”Suddenly a fearful explosion falls on us. I tremble to my skull; a metallic reverberation fills my head; a scorching and suffocating smell of sulphur pierces my nostrils. The earth has opened in front of me. I feel myself lifted and hurled aside—doubled up, choked, and half blinded by this lightning and thunder. But still my recollection is clear; and in that moment when I looked wildly and desperately for my comrade-in-arms, I saw his body go up, erect and black, both his arms outstretched to their limit, and a flame in the place of his head!” Aerial view of the trenchesThe thing about war, and this applies to every war, is the swings experienced by a soldier between being bored out of his mind and being so terrified that he is on the verge of losing all reason. The author, Henri Barbusse, served in the war for seventeen months and was invalided out three different times. During one of those convalescing periods he penned this novel. Published in 1916 and translated into English in 1917 it was one of the earliest war novels and certainly well ahead of the glut of war novels and memoirs that emerged in the 1920s. The book was heavily criticized for being published while the war was still going (some even used the word treasonous) and for the stark realism it conveyed to a public already wondering if the powers that be had completely lost their minds. ”War is frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the belly, mud and dung and infamous filth. It is befouled faces and tattered flesh, it is the corpses that are no longer like corpses even, floating on the ravenous earth. It is that, that endless monotony of misery, broken, by poignant tragedies; it is that, and not the bayonet glittering like silver, nor the bugle's chanticleer call to the sun!" A French soldier on leave, but you can still see trench mud on his boots.This is the story of a squad, a French squad. They are not soldiers. They are tailors, bakers, teachers, reporters, and shopkeepers all part of a volunteer army. They go to war for France, but they stay for the bonds that have formed with their mates under the most horrendous conditions. Their boots are like cardboard. Their clothing so cheap that they soon become rags. And it won’t for the love of God stop raining. “I once used to think that the worst hell in war was the flame of shells; and then for long I thought it was the suffocation of the caverns which eternally confine us. But it is neither of these. Hell is water.” The narrator of this book remains nameless, but of course I couldn’t help thinking it was Barbusse himself sitting there soaked to the bone dreaming about food, women, and shelter; and yet, dutifully recording the conversations of men who most likely did not survive the war. In fact as the novel progresses I started to think I was reading Christie’s And Then There Were None as first one and then another of the squad meets with mishap. French SquadThe dialogue, even the most inane of it, was fascinating as the members of squad give each other a hard time and speculate about the war. It reeked of authenticity. “No one can know it, not even us.”"No, not even us, not even us!" some one cried. "That's what I say, too. We shall forget—we're forgetting already, my boy!" "We've seen too much to remember." "And everything we've seen was too much. We're not made to hold it all. It takes its damned hook in all directions. We're too little to hold it."One of the most tragic things about this little piece of dialogue is how right they are. They do forget. When WW2 begins, I’ve read that many of those that survived the hell of WW1 encouraged their sons to join up and reproached those who were slow to respond to the call of their country. How can they possibly forget this? Around the dead flutter letters that have escaped from pockets or cartridge pouches while they were being placed on the ground. Over one of these bits of white paper, whose wings still beat though the mud ensnares them, I stoop slightly and read a sentence—"My dear Henry, what a fine day it is for your birthday!" The man is on his belly; his loins are rent from hip to hip by a deep furrow; his head is half turned round; we see a sunken eye; and on temples, cheek and neck a kind of green moss is growing.There is something so poignant to me about those letters fluttering away. Letters are so precious to a soldier. They are creased and folded from countless readings. They nurse him mentally back to health. They give him hope that someone is thinking about him and that someone remembers who he was before this war started chipping away at every corner stone of the man he was supposed to be. Letters are a lifebuoy in a sea of misery. A refugee appears out of the gray. She is magical, angelic, and maybe beautiful, who can say for sure because just being a woman makes her a lovely, lovely mirage. ”She half arose on our left from the green shadows of the undergrowth. Steadying herself with one hand on a branch, she leaned forward and revealed the night-dark eyes and pale face, which showed—so brightly lighted was one whole side of it—like a crescent moon.”When men are kept from women too long it isn’t just about the most obvious reason why men are missing women, it is also about who men are when they are with women. We are different. We talk different. We walk different. We are in many ways better versions of ourselves. Woman make us want to civilize the untamed. If we are lucky, some of our best memories are of a kiss backed by stars, or the brush of her hand on our neck, or maybe catching her looking at us with tenderness that for a moment makes us feel like a god. We are not meant to be deprived of them. Henri Barbusse in uniform.After the war Henri Barbusse moved to Moscow, married a Russian woman, and joined the Bolshevik Party. He continued to write and when he died in 1935 he was working on a biography of Stalin. Under Fire is his second novel. His first book titled Hell was published in 1908 and also has an unnamed narrator. His first book created a sensation when it was finally translated into English in 1966. Barbusse painted a world too scandalously realistic. The dialogue, the descriptions of the chaos, and the boredom all rang true in this book. Barbusse chose to write a novel, but it has so much blended fact that it feels more like a historically accurate rendition of a time when the whole world was tilting at windmills.
