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A character in Le Feu

Barque

A Paris messenger who rode a delivery tricycle through the traffic, and the squad's fixer, mimic and loudest mouth.

The book

Cover of Le Feu by Henri Barbusse
Le FeuHenri Barbusse, 1916

The first great trench novel — written in the mud by a forty-one-year-old private, Goncourt-crowned while the war it describes still ran.

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At a glance

In the book
Private in Corporal Bertrand's squad
Trade before the war
Porter and messenger, on a carrier-tricycle in Paris
From
The Paris suburbs, and he sounds like it
Reputation
The resourceful one, which the narrator finds wearing at times
Prized possession
A water-bottle stretched from two litres to two and a half by a shot from a blank cartridge
Double act
With Tirette, the squad's other comedian

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Before the war Barque carried parcels around Paris on a delivery tricycle, weaving between taxis and swearing at pedestrians. He is long-legged and pale with a small red goatee, and he has brought the city with him: the accent, the patter, and a professional confidence that he can get hold of anything.

He is the squad's negotiator and its performer. He also has the sharpest eyes in the book, which is not always to his credit, and one of the few conversations in Le Feu about the book itself is his.

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • The lookA chest-protector cut from a pink eiderdown quilt, now bleached and mottled by rain; surgical bandages wrapped round his leg-cloths to keep them clean, which give him white calves; a cotton cap under his helmet with a red tassel hanging below the rim.
  • The fixerThe squad's plan at every rest is to rent a room and a table so it can eat sitting down. Barque is the one who gets it: he talks a hostile landlady into a windowless laundry shed, makes a table out of an old door on two barrels, and gets wine out of her that she is not legally allowed to sell.
  • The newspaper actHe performs the war reporting of the day out loud, holding an imaginary paper in front of his nose: the Crown Prince mad and repeatedly killed, the Germans chewing wood, the trenches so comfortable that men will be sorry to leave. Then he plays the editor telling his writers to spin it out again to fill four pages.
  • The crueltyWhen a working party of elderly Territorials files past, bent under picks and shovels, Barque and Tirette lean on the trench wall and jeer at them one by one for the entertainment of the others. The narrator writes it down flatly, and says that the miserable are mocking the still more miserable.
  • What he asks the narratorFinding him writing, Barque asks whether the book will make common soldiers talk the way they really talk, obscenities and all, or clean it up. He warns that leaving the swearing out would be like painting a portrait and skipping one of the colours.
  • He stopped complainingHe says he spent the first months of the war furious with civilians, with the rear, with shirkers. He was young then. Now he takes things as they come, because the alternative is going mad.
Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

Barque is killed on the night patrol into No Man's Land, along with Lamuse, Biquet and Eudore, when a German machine-gun catches the party in the open under a flare. He is shot in the belly. The bodies cannot be recovered for two nights, and are then stacked in a recess in the trench wall where the squad has to live alongside them. The narrator describes what four days have done to him without softening any of it.

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