Under Fire

by Henri Barbusse, Robin Buss (Translator), Fitzwater Wray

Based on his own experience of the Great War, Henri Barbusse's novel is a powerful account of one of the greatest horrors mankind has ever inflicted on itself.

For the group of ordinary men in the French Sixth Battalion, thrown together from all over France and longing for home, war is simply a matter of survival, lightened only by the arrival of their rations or a glimpse of a pretty girl or a brief reprieve in the hospital. Reminiscent of classics like Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Under Fire (originally published in French as La Feu) vividly evokes life in the trenches: the mud, stench, and monotony of waiting while constantly fearing for one's life in an infernal and seemingly eternal battlefield.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Genres: Fiction, War, World War I, Classics, France, Historical Fiction, French Literature

352 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1916

About the author

Henri Barbusse (1873-1935) was a French novelist and a member of the French Communist Party.

The son of a French father and an English mother, Barbusse was born in Asnières-sur-Seine, France in 1873. Although he grew up in a small town, he left for Paris in 1889 at age 16. In 1914, at the age of 41, he enlisted in the French Army and served against Germany in World War I. Invalided out of the army three times, Barbusse would serve in the war for 17 months, until the end of 1915, when he was permanently moved into a clerical position due to pulmonary damage, exhaustion, and dysentery.

Barbusse first came to fame with the publication of his novel Le Feu (translated as Under Fire) in 1916, which was based on his experiences during World War I. By this time, Barbusse had become a pacifist, and his writing demonstrated his growing hatred of militarism. Le Feu drew criticism at the time for its harsh naturalism, but won the Prix Goncourt.

In January, 1918 he left France and moved to the city of Moscow, Russia where he married a Russian woman and joined the Bolshevik Party. The novel Clarté is about an office worker who, while serving in the army, begins to realize that the imperialist war is a crime.

The Russian Revolution had significant influence on the life and work of Barbusse. He joined the French Communist Party in 1923 and later traveled back to the Soviet Union. His later works, Manifeste aux Intellectuels (Elevations) (1930) and others show a more revolutionary standpoint. Of these, the 1921 Le Couteau entre les dents (The Knife Between My Teeth) marks Barbusse's siding with Bolshevism and the October Revolution. Barbusse characterized the birth of Soviet Russia as "the greatest and most beautiful phenomenon in world history." The book "Light from the Abyss" (1919) and the collection of articles "Words of a Fighting Man" (1920) contain calls for the overthrow of capitalism. In 1925, Barbusse published "Chains", showing history as the unbroken chain of suffering of people and their struggle for freedom and justice. In the publicistic book "The Butchers" he exposes the White Terror in the Balkan countries.

In 1927 Barbusse was a participant in the Congress of Friends of the Soviet Union in Moscow. He led the World Congress Against Imperialist War (Amsterdam, 1932) and headed the World Committee Against War and Fascism, founded in 1933. He took part in the work of the International Youth Congress (Paris, 1933) and the International Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture. In the 1920s and 1930s, he also edited the periodicals Monde and Progrès Civique, which published some of the first writings of George Orwell.

In 1934 Barbusse sent Egon Kisch to Australia to represent the International Movement Against War and Fascism as part of his work for the Comintern. The resulting unsuccessful exclusion of Egon Kisch from Australia by the Conservative Australian Government succeeded in energising Communism in Australia and resulted in Kisch staying longer than Barbusse had intended.

An associate of Romain Rolland and editor of Clarté, he attempted to define a proletarian literature, akin to Proletkult and Socialist realism. Barbusse was the author of a 1936 biography of Joseph Stalin, titled Staline: Un monde nouveau vu à travers un homme (Stalin. A New World Seen Through the Man). Barbusse subsequently led a violent press campaign against his former friend Panait Istrati - a Romanian writer who had expressed criticism of the Soviet state. Barbusse in turn was harshly criticized for his admiration of Stalin and his propagandistic activities on behalf of Soviet Russia by his former comrade Victor Serge, who noted that Barbusse had dedicated a book to Leon Trotsky before Stalin had definitively won the power struggle against Trotsky, only to denounce Trotsky as a traitor after the latter's fall from power. Serge called Barbusse a hypocrite who was determined to

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

”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 trenches

The 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 Squad

The 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.

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, the central character, having been wounded on the Italian Front, escapes from the army and takes refuge in a hotel in the Alps. While there he meets an old acquaintance who interrogates him on the subject of war literature:

‘What have you been reading?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I'm afraid I am very dull.’
‘No. But you should read.’
‘What is there written in war-time?’
‘There is Le Feu by a Frenchman, Barbusse.’
[…] ‘Those books were at the hospital.’
‘Then you have been reading?’
‘Yes, but nothing any good.’

I don't know if A Farewell to Arms can really be considered a war novel proper, but to the extent that it is one, it's a less successful one than Le Feu – and Hemingway, who drove ambulances in Italy, has got a goddamn nerve criticising the experiences of Henri Barbusse, who was a front-line footsoldier in the trenches.

This book, pace Papa, is good. It is really good, and not just in a documentary sense – which I had expected – but also in a literary sense, which I had not. The First World War was of course the first major conflict to field hordes of men that had benefited from a systematic education – hence the wealth of poetry and journals – and Barbusse is a case in point. Before being a poilu he'd been a literature graduate; at university, his tutor had been Mallarmé. Le Feu, which won the Prix Goncourt, shows a steady literary intelligence every step of the way.

The reason I had expected it to be of primarily documentary interest is, I suppose, because of its uniquely early appearance. Barbusse wrote the novel while on convalescent leave in 1915, and somehow managed to publish it (albeit in heavily censored form) the following year, when the war was still at its height. So these are dispatches from the very heart of the maelstrom, however fictionalised they may be.

You wouldn't call it enjoyable. It is oppressive and I found it often a slow read – but I've never before been given such a visceral idea of daily life in the trenches. The dreadful monotony of forced marches, the constant tiredness, the misery of trying to find your way through knee-high mud in the dark, of trying to sleep on wet mud while dressed in sodden clothes, negotiating the ever-changing labyrinth of trenches and boyaux, the exhaustion of heaving yourself up over the muddy parapet to charge at banks of barbed wire with mortar shells landing all around you – it's just so undramatically, so realistically described.

Some of the details are truly extraordinary. I hope never to gain a comparable understanding of the changes undergone by a friend's face after they drown in mud, or the exact pressure needed to pull the boot off an old corpse without also pulling off the foot. At one point the narrator's company, lost in the trenches in the middle of the night, is led through a sewage channel to try and find the front lines, so that they are literally marching ankle-deep in shit (‘dont on sent, parmi la bourbe terreuse, les fléchissements mous’). On another occasion, lost in the driving rain, he is about to lower himself into a trench when he hears German voices walk past and realises he's inadvertently wandered up to the enemy lines – an incredible reminder that the French and German positions were barely forty metres apart at some points.

Barbusse's most interesting tool though is dialogue: the earthy patois of the poilus, a rich mix of slang and regionalisms, is central here, and must make translating this novel an unusually challenging prospect. I certainly learnt a lot of vocab reading it. With the proviso that I am not a native speaker, to me it all had a deep ring of truth to it, and the many long conversational scenes are as close as you'll ever get to eavesdropping on the trenches of 1915. Here, for example, the men are bitching about all those officers that dress up in flash uniforms but stay well behind the lines:

— On les connaît, ceux-là ! I's diront, en f'sant l' gracieux dans leur monde : « J' m'ai engagé pour la guerre. — Ah ! comme c'est beau, c' que vouz avez fait ; vous avez, de votre propre volonté, affronté la mitraille ! — Mais oui, madame la marquise, j' suis comme ça. » Eh, va donc, fumiste !

