Although Rageot initially portrays Fran~ois as energized by war work, as the war drags on, the latter's actions imply that his faith in science has been strained and even destroyed by the war. 95 But Fran90is's angst about the war finds expression only indirectly, in the obscure feeling that something is terribly wrong with his marriage. He cCfeels a heavy weight on his conscience, a constant constraint . . n 96 When he discovers the affair between his brother and his wife, he suffers a com- 36 · La Femme Moderne plete crisis, losing faith in his life:>s work as well as his love.

79 In memoirs of the war, novels, and trench journals, women's loyalty frequently allows the front soldier to recover some sense of himself as a husband, a lover, a fiance, or a son-in other words, as an individual and a man. Eulogies to women's efforts on the nation's behalf represented women as nurses or mothers whose devotion lifted the hearts of the nation. While these complimentary images of women served as propaganda, no evidence exists that the more negative portrayal of female wartime behavior, such as we have seen in trench journals, memoirs, and novels like Barbusse's Le Feu, was censored during the war.

The restaurants are crammed. " 25 In viewing the material contrasts between trench and civilian life, returning soldiers saw the homefront as a world of extravagence and luxury, whose pleasures they were largely denied. 26 No-man's-land entailed a daily battle with mud, rats, lice, and rain, as well as the German enemy. It was a cemetery of dismembered, unburied bodies, where life expectancy was often as short as three months. Surrounded by corpses, the front soldier expected and even desired death at any moment.