One day about seven years ago, Marc Dugain, the then 35-year-old chairman of Proteus Airlines, a subsidiary of Air France, came across a photograph of his grandfather taken on the eve of the first world war. It was profoundly shocking because this was a picture of a handsome young man looking with an assured and expectant air into the future; Dugain had only known his grandfather as a man with half his face blown away, mouth, cheek and nose gouged out by a shell in the first week of hostilities.
Possessed by an overwhelming desire to understand how someone rendered so repulsive to society goes on living, Dugain took leave and wrote furiously for 15 days. The result was The Officers' Ward: not just another dramatic recounting of a war tragedy, but a novel that goes right into the world of the hero and his disfigured companions, people deprived of easy human relationships while enduring endless crude facial reconstructions in the vain hope of making them more acceptable to society.
Since the French army, fearing the effect on morale, was not keen on having men with blasted faces walking around the streets, the officers lived out the war in Paris's Val de Grace hospital. The details of physical reconstruction and volatile mental states are so persuasive that one assumes Dugain must have spent years listening to his grandfather endlessly reliving his experience, backed up by family documents.
"But my grandfather died when I was nine," says Dugain, in London with François Dupeyron, director of the film adaptation. "He never spoke about it, and there were no documents. I just had to know how a man survives this. The only way to do it was to get into the part like an actor."
Published in France in 1998, Dugain's novel won three literary awards and was shortlisted for the grand prix of the Académie Française. This encouraged Dugain to abandon the business world, despite it being the family tradition. "I sold all my interests in Proteus Airlines," he says, "and I have been writing ever since." His next novel is due in September, and he is also writing a play.
"I had many approaches," Dugain says of his novel. "Some from America. But I wasn't going to let the Americans film the story of my grandfather. I found a producer who would honour certain moral obligations to the story, and left him to it."
Dupeyron's film of the same name, very faithful to the book, was last year nominated for nine César awards (the French Oscars) and was the official entry at the Cannes festival. His work is not much known outside France; he broke into feature films by writing a script turned down by everyone - until Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu picked it up. "It was a kind of surreal film called A Funny Place for a Meeting," he says. He continued to make features and write scripts for other directors - until The Officers' Ward was "just handed to me".
"I understood it straight away," he says. "I wrote the script, which came easily, but the visualisation presented problems." With all those disfigured people on screen, the first difficulty must have been to avoid it collapsing into a horror film. "Exactly," he says. "For a long time, you do not see the hero's face. The figures are often in the shadows, or covered by bandages. I wanted to avoid a sense of repulsion in the audience. I wanted them to get to know the characters as human beings and distinct personalities, so I waited and waited. But I was not trying to create suspense, I just waited until I felt the audience was demanding to see them."
The film shows poignantly how the first instinct of people facing such a hideous dilemma is to keep their families at bay and seek strength from their fellow sufferers. The three men and the woman make "a tacit decision to reject introspection and avoid thinking about the disaster of our existence... to avoid martyr's selfishness". Whatever hope there is for a disfigured man to make a life for himself, it becomes clear there is none for a woman with a horrible face.
Normally, it is films that make a concession to the public by grafting on a happy ending. But in this case it is the book that has the "happy" ending - actually justified by the truth, since Dugain's disfigured grandfather had a happy marriage and children. But Dupeyron ultimately rejected such comfort, leaving his characters to work out their futures in a lonely world.
"I had a happy ending in which he marries and has a child," Dupeyron says. "After all, one has the right to a happy ending when it is the truth. I had a scene where the disfigured man looks lovingly at the beautiful new baby in his arms. It was very sad, actually. But I cut it. I felt it might work against the story."
Dugain's explanation of simply entering the world of the disfigured like an actor somehow does not fully explain the level of imaginative intensity with which he tells his story. I bring it up again. Dugain says that, while his grandfather never talked to him about his experience, he held reunions with his disfigured comrades. He even founded a society called Les Gueules Cassées (The Broken Mugs).
"The government provided a chateau in the country for these reunions," Dugain says,"and as a child on summer holidays, I often sat with all these disfigured people. I did not think it exceptional."
But something clearly continued to work on his subconscious. He says his father contracted polio in early life and was partly paralysed. Then he reveals the final tragedy, which appears to have happened just before he threw himself into examining this world of disfigurement with such passion. His wife was involved in a terrible car accident: "She lost her leg. So there are three generations of deformity in my family."
· The Officers' Ward is out on Friday.
