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  "name": "Henri Barbusse",
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      "title": "Under Fire",
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      "slug": "they-will-say",
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      "text": "\"They will say to you,\" growled a kneeling man who stooped with his two bands in the earth and shook his shoulders like a mastiff, 'My friend, you have been a wonderful hero!' I don't want them to say it! \"Heroes? Some sort of extraordinary being? Idols? Rot! We've been murderers. We have respectably followed the trade of hangmen. We shall do it again with all our might, because it's of great importance to follow that trade, so as to punish war and smother it. The act of slaughter is always ignoble; sometimes necessary, but always ignoble. Yes, hard and persistent murderers, that's what we've been. But don't talk to me about military virtue because I've killed Germans.\" \"Nor to me,\" cried another in so loud a voice that no one could have replied to him even had he dared; \"nor to me, because I've saved the lives of Frenchmen! Why, we might as well set fire to houses for the sake of the excellence of life-saving!\"",
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      "slug": "i-tell-them",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/henri-barbusse/under-fire/i-tell-them",
      "text": "I tell them that fraternity is a dream, an obscure and uncertain sentiment; that while it is unnatural for a man to hate one whom he does not know, it is equally unnatural to love him. You can build nothing on fraternity. Nor on liberty, either; it is too relative a thing in a society where all the elements subdivide each other by force. But equality is always the same. Liberty and fraternity are words while equality is a fact. Equality should be the great human formula — social equality, for while individuals have varying values, each must have an equal share in the social life; and that is only just, because the life of one human being is equal to the life of another. That formula is of prodigious importance. The principle of the equal rights of every living being and the sacred will of the majority is infallible and must be invincible; all progress will be brought about by it, all, with a force truly divine. It will bring first the smooth bed-rock of all progress — the settling of quarrels by that justice which is exactly the same thing as the general advantage.",
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      "slug": "we-shall-say",
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      "text": "\"We shall say to ourselves,\" says one, \"'After all, why do we make war?' We don't know at all why, but we can say who we make it for. We shall be forced to see that if every nation every day brings the fresh bodies of fifteen hundred young men to the God of War to be lacerated, it's for the pleasure of a few ringleaders that we could easily count; that if whole nations go to slaughter marshaled in armies in order that the gold-striped caste may write their princely names in history, so that other gilded people of the same rank can contrive more business, and expand in the way of employees and shops — and we shall see, as soon as we open our eyes, that the divisions between mankind are not what we thought, and those one did believe in are not divisions.\"",
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      "slug": "it-would-be-a-crime",
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      "text": "\"It would be a crime to exhibit the fine side of war, even if there were one!\" murmured one of the somber soldiers. The first man continued. \"They'll say those things to us by way of paying us with glory, and to pay themselves, too, for what they haven't done. But military glory — it isn't even true for us common soldiers. It's for some, but outside those elect the soldier's glory is a lie, like every other fine-looking thing in war. In reality, the soldier's sacrifice is obscurely concealed. The multitudes that make up the waves of attack have no reward. They run to hurl themselves into a frightful inglorious nothing. You cannot even heap up their names, their poor little names of nobodies.\"",
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      "slug": "its-with-us-only",
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      "text": "It's with us only that they make battles. It is we who are the material of war. War is made up of the flesh and the souls of common soldiers only. It is we who make the plains of dead and the rivers of blood, all of us, and each of us is invisible and silent because of the immensity of our numbers. The emptied towns and the villages destroyed, they are a wilderness of our making. Yes, war is all of us, and all of us together.",
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      "slug": "stop-war-impossible",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/henri-barbusse/under-fire/stop-war-impossible",
      "text": "Stop war? Impossible! There is no cure for the world's disease.",
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      "slug": "two-armies-at-death-grips",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/henri-barbusse/under-fire/two-armies-at-death-grips",
      "text": "Two armies at death-grips — that is one great army committing suicide.",
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