Barbusse's Under Fire wins the Prix Goncourt

On 15 December 1916 the Prix Goncourt, France’s most important literary award, was given to Henri Barbusse’s book Under Fire (Le Feu), subtitled “The Diary of a Squad”. It was one of the first books to show trench warfare without patriotic embellishment, written by a soldier who had himself fought for many months in the front line.

Barbusse, born in 1873 near Paris, had been a writer and journalist with pacifist views before the war. Even so, in 1914, aged 41 and with weak lungs, he volunteered for the infantry. He served in the 231st Infantry Regiment, in the front line from December 1914, and in June 1915 he received the Croix de Guerre with a citation in orders. He was often ill and returned to the front several times after treatment, until in 1916 he was withdrawn from the line. The notes he made in the trenches became the basis of the book.

Under Fire tells of the soldiers of a single squad, drawn from all over France, seen through the eyes of a narrator who is one of them. Barbusse showed the war as filth, mud, exhaustion and death rather than heroic deeds, and he described an attack across no man’s land at close quarters, from the point of view of an infantryman taking part in it. The book first appeared in instalments in the daily L’Œuvre from 3 August to 9 November 1916, and in November Flammarion published it in full. The censors let it through, although many civilian readers were outraged by its naturalism. Soldiers, by contrast, accepted it as a faithful picture of what they had lived through.

Throughout the war the Académie Goncourt rewarded writers who had returned from the front. In the same year, 1916, it also awarded the prize for 1914, postponed because of the war, which went to the badly wounded Adrien Bertrand for L’Appel du sol. The prize for Under Fire, awarded a few weeks after the book came out, brought it enormous publicity, and it became a great publishing success. An English translation, Under Fire, appeared in June 1917, and a German one in Zurich in 1918.

The book made Barbusse one of the leading anti-war voices in France. Discharged as unfit for service, in November 1917 he co-founded the republican ex-servicemen’s association ARAC. After the war some veterans, such as the critic Jean Norton Cru, accused Under Fire of mixing truth with literary exaggeration, but the book remained one of the most widely read testimonies of the First World War.