two unlikely heroes, one a fat man sitting in a wheelbarrow and reading comic books, and the other a thing and belligerent man. Godard selects such unlikely protagonists to emphasize the foolishness of war and to show how the most ordinary men are turned into killers by money, ideology, and simply the fact that everyone else is doing it.
The very presence of the two soldiers riding rapidly to the shack in the opening sequence creates a sense of tension and of violence to come, and the fact that there is a war also indicates that much violence will be perpetrated on those who are swept up in the fighting on either side. Indeed, the two soldiers tell the two poor men that going to war is a good thing because you can do everything in a war that you could not do under normal circumstances. The two men are promised that they can rape and steal with impunity. The two men join up willingly and go off to war; they then start living closer to their instincts and further and further from the rules of civilized society. Violence is more and more a part of their reaction, and it seems that Godard finds violence to be a part of human nature which ordinarily is suppressed but which explodes from time to time into war, allowing all manner of depravity in a short period of time until it is placed back in the bottle.
Godard creates in his two main characters a pair of soldiers whoa re simply too good at what they do, too dedicated to indulging the violence that is within them. They were ordinary men in the beginning with nothing remarkable to separate them from the norm. Indeed, they could even be considered below the norm given their poverty and general laziness. The prospect of stealing and killing, however, generates a different sort of energy for the pair, and they become dedicated soldiers, carrying the horrors of war with them and devastating the countryside. When they come home, they have with them all a stack of postcards detail...