Under Fire (Penguin Classics)

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(5 stars) - Under Fire: Dante wrote about hell but Frenchman Henri Barbusse lived through it during World War I trench warfare
Henri Barbusse (1873-1935) was a middle-aged journalist when the guns of August were unleased on Western Civilization in 1914. Barbusse enlisted in the French Army serving eighteen months in the trenches. This novel was published in 1915 to huge sales and critical acclaim. Many officers requested copies of the book to distribute to their troops. It is a brutal, graphic and heartbreaking account of life and sudden death on the battlefield.
One of the literary pluses of the novel is the descriptive and poetic power of Barbusse's prose. We learn of the lives of his fellow soldiers, their longings and their desire to live through the bombardments which fall on their heads. Barbusse tells us of their love affairs, fears and dreams. He describes in detail the grisly death of many of his fellow soldiers. We lean over their shoulder as they read letters from home; meet cowards and civilans who have no concept of the horrors of modern technological warfaree. This is a description of war totally devoid of all romanticism. It is war as it is actually experienced. Barbusse's descriptions of the dead will never be forgotten by the reader.
The last pages of the novel are the most powerful. Barbusse makes a plea for pacifism as he excoriates the governmental and military donkeys who lead men into senseless suicidal charges across the no man's land of trenches. Barbusse became a well known anti-war advocate who became a Communist party member. Barbusse died in Moscow.
Under Fire is in that select company of great World War I novels and autobiographies which include Robert Graves' "Good-bye to All That"; Ernst Junger's "Storm of Steel"; John Dos Passos "Three Comrades" Vera Brittain's "Testament of Youth" and Erich M. Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front." It is an essential soldier level view of the mechanized murder which was World War I and remains all wars. The book proves General William Tecumseh's Sherman's remark that "War is Hell."

(1 stars) - Its OK, but.....
This book is Ok, but its a hard read at this late time....
Not exactly sure how to state it, but the book is dense...it does not equal "All's Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich M. Remarque, or "Storm of Steel" by Ernst Junger...

Barbusse wrote it after spending a VERY brief time at the front. For whatever thats worth. It has been catagorized by most historians as total fiction since then, with good reason. Barbusse was a stretcher-bearer; never a rifleman or front-line 'soldat'. He spent little time there.

It falls under the genre of "war is hell" and the "lost generation" of literature from WW1. (Nothing against them, by the way).
In my opinion its a difficult book to read, by 2001 standards.
Worth your while, if you can find it cheap - but don't expect anything monumental or any revelations in it...

(3 stars) - overated
After reading this book I was surprised to see it had an equal rating with "Storm of Steel", I would not even put them in the same categorie. This book had very long dry spells that took away from the few interesting chapters. The last few chapters dealing with the battle and aftermath are the only reason I gave it three stars.

(4 stars) - Must Read
This is an excellent anti-war novel by a writer who fought in one. All should read this book, lest we forget the horrors of war.

(In 2003, I searched all of Paris to find the 1917 translation of this book. I found it in Berkeley, California, at a used bookstore and got ripped off. Then I found it re-released by Penguin Classics in 2004. Both the 1917 translation and the 2004 are good.)

(5 stars) - Amazing book here
Amazing, sweeping, a black and white word picture of the nightmare of trench warfare. I read this book in the Univ. of Arizona library in stages from 1997-99 not for a class, not for a term paper, but merely BECAUSE IT WAS THERE. Barbusse is a poet when the shells are falling at 3:00 am, he is a priest when an appeal to Mon Dieu is needed to save a friend horribly wounded. How someone could compose something this flowing, with this kind of rhythm, even as the Hun is rushing another muddy trench, is amazing to me. He must have attained some altered state, some semi-divine detachment, when composing the lyrics that actually describe a nightmare you can't wake up from; or what most other people called World War I. Yet so many will have nothing to do with this type of literature, it's about war and therefore turns off automatically the majority of readers, and essentially all of the female type. But that is their loss - the book ends with a gasp at hope no matter how dark the sky; there is a ray of sun peeking through even the Germanic cloud of Destruction. This can be an example for all of our hopes whether one is surrounded by an actual battle or a conflict of one's own making.

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