Under Fire

A searing evocation of the squalid conditions and the physical and psychological horrors endured by soldiers fighting on the Western Front, Under Fire is the French novel of the First World War. Astonishingly, it was published in 1916, at the very height of the conflict.

Henri Barbusse started Under Fire in hospital after being invalided out from the front-line, drawing on the journal he kept in the trenches. In a series of meticulously observed episodes, we follow a fictionalised squad – a diverse group of men of all ages, and from all over France – as they come out of the front-line and rest, return to combat, endure a nightmarish bombardment, participate in a chaotic assault on a German trench and then face up to its appalling aftermath. Much of Under Fire is written in the present tense, making us virtual eyewitnesses, and its graphic descriptions of forced marches through excrement, horrific injuries and putrefying corpses established Barbusse as ʻthe Zola of the trenchesʼ.

Appearing initially in installments in the literary magazine L'Œuvre to avoid censorship, Under Fire was devoured by readers on the battlefield and at home, desperate for an ‘authentic’ account of the war. Within a year it had sold almost a quarter of a million copies, and was awarded the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, before it had even been published in book-form. Ironically, its potential to demoralise was only recognised in Austria and Germany, where it was banned.