Under Fire: The Story of a Squad by Henri Barbusse

The war novel to end all war novels

Under Fire is a novel by French author Henri Barbusse, based on his own military experiences in World War I. Barbusse enlisted in the French Army at the age of 41 and served on the Western Front from 1914 to 1916. Under Fire was published in late 1916, while the Great War was still very much in progress. The book was a great success upon its release and received the Prix Goncourt (France’s award for best novel of the year).

Much of the action of Under Fire takes place in the trenches on the front lines of the fighting between France and Germany. The story follows a squadron of foot soldiers, men with working class backgrounds and little education—not career soldiers but common privates plucked from their hometowns and thrust into the hell of war. The book has about a hundred named characters, most of them members of this squadron, but a core group of about a dozen men form the central cast of this drama. The book is narrated by one of the squad’s soldiers who is presumably Barbusse himself. He is never mentioned by name, but it is revealed that he is a writer gathering stories for what might someday be a book.

Under Fire was controversial for its time because of its brutal naturalism. Barbusse’s literary style is similar to that of Emile Zola’s, as seen in the latter’s own classic war novel The Debacle, but taken to extremes worthy of a horrific world war fought with modern technology. Barbusse vividly describes the miserable living conditions in the trenches and the terror of undergoing constant bombardments. The battle scenes are drenched in rain and mired in mud. Barbusse’s prose is littered with gruesome images of injuries, deaths, and corpses littering the land like a macabre sculpture garden. Nothing in this novel qualifies as a glorified or romanticized image of war. Barbusse pushes a very strident anti-war message here. He may have served almost two years in combat, but in his heart he is clearly a pacifist. Barbusse’s experiences of war even converted him to communism after seeing his fellow poilus suffer for the aristocrats and oligarchs who make war for their own benefit.

This is not entirely a novel about combat. Between the battles there is plenty of time for the men of the squad to take their leave in small towns, farms, and even in Paris. Their experiences, however, are far from luxurious as the mud, the rain, hunger, and lice seem to follow them wherever they go. Barbusse depicts the life of a soldier as just as much drudgery as danger, but his uncompromising realism insures that the narrative never becomes boring. Amid all the tragedy one finds moments of humor and the camaraderie of brothers in arms. At times, these men may come across as salt-of-the-earth caricatures, but I find that preferable to the tortured poets that inhabit some highbrow war novels, like John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers. Barbusse makes you feel for these soldiers, as victims crushed under the wheel of war, but he never resorts to excessive sentimentalism or cloying melodrama.

Under Fire influenced Ernest Hemingway’s writings on World War I, as well as those of Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, which was published in 1928. I haven’t yet read that latter novel, but if it is, as people say, the greatest novel of World War I, I can only assume that Barbusse’s Under Fire is a close second. As a document of war, it is difficult to imagine a much more vivid and visceral experience then what Barbusse delivers here. If we had no photographs or artifacts of the Great War, Barbusse’s text alone would be sufficient to teach us what that tragic conflict was like. Under Fire is an exceptional novel that deserves a more prominent position in the canon of 20th century world literature.