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I went on such a day as Barbusse describes. It clung to the undergrowth, which was torn by shell-fire, and to every blade of grass growing rankly round the lips of shell-craters in which were bits of red rag or old bones, the red pantaloons of the first French armies who had fought through those woods in the beginning of the war.
Alfred de Vigny was an early nineteenth century forerunner of Barbusse and Duhamel, and this record of the Napoleonic wars is curiously analogous to the books of these later men. I call attention to it here because it includes "Laurette," which is one of the great French short stories. This is the eleventh volume in the first collected English edition of Dostoevsky's works.
In that mirror the war is reflected day by day for sixteen months. It is a mirror of two eyes; they are clear, shrewd, perspicacious, and bold; they are the eyes of a Frenchman. The author, Henri Barbusse, dedicates his book: "To the memory of the comrades who fell by my side at Crouy and on Hill 119," during December, 1915. In Paris Le Feu was honoured with the Goncourt prize.
Few writers, other than these two, have been able to portray the naked ugliness of warfare, and the passions which warfare engenders, with more brutal power. Time alone will tell whether these stories have a chance of permanence, but I am disposed to rank them with that other portrait of the mercilessness of war, "Under Fire," by Henri Barbusse.
It is a Frenchman Henri Barbusse who, in spite of the German invasion, the outrages against his people, the agony of France, has the courage to say that all peoples in Europe were involved in the guilt of that war because of their adherence to that old barbaric creed of brute force and the superstitious servitude of their souls to symbols of national pride based upon military tradition.
I listened, writes Barbusse, bending towards him, leaning on a stick. I drank in the words that came, in the twilit silence, from lips which rarely broke silence. His voice rang out as he said: "Liebknecht!"
Unlike Henri Barbusse, who, in his dreadful book Le Feu, gave the unrelieved blackness of this human drama, I have here and in other books shown the light as well as the shade in which our men lived, the gaiety as well as the fear they had, the exultation as well as the agony of battle, the spiritual ardor of boys as well as the brutality of the task that was theirs.
In one of the scenes of his terrible and admirable book, Under Fire, a record of experiences in the trenches of Picardy, dedicated "To the memory of the comrades who fell by my side at Crouy and on Hill 119," Henri Barbusse depicts two privates going on leave to the neighbouring town.
With more subtle and restrained artistry than M. Barbusse, the author has portrayed the simple chronicles of many of his comrades. He employs only the plainest notation of speech, with an economy not unlike that of Maupassant, and the indictment is the more terrible because of this emphasis of understatement.
See, for example, Under Fire by Henri Barbusse, and the heart-rending tales issued by Andreas Latzko under the collective title of Men in Battle. Others express the pain and horror of those who, remaining at home, look on at the butchery without taking part in it, and who, being inactive, suffer all the more from the torments of thought.
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