The Forerunners (Romain Rolland)/XV
XV
UNDER FIRE
By Henri Barbusse[1]
HERE we have a pitiless mirror of the war. 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.
By what miracle has so truth-telling a work been able to appear unmutilated, at a time when so many free words, infinitely less free, have been censored? I shall not attempt to explain the fact, but I shall profit by it. The voice of this witness drives back into the shadow all the interested falsehoods which during the last three years have served to idealise the European slaughter-house.
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The work is of the first rank, and is so full of matter that more than one article would be requisite to present its whole scope. All that I shall attempt to deal with here will be the chief aspects—its artistry and its thought.
The dominant impression it conveys is one of extreme objectivity. 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. He contemplates the moving spectacle, he listens, he feels, he touches; he seizes it, with all his senses on the stretch. Marvellous is the assured grasp displayed by this French spirit, for no emotion affects the sharpness of the outline or the precision of the technique. We discern here manifold touches, lively, vibrant, crude, well fitted to reproduce the shocks and starts of the poor human machines as they pass from a weary torpor to the hyperaesthesia of hallucination—but these juxtaposed touches are placed and combined by an intelligence that is ever master of itself. The style is impressionist. The author is prone, unduly prone in my opinion, to make use of visual word-plays after the manner of Jules Renard. He is fond of "artistic writing," a typically Parisian product, a style which in ordinary times seems to "powder puff" the emotions, but which, amid the convulsions of the war, exhibits a certain heroic elegance. The narrative is terse, gloomy, stifling; but there come episodes of repose, which break its unity, and by these the tension is relieved for a moment. Few readers will fail to appreciate the charm, the discreet emotion, of these episodes, as for instance in the chapter "On Leave." But three-fourths of the book deal with the trenches of Picardy, under the "muddy skies," under fire and under water—visions now of hell, now of the flood.
There the armies remain buried for years, at the bottom of an eternal battlefield, closely packed, "chained shoulder to shoulder," huddling together "against the rain which descends from the skies, against the mud which oozes from the ground, against the cold, an emanation from the infinite which is all-pervading." The soldiers uncouthly rigged out in skins, rolls of blanket, … cardigans, and more cardigans, squares of oilcloth, fur caps, … hoods of tarpaulin, rubber, weatherproof cloth … look like cave men, gorillas, troglodytes. One of them, while digging, has turned up an axe made by quaternary man, a piece of pointed stone with a bone handle, and he is using it. Others, like savages, are making rough ornaments. Three generations side by side; all the races, but not all the classes. Sons of the soil and artisans for the most part. Small farmers, agricultural labourers, carters, porters and messengers, factory foremen, saloon keepers, newspaper sellers, ironmongers' assistants, miners—very few liberal professions are represented. This amalgam has a common speech, "made up of workshop and barrack slang and of rural dialects seasoned with a few neologisms." Each one is shown to us as a silhouette, a sharp and admirable likeness; once we have seen them we shall always know them apart. But the method of depiction is very different from that of Tolstoi. The Russian cannot meet with a soul without plumbing it to the depths. Here we look and pass on. The individual soul hardly exists; it is a mere shell. Beneath that shell, the collective soul, suffering, overwhelmed with fatigue, brutalised by the noise, poisoned by the smoke, endures infinite boredom, drowses, waits, waits unendingly. It is a "waiting-machine." It no longer tries to think; "it has given up the attempt to understand, it has renounced being itself." These are not soldiers, they don't wish to be soldiers, they are men. "They are men, good fellows of all kinds, rudely torn away from life; they are ignorant, not easily carried away, men of narrow outlook, but full of common sense which sometimes gets out of gear. They are inclined to go where they are led and to do as they are bid. They are tough, and able to bear a great deal. Simple men who have been artificially simplified yet more, and in whom, by the force of circumstances, the primitive instincts have become accentuated: the instinct of self-preservation, egoism, the dogged hope of living through, the lust of eating, drinking, and sleeping." Even amid the dangers of an artillery attack, within a few hours they get bored, yawn, play cards, talk nonsense, "snatch forty winks"—in a word, they are bored. "The overwhelming vastness of these great bombardments wearies the mind." They pass through a hell of suffering and forget all about it. "We've seen too much, and everything we saw was too much. We are not built to take all that in. It escapes from us in every direction; we are too small. We are forgetting-machines. Men are beings which think little; above all, they forget." In Napoleon's day every soldier had a marshal's baton in his knapsack, and every soldier had in his brain the ambitious image of the little Corsican officer. There are no longer any individuals now, there is a human mass which is itself lost amid elemental forces. "More than six thousand miles of French trenches, more than six thousand miles of such miseries or of worse; and the French front is only one-eighth of the whole." Instinctively the narrator is compelled to borrow his images from the rough mythology of primitive peoples, or from cosmic convulsions. He speaks of "rivers of wounded torn from the bowels of the earth which bleeds and rots unendingly"—"glaciers of corpses"—"gloomy immensities of Styx"—"Valley of Jehoshaphat"—prehistoric spectacles. What does the individual man amount to in all this? What does his suffering mean? "What's the use of complaining?" says one wounded man to another. "That's what war is, not the battles, but the terrible unnatural weariness; water up to the middle, mud, filth, infinite monotony of wretchedness, interrupted by acute tragedies."—At intervals, human groans, profound shudders, issue from the silence and the night.