Under FireThis is a remarkable book.Barbusse makes vivid use of his own experiences as a soldier during the First World War, to bring alive the day-to-day existence of the rank and file men who served in the trenches. The subtitle “The Story of a Squad” & the dedication: “To the Memory of the Comrades who Fell by My Side at Crouy & on Hill 119”, indicate where his focus and his loyalties lie.The content ranges widely across the troops experiences, from the boredom and trivialities of much of the day-to-day living when not in action, to the utmost horrors of battle and its aftermath. It is this broadness of content that helps to explain why a potential flaw in the book, actually becomes one of its strengths and attractions. Like other writers of this war, he struggles to find adequate means of communicating what the realities of mass trench warfare were really like. His response to this problem is a fluidity of style & technique, moving through a variety of literary techniques & styles. The jagged disruption this causes for the reader at times only helps to reflect the huge gulfs that occur between different aspects of the soldiers’ experiences. “The Portal” amounts to a self-contained short story in which the narrator accompanies Poterloo, one of the squad, who by very contrived means, is given the opportunity to observe his wife at home in the company of German troops, before returning to the battle ground & his death. While the chapter is quite moving, it is one of the less successful approaches.He is strongest in the more impressionistic scenes he creates. In “The Refuge” he accompanies a comrade into a packed covered trench where the wounded await medical attention: “In this confined cavity formed by the crossing of the ditches, in the bottom of a sort of robbers’ den we wait two hours, buffeted, squeezed, choked and blinded, climbing over each other like cattle, in an odour of blood & butchery. There are faces that become more distorted and emaciated from minute to minute. One of the patients can no longer hold back his tears; they come in floods as he shakes his head he sprinkles his neighbour. Another, bleeding like a fountain, shouts, ‘Hey, there! Have a look at me!’ A young man with burning eyes yells…”In the midst of this his friend is bandaged, thrusts his way back to narrator, says goodbye, is shoved away into the mob, a last glance of “his wasted face & vacant absorption in his trouble” & then is seen no more. Snippets of disjointed conversation are overheard, sometimes only half a comment, then another impression or sensation floods in. To me the best chapter of all was The Fatigue Party, where men are herded out on a senseless exercise to rebuild defences after the battle. They go in the darkness and the incessant rain, through the sodden mud of trenches: “…the covered trench, a heavy darkness settles on us and divides us from each other. The damp odour of a swamped cave steals into us … Little streams of water flow freely…and in spite of tentative groping we stumble on heaped up timber…the air in the tunnel is vibrating heavily … the brilliant beam of a little electric lamp flashes out and instantly the sergeant bellows… the flash lamp after revealing some dark and oozing walls in its cone of light, retires into the night.”They achieve nothing on this work party, which leads into the final chapter, as men on both sides face drowning or scrambling for refuge on a flooded battlefield.These snippets may give the impression that Barbusse spends 340 pages wallowing in the horrors of war; that is not so. The larger part of the book allows us to see the men’s humour & lightness, their longings & strivings for food, for home, for wine, for peace & quiet, for leave, for shelter. We are shown the responses as the men go on leave but then wish to be back with their units, because the civilian attitudes to the war & their life-style now seem so alien. Through Volpatte we see the anger felt against those with cushy jobs behind the lines.All of this may sound very familiar to anyone who has read novels such as “All Quiet on the Western Front”. What is interesting is that this is the great source book for them, but it is a more gritty and ‘real’ piece in itself.Barbusse writes from the point of view of a rather naïve form of socialism. The camaraderie, loyalty and essential goodness of the men under terrible conditions is contrasted with the grasping of those who profit by the war, the over-riding commitment to their own safety & comfort of the officers in the rear, and the incomprehension of the civilians who live essentially cushy lives. His conclusions may be simplistic, but for the likes of me who have never had to leave the cushy life of a civilian, he provides an excellent antidote if needed to the growing tendency to glorify contemporary military operations. Summed up in his words: “War is frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the belly, mud and dung and infamous filth. It is befouled faces and tattered flesh; it is the corpses that are no longer like corpses even, floating on the ravenous earth. It is that endless monotony of misery broken by poignant tragedies; it is that and not the bayonet’s silvery glitter, nor the trumpet’s cock-crow in the sun.”The book begins on the devastation of a flooded battlefield and ends just there yet again. A suitable epigraph for the book might be provided by Barbusse himself: “Though we march without end, we arrive nowhere.”
Do You like book Under Fire (2004)?
