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Updated: June 2, 2025
I went there first to the hill of Notre Dame de Lorette looking northward to Lens, and facing the Vimy Ridge, which the enemy held as a strong barrier against us above the village of Souchez and Ablain St.-Nazaire and Neuville St.-Vaast, which the French had captured when they were still there; and I am glad of that, for I saw in their places the men who had lived there and fought there as one may read in the terrible and tragic narrative of war by Henri Barbusse in Le Feu.
They were the men of Henri Barbusse his comrades. There were middle-aged men and boys mixed together in a confraternity of misery. They were plastered with wet clay, and their boots were enlarged grotesquely by the clots of mud on them. Their blue coats were soddened, and the water dripped out of them and made pools round their feet.
In his trench-poetry he somehow manages to combine the realism of Barbusse with an almost holy touch of imagination; and some of the most beautiful pieces are manly laments for friends killed in battle. He was himself severely wounded. His poems of strenuous action are mostly too long to quote; occasionally he writes in a more quiet mood of contemplation.
Save in the last chapter, wherein Barbusse expounds his ideas on social questions, we do not make the author's acquaintance. He is there among his obscure companions; he struggles and suffers with them, and from one moment to another his disappearance seems imminent; but he has the spiritual strength which enables him to withdraw himself from the picture and to veil his ego.
I should like to call special attention to this little book by a medical officer in the Canadian army, because it seems to me to be a significant footnote to the poignant records of Barbusse, Duhamel, and Élie Faure. So far as I know, this is the only volume of fiction written in English portraying successfully from the artist's point of view the acrid monotony of war.
After Under Fire, by Henri Barbusse, L'Holocauste by Paul Husson and the poignant meditations of André Delemer gave expression to their touching and profoundly human cry.
In vain they raised their voices and exhausted all the resources of French rhetoric, the "poilus" only shrugged their shoulders. However people in the rear liked them much better than the stories written in the dark and covered with mud, that came out of the trenches. The visions of a Barbusse had not yet dawned to show the truth to these talkative shadows.
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