In his second story, entitled "Le Songe," Vercors treats of
the familiar contrast between the individual and the universal conscience. He considers how, in our waking life, in the "sordid solitude" imposed upon us by our personal anxieties and preoccupations, our imagina- tion rejects the thought of human suffering unless it be actually obtruded on our attention. The tiny details of our habitual life, the necessities of food and warmth, assume for, us a reality wholly distinct from the cries of agony which rise around us : we pass through life as if in some sealed railway waggon in which the blinds are drawn. Only in dreams, only in the acute unrest of nightmares, does this wider reality emerge from our sub-conscious ; and Vercors thereupon relates, with stark realism, his own night- mare, and evokes the guttural gasps of those whose tongues have been burnt out by flaming irons or whose limbs are shattered by the truncheons of the S.S. Guards. His theme, perhaps, is trite ; his evocation is vivid rather than powerful ; we should not regard "Le Songe "as anything more than a capable short story did we not know that it had been written in November, 1943, at a time when the terror he describes was actual and not imaginary. Since the passion of love which has inspired " La marche a Pitoile " is confronted in "Le Songe" by a passion of hatred ; but this hatred is directed, not so much against those who commit the atrocities as against those who remain indifferent to them. " If," he writes, " from the depths of that unplumbed gehenna, from the depths of my stultified dis- tress, there remained within me any feeling at all . . . it was the cold and solitary despair of knowing that there were people in the world, men like us, with brains and hearts, who knew that we existed and who knew what we were enduring, but who continued their life, preoccupied with their own love-affairs and money affairs, even with their own food and drink, without according to us even one mite of
PitY." * * * *
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