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'Nothing before "Le Feu" had given such an appallingly vivid description of trench warfare or combined it with such passionate political conviction. The English translation, "Under Fire", appeared in June 1917 and Sassoon was reading it by mid-August; he lent it to Owen, who seems to have read it at Craiglockhart and again in December'.
'I read Barbusse in trenches and he made me see things I had never seen before though they were before my eyes every day; yet his description bore the same relation to an ordinary man's as does a passage of Ęschylus.'