It is the journal of a squad--fifteen or a dozen common soldiers in the trenches; their infinite pettiness, their infinite grandeur; the horrors they succumb to or surmount. The first page shows the strange moats or living wells of the trenches--and the strange creatures (huge bears, no doubt) who growl and waddle and stumble therein--‘des espèces d’ours qui pataugent et grognent. C’est nous.’ The book is a series of episodes rather than a novel. Strange how this form--which the French call the ‘Chest-of-Drawers,’ the _roman-à-tiroirs_, comprising a set of independent though sequestered events contained in a solid framework--has taken possession of French literature. M. Duhamel also employs it. _Jean-Christophe_ was a _roman-à-tiroirs_. Most popular during the Middle Ages and Renaissance (both the Divine Comedy and Don Quixote are on this model), the Nineteenth Century preferred the firm organic contexture of the novel of character. _La Cousine Bette_ or _Madame Bovary_, _The Mill on the Floss_, _Vanity Fair_, _The Old Curiosity Shop_, appeared to us of the Nineteenth Century, a finer development, an evolution. But the world goes round! Some of these episodes, once read, are fixed in the memory for ever; and of these the finest, I think, is _Le Portique_. Who can forget the death of Poterloo in the explosion of the obus, as he rises from the earth, bolt upright, black, his two arms stretched full length as on a cross, and a flame on his shoulders in place of the shattered head? We cannot banish that terrible image if we would. There are pages of _Le Feu_, which, just glanced at, imprint themselves on our consciousness--like the death of the horse, Trompette, in the mine of _Germinal_, for we are always brought back to our initial comparison of M. Barbusse with Zola. And those who appreciate what I can but call the epic grandeur of _Germinal_ or _L’Assommoir_, will do well to read _Le Feu_; while those who cannot endure the foul images, the filthy realism, the coarse slang, the half-mad enthusiasms and indignations of Zola, will be wise in avoiding any book by Henri Barbusse. For M. Barbusse, like Zola, is an apostle and writes inspired by the energy of his social revolt. Like Péguy--although he is so different from Péguy--he longs to fly to the rescue. There was a medieval saint and poetess, Mechtild of Magdeburg, who sang in one of her lyric prayers, ‘Ô Christ on the Cross, lend me Thine arms to save a suffering world!’ That is the prayer of M. Barbusse, only he addresses it to Socialism--or rather, if I understand him aright, to Bolshevism. He would save the dumb dwellers in that dark underworld which, in the present state of things, appears to have no issue. ‘And he went down into Hell.’ More than once the line has slid into my mind in reading his unedifying pages, and I understood that here, too, was a sort of Gospel--the most modern of the apocrypha.