Balcony in the forest Book

Straight away Julien Gracq emphasizes the irrationality of war and the novel begins as if the main hero is going to some wicked never-never land…
"A train for the Domain of Arnheim" thought the lieutenant, a great Poe enthusiast, and as he lit a cigarette he leaned his head back against the serge upholstery so his gaze could follow the crest of the high, shaggy cliffs aureoled by the low sun.
The beautifully baroque language of the book is in the outright contrast with the dire irreality of everything that happens.
Sometimes the beams crossing his uncurtained window wakened Grange during the night, like the lighthouse that had brushed across his panes on that Breton island where he had slept so badly; he got up, leaned on the sill, and for a moment watched the strange columns of light slowly, warily wheeling in the winter sky; then an image from his childhood reading occurred to him; he remembered H. G. Wells' sick Martian giants screaming their incomprehensible woes across the stupefied landscape.
Nothing seems to be happening but the air is oversaturated with anxiety and apprehension… And the uncertainty of the endless waiting begets the atmosphere of fatality.
It is very interesting to compare A Balcony in the Forest with Weekend at Dunkirk by Robert Merle - both novels boast identical aura of doom…
Everything that occurs, occurs the last time: last hopes, last dreams, last desires, the last love…
"How old are you?" he would ask her sometimes, stroking her eyebrows with his finger, staggered by her beauty, blinking as if into too bright a light while she laughed her throaty laugh and lightly ruffled his hair - but he realized that his question had no meaning, that youth, here, had nothing to do with age; she belonged to a fabulous species, like unicorns. "I found her in the woods," he mused, and a certain wonder touched his heart; there was a sign upon her: the sea had floated her to him on a stone slab; he felt how precariously she was granted; the waves that had brought her would take her back again.
Human beings loathe war but their inhuman political leaders keep them warring.