isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

230 THE PROPHET ARMED
This preoccupation with the 'human factor' in war lifts his
military writings far above the professional level. For example,
his essay 'Barbed Wire and Scissors' is a technical study of
trench warfare and, at the same time, an intuitive and imaginative
reconstruction of its psychological impact on the huge
armies involved in it. It is almost incredible that the author
of this essay had never even seen a trench-so intimately did
he penetrate its strange atmosphere, foreshadowing much of
what writers like Remarque, Zweig, Hasek, Sherriff, Barbusse,
Glaser, and others were to write after the war in autobiographical
novels and plays.
If the fate of Trotsky's writings, we repeat, and the extent to
which they are read or ignored had not been so inseparably
bound up with his political fortunes and with the sympathies
and antipathies that his mere name evokes, he would have
had his niche in literature on the strength of these writings
alone. This is especially true of his descriptive pieces. In these
he usually narrates the adventures of a single soldier, revealing
through them some significant aspect of the war. In 'The
Seventh Infantry Regiment in the Belgian Epic', for instance,
which he wrote at Calais in February 1915, he describes the
experiences of De Baer, a student of law at the U nivcrsity of
Louvain, in whom he focuses the whole drama of invaded and
occupied Belgium. He follows the young lawyer from the outbreak
of the war through the confusion of mobilization,
through battles, retreats, encirclements, and escapes, through a
sequence of strange yet quite normal scenes, in which we see
and feel the elemental upsurge of patriotism in the invaded
people, their sufferings, their unwitting, often accidental
heroism, a heroism in which the tragic and the comic arc intertwined,
and, above all, the boundless absurdity of war. The
student De Baer goes through appalling torments in the
trenches; then he is detailed to a court martial to act as defending
counsel for fellow soldiers; he returns to the trenches and unknowingly
distinguishes himself in battle and is decorated with
much pomp and solemnity. After that, almost alone of his
encircled company, he survives without a scratch, and loses
only his spectacles in the fray. Sent to a hospital in France, he
is found to be too short-sighted to be a soldier, and is released.
Thrown out by the military machine in a foreign country, he