Secker and Warburg edition 1958 – first published by Editions Denoel, Paris, 1955

THE BLOCKHOUSE

During the bombardment following the Allied landings in Normandy in 1944, six Frenchmen working for the Germans as forced labourers take refuge in a deserted blockhouse. No sooner have they hidden themselves than the entrance is blocked by an exploding shell. At first they are in the dark: Rouquet, a mild schoolmaster; Turenne, a miner by profession; Aufret, the self-imposed, bombastic leader soon to be eclipsed by Grabinski, the strongest, most resourceful. It is he who finds matches, whereupon they discover themselves in a supply depot stacked with food, wine and clothing. Though there is no way out, they will not die yet.

Now begins their life together, the development of their relations to each other, the various ways they distract themselves. Visconti draws an obscene design on the wall: Cauvin finds a bicycle. We share their gradual change from ordinary human beings into barely recognisable cavemen, and after the first death it becomes clear that whoever survives will do so because somehow he has been able to preserve a spark of human feeling.

THE AUTHOR

Jean-Paul Clébert was born in Paris in 1926. Writing of himself he says: “My secondary education was interrupted by the war but continued as a prisoner. I have never had a regular job but have been successively: house painter, cook, newspaper seller, farm worker, navvy undertaker’s mute, valet de pied, cafe proprietor and tramp. Lived for some years with gipsies and am now engaged on writing a book about them. Have also travelled widely in the East. I now live alone on a farm in Haute Provence.”

The Blockhouse is M. Clébert’s third book, and his first to be translated into English.