compared with his wholesale slaughter’.
As is so often the case, Barbusse was the first to offer protest in major imaginative form at not simply the suffering the war inflicted on men, but at men’s capacity, in time of war, to
inflict suffering on others. In ‘Dawn’, the final chapter of
Under Fire
, a soldier sums up himself and his fellows as ‘incredibly pitiful wretches, and savages as well,
brutes, robbers, and dirty devils’. A little later one of the group of ‘sufferers’says simply: ‘We’ve been murderers.’ Together the group of
suffering murderers cries ‘shame on the soldier’s calling that changes men by turn into stupid victims or ignoble brutes’.
when
Will kindness have such power again?
One of the reasons for the war’s enduring power is the way that, in the midst of so much brutality and carnage, compassion and kindness not only failed to wither but often
flowered.
The most moving episodes in the war always involve the awakening of a sense of the enemy’s shared humanity. Often this is initiated by the simplest gesture – an enemy soldier
offering prisoners cigarettes or a drink from his canteen. On Christmas Day 1914 there was a truce along the whole length of the Western Front. In some circumstances, especially where the gap
between the two lines of trenches was small, this became tacitly extended into the ‘live and let live’ policy whereby each side refrained from antagonizing the other. ‘For either
side to bomb the other,’ Charles Sorley had realized as early as July 1915,
would be a useless violation of the unwritten laws that govern the relations of combatants permanently within a hundred yards of distance from each other, who have found out
that to provide discomfort for the other is but a roundabout way of providing it for themselves.
Most poignant of all are the occasions when tenderness springs directly from an appalled awareness of the pain inflicted onthe enemy. A German battalion
commander recalls that after the British began their retreat from the battlefield at Loos in September 1915, ‘no shot was fired at them from the German trenches for the rest of the day, so
great was the feeling of compassion and mercy for the enemy after such a victory.’
Henry Williamson remembers coming across
a Saxon boy crushed under a shattered tank, moaning ‘Mutter, Mutter, Mutter,’ out of ghastly grey lips. A British soldier, wounded in the leg, and sitting
nearby, hearing the words, and dragging himself to the dying boy, takes his cold hand and says: ‘All right, son, it’s all right. Mother’s here with you.’
Episodes like these are scattered throughout memoirs and oral testimonies from the war. Civilians bayed for blood and victory; combatants, meanwhile, had become passive instruments of their
nations’ will. In the words of Arthur Bryant:
German civilians sang specially composed hymns of hate against England and, in the most civilized country in the world, quiet inoffensive English gentlemen and ladies who
had never seen a blow struck in anger scouted the very mention of peace and spoke of the whole German race as they would of a pack of wild beasts. Only in the battleline itself was there no
hatred: only suffering and endurance: death and infinite waste.
In
Under Fire
the shattered survivors of French and German units sleep side by side in the mud. This moment ofexhausted solidarity is then worked up into the
climactic vision of fraternity in which war will have no place. The experience of the trenches gives rise to Barbusse’s socialist-pacifist vision of a possible future. In this light the
mutinies that rocked the French army in the spring of 1917 were like grumbling premonitions of revolution. The mutinies were suppressed, discipline was restored, conditions – food, leave
– were improved. A similar configuration of experience, however, could lead to a more violently protracted form of discontent as there emerged from the
As is so often the case, Barbusse was the first to offer protest in major imaginative form at not simply the suffering the war inflicted on men, but at men’s capacity, in time of war, to
inflict suffering on others. In ‘Dawn’, the final chapter of
Under Fire
, a soldier sums up himself and his fellows as ‘incredibly pitiful wretches, and savages as well,
brutes, robbers, and dirty devils’. A little later one of the group of ‘sufferers’says simply: ‘We’ve been murderers.’ Together the group of
suffering murderers cries ‘shame on the soldier’s calling that changes men by turn into stupid victims or ignoble brutes’.
when
Will kindness have such power again?
One of the reasons for the war’s enduring power is the way that, in the midst of so much brutality and carnage, compassion and kindness not only failed to wither but often
flowered.
The most moving episodes in the war always involve the awakening of a sense of the enemy’s shared humanity. Often this is initiated by the simplest gesture – an enemy soldier
offering prisoners cigarettes or a drink from his canteen. On Christmas Day 1914 there was a truce along the whole length of the Western Front. In some circumstances, especially where the gap
between the two lines of trenches was small, this became tacitly extended into the ‘live and let live’ policy whereby each side refrained from antagonizing the other. ‘For either
side to bomb the other,’ Charles Sorley had realized as early as July 1915,
would be a useless violation of the unwritten laws that govern the relations of combatants permanently within a hundred yards of distance from each other, who have found out
that to provide discomfort for the other is but a roundabout way of providing it for themselves.
Most poignant of all are the occasions when tenderness springs directly from an appalled awareness of the pain inflicted onthe enemy. A German battalion
commander recalls that after the British began their retreat from the battlefield at Loos in September 1915, ‘no shot was fired at them from the German trenches for the rest of the day, so
great was the feeling of compassion and mercy for the enemy after such a victory.’
Henry Williamson remembers coming across
a Saxon boy crushed under a shattered tank, moaning ‘Mutter, Mutter, Mutter,’ out of ghastly grey lips. A British soldier, wounded in the leg, and sitting
nearby, hearing the words, and dragging himself to the dying boy, takes his cold hand and says: ‘All right, son, it’s all right. Mother’s here with you.’
Episodes like these are scattered throughout memoirs and oral testimonies from the war. Civilians bayed for blood and victory; combatants, meanwhile, had become passive instruments of their
nations’ will. In the words of Arthur Bryant:
German civilians sang specially composed hymns of hate against England and, in the most civilized country in the world, quiet inoffensive English gentlemen and ladies who
had never seen a blow struck in anger scouted the very mention of peace and spoke of the whole German race as they would of a pack of wild beasts. Only in the battleline itself was there no
hatred: only suffering and endurance: death and infinite waste.
In
Under Fire
the shattered survivors of French and German units sleep side by side in the mud. This moment ofexhausted solidarity is then worked up into the
climactic vision of fraternity in which war will have no place. The experience of the trenches gives rise to Barbusse’s socialist-pacifist vision of a possible future. In this light the
mutinies that rocked the French army in the spring of 1917 were like grumbling premonitions of revolution. The mutinies were suppressed, discipline was restored, conditions – food, leave
– were improved. A similar configuration of experience, however, could lead to a more violently protracted form of discontent as there emerged from the
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