“We know all about their sort! They'll talk it up in company, putting on airs: ‘I signed up for the war.’ — ‘Oh! How noble you are! Facing the bullets, of your own free will!’ — ‘Well, you know, my lady – that's just the kind of guy I am.’ Well go on then, arsehole!”

These are the kind of people back in society whose attitude is neatly summed up by Barbusse as ‘Sauvons la France! – et commençons par nous sauver!’ But talking about them is just comic relief, for us and for the men involved. More often they struggle with what the war is for, how it has turned normal people into brute machines that sleep on their feet and kill strangers, and how it could ever hope to be justified by some brighter potential future.

—L'avenir ! L'avenir ! L'œuvre de l'avenir sera d'effacer ce présent-ci, et de l'effacer plus encore qu'on ne pense, de l'effacer comme quelque chose d'abominable et d'honteux. Et pourtant, ce présent, il le fallait, il le fallait !

“The future, the future! The work of the future will be to erase this present, and to erase it even more than we realise – to erase it as something abominable and shameful. And yet, this present – we needed it, we needed it!”

He is trying to convince himself, of course. The gritty details in this book are the more powerful for being set alongside equally representative scenes of inactivity and soul-destroying monotony – monotony for the soldiers, I hasten to add, not for the readers. The readers are in for something altogether different.

Barbusse is the real deal and I feel changed for reading this remarkable document. I'll leave the final analysis on the mess we're presented with to one of his mud-encrusted colleagues: Deux armées qui se battent, c'est comme une grande armée qui se suicide! Two armies fighting each other is just one big army committing suicide.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit disappointed with this to be honest. Reminiscent of classics such as Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms? Personally, I just didn't see it. I was expecting one of those great war novels that you can't stop thinking about, with scene after scene playing over and over in one's head. That's not to say it wasn't good though. But, for me, that's all it was. Just good. Not the masterpiece I was hoping for. Took well over 100 pages to get going. And I question the translation too. Probably would have been wiser reading in French. On the plus side Barbusse never glamorizes the war. It reads very much like an anti-war novel. Set eighteen months after the start of WW1, Barbusse wrote and first published it as a serial in L’Oeuvre whilst he was recovering from wounds that would prevent him from returning to the front. It is rich in details of how soldiers navigate the day to day life, and builds a strong atmosphere of the trenches and surrounding areas that can be both poetic and deeply harrowing. But It wasn't until the final third, with the surviving soldiers caked in the suffocating mud of no-man's-land, and the closing chapter set within and beyond the war zone that I found it more engrossing. It was a right old slog just to get there though. Something tells me I should have read Gabriel Chevallier's 1930 WW1 novel La Peur (Fear) instead. I was even advised that it is the better book.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars
One of the earliest novels about WW1. Barbusse was a front line soldier and he drew on what he saw in the trenches and wrote and published in 1916. It charts the life of one particular squad. There is very little about the officer and the characters are ordinary poilu (French infantrymen). There is a nameless narrator and the chapters are episodic, looking at a different aspect or incident. The members of the squad are just ordinary men and as Barbusse says:

"Fully conscious of what they are doing, fully fit and in good health, they have massed there to throw themselves once more into that madman's role that is imposed on each of them by the folly of the human race.”

Barbusse made notes whilst still in the trenches. There is no glory here and no heroic warriors and readers are not spared the grim details of everyday life. The experience of war led Barbusse to pacifism and communism.
Barbusse shows the vulnerable side of the soldiers and often they recount their lives before the war. There is a common humanity, even with the Germans, a recognition they are in the same situation as the French soldiers and have as little agency as they do. As Barbusse says:

“But don’t talk to me of military virtue because I killed some Germans”

“Yes, it’s true, we differ profoundly. However, we resemble each other. Despite the diversity of age, origin, culture, situations and of all that was, despite the abysses that previously separated us, we are basically the same.”

There is a strong sense of realism that you find in the best of the contemporary accounts:

“I see shadows coming from these sidelong pits and moving about, huge and misshapen lumps, bear-like, that flounder and growl. They are ‘us’.
Who are ‘us’!? The soldiers who are sent to the front are all poor farmers, workers and employees:
“Our ages? We are of all ages.” […]
“Our races? We are of all races; we come from everywhere.” […]
Our callings? A little of all – in the lump. In those departed days when we had a social status, before we came to immure our destiny in the molehills that we must always build up again as fast as rain and scrap-iron beat them down, what were we? Sons of the soil and artisans mostly. Lamuse was a farm-servant, Paradis a carter. Cadilhac, whose helmet rides loosely on his pointed head, though it is a juvenile size – like a dome on a steeple, says Tirette – owns land. Papa Blaire was a small farmer in La Brie.”

The title Under Fire does not reflect what happens in the book, as being under fire is a small part of it. The finding of food plays a significant part as does the management of the dead and the descriptions of corpses in the landscape. There are also descriptions of the landscape and the effects of the war on it

“There are trees here; a row of excoriated willow trunks, some of wide countenance, and others hollowed and yawning, like coffins on end. The scene through which we are struggling is rent and convulsed, with hills and chasms, and with such sombre swellings as if all the clouds of storm had rolled down here. Above the tortured earth, this stampeded file of trunks stands forth against a striped brown sky, milky in places and obscurely sparking – a sky of agate.”
The whole is a plea that war is pointless:
“We’re made to live, not to be done in like this!”
“Men are made to be husbands, fathers – men, what the devil! – not beasts that hunt each other and cut each other’s throats and make themselves stink like all that.”
“Two armies fighting each other – that’s like one great army committing suicide!”

It is an impassioned account of the futility of war, populated by ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances.

[E. G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction: Henri Barbusse and the Birth of the Moral Witness, by Jay Winter
Translator's Note

--Under Fire

[Abi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an essential, but too often ignored, read for anyone interested in World War I, the literature of that period, or war lit in general. As a piece of literature it was highly significant. Published in 1916, it was one of the first works to openly criticise the war and was a major influence on Siegfried Sassoon.
It tells the story of a group of ordinary French soldiers, drawing deeply on Barbusse's own experiences in the trenches. The structure is not a complete narrative, but instead episodic, jumping from one aspect of poilu life to another. It actually works extremely well, and comes as close as any WWI novel I've ever read to encapsulating the essence of what it was to fight in the trenches. The scene in the café when the group are on leave is just perfect.
You also get a little more for your money than you do with Sassoon and his ilk; the story is book-ended with philosophical scenes that go beyond realism and are just as effective as frank depictions of the brutal horrors of trench warfare, although the book contains these too. I suppose it's more 'French' in a way that's difficult to pin down.
Under Fire, or Le Feu is not my favourite WWI novel. That distinction would probably go to All Quiet on the Western Front. But it is one of them, and it is an extremely important literary work.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henri Barbusse's Under Fire is the grand-daddy of all realistic books on infantry warfare. Although, in the last chapter, there is an attempt to step back and meditate on the folly of war, the book is a baleful series of vignettes involving mud. seemingly endless rain, and twisted bodies of fallen soldiers.

We start following the men in a single unit, but as the book goes on, the dramatis personae are whittled down by bullets and shells. In the end, there are only the unnamed narrator and a fellow poilu named Paradis.