Here and there, in the course of this long narration, peaks emerge from the grey and bloody uniformity: the attack ("under fire"); "the field hospital"; "the dawn." I wish I had space to quote the admirable picture of the men awaiting the order to attack; they are motionless; an assumed calm masks such dreams, such fears, such farewell thoughts! Without any illusions, without enthusiasm, without excitement, "despite the busy propaganda of the authorities, without intoxication either material or moral," fully aware of what they are doing, they await the signal to hurl themselves "once more into this madman's role imposed on each of them by the madness of mankind." Then comes the "headlong rush to the abyss," where blindly, amid shell-splinters hissing like red-hot iron plunged into water, amid the stench of sulphur, they race forward. Next comes the butchery in the trenches, where "at first the men do not know what to do," but where a frenzy soon seizes them, so that "they hardly recognise those whom they know best, and it seems as if all their previous life had suddenly retreated to a vast distance.…" Then the exultation passes, and "nothing remains but infinite fatigue and infinite waiting."
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But I must cut these descriptions short, for I have to consider the leading content of the work, its thought.
In War and Peace the profound sense of the destiny which guides mankind is ardently sought, and is found from time to time by the light of some flash of suffering or of genius, found by those few who, through breed or individual sensibility, have exceptional insight: for instance Prince Andrew, Peter Besuhov. But a great roller seems to have passed over the peoples of to-day, reducing all to a level. The most that can happen is that for a moment, now and again, there may rise from the huge flock the isolated bleating of one of the beasts about to die. Thus we have the ethereal figure of Corporal Bertrand, "with his thoughtful smile"—the merest sketch—"a man of few words, never talking of himself"; a man who could once only deliver up the secret of his anguished thoughts—in the twilight hour which follows the killing, just before he himself is killed. He thinks of those whom he has slain in the frenzy of the hand-to-hand fighting:
"It had to be done," he said. "It had to be done, for the sake of the future."
He folded his arms and threw up his head.
"The future!" he cried, all of a sudden. "Those who live after us—what will they think of these killings, … these exploits, concerning which we who do them do not even know if they are to be compared with those of the heroes of Plutarch and Corneille or with the deeds of apaches! … For all that, mind you, there is one figure that has risen above the war, a figure which will shine with the beauty and the greatness of its courage."
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!"
The same evening, Marthereau, a humble territorial, whose face, bristling with hair, recalled that of a water-spaniel, is listening to a comrade who says: "William is a foul beast, but Napoleon is a great man." This same soldier, after groaning about the war, goes on to speak with delight of the martial ardour displayed by the only son left to him, a boy of five. Marthereau shakes his weary head, his fine eyes shining like those of a puzzled and thoughtful hound. He sighs, saying: "Oh, we're none of us so bad, but we're unlucky, poor devils all of us. But we're too stupid, we're too stupid!"
As a rule, however, the human cry from these lowly fellows is anonymous. We hardly know who has been speaking, for, often enough, all share in a common thought. Born out of common trials, this thought brings them much closer to the other unfortunates in the enemy trenches than to the rest of the world away there in the rear. For visitors from the rear, "trench tourists," for people in the rear, journalists "who exploit the public misery," bellicose intellectuals, the soldiers unite in showing a contempt which is free from violence but knows no bounds. To them has come "the revelation of the great reality": a difference between human beings, a difference far profounder and with far more impassable barriers than those of race: the sharp, glaring, and inalterable distinction, in the population of every country, between those who profit and those who suffer, those who have been compelled to sacrifice everything, those who give to the uttermost of their numbers, of their strength, and of their martyrdom, those over whom the others march forward smiling and successful.
