Just Finished Reading: Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (FP: 1916)

It was all just a matter of survival, that and luck. That’s how you got through the days and especially the nights in the trenches. The focus of the whole squad was keeping warm, keeping dry (if you could) and getting enough to eat. Speculating about what was happening on other parts of the Front was as pointless as wondering what the officers, briefly glimpsed from time to time escorting journalists or rushing along the narrow trench on a mysterious assignment intended to do with them next. No one told them anything except in the form of orders given moments before whatever action was demanded – the repair of the trench or the building of new ones, a temporary relocation behind the lines for rest and repair or an attack on the Bosche trenches sometimes as little as 40 metres away. Being old hands with over a year’s experience they knew to keep their heads down even without the prompting of enemy artillery in all its many vocal forms. They had seen enough random and bloody deaths from a snipers bullet to recklessly put their heads above the parapet without a very good reason. But it wasn’t the bullets or even the shells that defined their lives – it was the ever present lice, the rats and the mud and of course the ever present smell of shit and death. Their admiration for stretcher bearers knew no bounds. Men who risked their lives each day to retrieve not only the wounded but the dead from battlefields swept by machine gun fire deserved nothing less. Of course they were crazy which helped though not as crazy as the gunners who ran into no-man’s land to recover fuses from unexploded German shells to discover esoteric details of the guns which fired them and where they could be located and therefore killed by counter battery. Yet, as always it seemed, it was the poor bloody infantry that did the work with pick, shovel and bayonet that ended up paying the price and the butcher’s bill each time an attack was ordered. Each day the squad diminished as veteran after veteran fell to the random mechanical death dealt out by enemy machine guns. Little wonder that, when taken alive, they were executed on the spot and laughed at as they died. This was not a war fought between gentlemen but by bakers, postmen and common farm labourers. Gentlemen fought in the air with chivalry, here on the ground, in the mud, men murdered each other.

This is a well-deserved classic (and not just in France). It’s also rather unusual. For one thing it was published during the war rather, like many others, after the conflict had ceased. It also went against the grain and showed the soldiers as average men rather than as iconic heroes. Although they occasionally thought about what they would do after the war their main focus was surviving that day and the day after. Long term thinking didn’t make a lot of sense when so many were dying each day in a war they seemed to go on forever. Narrated in the first person by the author who served in the trenches in the early years of the war before being invalided out the story had a gritty visceral intensity at times that was almost breath-taking. Two sections in particular jumped out at me. One in which the narrator walked back an injured squad mate across the battlefield they had so recently crossed at a run to an aid station showing the number of dead and dying required to gain a few hundred metres of ground and later the shelling of the same aid station by enemy artillery and the chaos and death it caused. There are stomach churning moments throughout the narrative as this is as far from a tale of glory and heroism as you can get. Such things are almost taken for granted these days but at the time such an anti-war novel was quite a shock to those safely back home being fed a daily diet of official propaganda. Definitely a must read for anyone interested in WW1.

Translated from the French by Robin Buss.