However grim the subject matter may be -- and there are few successful comedic novels about the First World War -- there are some sprightly episodes. There is a pretty young blonde named Eudoxie who seems to follow the unit from one battle zone to the next, but who does not seem to belong to any one soldier. She herself falls in the end.

[Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an important book. It is quite short, at just under 300 pages, comprising a series of linked short stories about life in the French trenches during World War One.

I have not been a soldier but this book rings true to me in depicting the life of the "poilu" (literally "hairy one" - the French eqivalent of the British Tommy or poor bloody infantry). The war is nine parts drudgery and boredom to one part terror. Life in the trenches boils down to food, warmth and shelter, looking after your mates, and contempt for the officers, armchair generals and shirkers safely ensconced in the rear.

Death is all around and seemingly random.

The book gets increasingly bleak as we build towards a major French offensive, during which most of the soldiers in the book are killed, often in gruesome ways. Death is a leveller in that it comes to French and Germans alike, the dead from both sides rotting and decaying side by side - brothers in death if not life.

There are many passages I liked, this one is typical .....

"War is frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the belly, and 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, the endless monotony of misery, broken by poignant tragedies .."

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot get my hands on enough material from the Inter-War Period. I admit that I have this problem. I love poilus.

This book has an interesting history of being dragged from fiction to non-fiction and back again. It was originally published in serial form in 1916, making it one of the only works ABOUT World War I to come out before the war itself was ended. Barbusse had at that time been wounded, pulled from the front and relegated to a job in the War Office; he was arguably able to depict more of the true violence and suffering on the front, by way of publishing incrementally in newspapers. 'Anastasie' had a tighter leash on the book publications, apparently.

Whether or not it is a 100% accurate recounting of the day-to-day movement of troops (which it never claims to be), one cannot argue with the eloquence of imagery, or the bared-to-bones depiction of humanity as it is ground beneath the invisible bootheel of incomprehensible war. Having read a considerable amount of World War I-related nonfiction, it matters less to me how clearly Barbusse recalls fronts and actions in proper order, and more how precisely he details the emotional state of the men thrown into the mill and muck of trench warfare.

[[P] · Rating 3 out of 5]

Make no mistake, in the event of war I would be a deserter. Although logically speaking you can’t desert something that you refuse to participate in; you have to engage, in even the most basic, superficial fashion before you can disengage. Whenever I attempt to explain my pacifism, and my attitude towards the military in general, I almost always receive the same, slightly sneering, response: what about the two world wars? It is the last card, the Ace up the sleeve, of the proud patriot. The suggestion is that it would be somehow monstrous not to have fought in these just wars. It is an aggressive form of emotional blackmail or manipulation, as though my objection to killing people, and being killed myself, is a mouthful of green phlegm aimed in the face of the millions who died. The millions who died for me, as I am repeatedly reminded. And my response? Well, I wouldn’t have willingly fought in those circumstances either. My resistance, or cowardice, is absolute.

With the state of the world being what it is, there increasingly seems to be a suspect, dangerous aura around the military and military action, at least in the UK, an aura of unquestionable heroism, and an atmosphere of celebration. It strikes me that to be a soldier automatically confers upon you a kind of superiority and moral infallibility. There are, the fist-pumping, flag-waving general public would have us believe, no scared soldiers, no stupid soldiers, etc. Yet, ironically, if the literature associated with WW1 and WW2 – those aforementioned just wars that any right-thinking individual would be eager to fight in – has taught us anything it is that those who were involved in them were ordinary people, and that many of the men who died for me would, for example, and quite understandably, rather have been anywhere else than in a foxhole in a field, awaiting the bullet that bore their name.

“These are not soldiers, these are men. They are not adventurers or warriors, designed for human butchery – as butchers or cattle. They are the ploughmen or workers that one recognizes even in their uniforms. They are uprooted civilians. They are ready, waiting for the signal for death or murder, but when you examine their faces between the vertical ranks of bayonets, they are nothing but men.”

One of the first, and most acclaimed, novels dealing with the lives of ordinary soldiers is Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu [which means The Fire, but which was given the more evocative title of Under Fire in the English translation by Robin Buss]. Originally published in 1916, it is said to be a fictionalised account of the author’s own experiences as a French soldier on the western front during WW1, and was actually subject to some controversy because of its unflinching realism and refusal to romanticise. However, the book begins in a sanatorium, one that is hanging over, and looking down upon, the world. From this safe and comfortable vantage point the residents, including the narrator, discuss the war that has just been declared and share a vision, a vision of carnage and bloodshed in the fields, on the beaches, and across the land that lies below. It is a beautiful and moving piece of writing, because you know, of course, that this isn’t idle melodrama, that these events will, and did, come to pass.



Once the opening few pages are out of the way Under Fire becomes the novel that one was likely expecting, as it climbs down from the mountain, so to speak, and crawls into the trenches. These pits, which eerily resemble graves, are, we are left in no doubt, hellish places: carpeted with sticky mud, smelling strongly of urine, and overrun with lice. Yet it is of course the men who inhabit them, men ‘buried in the depths of an eternal battlefield’, that are the real focus. Indeed, much of Under Fire is given over to their conversations, which naturally gives you a sense of what they are thinking and feeling; and what one finds is that their concerns are basic, that they want to eat, drink wine, have sex, and stay alive. Moreover, through their interactions with one another, and through the anecdotes that they tell each other, Barbusse not only reveals their more admirable qualities, but those that are less so too; they are, for example, opportunistic, scavengers almost, looking to pick up helmets and boots, often from the dead. They are, in short, simple men; they are human beings, not superheroes.

“They are men, ordinary men, who have suddenly been snatched away from life. Like Ordinary men as a whole they are ignorant, not too keen, narrow-minded and full of good old-fashioned common sense, which sometimes goes astray; they are liable to let themselves be led and to do as they are told, inured to hardship and able to suffer long.”

There is a chapter in the book titled Swearwords, in which Barque asks Barbusse, or the narrator who is standing in for him: “if you get your squaddies in your book to speak, will you make them speak like they do, or will you tidy it up and make it proper?” In other words, will he tell the truth or will he, under pressure from a publisher, keep it clean? His answer is immediate: he will tell the truth. To do otherwise would be to misrepresent these people. Therefore, their speech is, as you would expect of a group drawn from the lower classes, littered with slang and profanity. However, this does cause something of a problem for the reader, certainly a reader of the English translation. The men are French, of course, but, names aside, one would not think so, because they speak in a wooden, old-timey kind of British dialect, full of words and phrases such as “I’ve caught me death” and “by buggery”. This is not necessarily a criticism of the translator, for I understand the difficulties there must be in striking the right tone, or balance, where foreign slang is concerned, but sympathy and understanding does not prevent these parts from sounding odd [and occasionally laughable] to one’s ear [“a whizzbang fell in his bangers” was my favourite].

While it is usually the case that writers are eager to individualise those caught up in tragic events, to give distinct [and likeable] personalities to the victims, in an effort to make them, and their experiences, more relatable, Barbusse appears keen to do the opposite. He repeatedly makes reference to a ‘mass’ of men, at one point likening them to a ‘cloud.’ This emphasis on the men as an indistinct, uniform mass works in two ways, or from two perspectives; there is, first of all, the way that the soldiers see themselves and their comrades, which is as undervalued and expendable. There is the sense that they have given up, or had taken away, their individuality by being a part of the war machine. Secondly, and by extension, is the way that the soldiers are viewed by those in power, which is to say that one man is very much like another, he is a means to an end. It is interesting, therefore, and perhaps appropriate, that Barbusse’s characters are not well-developed. After spending many hours with these poilus I honestly could not distinguish, except by name, between a Volpatte or a Paradis.

