Lamuse
An enormous farm labourer from western France, called the ox-man. He spends the book in helpless pursuit of a refugee woman who cannot stand the sight of him.
To get near Eudoxie Dumail, a refugee woman he has seen twice. Once he learns her surname he decides he will marry her.
The book
At a glance
- Private in Corporal Bertrand's squad
- Farm servant, in Poitou
- The ox-man
- Carrying other men's kit as well as his own
- Got up and brought wounded men in while people shouted at him to get down; says it was nothing to make a song about
- Eudoxie Dumail, a refugee billeted with a family at Gamblin
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeLamuse worked as a farm servant in Poitou. He is huge, and getting bigger, with a neck and cheeks the colour of underdone beef and a face the narrator compares to a baby's. The squad calls him the ox-man. He admits freely that he has dodged the trenches whenever he could, and then mentions, without making anything of it, that he has carried wounded men in under fire because he could not leave them there.
His story is the only love story in Le Feu, and Barbusse gives it no tenderness at all. It is about a man who wants something he cannot express and cannot have.
How the book draws them
- The size of himHe rises out of the trench like a ruined tower with posters still stuck to it. He eats more than anyone, sweats constantly, and cannot find a comfortable position to sleep in.
- The pack-horseMeeting exhausted men on the road he takes their rifles, pouches and packs off them and adds the lot to his own load, until he disappears under it and can only move in short steps.
- EudoxieA young refugee woman with very fair hair who wanders the war zone without apparent fear, sometimes near the front line. Lamuse sees her at the edge of a wood, follows her from village to village, and tells the narrator she must be there for him.
- The laneHe meets her alone on a footpath, takes her hand and tries to kiss her. She tells him to leave her alone, that he disgusts her, and pulls free. He lets go, and the narrator walks him home while he sniffs and says nothing.
- What he saw undergroundVolunteering to help the sappers dig a new tunnel forward, he breaks into an old collapsed trench and a weight falls on him in the dark. It is Eudoxie's body, dead about a month. He has to hold it against his chest with one arm to work with the other and get it past him in the narrow space.
- He never tells the squadHe whispers it once to the narrator, very quietly, and then regrets it. Farfadet, the clerk Eudoxie actually smiled at, is never told she is dead, and goes on writing his postcards.
Lamuse is killed on the night patrol with Barque, Biquet and Eudore. His right shoulder is destroyed by several bullets and the arm left attached by strips of sleeve, and when the bodies are laid in the trench that arm hangs out of the pile and its hand brushes the faces of men going past, so they pin it to his greatcoat. He dies without anyone in the squad except the narrator knowing what happened in the tunnel.