Under Fire: The Story of a Squad
1916
Published in 1916, while the Great War still raged, Under Fire is one of the first novels to emerge directly from the trenches themselves. Henri Barbusse wrote it not from memory, but from lived experience, and this immediacy pulses through every page. The novel follows the French Sixth Battalion, ordinary men drawn from every corner of France, thrust together in mud and darkness to endure an experience none of them can fully comprehend or articulate. Through shifting perspectives, we enter their world of constant fear, mind-numbing monotony, and the strange brotherhood that forms when death is the only certainty. Barbusse offers no heroic rhetoric, no glorious cause. Instead, he documents the grotesque machinery of modern warfare: the endless waiting, the rats, the rotting bodies, the artillery that turns men into unrecognizable fragments. Yet amid the horror, there are fleeting human moments, a shared cigarette, a glimpse of a woman, the dark humor soldiers use to survive the unspeakable. This is not a war novel that celebrates courage; it is a witness account from the abyss, exposing what industrialized slaughter does to the human soul. It laid groundwork for every war novel that followed, from Hemingway to Remarque, yet nothing captures that specific early-war horror quite like this original.
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“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