“A soldier, or even lots of them, are nothing, or less than nothing in this mass and so we are quite lost, drowned, like the few drops of blood we are in this deluge of men and things.”

There is, of course, much in the novel that confirms the horror and brutality of war, but I am not going to linger over that. It is hardly news. What I find more interesting is the psychology of those who find themselves in war situations, specifically the mentality of living in such close proximity with death. How do you cope with seeing a man blown into the air, his head a ball of fire? How do you cope knowing that from one moment to the next it could be you? It changes you, of that there is no doubt. Some become blasé, such as the man who pulls off a dead German officer’s boots, taking the legs with them, and recounts this gruesome story without a trace of emotion. Yet there is another story, a story Barbusse doesn’t tell but which was always on my mind as I read his book, which is that of those who return, who survive and go home, but have to deal with what they have done and what they have witnessed. I don’t know how you do that either. And I hope to never find out.

[Jeroen Vandenbossche · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un classique de la littérature de guerre qui ne m’a ni déçu, ni ébloui.

Il n’est pas difficile de comprendre pourquoi le texte a été apprécié par les contemporains de l’auteur (grand succès de librairie, le roman remporte aussi le prix Goncourt en 1916): la description horrifique de la première guerre mondiale, en rupture radicale avec la propagande officielle de l’époque, a sans doute resonné avec le vécu des soldats et de leur proches.


L’écriture et la narration sont tout à fait conventionnelles, plus proches de Zola et des naturalistes que des expériences radicales des modernistes contemporains. Sans doute cela a-t-il aussi facilité la réception par le grand public. En même temps, c’est ce qui donne à ce texte son air un peu désuet et vieillot.

[Brian Robbins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Under Fire

This 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.”

[Dvd (#) · Rating 4 out of 5]

11/09/2022 (**** 1/2)

Una squadra di soldati francesi - i celebri poilu che affrontarono lo spaventoso mondo delle trincee della Grande Guerra - raccontata dagli occhi e con le parole di uno di loro, Barbusse stesso. Barbusse che era una anomalia in quel gruppo: lui, scrittore e attivista politico (comunista); gli altri erano contadini, operai, piccoli impiegati. Ognuno con le sue manie, le sue miserie e le sue grandezze: tutte piccole, perché è della piccola gente che si sta parlando. Semplici, illetterati, sconfitti, piegati, sottomessi, gettati come carbone in una fornace sempre attiva.

La prima parte del romanzo ha uno stile colloquiale, che tende molto al racconto popolare, allo sberleffo popolaresco. La guerra combattuta sta sullo sfondo, ci si concentra più sul mondo colloquiale dei soldati, sulla nostalgia di casa e della vita di prima, nel contrasto con gli spaventosi disagi della vita di adesso (cose che noi altri si fa fatica a concepire - anche solo fare il piantone all'addiaccio, in dicembre, sotto un diluvio d'acqua, con vestiti e scarpe di materiali scadenti). Fra bestemmie, sberleffi e frasi sgrammaticate, i capitoli scorrono abbastanza veloci, in una generale certa confusione che piace a tratti.

Il tono cambia drasticamente con il capitolo XIX e raggiunge il culmine con lo straordinario XX capitolo, il più lungo, di gran lunga una delle cose più intense e devastanti mai lette. La squadra finisce sotto un terrificante bombardamento, che dura giorni, prosegue in un'avanzata alla garibaldina in pieno giorno nella terra di nessuno, termina con la conta dei morti e dei feriti, in un paesaggio indescrivibile, che è la cosa più simile immaginabile all'inferno. Una landa dove non esiste più nulla, né alberi né edifici, ma solo buche e trincee, terreno polverizzato a forza di esplosioni, fango alto un piede, rottami. Nel terreno rimestato emerge di tutto, soprattutto resti umani. Nuovi o vecchi, morti di un anno o di mesi prima riportati in superficie a pezzi, gonfi, slabrati, inscheletriti, muffiti, mummificati, interi, polverizzati, ridotti a cumuli di poltiglia. Mentre i vivi ci passano in mezzo, sopra, sotto.

Voi immaginate questi poveri cristi - francesi e tedeschi, inglesi, italiani, russi, austriaci, turchi e tutto un intero mondo, quello del florido e spensierato Occidente ebbro di progresso e positivismo - e provate a immaginare quello che li circondò, e poi immaginateli sospesi ogni minuto nell'attesa del colpo giusto, a sperare nella "buona"ferita, a attendere - più probabilmente - una morte orrenda e nemmeno una sepoltura.

Perché, quando leggete nei libri di storia la voce "dispersi", ricordate che si intende "morti mai ritrovati". Polverizzati, fatti a pezzi, annegati o asfissiati dal terreno, sepolti. Magari ritrovati, ma in condizioni tali da non essere riconoscibili. Per lo più, ancora lì, ancora oggi, sepolti nei campi della Somme, della Marna, dell'Artois, del Carso, nelle paludi russe e prussiane.

Questa fu la Grande Guerra, e Barbusse la descrive in maniera eccezzionalmente vivida e forte.

Il capitolo finale è un inno al pacifismo, ma riuscito solo in parte e forse troppo retorico: ho preferito nettamente la straordinaria orazione finale de E Johnny prese il fucile. Per il resto, il libro vale Remarque e Junger, anche se solo in alcune parti. Da qui le 4 stelle e mezzo.

Consigliato.

[Kuszma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Az biztos, hogy annak, aki a háborút valami marhára heroikus dolognak képzelte el, olyan lehetett ez a könyv, mintha egy vödör jeges vízzel nyakon öntötték volna, és utána még a vödröt is hozzávágják. Barbusse helyenként impresszionizmusba hajló hevülettel rögzíti a lövészárok-hadviselés minden pokoli aspektusát, amely egyfelől elképesztően indusztriális és kaotikusan modern, ami mondjuk a vasúti közlekedést vagy a fegyverrendszereket illeti, ugyanakkor paradox módon a paleolit ősember állapotába kényszeríti az egyszerű bakát: egy olyan világba, ahol az élet egy mocskos sárgödörben, evés és túlélés tengelyén mozog. Ez a világ rettentő és undokul undorító, leszakadt lábak és kiomló belek szegélyezik, és külön súlyosbító körülmény, hogy a külvilág szemében sincs becse – hisz bár ez az ősember hőssé avanzsál, amint elhalálozik, ám amíg él, csak megvetendő pária, akire a hátországban élők csak húzzák a szájukat, a tisztek a szögesdróton támadt rések betömésére használják őket, a paraszt meg rajta igyekszik meggazdagodni. De vigasztalódj, baka, mert itt van Barbusse, aki fogja magát, és e regénnyel beledörgöli a nevezetes hátország orrát a valóságba.

