Henri Barbusse

Henri Barbusse was a middle-aged Parisian man of letters — poems, a novel, magazine work — when the war came, and he did what almost no one of his standing did: enlisted in the infantry at forty-one and carried a rifle on the Western Front through seventeen months of mud. Out of that service came Le Feu (Under Fire, 1916), the first great novel of the trenches written from inside them — serialized while the battles it described still ran, awarded the Prix Goncourt that December, and read by the hundreds of thousands, most meaningfully by the soldiers themselves, who wrote to tell him he had gotten it right.

The book scandalized the patriotic press for exactly the reasons it lasted: no glory, no clean deaths, the ranks' own voices in the ranks' own argot, and a closing vision that dared to ask what the slaughter was for. It made Barbusse the conscience of a generation of veterans, and made his method — the war told at trench level, from below — the standard everything after would answer to: Céline named him among the few moderns he rated, and Hemingway, editing Men at War in 1942, singled out Le Feu as the rare book that told the truth while the war was still being fought.

The war's aftermath made him a militant: convinced that testimony demanded politics, he founded the veterans' Clarté movement, joined the Communist Party, and ran the literary pages of L'Humanité — a conversion that carried him, by way of congresses and campaigns, to his death in Moscow in 1935, where he had gone for a writers' gathering. The politics dated; the novel did not. It remains where war writing in the modern line begins.