12. Under Fire – The Real Face of War¶
Core Argument¶
12. Under Fire – The Real Face of War
Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire strips war of its heroic veneer, presenting it instead as an endless monotony of misery punctuated by sudden, senseless tragedy. The soldiers are not intellectuals or the wealthy—who risked only their faces at loopholes or beneath gold-laced caps—but poor farmers, workers, and artisans. Reduced to a primeval state, they are bound by a common fate and a shared language of suffering. Trench life is defined by waiting, not fighting; men become “waiting-machines,” plagued by lice, rain, and late rations. On rare leave, they are fleeced by greedy peasants growing rich from the war. There is little hatred for the German enemy, imagined as fellow slaves, but a burning contempt for the rich, the parasites, and those who evaded the draft. Battle itself is a descent into hell: men advance as blind automata through mud and machine-gun fire, slaughtering mechanically. Afterwards, survivors see a world starkly divided between those who fight and die and those who profit—a clean-cut division between those who gain and those who grieve.
In the trenches, soldiers articulate a class-conscious anti-war position. Volpatte declares there are “two foreign countries”: the Front, full of the unhappy, and the Rear, full of the happy. Men argue they were made to live as husbands and fathers, not as beasts slaughtering each other; two armies fighting is “one great army committing suicide.” The discussion takes on revolutionary content: soldiers realise war is made of “the mass of the people”—themselves. They are the material of war, its flesh and blood, yet it is not they who decide but “the masters who steer them.” One soldier concludes the war is like the French Revolution continuing, and that after this war they may have to fight not foreigners but their own masters.
Barbusse himself became a Communist and Stalinist, moving to Moscow and joining the Bolshevik Party. Trotsky criticised his capitulation to Stalinism but praised Le Feu as the greatest novel of the First World War. The novel ends with Barbusse’s own call: the peoples must unite against their exploiters. War serves the gold-striped caste and profiteers. The enemies of the common soldier include not only financiers and speculators but also militarists, traditionalists, priests who offer “the morphine of their Paradise,” and nationalist intellectuals who distort truth. All who cling to the old order are the soldiers’ enemies. The novel closes with a dawn of consciousness, pointing toward revolution against this intolerable state.