His novel – published in 1958 – is about just such a moment, albeit one nearly 150 years into the past. But he did bring another, and many would argue, equally apposite experience, as a French patriot and communist who had lived through the crises of the Spanish Civil War and the German Occupation, which had necessitated choices that exposed the individual to mortal danger. Louis Aragon is, of course, a very different writer from Tolstoy, with different personal experiences and understanding of the past, albeit not as an army officer, like Tolstoy in the Crimea. Such portrayals offer healthy antidotes to the Great Man perspective of the generals and strategists, kings and emperors, by giving due place to the individual soldier, his fears and conflicting loyalties. Novelists often use their own experiences, like Tolstoy in War and Peace, to discuss the motives and pathologies of soldiers, and the crises of conscience and loyalty that they must have faced. Yet to deny novels any role in the study of history is to discount the power of literary imagination in conjuring up the doubts and emotions of those who were there. What, one may legitimately ask, can historians of war and conflict learn from novels, even great novels, when written by authors who did not take part in the conflict and may not have known those who did? The question is only complicated by the propagandist tone of so many of the memoirs and official histories that were published shortly after the end of wars.
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