Under Fire

Set during World War I on the Western Front, the novel follows a squad of French infantrymen through the daily miseries, brief respites, and catastrophic violence of trench warfare. The story is narrated by an unnamed soldier who observes and records the lives of his comrades in Corporal Bertrand's squad.

The novel opens at a mountaintop sanatorium in the Alps, where gravely ill patients learn from a newspaper that war has been declared. Freed from nationalist prejudice, an Austrian condemns Austria's act, a German hopes Germany is beaten, and an Englishman hopes France will win. They envision battlefields spreading across Europe, one calling the conflict "one great army committing suicide." As a storm engulfs the mountain, they perceive a mud-covered plain far below, crawling with soldiers they describe as "slaves" whose shared suffering may someday transform the world.

The narrative shifts to the trenches, where the narrator introduces his squad as dawn breaks over a waterlogged, shell-scarred landscape. The men emerge from their dugouts: Paradis, with his round, babyish face; Volpatte, hoarse and louse-infested; Lamuse, an enormous farm servant; Biquet, a rough young Breton; Barque, the sharp-tongued Parisian; Corporal Bertrand, quiet and principled; Cocon, obsessed with statistics; and many others. They come from every region of France and every civilian trade, yet shared deprivation has made them nearly identical. Their philosophy is blunt: Stop trying to understand, live hour to hour, endure.

After a brutal rotation, the 18th Company returns visibly diminished, with 18 killed and 50 wounded in four days from bombardment alone. Yet the survivors are paradoxically exuberant, laughing and talking loudly, celebrating survival itself. Meanwhile, two squad members, Volpatte and Fouillade, are found after being stranded in a shell-hole for four days. Volpatte, his head wrapped in bandages from ear wounds, already dreams of evacuation to a hospital. On the walk back, the narrator glimpses Eudoxie, a beautiful fair-haired refugee, exchanging a smile with Farfadet, the squad's frail former clerk, revealing a secret romance. Lamuse, who obsessively desires Eudoxie, notices nothing.

At rest quarters in Gauchin-l'Abbé, the squad rents a table in a filthy shed from a hostile local woman who charges inflated prices. A child innocently reveals his father hopes the war continues because the family is growing rich. Lamuse encounters Eudoxie and confesses his love; she recoils in disgust and flees, leaving him devastated. The rest stretches to 17 days before ending abruptly with a night alarm. The regiment entrains for a new sector, and Cocon calculates that transporting the entire French Army in continuous trains would require 40 days and 40 nights.

Eudore, a quiet soldier, returns from leave and recounts how bureaucratic delays consumed all but his final night with his wife Mariette, which he spent awake in a single room with four stranded fellow soldiers. He shares the private supper Mariette packed for him with his squad. Volpatte returns from two months of convalescence seething with rage at the rear-echelon world, describing depots full of shirkers who use feigned illness and connections to avoid combat. Bertrand offers a measured judgment: When liberty and justice are at stake, rear services should be staffed by the genuinely weak and old.

At Argoval, the narrator is shown the post where a soldier was executed for desertion that morning, a decent man denied leniency by a civilian conviction. In miserable winter quarters, Fouillade, the lean Southerner, sinks into homesickness, dreaming of his wife and home near Sète. He finds a kindred spirit in Labri, the squad's neglected, dying dog.

The narrator accompanies Poterloo, a miner from occupied northern France, on a forbidden visit to his destroyed village of Souchez. Under cover of fog, they walk past decomposing dead and obliterated roads. Poterloo cannot find his own house amid the rubble. He confesses that weeks earlier, disguised in a German greatcoat, he crossed into enemy lines and saw his wife Clotilde smiling among German officers. Though devastated, he reasons toward understanding: She is young and alive, and he must survive to return. That evening, a shell explodes directly on them. The narrator sees Poterloo's body hurled upright with "a flame in the place of his head."

Lamuse volunteers for a sapping detail and returns shaking with horror: He discovered Eudoxie's decomposing corpse in a collapsed trench and was forced to embrace the remains in the narrow space. He tells only the narrator and regrets even that confession.

The squad has been in the first line for five days with no relief when the attack comes. The bodies of Lamuse, Barque, Biquet, and Eudore already lie in the trench, killed days earlier by machine-gun fire during a patrol. Mesnil André has vanished; his brother Joseph searches No Man's Land alone. Paradis later shows the narrator André's corpse squatting just behind their trench wall, separated from the living by inches of earth. The alarm sounds. The narrator looks at the pale faces around him and thinks: "They are not soldiers, they are men." They climb out. The barrage erupts, a wall of flame and steel. Men are flung aside, buried, incinerated. They cross the barrage by chance and sweep through the abandoned German trench. Bertrand kicks back an enemy bomb. Soldiers hurl grenades into dugouts and collapse entrances with pickaxes. Mesnil Joseph is shot in the thigh.

That night, Bertrand speaks about the shame and necessity of war, crying out the name of Karl Liebknecht, the German socialist politician who opposed the war from within Germany, as the one figure who has risen above the conflict. The next day, the narrator guides Joseph to the rear through fields of dead. They find Bertrand's body grotesquely twisted. Volpatte takes his pocket-book: "He was truly a good sort. We had need of him always."

At the Refuge, an underground clearing station packed with wounded, the narrator encounters an aviator who saw identical French and German church services from the air, wounded men debating God's existence, and two Foreign Legionnaires exchanging identities so the survivor can escape his criminal past. Joseph is bandaged and led away. The narrator reflects: "In war, life separates us just as death does."

During a visit to a rear-area town, the surviving squad members experience the alienating gulf between themselves and civilians who romanticize combat. Volpatte articulates the division: "There are two foreign countries. The Front, where there are too many unhappy, and the Rear, where there are too many happy."

After an interminable night fatigue-party lost in flooded trenches, dawn reveals a drowned battlefield. German soldiers approach and surrender. Paradis speaks: "That's war. It's not anything else." He means not glittering bayonets or trumpets but "frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the belly, mud and dung and infamous filth." Haltingly, the soldiers articulate a vision: War is made by the masses for the benefit of a few, and "two armies fighting each other, that's like one great army committing suicide," echoing the sanatorium patients from the opening. They declare that the spirit of war itself must be defeated and that equality among all people is the essential principle. As the storm continues, a gleam of light appears between the clouds, carrying "its proof that the sun is there."