Ez eddig rendben is van. Csak hát ugye ha ez regény, akkor regénynek nem annyira jó. Bár – való igaz – úttörő jelentőségű a világirodalomban. Ám az én szívem architektúrájában a grönlandi jégsapkákhoz hasonlatos (és a klímaváltozás sem segít ezen), következésképpen kénytelen vagyok számításba venni, hogy a szöveg tulajdonságai az olvasmányélményt bizony kissé erodálták. Barbusse egész egyszerűen nem veszi a fáradságot, hogy horrorfreskóját bármivel is fellazítsa, így az egész olyan lesz, mint egy nyúlós-mászkos tésztagombóc a torokban. Nehéz lenyelni. Persze lehet azzal érvelni, hogy egy lövészárok-rémdrámát legyen is nehéz lenyelni, mert pont ez a lényege, a lenyelhetetlenség. De az irodalom sajátossága, hogy a szörnyűségek gyakran azáltal válnak az olvasó számára felfoghatóvá, hogy – akár a valós eseményeken módosítva – regénytechnikai eszközökkel tesszük őket emészthetővé. (Olyasféleképpen, ahogy mondjuk Heller elegyíti a bombázóhadviselést saját klasszikusában az abszurd humorral, olyan minőséget hozva létre, ami különösképp igazabbnak tűnik, mint a pőre igazság. Ilyen az irodalom, na. Nem feltétlenül a pontosság, hanem az átlényegítés az üzemanyaga.) Viszont Barbusse ezzel nem szöszöl, ő csak pakolja egymás mögé a hátborzongató mozaikokat, nem rak bele sem ívet, sem szünetet – még a katonai pihenőket is úgy applikálja a szövegbe, hogy fájjanak, érezzük az átmeneti szállások elviselhetetlen bűzét, hogy a falusiak a bőrét is lenyúzzák a harcosnak egyetlen pohár borért cserébe. No és az, hogy az író a regényt a végén átúsztatja propagandába… az, ha érthető is, de mai szemmel kissé ambivalens érzéseket kelt. De azért – bevallom – rám is hat a tudat, hogy ez egy fontos regény, így nem is akarom túlzott verbális korbácsolásnak alávetni.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

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-soldiers 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."
__________________

[Chris Wray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting, devastating and deeply moving, this is a novel that will stay with me for a long time. Henri Barbusse's fictionalized account of the life of a squad of French soldiers (based on his own experiences) is a landmark in the history of war literature, and its influence can be seen on almost everything that has followed. His descriptions of the soldiers life, the conditions they faced, and particularly of the dead, are shocking to read in 2022; in 1915 they must have been absolutely incendiary. As the book goes on there is an almost unreal, nightmarish quality to Barbusse's writing. As he describes the darkness, the mud and the omni-present decaying dead, there is a sense in which he and his comrades are descending into the abyss. If he wasn't describing real events you could easily start to mistake Under Fire for a work of noir fantasy, or a post apocalyptic horror. At times, it reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road".

Barbusse structures his novel as a series of snapshots of soldierly life, some lasting only a page or two and some running to dozens of pages. He has perfectly captured the boredom, hunger, fear and numbing tiredness that characterise much of the lot of the frontline infantryman, and also the squalor of trench warfare on the Western Front. He begins with the banal and often humdrum reality of life in the rear, and gradually moves his narrative closer to the front. The book reaches a crescendo with his description of the narrator's squad going into action, in two chapters titled "Bombardment" and "Fire." For me, this was the strongest and most memorable part of the book.

As well as the vividness of Barbusse's description of his experiences, the other thing that comes through strongly is his sense of disillusionment. To put it mildly, this is an anti-war novel and Barbusse saw himself as a moral witness with an almost sacred duty to tell his story and ensure that the wider public saw something of the reality of a twentieth century, industrial war. Whether or not the First World War was ultimately necessary, Barbusse's crowning achievement is in creating a portrait of the horror and tragedy of war that is both unstinting and timeless.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I look at their pale, contracted, and reflective faces. They are not soldiers, they are men. They are not adventurers, or warriors, or made for human slaughter, neither butchers nor cattle. They are laborers and artisans whom one recognizes in their uniforms. They are civilians uprooted, and they are ready. They await the signal for death or murder; but you may see, looking at their faces between the vertical gleams of their bayonets, that they are simply men.

This is much more an anti-war novel than a novel about The Great War. That war has been sub-titled "the war to end all wars" and it certainly should have been such. Men see things in war that should not be seen by anyone. Barbusse, like others, tells of these things. In his own way, he did what he could to make men see what war truly is.

The thing I learned from this is what a poor thing the French army was. What struck me perhaps more than any other was that the men had to fend for themselves when not at the front. They were rotated out fairly frequently, but when marched back behind the lines, they had to find quarters with whomever would agree to let them sleep in their barns or other outbuildings. Also, supplying the men with food seemed to have been inefficient at best, but more often simply inadequate, occasionally non-existent.

Though I'll take these things away with me, I struggled to read it. Not so far from the end, it didn't seem close enough. I just wanted it to be over. This just barely crosses the line between 2- and 3-stars.

[Eleanor · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I read this book, particularly the long and agonising section describing what it was like to be under fire, I couldn't help thinking about the early editors who found it necessary to tone down the swearwords, apparently under the impression that these would be more shocking than the great obscenity of the war itself.

My only disappointment with this book was the final chapter, which jarred with me. It didn't ring true after the stunning realism of the rest of the book.

Definitely a must read for anyone who wants to try to understand the horrors of the Great War. The matter-of-fact tone in which these horrors are described brings them home far more strongly than any histrionics could ever do.

[Tülay]

Savaşları durdurun! Bunu yapmak mümkün! Savaşları durdurun! Dünyanın yarası böyle şifa bulmaz.
Dünyanın kirini, pasını utancını en iyi anlatan kavramdır savaş. Birinci Dünya Savaşı hakkında çok sayıda kitap yazıldı. Bu kitaplar kurgu ile birleştirildi, betimlendi. Savaşın insan üstündeki psikolojik etkileri ve yıkımları anlatıldı çoğu zaman. Ateş romanı bunlardan biraz daha farklı. Fransiz cephesinde savaşan piyadelerin yaşadıklarını hiçbir kurgulama yapmadan anlatıyor Henri Barbusse. Yazarın savaşa katılmış olması ve orada gördükleri de bunda etkili. Bu bakımdan gerçekçi bir roman. Barbusse, savaşa katılır ama savaşta gördükleri acılar onu etkiler, bu acilar neden yaşanır bunlari sorgular ve daha sonra savaş karşıtı bir düşünceyi benimser. Ölen insanların ayakkabılarını askerlerin giymesi, surekli ses çıkaran saatin aranan kardeşin saati olduğunun öğrenilmesi, bir eşya gibi insanların üst üste yığılması, Alman ve Fransız cephesinde aynı dua seslerinin çıkması, askerlerin aile üyelerini hatırlayıp eşyalarla bağ kurması gibi konular okuyucuyu etkiliyor. Barbusse bir savaşı anlatsa da Ateş romani savaş karşıtı bir roman. Emperyalizm, sosyal adalet, eşitlik gibi kavramlar romanda sorgulanan konular arasında. Barbusse, sadece bir yazar degil döneminin en onemli devrimcilerinden biri. Zweig, Wells, André Gide gibi edebiyatçılarla arkadaşlığı var. Kitabi da dilimize kazandıran Suat Derviş. Ben kitabi cok sevdim. Siz de toplumsal gerçekçi romanları seviyorsanız okuyun derim. İyi okumalar.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I am not sure I have ever read a book which brings to life the realities, both the horrors and the banalities of trench warfare in WWI as well or as beautifully as this one. I read it in English translation, and some of the phrases and images are just heartstoppingly lovely. I would like to tackle the French version, although there is a lot of period slang. Every now and then, you come across a phrase of terrible irony, as when the soldiers muse that the fields have been shelled for weeks and one wonders how long they will still be finding unexploded bombs (100 years and counting) or lament that "If we forget what this was like, it will happen again, and this will have been for nothing!" Barbusse lays it all out: the boredom, the filth, the hunger, the terror, the confusion, the humor, the endless, endless rain. The horrors, and there are many, are described simply and matter-of-factly, as though such things no longer have an impact, or not until years later in peacetime. The narration is deeply philosophical and humanistic as well. This isn't just an accurate picture, it's a thoughtful one as well.

