Vicente Blasco Ibañez and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse : The Civil War of Europeans as a Cultural War

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a novel about the Great War, was written in 1916 by the Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. Ibáñez was a liberal intellectual and opponent to German militarism and the House of Austria, which had been intolerant and retrograde during its rule of Spain in the seventeenth century. This study explores the imperialist, militarist and cultural tensions of the war through Ibáñez’s novel. The formation of blocks of alliances and the capture of rich territories, according to Lenin, translated into the juxtaposition of the German Reich—represented historically by old Germania and the current German Empire fighting for European supremacy—with the Latinity of Ancient Rome and the contemporary French Republic. This cultural and ideological struggle is reflected in the novel’s characters and dialogue. Ibáñez suggests that the 1914 confrontation arose from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. In the novel, the conflict is typified in two opposing novelistic characters, a German and a Frenchman, who immigrate to Argentina to escape war and poverty. Both return to their countries of origin rich and related to each other, having married the daughters of a rich landlord, Madariaga, although his sons have become cousins and nephews and they face each other from opposite sides of the battlefield. World War I is an irresistible force the magnitude of which draws together all the characters, Ibáñez was absorbed in narrating the first year of the war, when France suffered bitter defeats, and writing about this ongoing event led to his success in the USA, where he maintained the appreciation of the public by quickly creating a film version of the novel.


Introducing the Problem: Old Politics in New Clothes
Although now nearly forgotten, one of the most famous contemporary novels about World War I was written in 1915 and published in 1916, by the Spanish fiction author and journalist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867Ibáñez ( -1928)).At that time, the author was living in exile in France where he was working as a journalist, when the war broke out.His personal feelings toward France might be the same as his character, Marcelo Desnoyers.Seeing in 1914, the crowd of men running to sign up, thought: "All these men moved with spontaneous impulse, desirous of manifesting their love to the Republic.And Desnoyers, moved by the spectator, thought that France was still something to the world, which still exerted a moral force on the peoples, and that their joys and disgraces interested the mankind" (1933, p. 152).
His choice to go to France-which welcomed him-was a passionate one, seemingly derived in part from his opposition to the designs of Germany's Hohenzollern Empire.As a liberal Spaniard, he hated the old House of Austria because the Spanish Hapsburg dynasty had, in his opinion, negatively influenced Spanish culture and history during its rule between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The Hapsburgs' backward policies and religious and cultural intolerance had been responsible for the expulsion and elimination of Spain's Jews and Moors.Ultimately, the dynasty had held back Spain's social, material and scientific progress.
Ibáñez had opposed the German Empire's victory because, as a peninsular and republican intellectual, the prospect of a brutal militarist monarchy ruling the world was odious to him.On the other hand, France, despite its defects, embodied the consecrated ideals of positive republican egalitarianism that had emanated from the French Revolution.As a Democrat, he saw in this country a counterpoint to his Spain, where the agricultural class, the army and the church exercised a harmful influence over institutions.

The Importance of the Problem
In his literary works, he used strong regional and naturalistic features along with intense emotionalism, precisely describing environments and scenes.His work was full-featured, including the top of the thesis novels, such as The Four Horseman and Mare Nostrum, about World War I.In the novels of intense regional vigor, such as La Barraca and the La Catedral, there is a strong sociological appeal.While in the novel Sangre y Arena (1908), Blood and Sand, and a novel with intense psychological, historical, national and human contribution in a dramatic narrative.These characteristics made his works palatable to the nascent cinema that adopted them.Los cuatro ginetes del Apocalípsis was published in France in 1916, during the Great War.Translated into English in 1918, it became the best-selling book in the US in 1919.The novel anticipates studies about war memories' disruption of soldiers' ability to talk, write and engage in "storytelling".It especially calls to mind the seminal work of Walter Benjamin, who described soldiers who had lived the horrors of the Great War as having "grown silent", unable to report on or verbalize their experiences in narrative form (2006, p. 362).

Discussion: World War I and Imperialism
The thirty years of peace before the Great War, which lasted until 1914, had witnessed the apogee of Europe's global expansion through the growth of monopolies and financial concerns in its most powerful countries.It was a time of intense technical and industrial progress driven by high standards of productivity (Stevenson, 2013, p. 5).It was a period that some individuals, such as a young Winston Churchill, regarded with sorrow, in his memoires of his youth, in which an international war seemed impossible on days when he lived (Churchill, 1996, p. 40).The most powerful countries got together and formed blocs of alliances (Arrighi & Silver, 1999, p. 186).In brief, the Central Powers bloc, composed of the German and the Austro-Hungarian Empires, opposed the Entente constituted by the British Empire, the French Republic and Russia, to which were added Italy and the United States of America.
However, when tensions hit their apex, mutual confrontation was inevitable; one of the contenders had to lose that someone else might win and, in doing so, appropriate agrarian, industrial and mining regions (Lenin, 2011, p. 218).As noted by Lenin, inasmuch as the stock of unowned land in the world was exhausted, the powers necessarily turned their covetous eyes to fragile empires such as those of the Ottomans, the Chinese and the Spanish (2011, p. 224).

