A character in Le Feu

Eudore

A small pale man who kept a roadside café close enough to the front for the shells to reach it. His six days of leave produce one of the saddest chapters in the book.

What they want

A night alone with his wife, which is the only thing he asks of six days and does not get.

The book

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: Kept a roadside café at Villers-l'Abbaye
Wife: Mariette, who is running the café alone
Apart: Fifteen months, before the leave
Reputation: The unlucky one
Chapter: The eighth, called On Leave, is almost entirely his

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Eudore ran a café at Villers-l'Abbaye, a hamlet of four houses spread along a road, which his wife Mariette has been keeping open since the shelling stopped. He is small and pale, with a mild pleasant face and barely a moustache, and the squad's settled opinion is that he has no luck.

Nearly all of what we know about him comes from one story he tells on the road back from leave, to four men who have been on wine fatigue and walk him home. It is a comic story about hospitality, and it is unbearable.

How the book draws them

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

The caféOne of four houses in the hamlet, on the road at the top of a slope. It is a single room that serves as dining room and kitchen, with a cellar two steps deep that is full of water and no loft.
The lettersHe keeps every letter his wife sends, in a packet of worn and shiny paper, and reads them again when he is cold and low. He says it does not actually warm him, but it seems to.
The leave that went wrongHis wife applied early for a travel permit so they could meet at his parents' village. His leave came through and hers did not. He spent five of his six days waiting with his parents, watching the door.
The last dayHe gets a pass from the mayor and travels to her instead, through six days of rain that have taken the roads apart, arriving at dusk with four other men on leave who are bound elsewhere and cannot get through.
One night, five menThe strangers cannot be sent out into that weather and will not stay and spoil the couple's night. Each side wins the argument in turn, and the upshot is that all of them sit up in the one room until morning, yawning politely, while Eudore and Mariette look at each other and at everybody else.
What she gives him at the doorA parcel: the knuckle of ham, the bread and the litre of good wine she had bought for the supper they never had. He opens it on the road and shares it out among the men walking back with him.

Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

Eudore is one of the four men killed on the night patrol, shot through the throat. When the bodies are laid out in the trench four days later the narrator notes how small he looks beside the others, and that his little face has gone completely white, like the powdered face of a clown, among the grey and blue of the rest.

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