Under Fire - Henri Barbusse (best book series to read txt) 📗

the distant violence breaks feebly on our buried ears. All around us, the waters continue to sap the earth and by degrees to ensnare its heights.

“It’s beginning again.”

Then one of us says, “Ah, look what we’ve got against us!”

Already there is uneasy hesitation in these castaways’ discussion of their tragedy, in the huge masterpiece of destiny that they are roughly sketching. It is not only the peril and pain, the misery of the moment, whose endless beginning they see again. It is the enmity of circumstances and people against the truth, the accumulation of privilege and ignorance, of deafness and unwillingness, the taken sides, the savage conditions accepted, the immovable masses, the tangled lines.

And the dream of fumbling thought is continued in another vision, in which everlasting enemies emerge from the shadows of the past and stand forth in the stormy darkness of to-day.

*

Here they are. We seem to see them silhouetted against the sky, above the crests of the storm that beglooms the world—a cavalcade of warriors, prancing and flashing, the charges that carry armor and plumes and gold ornament, crowns and swords. They are burdened with weapons; they send forth gleams of light; magnificent they roll. The antiquated movements of the warlike ride divide the clouds like the painted fierceness of a theatrical scene.

And far above the fevered gaze of them who are upon the ground, whose bodies are layered with the dregs of the earth and the wasted fields, the phantom cohort flows from the four corners of the horizon, drives back the sky’s infinity and hides its blue deeps.

And they are legion. They are not only the warrior caste who shout as they fight and have joy of it, not only those whom universal slavery has clothed in magic power, the mighty by birth, who tower here and there above the prostration of the human race and will take their sudden stand by the scales of justice when they think they see great profit to gain; not only these, but whole multitudes who minister consciously or unconsciously to their fearful privilege.

“There are those who say,” now cries one of the somber and compelling talkers, extending his hand as though he could see the pageant, “there are those who say, ‘How fine they are!’”

“And those who say, ‘The nations hate each other!’”

“And those who say, ‘I get fat on war, and my belly matures on it!’”

“And those who say, ‘There has always been war, so there always will be!’”

“There are those who say, ‘I can’t see farther than the end of my nose, and I forbid others to see farther!’”

“There are those who say, ‘Babies come into the world with either red or blue breeches on!’”

“There are those,” growled a hoarse voice, “who say, ‘Bow your head and trust in God!’”

*

Ah, you are right, poor countless workmen of the battles, you who have made with your bands all of the Great War, you whose omnipotence is not yet used for well-doing, you human host whose every face is a world of sorrows, you who dream bowed under the yoke of a thought beneath that sky where long black clouds rend themselves and expand in disheveled lengths like evil angels—yes, you are right. There are all those things against you. Against you and your great common interests which as you dimly saw are the same thing in effect as justice, there are not only the sword-wavers, the profiteers, and the intriguers.

There is not only the prodigious opposition of interested parties—financiers, speculators great and small, armorplated in their banks and houses, who live on war and live in peace during war, with their brows stubbornly set upon a secret doctrine and their faces shut up like safes.

There are those who admire the exchange of flashing blows, who hail like women the bright colors of uniforms; those whom military music and the martial ballads poured upon the public intoxicate as with brandy; the dizzy-brained, the feeble-minded, the superstitious, the savages.

There are those who bury themselves in the past, on whose lips are the sayings only of bygone days, the traditionalists for whom an injustice has legal force because it is perpetuated, who aspire to be guided by the dead, who strive to subordinate progress and the future and all their palpitating passion to the realm of ghosts and nursery-tales.

With them are all the parsons, who seek to excite you and to lull you to sleep with the morphine of their Paradise, so that nothing may change. There are the lawyers, the economists, the historians—and how many more?—who befog you with the rigmarole of theory, who declare the inter-antagonism of nationalities at a time when the only unity possessed by each nation of to-day is in the arbitrary map-made lines of her frontiers, while she is inhabited by an artificial amalgam of races; there are the worm-eaten genealogists, who forge for the ambitious of conquest and plunder false certificates of philosophy and imaginary titles of nobility. The infirmity of human intelligence is short sight. In too many cases, the wiseacres are dunces of a sort, who lose sight of the simplicity of things, and stifle and obscure it with formulae and trivialities. It is the small things that one learns from books, not the great ones.

