Free The Incorrigible Optimists Club by Jean-Michel Guenassia Page A

He’s lending them to you.’
    Since I looked doubtful, she grabbed a bundle of envelopes held together by a rubber band and read us his most recent letter:

    Dearest Cécile,
    The holidays drag on. The weather’s perfect. At night, we freeze. We’re still at our base camp at Souk-Ahras. Since the Morice line has turned out to be completely useless, they’re reinforcing it with the Challe line. This is serious stuff. The fence is electrified all the way along with five thousand volts and at certain points it’s over thirty thousand. Best not to touch it. I’m working with a guy from Electricité de France who knows all about high voltage and, what with my military skills, if I don’t find a job in management, I could retrain in electricity. As incredible as it may seem, the French army has learnt lessons from past mistakes. The heavy and supposedly impassable Maginot line-style fortifications are no more, the Challe line is a simple cordon used to detect break-ins and, as such, it’s pretty diabolical. We have a system that enables us to identify where the line has been cut and we can send out units straight away to step in and prevent people infiltrating from Tunisia. As soon as there’s an alert, we fire off star shells. What with surveillance radar and the mined barbed-wire system, the place has become too quiet. For weeks, nothing has happened. You’d think you were a character in The Desert of the Tartars. I think of myself as Lieutenant Drogo. Except I’ve got nobody here with whom I can discuss anything. Buzzati’s book is unrealistic. His fortress has an unbelievable number of intellectuals per square metre. Here, it’s real life: nothing but thickos. We look ahead of us. The enemy’s over there. We wonder where. There’s nothing butshrubs and scree. Perhaps they’re somewhere else. We spend our days waiting for the guys from the ALN and we get bored to death. I spend hours monitoring the echoes on the radar. The only time we got the alert, it was a wild boar that had managed to get itself trapped. This at least improves the rations. Finally, what bugs me most is that I’m starting to alter my views. I was convinced that we were all bastards, that the local inhabitants were against us and wanted independence. Now I realise you shouldn’t listen to the pet theories of people miles away/nowhere near the conflict. You have to see what’s going on in these places. The army is doing a real job here and you mustn’t believe the crap you hear. There are nothing but bad solutions to choose from. Few people can have spoken such crap as I have. Apart from Franck, perhaps. That was in Paris. Here, it’s different. We’re not in a café chatting, we’ve got our hands in the shit. I feel as if I’m a windsock. I keep on changing my mind. At times, I ask myself what the hell we’re doing here and afterwards I realize that, if we leave, there’s going to be a ghastly mess. They’re not joking, the guys confronting us. But they’re not just coming to pick a quarrel with us, they know that we’re well equipped. They never attack from the front.
    The Saint-Justisme is taking shape. After some tedious starts, I’ve filled two exercise books that I found at a nearby school whose pupils were evacuated over a year ago. I am more and more convinced that democracy is nothing but a hoax invented by the bourgeoisie so they can run the system permanently. We’re going to have to smash everything, without regard or discussion. Individual freedoms are snares and fantasies. What’s the use of being free to say what you think if you have a bloody awful salary and you live like a dog? You express yourself, you enjoy the so-called freedoms of the pseudo-democracy, but your life is rotten. We’ve had revolutions and wars. We’ve overthrown governments. Nothing changes. The rich remain rich and the poor just as