This one deserves to be better known.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

A serious, interesting, reportage style, anti war novel that reads like a non fiction account of a squad of around fifteen ordinary Frenchmen experiencing the tragedy of being required to fight against German soldiers in appalling conditions. There are some poignant, memorable scenes. Digging trenches only to find them collapsing inwards due to heavy rainfall and the soldiers lying exhausted, exposed on a hill face. The soldier who returns from the war front for a short time, only to see through the house window his wife in the company of men, having a good time. The men at the front who were lost and accidentally found themselves on the German side on the trenches.
Here is an example of the author’s writing style:
‘These are not soldiers, these are men. They are not adventurers or warriors, designed for human butchery - as butchers or cattle. They are ploughmen or workers that one recognises even in their uniforms. They are uprooted civilians. They are ready, waiting for the signal for death or murder, but when you examine their faces between the vertical ranks of bayonets, they are nothing but men.’

[Steve]

War – what a necessary waste. M. Barbusse believes war should never occur citing the childish emotions that propel armed conflicts, and the emptiness that follows. He offers sufficient imagery from early years of the First World War unsparingly detailed on both sides of the trench – abundant death and noxious gore – to allow for easy agreement. What a difference from the standard mythical product of Ernst Jünger in Storm of Steel. M. Barbusse spares no myth, and derides the purposeful corruption of truth, which is why this volume has never been seen lying within one hundred feet of a military recruiting station – with these words now residing in obscurity, recruiters the world over have found their prayers answered.

I don’t know if war is ultimately necessary, however, I do believe the credible threat of destructive conflict is. Humanity will always have its share of bad actors inspired with enthusiastic passion gathered from the branches of greed, power, personal security, ethnocentrism, religious conviction, exceptionalism, and nationalism. A question is then raised of lines; where do our protective interests begin and end? The answer to this subjective question has cost the lives and health of countless souls through time. I suggest that if we are to call upon the lives and well-being of our citizens, that call should be made only for the soundest of reasons, and only when all practical options have been exhausted. I’m not sure our history measures well against that test.

[Penny -Thecatladybooknook · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard that this book is the French "version" of All Quiet on the Western Front. In that bit of description, yes, it is. It is the story of a group of soldiers from all walks of life from France at the Western Front in World War I. Since All Quiet is one of my favorite novels, it is hard for me not to compare the two books and to be fair to both.

The main sticking point for me was that I didn't feel I got to know the characters in Under Fire like I did All Quiet, so while seeing the devastation that was happening to the group of friends in wartime and the horrible situations they were in, it didn't have as deep of an impact on me as in All Quiet. I did enjoy his writing.

[Noah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Dieser Krieg ist mehr als ein Sturmangriff, der einer Parade gleicht, mehr als die offene Schlacht, die sich wie eine Standarte erhebt, sogar mehr als der Nahkampf, bei dem man schreiend aufeinanderstürzt - dieser Krieg ist mehr als das alles: Er ist die furchtbare, die grenzenlose Erschöpfung; Wasser bis an die Hüften, der Morast und der Schlamm und der widerwärtige Schmutz. Dazu die verwesten Gesichter, zerfetzte Leiber und die Leichen, die keinem Leichnam mehr ähnlich sehen und auf der gefräßigen Erde schwimmen. Das ist der Krieg, dieses endlose, eintönige Elend, von wahnwitzigen Tragödien unterbrochen; das ist der Krieg und nicht das Bajonett in seinem Silberglanz, auch nicht der Hahnenschrei der Hörner im Sonnenlicht!"

Der erste Weltkrieg ist hat wohl mehr literarische und künstlerische Meisterwerke hervorgebracht, als jeder Krieg davor oder danach, was sicherlich auch daran lag, dass sich mehr Intellektuelle unter den Kämpfenden befanden und dass er mit dem Beginn einer literarischen Hochphase in Europa und den USA koinzidierte. Nicht zuletzt wurde er nur in Russland und Österreich-Ungarn durch andere Ereignisse, die literarisch zu verarbeiten waren, überlagert.

Unter den großartigen Werken gibt es jene, die den Krieg prinzipiell als heroisches Ereignis ansehen, auch wenn sie einzelne Aspekte des Krieges ablehnen. Beim ersten Weltkrieg (und auch beim zweiten) stehen hier Hemmingway und Ernst Jünger an erster Front. Beide Autoren haben sich freiwillig gemeldet und beschreiben den Krieg eher aus der priviligierten Sicht der Offiziere.

Demgegenüber stehen die damals hochumstrittenen Werke, die dem Krieg nichts heroisches abgewinnen können, auch wenn einzelne Figuren anlässlich des Krieges Heldenmut zeigen. Hier stechen Remarques "Im Westen nichts Neues" und eben Barbusses "Feuer" hervor. Bezeichnenderweise sind beide Romane von der Flandernerfahrung geprägt und beide Autoren waren einfache Soldaten ohne nennenswerten Rang.

(Hašeks "Schwejk" stellt daneben eine eigene Kategorie für sich dar).

Das Feuer ist literarisch weniger durchkonzipiert, als "Im Westen nichts Neues", was sicherlich auch daran liegt, dass sich Barbusse nur wenige Monate Zeit nahm und dieses Werk - bereits 1916 erschienen und 1915 fertiggestellt - keine literarischen Vorbilder haben konnte. Gerade deswegen ist es aber von enormer historischer Bedeutung. Auch wenn es seine Längen hat und ziemlich viele Charaktere vorgestellt werden, die dann nach und nach umgebracht werden, ist es absolut lesenswert. Es ist kein schönes Buch, es ist wesentlich plastischer und realistischer als fast alles, was in der damaligen Zeit oder je davor über den Krieg geschrieben wurde und nicht nur zartbeseiteten kann es übel werden, wenn die Gerüche und Geräusche der Schützengräben lebhaft aus den Seiten aufsteigen. Gerade deswegen aber ist es wirkmächtig. Barbusses Soldaten sind einfache Franzosen, die für ihre Kollegen oder ein Glas Wein Heldenmut entwickeln, die den Krieg, ihre Offiziere und die sie bejubelnde Zivilbevölkerung aber hassen, während sie die einfachen Soldaten ihnen gegenüber als gleichwertig anerkennen. Sie bewahren sich indes gerade in den dramatischen Situationen ihre Würde, ohne sich in Un- oder Übermenschen zu verwandeln.

Historisch interessant erscheint auch die schlechte Versorgungslage der französischen Soldaten bereits 1915 und das Defizit gegenüber der Zivilbevölkerung.

[A.J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Realistic and horrific account of a French WWI soldier and his squad in the trenches, written by a French WWI soldier from the trenches and published during the war. Told in a vignette style that verges on non-fiction memoir, the authentic insight into camp life and the soldiers’ stories and hopes were captivating but the battlefield sections were too graphic for me. Nevertheless, it’s an important novel.