And even while they are saying that they do not wish for war they are doing all they can to perpetuate it. They nourish national vanity and the love of supremacy by force. “We alone,” they say, each behind his shelter, “we alone are the guardians of courage and loyalty, of ability and good taste!” Out of the greatness and richness of a country they make something like a consuming disease. Out of patriotism—which can be respected as long as it remains in the domain of sentiment and art on exactly the same footing as the sense of family and local pride, all equally sacred—out of patriotism they make a Utopian and impracticable idea, unbalancing the world, a sort of cancer which drains all the living force, spreads everywhere and crushes life, a contagious cancer which culminates either in the crash of war or in the exhaustion and suffocation of armed peace.

They pervert the most admirable of moral principles. How many are the crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them with the word “national”? They distort even truth itself. For the truth which is eternally the same they substitute each their national truth. So many nations, so many truths; and thus they falsify and twist the truth.

Those are your enemies. All those people whose childish and odiously ridiculous disputes you hear snarling above you—“It wasn’t me that began, it was you!”—“No, it wasn’t me, it was you!”—“Hit me then!”—“No, you hit me!”—those puerilities that perpetuate the world’s huge wound, for the disputants are not the people truly concerned, but quite the contrary, nor do they desire to have done with it; all those people who cannot or will not make peace on earth; all those who for one reason or another cling to the ancient state of things and find or invent excuses for it—they are your enemies!

They are your enemies as much as those German soldiers are to-day who are prostrate here between you in the mud, who are only poor dupes hatefully deceived and brutalized, domestic beasts. They are your enemies, wherever they were born, however they pronounce their names, whatever the language in which they lie. Look at them, in the heaven and on the earth. Look at them, everywhere! Identify them once for all, and be mindful for ever!

*

“They will say to you,” growled a kneeling man who stooped with his two bands in the earth and shook his shoulders like a mastiff, ‘My friend, you have been a wonderful hero!’ I don’t want them to say it!

“Heroes? Some sort of extraordinary being? Idols? Rot! We’ve been murderers. We have respectably followed the trade of hangmen. We shall do it again with all our might, because it’s of great importance to follow that trade, so as to punish war and smother it. The act of slaughter is always ignoble; sometimes necessary, but always ignoble. Yes, hard and persistent murderers, that’s what we’ve been. But don’t talk to me about military virtue because I’ve killed Germans.”

“Nor to me,” cried another in so loud a voice that no one could have replied to him even had he dared; “nor to me, because I’ve saved the lives of Frenchmen! Why, we might as well set fire to houses for the sake of the excellence of life-saving!”

“It would be a crime to exhibit the fine side of war, even if there were one!” murmured one of the somber soldiers.

The first man continued. “They’ll say those things to us by way of paying us with glory, and to pay themselves, too, for what they haven’t done. But military glory—it isn’t even true for us common soldiers. It’s for some, but outside those elect the soldier’s glory is a lie, like every other fine-looking thing in war. In reality, the soldier’s sacrifice is obscurely concealed. The multitudes that make up the waves of attack have no reward. They run to hurl themselves into a frightful inglorious nothing. You cannot even heap up their names, their poor little names of nobodies.”

“To hell with it all,” replies a man, “we’ve got other things to think about.”

“But all that,” hiccupped a face which the mud concealed like a hideous hand, “may you even say it? You’d be cursed, and ‘shot at dawn’! They’ve made around a Marshal’s plumes a religion as bad and stupid and malignant as the other!”

The man raised himself, fell down, and rose again. The wound that he had under his armor of filth was staining the ground, and when he had spoken, his wide-open eyes looked down at all the blood he had given for the healing of the world.

*

The others, one by one, straighten themselves. The storm is falling more heavily on the expanse of flayed and martyred fields. The day is full of night. It is as if new enemy shapes of men and groups of men are rising unceasingly on the crest of the mountain-chain of clouds, round about the barbaric outlines of crosses, eagles, churches, royal and military palaces and temples. They seem to multiply there, shutting out the stars that are fewer than mankind; it seems even as if these apparitions are moving in all directions in the excavated ground, here, there, among the real beings who are thrown there at random, half buried in the earth like grains of corn.

My still living companions have at last got up. Standing with difficulty on the foundered soil, enclosed in their bemired garb, laid out in strange upright coffins of mud, raising their huge simplicity out of the earth’s depths—a profoundity like that of ignorance—they move and cry out, with their gaze, their arms and their fists extended towards the sky whence fall daylight and storm. They are struggling against victorious specters, like the Cyranos and Don Quixotes that they still are.

One sees their shadows stirring on the shining sad expanse of the plain, and reflected in the pallid stagnant surface of the old trenches, which now only the infinite void of space inhabits and purifies, in the center of a polar desert whose horizons fume.

But their eyes are opened. They are beginning to make out the boundless simplicity of things. And Truth not only invests them with a dawn of