Buck's Reviews > Scum of the Earth

Oh France, why must you be so full of fail?

For anyone who’s a fan of Western civilization—as I am, most days—the fall of France in 1940 represents a spectacular, game-seven meltdown on the part of the home side. Born decades later and a continent away, I can still access some vicarious shame at that whole debacle. A great, modern democracy folding up like a set of Wal-Mart patio furniture – well, it’s something you never want to see, any more than you want to see your dad cry.

Scum of the Earth is Arthur Koestler’s brilliant, bitter take on the French collapse. Its main theme is that 1940 was more than just a military disaster; it was a complete moral capitulation. In his view, France—sour and divided, and half in love with easeful death—was already whupped before the first panzers nosed their way out of the Ardennes.

Koestler had good reason to be pissed off. Living in Paris when the war broke out, he was rounded up with hundreds of other ‘undesirable aliens’ and placed in an internment camp. Most of these men, including Koestler himself, were refugees from fascism, and asked for nothing better than to join the French army and fight the Nazis. Instead, the government let them rot in atrocious conditions and, when the Germans came, simply handed them over to the Gestapo (helpfully providing their dossiers). Koestler managed to escape to England, where he immediately sat down and wrote Scum of the Earth, at least in part as a well-deserved fuck you to France.

I’ll probably have a new theory next week, but as of now, I believe that one of literature’s noblest functions is to rescue things from oblivion. Which sounds pompous, but just amounts to this: bearing witness, getting it all down. You read a book like Scum of the Earth and suddenly a whole vanished world is before you again, with its stinks and slang, its gadgets and ambience. And then there are the people: ordinary people, mostly, who leer up out of the book for a page or two, say something trivial or profound, and fade back into history. At one point, Koestler catalogues some of his fellow internees in the filthy barrack at Le Vernet:

There was also the ex-Buddhist monk from Mongolia who sold postcards of nudes in Montparnasse cafes, and Balogh the Hungarian, who had been commander of a warship on the Danube and a stamp-collector, and who had been invited by King George V to London in 1912 to show his collection…There was Dessauer, the ex-rabbi and medical orderly, who wore his wristwatch on the wrist of a prosthesis which replaced his right arm; at night the prosthesis with the watch hung on a nail over his place in Barrack 33, and whoever wanted to know the time took Dessauer’s arm and carried it to the oil lamp next to the entrance. And there was Herr Birn, a German business man who had spent the four years of the Great War as a civilian prisoner in England and had learnt all the variants of the Italian opening by heart from the chess book and now, interned for a second time, learnt with the same German thoroughness the variants of the Queen’s Gambit, and yet, when it came to playing, lost every game within twenty moves.

So there they are: the exotic offscourings of wartime Paris, all doomed by some combination of French malice and French inertia. But a writer remembered them and put them in a book: a tenuous afterlife, you might say, but more than most of us will enjoy.