In World War I Aragon served briefly as an 'auxiliary doctor' After the war he continued with his studies. The magazine and public happenings were a vehicle to scorn on all the bourgeois values that intellectual saw destroyed by the horrors of war. Events yielded to my will. I retouched the good Lord and gave him whiskers. In 'The Big Torus' Aragon juxtaposed the preparations for a wedding with the images of emerging war.
Blood flows in the rebellious town.
Now the man is looking at a patch of stars and the bride's white stockings are raised up over her thighs. Shadows dance in the wind. For a modern reader Paris appears idyllic and innocent with its chorus girls and artists, bar rooms and commercial travellers. Turn round, and see, there right opposite is the little restaurant where, in our progress towards the depths of the imagination, I fond the last traces of the Dada movement. When Saulnier seemed too expensive for us, we used to come here, appeasing our inopportune appetites as best we could with food cooked in rancid coconut oil and with their sharp, unpleasant wine, consumed in a stuffy, vulgar atmosphere.