Theoretical and Practical Implications of This Study
A highly celebrated but controversial pre-war British thinker, Norman Angell, wrote an acclaimed work before the war entitled The Great Illusion.In its successive editions, dated 1909 and 1910, the book suggested that, for entrepreneurs, financiers and industrialists, a world war was impossible due to the complexity of economic relations.Socialists also argued that a world war was highly unlikely, maintaining that workers, through a chain of massive strikes in the factories of belligerent countries, could paralyze the source of any large-scale conflict (Collins, 2008, p. 36).Angell believed that the construction of dissuasive fleets would only increase the danger of conflagration.
By contrast, a German author and general of cavalry, Friedrich Von Bernhardi, defended as necessary the declaration of a preventive war by Germany.His work, Germany and the Next War, edited in 1912, in London, by Edward Publishing, seems to predict the inevitable.He justified a potential conflict undertaken by his country as a consequence of its supremacy in Europe.In his words, the German Empire had not only the right but the duty to annex the weakest nearby countries and, ultimately, to control the entire world.
When published in England, General Bernhardi's book became "the book that caused the war".The work made a huge impression on Adolf Hitler, who proclaimed his desire for German revenge (Bridgham, 2006).As David Crook has noted, the German war suggested by Bernhardi may have been influenced by a misreading of Darwin.Bernhardi may have concluded, based on the idea that the selection of species recovered already-consolidated resources, that war was a biological imperative necessary for Germany's survival (Crook, 2007).Other German writers, such as Ernst Troeltsch and Thomas Mann, were equally supportive of the war and of German victory and against his brother, Heinrich Mann, was an ardent pacifist and opponent of expansionist policy.According to Louis Dumont, Troeltsch and Thomas Mann both wrote about the curious notion that Germany had not yet had to develop the modern idea of national sovereignty.The country had remained anchored in the notion of universal sovereignty, which had materialized during the Middle Ages and the era of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire.The concept of national sovereignty intensified the pursuit of foreign domains, which these authors defended during World War I. "Not only did Thomas Mann believe in the victory at least in the first years of the war, like Troeltsch and against his brother, that Germany had the power of vocation" (Dumont, 1987, p. 46).Some features produced by the spirit of rationality seemed to be safeguards against this catastrophe.For the Briton Angell, one of them was the economic system and financial design that formed an international monetary pattern capable of preventing a conflict.For these authors, Angell and Mann, another of the above-mentioned opportunities was the notion of progress that involved every country in the same practices.Capitalists and socialists believed that the rationality of the system would prevent the madness of a world conflagration.Actually, the world economic system was rapidly approaching an impasse that erupted in the 1914-1918 conflict.The deterioration of the international fin de siècle political arrangement resulted in the Entente, or the Western allies, fighting against the Central Powers (Hobsbawm, 1997, p. 442), making the war clash between blocs governed by their respective elites (Polanyi, 2001, p. 37) who, using industry and modern weaponry, aspired to maintain the status quo.

The Importance of the Problem
Surveying this panorama, Arno Mayer defined an idealized world as one from the past (2010, p. 311).Part of his theory is the notion that, for a long time, historians were worried about highlighting progress, the advance of science and the success of industrial capitalism.Confounded by industrialization, they tended to neglect the importance and power of resistance to change; they minimized the efficacy of these forces of inertia, just quoting some, like the economic rationality and the aristocratic political conservatism, in delaying the decline of the old order, aside from the historical regression that it represented (Mayer, 2010, p. 16).
Though France continued to claim her lost provinces, they would not go to war while isolated against a militarily strong German Empire (Stevenson,p. 16).However, during the first decade of the twentieth century, a series of alliances-with the Russian Empire, in which they invested massive amounts of capital, and then with Great Britain-allowed France to feel safer (Gilbert, 1994, p. 26).

Method: Military Technology: The Storerooms Must Be Emptied Someday
In this section, we will delve into the peculiarities that define the Great War as the first industrial conflict in history.The great methodological paradox will involve dissolve in the air all the theoretical paradigms built on theories of the past.The modern industrial war acquires its own life and establishes new defining criteria of itself and of reality; rational prognostics of its duration will depend on the engaged forces.Modern industrial world war: it is massive, and it is global.It will undo all of the preceding theories of economic and social rationality and will lead us to seek a unique witnessing gaze in the perplexity of Ibáñez's writing.