[Francyy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meraviglioso il capitolo sul l'assalto da trincea a trincea. Finito questo libro un solo pensiero: atrocità! Scrittura entusiasmante, vera. Si sente l'odore del sangue e della guerra, si sentono i respiri dei poilus, la loro disperazione. Una unica pecca, l'ultimo capitolo.

[P.E.]

La gouaille prêtée aux soldats qui sortent des mots d'esprit en situation de danger de mort permanent a eu raison de ma patience.

[Bertrand · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am generally very wary of patois, créole and other celebration of idiolectic regionalism, as it can be found in French naturalist and late-romantic fiction; There is no doubt a part of ideology in that rejection, and a part of ignorance too, but in my experience vernacular dialogues generally tend to make up for uneventful conversation with exotic terminology. So when I engaged the six hundred pages of Barbusse’s “Le Feu” to find that the narrator (pretty much the only character who could be expected to use anything but the language one addresses cattle with) was of the silent type, I kind of wished for d’Annunzio’s (the other extreme...) rather than Barbusse’s Fire. After about a hundred pages, if I am glad I have read the book in my native French (most of the dialogues would be lost on me if it were in English) I have grown very much accustomed to Barbusse’s perverse fascination for the illiterate.

There are two themes that intersect in Barbusse’s project: the war and the commoners. His project is to write an account of the war as it was lived by the lower class. To a significant extent, and despite outstanding litterary qualities, they come into conflict:
The unending rigmarole of of provincial peasants and proles, despite Barbusse’s laudable efforts at giving them some specificity, start feeling like a litany about half-way through the book: food, booze, an inarticulate indignation and a naive idealization of life before the war comes back in their dialogues again and again, so much so that in fact the diversity of the characters dissolves into the portrayal of a unanimous mass of boorish victims. A couple of Deus ex Machina do discreetly stand out, the caporal Bertrand and the accountant, the first being the fair but distant voice of bourgeois leftism, the other the vessel for Barbusse to provide some hard facts and numbers about the war.
Completely deprived of subjectivity by first the alienation of the working class, and second by that of life in the trenches, this reader found it difficult to empathize with those characters.

Barbusse, instead, is found at his best in small epiphanic nuggets where the absurdity of trench-life is in its purest form, unmixed with social tropes: “Around the dead fluttered letters which, while they were deposited on the ground, had escaped from their pockets or their cartridge belts. On one of those little bits of all white paper, that flitted in the wind but which the mud englued, I read, leaning over slightly, the sentence: “My dear Henri, how beautiful was the weather on your name day !” The man lies on his belly; his back was cleaved from one hip to the other by a profound furrow; His head was half-turned; we see the empty eye, and on the temple, the cheek and the neck, a sort of green moss has grown. (…). And if we were to say something in front of this heap of annihilated creatures, we would say: “Poor guy!” (205-6)
This memorable outing of the narrator with his mate Poterloo, among the inhumane landscape where flesh and mud have melted into one choking mass, is a telling highlight of the author’s gruesome but poetic (in fact so gruesome it is poetic) attention to details : “We approached them slowly. They were layed tight against each others: each gesturing with arms and legs, a petrified movement, distinct in agony. Some show half-molded faces, the skin rusting, yellow dotted with black. Some have their face fully blackened, tarred, lips swollen and enormous: negro heads blown like balloons.
Between two bodies, reaching out confusingly from one or the other, a cut-off wrist finished in a ball of filaments.
Others are shapeless larvae, sullied, were stick out some vague objects of equipment or shards of bone. Further away, a corpse has been moved in such a state that one has had, not to loose it on the way, to pile him up in some wire fencing then attached to both ends of a stake. Like this, rolled up in this iron hammock, he was carried and dropped here. One can distinguish neither the top nor the bottom in this body; in the pile that he makes, we can only recognize the gaping pocket of trousers. We can see an insect that exits and enters. “ (205)

There is something hieratic and abstract, like a painting of Barnett Newman, in the apocalyptic experience Barbusse, like many of the war novelists, takes such pain to depict: visionary revelations of the absurdity of life and of the death of God, they fail to move the cast of characters the author assembled, shielded from abstraction, from all causes or aspirations by their earthly common-sense and their simplicity.
This isolation seems often contrived by the author to emphasize the tragedy of common men sacrificed for ideals they have no grasp of. History has shown that nationalism was not then the vice of the middle class, as many on the left wished to see it, but a widespread -if suicidal- aspiration, down to the footsoldier. Of course no one can claim that Barbusse does not depict his brigade as he saw it, closer and better than we might ever do, but we can wish for less angelism (“How happy was life before!”, 204, or “It’s when there is nothing left that we understand we were happy. Ah! How happy we were!”, 212) and more psychology: “Those are simple men that have been simplified further, and whose primordial drives only, out of necessity, can grow: survival instinct, egoism, hope to hold on for ever, joys of eating, drinking and sleeping.” (68)

Surely it has become a commonplace to compare Junger and Barbusse, but it feels even staler to claim they cannot be: the first world war, and the experience of the trenches, had something international, maybe even universal in the words of most of its chroniclers.
Both Le Feu and Storm of Steel are emphatically direct and realist in their depiction, and are based on journals kept at the front. In a sense, despite a seemingly polar opposition between Junger’s enthusiastic Storm and Steel and Barbusse’s elegiac tone, both share a common stock of poetic image, as did a strikingly large number of trench writers: if the moral judgement on the events vary from one to the other, there is a remarkable consensus on moods and metaphors in depicting “la guerre suprême” (12).
Indeed, the same mindset, which Barbusse sees both as alienation and innocence, is extremely close to that “liberated” mentality celebrated by Junger, as well as some future fascists (Ardengo Soffici for example) :
“The soldiers of this war have, for all things, the philosophy of a child: they never look afar, nor around them, nor ahead. They think more or less day to day.” (74)

But Barbusse of course is a pacifist and a humanist – to him, no atavistic return to simple, primitive concern, can salvage those men: what the rightists are celebrating is to him the last stage of degeneration, that which outstrips the man from all its hope and dignity prior to its eventual physical elimination. At times Le Feu even reminded me of Arendt, in its emphasis on the de-humanizing character of war: physically so: « One stumbles upon reefs of crouching beings, curled up, bleeding and screaming, at the bottom. » (346) - and mentally too: “I raise myself half-way as on a battle-field. I contemplate once more those creatures that rolled here one above the other among the regions and the events. I watch them all, wedged in the chasm of oblivion and inertia, at the brink of which some seem to cling, with their pitiable preoccupations, with their child-like instinct and their ignorance of slaves.” (257)

How come, sometimes the reader might wonder, are those men so broken, so crushed by the experience, while Barbusse himself retain enough distance, enough aloofness to write about it with such brio?
I suspect this tension is grounded in Barbusse’s frustrated attempt to align himself effectively with a the plebes he outlined too starkly - as if the writer Barbusse finds himself was unable to resist the poetic appeal of of the spectacle of technological warfare, that which his creations, unsullied by artistic aspiration, can remained aloof from. The sublimity of inhumane, monstruous experience of the Great War shows again and again in the book.

