The scene opens in a smouldering orchard in Flanders where the French soldier Ferdinand
shell-shocked badly wounded and surrounded on all sides by mud corpses and destruction tries
to find his way to safety and make sense of what has happened to him since he lost
consciousness. His hallucinatory wanderings eventually take him to the military hospital of
Peurdu-sur-la-Lys. There after narrowly cheating death he strikes up a friendship with a
Parisian pimp and continues to be confronted with the moral chaos and side effects of war in
all their vicious and repulsive senselessness and brutality. Written around 1934 only a couple
of years after Journey to the End of the Night War shares its protagonist its setting and
many of its themes with Céline's most celebrated novel. Its manuscript considered lost after
being looted during the Liberation of Paris re-emerged in France in 2020 sparking a frenzy of
interest and being hailed as a major rediscovery. Translated now for the first time into
English War is a powerfully vivid unflinching darkly comical exploration of the physical and
mental trauma of the Western Front which provides a fascinating missing link in the writing
career of one of the greatest - and most controversial - authors of the twentieth century.
