



Produced by Charles Aldarondo.  HTML version by Al Haines.









Under Fire

The Story of a Squad


By

Henri Barbusse

(1874-1935)



Translated by Fitzwater Wray



  To
  the memory of
  the comrades who fell by my side
  at Crouy and on Hill 119

  January, May, and September 1915





Contents


     I.  The Vision
    II.  In the Earth
   III.  The Return
    IV.  Volpatte and Fouillade
     V.  Sanctuary
    VI.  Habits
   VII.  Entraining
  VIII.  On Leave
    IX.  The Anger of Volpatte
     X.  Argoval
    XI.  The Dog
   XII.  The Doorway
  XIII.  The Big Words
   XIV.  Of Burdens
    XV.  The Egg
   XVI.  An Idyll
  XVII.  The Sap
 XVIII.  A Box of Matches
   XIX.  Bombardment
    XX.  Under Fire
   XXI.  The Refuge
  XXII.  Going About
 XXIII.  The Fatigue-Party
  XXIV.  The Dawn




UNDER FIRE



I

The Vision


MONT BLANC, the Dent du Midi, and the Aiguille Verte look across at the
bloodless faces that show above the blankets along the gallery of the
sanatorium. This roofed-in gallery of rustic wood-work on the first
floor of the palatial hospital is isolated in Space and overlooks the
world. The blankets of fine wool--red, green, brown, or white--from
which those wasted cheeks and shining eyes protrude are quite still. No
sound comes from the long couches except when some one coughs, or that
of the pages of a book turned over at long and regular intervals, or
the undertone of question and quiet answer between neighbors, or now
and again the crescendo disturbance of a daring crow, escaped to the
balcony from those flocks that seem threaded across the immense
transparency like chaplets of black pearls.

Silence is obligatory. Besides, the rich and high-placed who have come
here from all the ends of the earth, smitten by the same evil, have
lost the habit of talking. They have withdrawn into themselves, to
think of their life and of their death.

A servant appears in the balcony, dressed in white and walking softly.
She brings newspapers and hands them about.

"It's decided," says the first to unfold his paper. "War is declared."

Expected as the news is, its effect is almost dazing, for this audience
feels that its portent is without measure or limit. These men of
culture and intelligence, detached from the affairs of the world and
almost from the world itself, whose faculties are deepened by suffering
and meditation, as far remote from their fellow men as if they were
already of the Future--these men look deeply into the distance, towards
the unknowable land of the living and the insane.

"Austria's act is a crime," says the Austrian.

"France must win," says the Englishman.

"I hope Germany will be beaten," says the German.

They settle down again under the blankets and on the pillows, looking
to heaven and the high peaks. But in spite of that vast purity, the
silence is filled with the dire disclosure of a moment before.

War!

Some of the invalids break the silence, and say the word again under
their breath, reflecting that this is the greatest happening of the
age, and perhaps of all ages. Even on the lucid landscape at which they
gaze the news casts something like a vague and somber mirage.

The tranquil expanses of the valley, adorned with soft and smooth
pastures and hamlets rosy as the rose, with the sable shadow-stains of
the majestic mountains and the black lace and white of pines and
eternal snow, become alive with the movements of men, whose multitudes
swarm in distinct masses. Attacks develop, wave by wave, across the
fields and then stand still. Houses are eviscerated like human beings
and towns like houses. Villages appear in crumpled whiteness as though
fallen from heaven to earth. The very shape of the plain is changed by
the frightful heaps of wounded and slain.

Each country whose frontiers are consumed by carnage is seen tearing
from its heart ever more warriors of full blood and force. One's eyes
follow the flow of these living tributaries to the River of Death. To
north and south and west afar there are battles on every side. Turn
where you will, there is war in every corner of that vastness.

One of the pale-faced clairvoyants lifts himself on his elbow, reckons
and numbers the fighters present and to come--thirty millions of
soldiers. Another stammers, his eyes full of slaughter, "Two armies at
death-grips--that is one great army committing suicide."

