‘Men are made to be husbands, fathers — men, in short! Not animals that hunt one another down.’ Written in the trenches as the First World War raged around him, Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire draws directly on his own experiences to create the most celebrated French novel of the conflict. The story follows an ordinary French battalion — men drawn together from every corner of France, homesick and exhausted — for whom war has been stripped of all glory, reduced to a grim daily contest for survival. The arrival of rations, a fleeting glimpse of a pretty girl, a few days’ respite in hospital: these are the limits of what they dare to hope for. Starkly evoking the mud, stench and grinding monotony of an eternal battlefield, the novel is equally a fierce critique of the inequality between officers and enlisted men, the wilful incomprehension of those safe from the fighting, and of war itself. Searing, unflinching and ruthlessly realist.
ISBN 13: 9780141393438
Author: Henri Barbusse
