance. The novel never really puts to a test the ideas the characters mouth, and as a result it is dogmatic and unconvincing. The Centurions reads like an Ayn Rand novel, with a kind of crazy internal logic, but without contiguity with the world. The conversations are all terribly knowing, but they smell of a sick and dangerous self-induced naivete.
Besides the soldiers and their women, The Centurions features two journalists, one hard-boiled and opportunist, the other more dreamy and appealing. It doesn't require too much imagination to realize that Larteguy (who writes for Paris-Presse) has there-by introduced himself explicitly into his novel. Evidently, he considers his own personality so complex that he must employ two characters to do justice to it. This would be offensive, except that one finishes The Centurions feeling that its author has only been playing with himself all the way along anyway.