Battle of Blenheim; then where Swift had applied irony to the economics of war Voltaire turned the same livid light on its cruelty and the whole civilized Europe of the Enlightenment was in general agreement against it. At last the tremendous boom in war under Napoleon brought the formula of our present detachment.
For the stagy and hectic glories of Napoleon had their counter-balance in a scientific dryness. Goya in his engravings gave frank expression to the scorn which had apparently been implicit in Callot's Misères de la Guerre of two hundred years before, and even the noble stoicism of de Vigny could not cloak the littleness of the military life; but it was Stendhal, who had ridden the tidal wave of the Napoleonic romance, who, outliving the romantic age, put warfare to its cruellest scrutiny. Not that he held any brief against war in general: he had merely a passion for ironic analysis. For him the Battle of Waterloo becomes a chaos of trivial or ridiculous incidents; as we go through it with young Fabrice del Dongo in La Chartreuse de Parme there is nothing glorious or romantic about it: first a vivandière, then a corpse, then a general swearing at getting splashed. And when Stendhal had described the first great battle of the century the foundation of modern war fiction had been laid. Tolstoy and Hugo acknowledged their debt to him and most of their successors have debts to acknowledge. Flaubert adds venom to Stendhal's coldness in his steel engraving of the shootings of '48 in L'Education Sentimentale; and in Michelet the attitude of mockery has invaded even military history so that the heroisms of Agincourt or Pavia wear a new and disconcerting aspect. Then the Franco-Prussian War drenched dryness in despair with Zola and his disciples: you find the same formula applied with more or less bitterness in any number of books—in the Soirées de Médan, in Maupassant, in the early novels of Mirbeau. In the United States Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage, which, whether or not inspired by Stendhal, represents precisely the same approach to the subject.
With the World War Barbusse burst his bombshell of naturalism compounded with humanitarianism and Dos Passos drew on Barbusse and Stendhal for a more local bombshell of his own. Finally Mr Boyd has rewritten The Red Badge of Courage, which I am told he had never read, as Crane had rewritten La Chartreuse de Parme, which I dare say he had never read either. It is not
