558 Vile times: Belgian interwar literature and the German occupation of 1914- 1918 by Sophie DE SCHAEPDRIJVER Penn State University (USA) scd10@psu.edu Introduction The Great War was a tall order for the professional historiography of the interwar era. Academic historians, even those who had been mobilized, treated the war from a distance, “as a political conflict on a grand scale, best viewed from above.” 1 Privileging the diplomatic and narrowly military aspects of the past conflict, they steered clear of the hecatomb. But the war’s impact on historiography went further in that it broke the confident liberal narrative of progress. This loss left the historical imagination “sorely challenged”. 2 (As it did that of social scientists and anthropologists. 3 ) Literature, by contrast, rendered the catastrophe legible by proffering a forceful metanarrative, that of the sacrificed front generation. The canonical status today of so much World War One poetry and fiction attests to the continued dominance of this metanarrative. In spite of one huge popular success and one succès d’estime during the post-Armistice years, Belgium’s front literature has found no enduring place in the international Great War canon. This in spite of the status of “Brave Little Belgium” as an emblem of the war’s issues in 1914, or, rather, precisely because of it, as I have explained elsewhere. 4 It 1 Antoine Prost and Jay Winter, The Great War in history: debates and controversies, 1914 to the present, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 15. 2 Modris Eksteins, Rites of spring: the Great War and the birth of the modern age, London - New York, Bantam, 1989, p. 291. 3 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Combattre. Une anthropologie historique de la guerre moderne (XIXe-XXe siècles), Paris, Seuil, 2008, chapters 1 and 2; Annette Becker, Maurice Halbwachs: un intellectuel en guerres mondiales 1914-1945, Paris, Agnès Viénot, 2003, especially p. 156. 4 “Death Is Elsewhere: The Shifting Locus of Tragedy in Belgian First World War Literature”, Yale French Studies, No. 102, Belgian Memories, Catherine Labio ed., 2002,