Light
1919
In the gray industrial town of Saint-Lanne, a clerk named Paulin moves through his days like a man underwater. He finishes another shift, traverses smoke-stained streets, and returns to an aunt's house where old wounds fester between arguments. Henri Barbusse's "Light" (published in French as "Le Feu" in 1916, winning the Prix Goncourt) is actually his devastating WWI novel, though this English edition appears to focus on his earlier social realist work depicting working-class French life before the war. The novel captures the crushing weight of daily existence for ordinary people: the monotony of labor, the sting of class humiliation, and the fragile hope that love might offer escape from grinding poverty. Through Paulin's journey home through the industrial landscape, Barbusse paints a portrait of early twentieth-century France where hope arrives like brief daylight through clouds, only to vanish again. This is Barbusse at his most naturalistic, documenting the emotional inertia of a man caught between familial duty and personal longing, in a world that feels indifferent to his dreams.
Editions
X-Ray
“These are not soldiers, these are men. They are notadventurers 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.””
— Henri Barbusse
“Shame on military glory, shame on armies, shame on the soldier's profession, which changes men, some into stupid victims, others into base executioners. Yes shame, that's true – but it's too true, it's true in eternity, but not yet for us.””
— Henri Barbusse
“Déjà, le mois de septembre, lendemain d'août et veille d'octobre et qui est par sa situation le plus émouvant des mois parsème les beaux jours de quelques fins avertissements. Déjà, on comprend ces feuilles mortes qui courent sur les pierres plates comme une bande de moineaux.””
— Henri Barbusse
“Two armies fighting each other are like one big army that commits suicide.””
— Henri Barbusse
“All these men with their corpse-like faces, in front of us and behind, driven to exhaustion, emptied of words and will....All these men laden with earth, who, you could say, are carrying their own graves...””
— Henri Barbusse
“My silent comrade, who is making great strides with lowered head, points out a field: "The cemetery," he says; "it was there before it was everywhere, before it laid hold on everything without end, like a plague.””
— Henri Barbusse
“Paradis says to me, "That's war.""Yes, that's it," he repeats in a far-away voice, "that's war. It's not anything else."He means”
— Henri Barbusse
“An aeroplane booms overhead. We follow its evolutions with our faces skyward, our necks twisted, our eyes watering at the piercing brightness of the sky. Lamuse declares to me, when we have brought our gaze back to earth, “Those machines ’ll never become practical, never.”“How can you say that? Look at the progress they’ve made already, and the speed of it.”“Yes, but they’ll stop there. They’ll never do any better, never.””
— Henri Barbusse
“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.””
— Henri Barbusse