One to whom this revelation has come, says bitterly: "That sort of thing does not encourage one to die!"
But none the less this man meets his death bravely, meekly, like the others.
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The climax of the work is the last chapter, "The Dawn." It is like an epilogue, the thought in which returns to join the thought in the prologue, "The Vision," but enlarges upon that opening thought, just as in a symphony the promise of the outset is fulfilled at the close.
"The Vision" describes the coming of the declaration of war, shows how the tidings reached a sanatorium in Savoy, facing Mont Blanc. There, these sick men, drawn thither from all the ends of the earth, "detached from the affairs of the world and almost from life itself, … as remote from their fellow-men as if they already belonged to a future age, look away into the distance, towards the incomprehensible land of the living and the mad." They contemplate the flood below; they watch the shipwrecked nations, grasping at straws. "These thirty millions of slaves, hurled against one another by guilt and by mistake, hurled into war and mud, uplift their human faces whose expression reveals at last a nascent will. The future is in the hands of these slaves, and it is plain that the old world will be transformed by the alliance one day to be made between those whose numbers and whose miseries are infinite."
The concluding chapter, "The Dawn," is a picture of the "flood below," of the lowland inundated by the rain, a picture of the crumbling trenches. The spectacle resembles a scene from the book of Genesis. Germans and French are fleeing together from the scourge of the elements, or are sinking pell-mell into a common grave. Some of these castaways, taking refuge on ridges of mud that stand up amid the waters, begin to awaken from their passivity, and a striking dialogue ensues between the sufferers, like the strophe and antistrophe in a Greek chorus. They are overwhelmed by excess of suffering. Even more are they overwhelmed, "as if by a yet greater disaster," by the thought that in days to come the survivors will be able to forget these ills.
"If only people would remember! If they would only remember, there would be no more wars."
Suddenly, from all sides, rises the cry: "There must never be another war."
Each in turn heaps insults upon war.
"Two armies fighting each other—that's like one great army committing suicide."
One suggests, "It's all right if you win." But the others make answer: "That's no good.—To win settles nothing.—What we need is to kill war."
"Then we shall have to go on fighting after the war?"—"Praps we shall."—"But praps it won't be foreigners we shall be fighting?"—"May be so. The peoples are fighting to-day to get rid of their masters."—"Then one works for the Prussians too?"—"Oh well, we may hope.…"—"But we oughtn't to interfere with other folks' business."—"Yes, yes, we ought to, for what you call other folks' business is our own."
"What do people fight for?"—"No one knows what they fight for, but we know whom they fight for. They fight for the pleasure of the few."
The soldiers reckon up these few: "the fighters, those born to power"; those who say, "the races hate one another"; those who say, "I grow fat on the war"; those who say, "there always has been war and there always will be"; those who say, "bow your head, and trust in God"; the sabre-rattlers, the profiteers, the ghouls who batten on the spoils; "the slaves of the past, the traditionalists, for whom an abuse has the force of law because it is of old date."
"Such as these are your enemies quite as much as any of the German soldiers who now share your wretchedness. The German soldiers are no more than poor dupes odiously betrayed and brutalised, domesticated beasts.… But the others are your enemies wherever they were born, whatever the fashion in which they utter their names, and whatever the language in which they lie. Look at them in the heavens above and on the earth beneath! Look at them everywhere! Look well, till you know them, that you may never forget their faces!"
Such is the wail of these armies. But the book closes with a note of hope, with the unspoken oath of international brotherhood, what time a rift forms in the black skies and a calm ray of light falls upon the flooded plain.
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One ray of sunlight does not make the sky clear, nor is the voice of one soldier the voice of an army. The armies of to-day are nations; and in such armies, as in every nation, there must doubtless conflict and mingle many different currents. Barbusse's story is that of a single squad, almost entirely composed of workers and peasants. But the fact that among these humble folk, among those who, like the third estate in '89, are nothing and shall be all,—that in this proletariat of the armies there is obscurely forming an awareness of universal humanity,—that so bold a voice can be raised from France,—that those who are actually fighting can make a heroic effort to ignore environing wretchedness and imminent death, to dream of the fraternal union of the warring peoples,—I find in this a greatness which surpasses that of all the victories, I find something whose poignant splendour will survive the splendour of battle. I find something which will, I hope, put an end to war.
February, 1917.
"Journal de Genève," March 19, 1917.
- ↑ Le Feu, Journal d'une Escouade, par Henri Barbusse, Flammarion, Paris, 1916. English translation, Under Fire, The Story of a Squad, Dent, London, 1917.