Four Soldiers
Hubert Mingarelli
Translated by Sam Taylor
Granta Books (£12.99)
Review by Alastair Mabbott
The first translation of this French author’s work into English came only five years ago with A Meal in Winter, deservedly acclaimed as a masterful novella. A slim but powerful book, it told of three German soldiers who capture a Polish Jew and decide to stop off for a meal at a deserted house before taking him back to camp to be killed. Telling the story from the point of view of invaders and executioners, Mingarelli examined the toll that their war had taken on them: their constant hunger and cold, their nightmares, the prickling of their consciences.
Four Soldiers follows on from it so naturally that it’s surprising to discover that it was written a decade earlier, its translation into English delayed until now. Four Soldiers is as profound and affecting, but somewhat less specific and more internalised, as though the seeds that came to full bloom in A Meal in Winter were only germinating here. Again, it’s about a small group of men, four illiterate soldiers on the Romanian front in the Russian Civil War of 1919: Pavel, Sifra, Kyabine and the narrator, Benia. In this book, they’re not cut off from the rest of their unit but make up an insular little group that pushes the handful of other named characters into the background.
The company retreats from the front into a forest, to hide out for the winter. For months there will be no fighting, just cooling their heels among the trees, but the war is still inexorably moulding their characters. Once again, Mingarelli is clearly less interested in battles than in the lulls between them, the peculiar tedium that passes for normality in wartime, and in the psychological effect they have on combatants.
The four men find ways to keep themselves occupied, scavenging for useful items and sometimes playing dice in an abandoned railway station. But the activity they pursue most avidly is bonding. They evolve rituals, taking turns to sleep with a looted pocket watch that opens up to reveal a photograph of a woman, telling themselves it’s for good luck rather than a way of cementing their friendship. Above all, they jealously guard the pond where they bathe, wash their clothes and relax, keeping its existence secret from the other soldiers.
When a new recruit is billeted with them, and they learn he can read and write, they ask him to write about the pond, what they did there and what it meant to them, needing to have their brotherhood memorialised in some way. Comradeship forged while sheltering in a freezing forest may not be much in the grand scheme of things, but they may be dead soon and it’s all they have.
In prose so simple and direct it’s like the stark landscape surrounding them, Mingarelli leaves as much unspoken as do his characters, letting deeper truths emerge from Benia’s narration. As brief as this captivating novella is, it’s a rich study of companionship and loyalty among men in combat.
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