Death in Masses

The line in Barbusse's "Under Fire" that best captures the experiences of mass death in WWI comes from chapter 20 "Fire". "The ground is so full of bodies that landslides uncover places bristling with feet, half-clothed skeletons and ossuaries of skulls, one beside the other in the sheer wall, like china jars."

I chose this line because it sounds like an image straight out of fiction apocolypse novels. What struck me most about this line, however, is that Barbusse will throw these lines out there on occasion, but then simply continue on with his narrative. As in the instance above, he just went on describing how he and his unit continued advancing through the trenches. He doesn't appear to be a particularly special guy in the beginning of this novel, yet somewhere along the way he became so desensitized to an environment saturated with death and suffering that he could then mention it as a side note, versus losing his story to it. This lack of focus on the masses of dead bodies speaks volumes about how the horrors of the war must have affected the soldiers.