Under Fire : The Story of a Squad

by Henri Barbusse

“Old man, you cannot imagine, you cannot, you cannot –

“How will they regard this slaughter, they who’ll live after us, to whom progress – which comes as sure as fate – will at last restore the poise of their conscience? How will they regard these exploits which even we who perform them don’t know whether one should compare them with those of Plutarch’s and Corneille’s heroes or with those of hooligans and apaches?

“The future, the future! The work of the future will be to wipe out the present, to wipe it out more than we can imagine, to wipe it out like something abominable and shameful. And yet – this present – it had to be, it had to be! Shame on military glory, shame on armies, shame on the soldier’s calling, that changes men by turns into stupid victims or ignoble brutes. Yes, shame. That’s the true word, but it’s too true; it’s true in eternity, but it’s not yet true for us. It will be true when there is a Bible that is entirely true, when it is found written among the other truths that a purified mind will at the same time let us understand. We are still lost, still exiled far from that time.

It swarms with corpses, and might be a cemetery of which the top has been taken away.

In war, life separates us just as death does, without our having even the time to think about it.

– “More than attacks that are like ceremonial reviews, more than visible battles unfurled like banners, more even than the hand-to-hand encounters of shouting strife, 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!”

There were some letters from me that I read over again just as if they were a book I was opening. And yet in spite of that, I’ve forgotten also all the pain I’ve had in the war. We’re forgetting-machines. Men are things that think a little but chiefly forget. That’s what we are.” “Then neither the other side nor us’ll remember! So much misery all wasted!”

“Ah, if one did remember!” cried some one. “If we remembered,” said another, “there wouldn’t be any more war.”