The importance of Henri Barbusse is twofold: first as the author of Le Feu (1916; translated as Under Fire, 1917), the best known and most influential French antiwar novel written during World War I; second as a major left-wing writer and thinker during the first third of the twentieth century. More militant than Romain Rolland but less so than Louis Aragon or Paul Nizan, Barbusse had a career as a novelist, pamphleteer, and editor characterized by a deep concern for the underprivileged and exploited and for the educative role of art and writing in the class struggle. He believed that by virtue of his particular gifts, the writer had a perception of life which it was his duty to transmit to others. In 1919, in a letter to the Italian author Gabriele d'Annunzio, he wrote: "L'écrivain, le penseur, le guide, doit voir plus loin que les prétendus...