“But that clutter of sodden corses
On the sodden Belgian grass—
That is a strange new beauty.”
Ford Maddox Ford, Antwerpen, 1915

Down to the mystique experience, another locus communis of the modernist depiction of war, is painted by both Junger and Barbusse. Compare:
“I had felt Death’s hand once before, on the road at Mory – but this time his grip was firmer and more determined. As I came down heavily on the bottom of the trench, I was convinced it was all over. Strangely, that moment is one of the very few in my life of which I am able to say they were utterly happy. I understood, as in a flash of lightening, the true inner purpose and form of my life. I felt surprise and disbelief that it was to end there and then, but this surprise had something untroubled and almost merry about it. Then I heard the firing grow less, as if I were a stone sinking under the surface of some turbulent water. Where I was going, there was neither war nor enmity.” (Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel, Penguin books, p.281)

“All of a sudden, a formidable explosion fell unto us. I was shaken down to my skull, a metallic resonance filled my head, a burning smell of sulfur penetrate my nostrils and suffocate me. The earth oppened in front of me. I felt raised above the ground and thrown to the side, folded, smoldered and half-blinded in this flash of thunder... Yet I remember very well: during this second where, instinctively, I sought, desperately, haggard, my brother in arms, I saw his body rose, standing, black, arms fully outstretched, and a flame instead of the head.” (230)

In fact if the reader was to survey both works in search of a radical difference, he might be disappointed: despite Barbusse’s effort to ground his narrative in “the social experience” of war, with a selection of salt-of-the-earth dialogues rendered in colourful and inflected dialects, both authors remain invariably at a remove from the mass: if in Junger this is rooted in an (reconstructed) aristocratic ideology of cold virtus and sacrifice, in Barbusse it comes from both ethnographic remove and the fascination the author cannot hide in the face of a surreal and visionary experience, unfathomed by his squadmates, yet which he cannot help but share with his reader.
To those soldiers around him he seems to love or want to love, the war is “merely” extra-ordinary, but to Barbusse and Junger, to the writer and his readers, the war is the brutal incursion of the unreal, of the fictional maybe, inside the most gritty real. The war seems to collapse the constitutive diegesis between the experience and its retelling, bringing the fact ever closer to the metaphor. This surreal collision of fact and fiction prompts in Junger lyrical outbursts and heroic (or absurd) deeds, whereas there seems to be a lingering sense of guilt in Barbusse’s chronicles.
To put it differently, by his very condition of writer or narrator, despite his best efforts, Barbusse has some of the same fascination many more enthusiastic authors have had in the morbid face of trench-war.

To me there is no doubting that the high-water mark of Barbusse’s prose is to be found not in his sometimes contrived naturalistic depiction of military life, but in the poetic effusions of his description of modern warfare: the fabric of the real pushed in bulks through the shredder of war, falls in an abstract dump of mud and flesh, where gleams from to time, explosions, shrapnel and other machines. The result is surreal, or maybe subreal, the incursion of hell on earth. Apocalyptic visions are regular trope of WW1 depiction, and despite his best efforts to “secularize” his discourse, Barbusse cannot help but giving us some rather successful examples.
“We leave. We are the two sole living spoiling this illusory and vaporous scene, this village strewed over the land, on which we step.” (213)

[Mehmet B · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Gerçeğin yerine, her biri kendi milli gerçeklerini koyuyor... Ne kadar millet varsa, o kadar gerçek var... Ve bunlar asıl gerçeği ezip büzüyor, işe yaramaz hale getiriyorlar..."
"Savaşın iyi tarafı yoktur; ama olsa bile onu belirtmek bir cinayettir."
Neden "savaşa karşı savaşmak" gerektiğini anlayabilmek ve daha iyi anlatabilmek için 1. dünya savaşı cephelerinde er olarak savaşa katılmış şair Henri Barbusse'nin romanı bir ayaklanış, hatta " şahlanış"...

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Under Fire: The Story of a Squad is a novel written by Henri Barbusse, published in 1916. It was one of the first novels about World War I to be published. Although it is fiction, the novel was based on Barbusse's experiences as a French soldier on the Western Front. It was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1916, whatever that is.

The novel takes the form of journal-like anecdotes which the unnamed narrator claims to be writing to record his time in the war. It follows a squad of French Poilu on the Western front in France after the German invasion. According to Winter, "His intention was to tell the story of a single squad, men from all over France, men of little learning but much generosity of spirit." The anecdotes are episodic, each with a chapter title. The chapter, "Fire" describes a trench assault from the Allied (French) trench across No-Man's Land into the German trench.

Barbusse wrote the novel while he was a serving soldier. Barbusse served in the war for seventeen months and was invalided three different times. During one of those convalescing periods he wrote this novel. He claimed to have taken notes for the novel while still in the trenches; after being injured and reassigned from the front, he wrote and published the novel while working at the War Office in 1916.

"Under Fire was a phenomenal success. The first in the line of such moral witnesses in the twentieth century were soldier-poets and novelists of the Great War. And the first among them was Henri Barbusse." The work was first published in serial form in L'Oeuvre, which enabled Barbusse to bypass the censors. Jacques Bertillon wrote to Barbusse in praise, "It is a masterpiece. It is a document which will remain as a witness to this war...."

Like many war novels, Under Fire was criticized for fictionalizing details of the war. It also was criticized for being published while the war was still going on. It certainly seems like a strange thing to do. In 1929, Jean Norton Cru, who was commissioned to critique French literature of World War I, called Under Fire "a concoction of truth, half-truth, and total falsehood."

Here are some of the things I've learned reading this book:

"If you see a chap with his skin and toggery so smeared and stained that you wouldn't touch him with a barge-pole, you can say to yourself, 'Probably he's a cook.' And the dirtier he is, the more likely to be a cook."........

We are waiting. Weary of sitting, we get up, our joints creaking like warping wood or old hinges. Damp rusts men as it rusts rifles; more slowly, but deeper. And we begin again, but not in the same way, to wait. In a state of war, one is always waiting. We have become waiting-machines. For the moment it is food we are waiting for. Then it will be the post. But each in its turn. When we have done with dinner we will think about the letters. After that, we shall set ourselves to wait for something else.....

All the same, they throw themselves on the food, and eat it standing, squatting, kneeling, sitting on tins, or on haversacks pulled out of the holes where they sleep—or even prone, their backs on the ground, disturbed by passers-by, cursed at and cursing. Apart from these fleeting insults and jests, they say nothing, the primary and universal interest being but to swallow, with their mouths and the circumference thereof as greasy as a rifle-breech. Contentment is theirs........

"It's every day alike, alors!" says Paradis to me; "yesterday it was Plaisance who wanted to let Fumex have it heavy on the jaw, about God knows what—a matter of opium pills, I think. First it's one and then it's another that talks of doing some one in. Are we getting to be a lot of wild animals because we look like 'em?"

"Mustn't take them too seriously, these men," Lamuse declares; "they're only kids."

"True enough, seeing that they're men."........

"At the beginning of it," says Tirette, "I used to think about a heap of things. I considered and calculated. Now, I don't think any more."

"Nor me either."

"Nor me."

"I've never tried to.".......

"We shall say to ourselves," says one, "'After all, why do we make war?' We don't know at all why, but we can say who we make it for. We shall be forced to see that if every nation every day brings the fresh bodies of fifteen hundred young men to the God of War to be lacerated, it's for the pleasure of a few ringleaders that we could easily count; that if whole nations go to slaughter marshaled in armies in order that the gold-striped caste may write their princely names in history, so that other gilded people of the same rank can contrive more business, and expand in the way of employees and shops—and we shall see, as soon as we open our eyes, that the divisions between mankind are not what we thought, and those one did believe in are not divisions."

Happy reading.