"It should not have been," says the deep and hollow voice of the first
in the line. But another says, "It is the French Revolution beginning
again." "Let thrones beware!" says another's undertone.

The third adds, "Perhaps it is the last war of all." A silence follows,
then some heads are shaken in dissent whose faces have been blanched
anew by the stale tragedy of sleepless night--"Stop war? Stop war?
Impossible! There is no cure for the world's disease."

Some one coughs, and then the Vision is swallowed up in the huge sunlit
peace of the lush meadows. In the rich colors of the glowing kine, the
black forests, the green fields and the blue distance, dies the
reflection of the fire where the old world burns and breaks. Infinite
silence engulfs the uproar of hate and pain from the dark swarmings of
mankind. They who have spoken retire one by one within themselves,
absorbed once more in their own mysterious malady.

But when evening is ready to descend within the valley, a storm breaks
over the mass of Mont Blanc. One may not go forth in such peril, for
the last waves of the storm-wind roll even to the great veranda, to
that harbor where they have taken refuge; and these victims of a great
internal wound encompass with their gaze the elemental convulsion.

They watch how the explosions of thunder on the mountain upheave the
level clouds like a stormy sea, how each one hurls a shaft of fire and
a column of cloud together into the twilight; and they turn their wan
and sunken faces to follow the flight of the eagles that wheel in the
sky and look from their supreme height down through the wreathing
mists, down to earth.

"Put an end to war?" say the watchers.--"Forbid the Storm!"

Cleansed from the passions of party and faction, liberated from
prejudice and infatuation and the tyranny of tradition, these watchers
on the threshold of another world are vaguely conscious of the
simplicity of the present and the yawning possibilities of the future.

The man at the end of the rank cries, "I can see crawling things down
there"--"Yes, as though they were alive"--"Some sort of plant,
perhaps"--"Some kind of men"--

And there amid the baleful glimmers of the storm, below the dark
disorder of the clouds that extend and unfurl over the earth like evil
spirits, they seem to see a great livid plain unrolled, which to their
seeing is made of mud and water, while figures appear and fast fix
themselves to the surface of it, all blinded and borne down with filth,
like the dreadful castaways of shipwreck. And it seems to them that
these are soldiers.

The streaming plain, seamed and seared with long parallel canals and
scooped into water-holes, is an immensity, and these castaways who
strive to exhume themselves from it are legion. But the thirty million
slaves, hurled upon one another in the mud of war by guilt and error,
uplift their human faces and reveal at last a bourgeoning Will. The
future is in the hands of these slaves, and it is clearly certain that
the alliance to be cemented some day by those whose number and whose
misery alike are infinite will transform the old world.




II

In the Earth


THE great pale sky is alive with thunderclaps. Each detonation reveals
together a shaft of red falling fire in what is left of the night, and
a column of smoke in what has dawned of the day. Up there--so high and
so far that they are heard unseen--a flight of dreadful birds goes
circling up with strong and palpitating cries to look down upon the
earth.

The earth! It is a vast and water-logged desert that begins to take
shape under the long-drawn desolation of daybreak. There are pools and
gullies where the bitter breath of earliest morning nips the water and
sets it a-shiver; tracks traced by the troops and the convoys of the
night in these barren fields, the lines of ruts that glisten in the
weak light like steel rails, mud-masses with broken stakes protruding
from them, ruined trestles, and bushes of wire in tangled coils. With
its slime-beds and puddles, the plain might be an endless gray sheet
that floats on the sea and has here and there gone under. Though no
rain is falling, all is drenched, oozing, washed out and drowned, and
even the wan light seems to flow.

Now you can make out a network of long ditches where the lave of the
night still lingers. It is the trench. It is carpeted at bottom with a
layer of slime that liberates the foot at each step with a sticky
sound; and by each dug-out it smells of the night's excretions. The
holes themselves, as you stoop to peer in, are foul of breath.

I see shadows coming from these sidelong pits and moving about, huge
and misshapen lumps, bear-like, that flounder and growl. They are "us."
We are muffled like Eskimos. Fleeces and blankets and sacking wrap us
up,