Henri Barbusse's war novel Under Fire war written while the Great War was still raging. Barbusse had spend 1914-1915 in the trenches and was then wounded enough to be assigned a desk job. A prolific writer before the war, he wrote this novel, which provides a French enlisted man's view of the war, during 1915-1916 and it became an immediate best seller in France and (in translation) in England and America. Soldiers recommended it as a realistic portrayal of the war. This new translation out from Penguin apparently is somewhat earthier and less weighted down with British-isms than the original 1917 English translation which was current before.The novel is told by an almost invisible narrator who is a stand-in for Barbusse himself -- a writer who plans to write about the war. The novel is low on plot, and the characters are hard to keep track of an not very well rounded. It's very much a day-in-the-life kind of novel, and what sticks with you is some of the description, the images and the incidents. As such it's not a rapid read all the time. You're not very wrapped up in worrying about what happens to the characters. I sometimes had difficulty in telling them apart. But perhaps the distance is almost needed given the subject matter. It does certainly give a very realistic on-the-ground view of the war, and it ends on an interestingly open note as the characters discuss whether the war is worth it. Barbusse himself seems not to have reached an answer on that question yet when he wrote it.
—Brendan Hodge
This book is one of the most graphic descriptions of the horror of The Great War that I have ever read. I think it is worth pointing out that Barbusse also focuses on class divisions. Thus we have the "trench tourists" who are little more than curiosity seekers and those who have managed to obtain safe positions behind the lines. Both types arouse the indignation of the ordinary soldier. Then there is the contrast between the conditions of the trench-solkdiers as it is reported at home and as it really is. War is thus a generator of lies and misery ratheer than a noble exercise in heroism. In this regard, Barbusse is in agreement with Remarque, Owen and Sassoon. Perhaps Barbusse misses the element of Pity in Owen, and the scathing fury of Sassoon. The characters are less developed than those in "All Quiet On the Western Front". But Barbusse conveys a more developed and realistic picture of the life of a soldier in thetrenches. A great deal of the novel has a"lethargic" quality where little seems to happen. But this is part of the depression the soldiers experience. It adds realism to the narrative. They are caught in a terrible irrational trap which may explode into a malign violence at any time. It has nothing to do with justice or nobility or patriotism or any decent morality--despite the sometimes desperate attempts of the soldiers to find something to give rationality to their insufferable existence. In the end, the self-defeating pupselessness of the war is expressed by a common soldier:. . . Two armies fighting each other--that's one great army committing suicide."__________________
—Richard
Henri Barbusse was half French, half British and born in 1873. Compared to the other authors discussed up to now, he was quite old when he signed up for the French army at the age of 41. Although he was injured often, he served for 15 months until he was placed into a clerical position. He published Under Fire (Le Feu in the original French) in 1916, just after the end of the First World War, in which he describes his experiences fighting. Similarly to the other works, it is very harsh and naturalistic and has been criticized for this but it is simultaneously recognized as one of the best French war novels. As one of the first, it also formed an inspiration for Remarque while writing All Quiet on the Western Front. Under Fire is written in a way very similar to a journal. Different sections are partitioned by lines as the unnamed protagonist describes his days in the War. By writing it as a diary, Barbusse perhaps hoped to bring his experiences closer to the reader and get away with the very brusque and harsh way in which he describes the War. Having been translated from French, my reading experience is of course a bit removed from the original one, but the translator left French expressions and words in the text which does make you feel as if you're surrounded by French soldiers. Similarly to Remarque's novel, there is mention of a lot of different soldiers which is slightly confusing at the beginning. But as the novel continues, the reader grows attached to them and the anonymous protagonist , which makes the constant threat of death all the more horrible. But where Remarque very much supported the sense of brotherhood that the War creates and the alienation of the soldiers from the normal world, Barbusse is mainly negative of the entire War. After his own experiences, he became pacifistic which is definitely noticeable in the novel.One of the things I enjoyed in this novel from the get go is the way the protagonist describes the equality that seems to exist between the different soldiers. Although he still describes the rich and powerful as seeing themselves above them, he goes to great lengths to show how they are all one.'Our races? We are of all races; we come from everywhere... Yes, we are truly and deeply different from each other. But we are alike all the same. In spite of this diversity of age, of country, of education, of position, of everything possible, in spite of the former gulfs that kept us apart, we are in the main alike. Under the same uncouth outlines we conceal and reveal the same ways and habits, the same simple nature of men who have reverted to the state primeval.'The brutality of the War brings something animalistic up in these men that shows them that at their very nature, they are all the same despite the differences they have grown up seeing in each other. The First World War also signified the end of some of the major monarchies of Europe and thereby the decline of nobility. Having to fight next to each other must have encouraged a certain disintegration of the class-systems that they were used to. Realising there was no difference between them must only have made their return into society much harder than it already was.I did not enjoy this novel as much as All Quiet on the Western Front, perhaps because I have been very busy, but I felt that the writing style in that novel was a lot more imaginative in the way it described the War, whereas Barbusse tried to bring the horror close to the reader by keeping it naturalistic.
—Juli Rahel