Measures and Variations: The Ammunition Stores Must Be Emptied
Upon reading The Four Horsemen, the reader is squarely confronted with the perplexity caused by the use of weapons of mass destruction capable of killing on a scale and velocity without precedent in history.As Hemingway wrote, the Great War was "the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever take [n] place on Earth" (1942, p. 7).Over the last decades of the nineteenth century, technology allowed the creation of new weapons and munitions, supplying the system that Hobsbawm called "the forces of death".Angell also noted that results of this production could not sit unused for long (Angell, 1910, p. 317), the arms race was dangerous, and although associated with other factors, such as strategic alliances, stored weapons could incite conflict due simply to their accumulation; armaments were likely to cause war (Murray, 2005, p. 272).
Military rationality reached its apogee at this point; this was best demonstrated by the promulgation of several plans designed to defeat one's enemy.These included the German Schlieffen, the French Plan XVII, the Russian Plans G, A and 19 and the Austro Hungarian Empire's Plans B and R, all of which combined made war inevitable (Rich, Hamilton, & Herwig, 2003, p. 254).The practical use of these plans on the battlefield returned military actions to the mold of attack and die as practiced in the American Civil War (1860War ( -1865)).In 1914, what the French called élan became an impetus for the offensive spirit and to push the soldier to attack.The expression "attack and die", born of the disastrous results of massive infantry charges, preceded the slaughter on a scale never before seen.Attack and die is the title of the book by McWhiney and Jamieson where they dissect the suicidal brutality of infantry charges and armament lethality: "It was not war-It was Murder" (1982, p. 3).The musket and cannon gave way to repeating and automatic weaponry in addition to powerful chemical explosives (Murray, 2005, p. 250).In his monumental and unfinished work about the Great War, Ibáñez realized the difference between the scale of this conflict and those that preceded it: "This is the first war with the people who make compulsory service; the first clash in which whole nations put under arms.Until recent years, the armies in which where thousands of men became armies of millions of men" (Lechado, 2014, p. 50).

Results: Was the War of 1914 the Revenge of Varus Against Arminius?
In this section, we will investigate the perception of the cultural instruments of transformation of nationalism into weapons of war.The results will consolidate an argument capable of regaining and convincing the rest of the world to assume a party between one of the alliances at war, since this was a world war.Thus, Ibáñez and the Latin world will be inclined to support France, its values and ideals, contrary to the Germanic Empire of the Hohenzollern.

French History and National Antiquities: Cultural Tools, Tools of War
France, since the revolution of 1789, had been fixed in the global imagination as a revolutionary country, republican and inclusive.The 1848 Revolution had ended the royalist method of government, and the Third Empire recast France as a progressive nation, rational, clarified and, above all, modern (Kirkland, 2013, p. 79).A new system of public health, basic urban sanitation and social progress, accompanying intense modernization in urban centers and transportation systems, changed the conception of that nation dramatically.
Even after the defeat of 1870, the modernizing impulse spread, despite the loss of the Lorraine and Alsace provinces to the German Empire (Wetzel, 2003).This national mutilation impressed itself deeply upon the collective French sentiment that started to clamor for revenge.Emerging nationalism after 1870 was linked to the social transformations of 1880, which resulted in an upsurge of chauvinism and anti-Semitism.Transformed into a militant practice, this nationalism considered the existence of the German enemy to be a permanent national threat (Hobsbawm,p. 144).
After the 1850s, France enjoyed an increase in scientific progress, a result of the performance of its prestigious research institutes (Joll,p. 28).The developing study of history was associated, in part, with the doctrine of scientific racism (Bayly, 2004, p. 237).Its roots of booth were situated in the eighteenth century, during the debates of Enlightenment, when there arose a trend of devaluing local nations that had resisted Rome, such as the Celts, the Gauls and the Franks.Prior to this, the invention of bard-druidism was the creation of nationally acclaimed antiquities bathed in ideology.
During the Revolution of 1789, the Gauls were elected the ancestors of the French Nation, and the double population theory was propounded in revolutionary debates (Thiesse, 2001, p. 48).Under it, the people, who constituted the Third Estate, would be the Gallic mass.The aristocrats, as the abbot Siéyes affirmed, would be the Germanic foreigners who should be sent back to the woods and swamps of Germany (Thiesse, 2001, p. 51).

National Antiquities: Germanism and Wotan's Horse
In Germany, Herder's studies in the eighteenth century established the foundations of a belief: that each people possess a mythology that forms the basis for their intellectual realizations.Defined as national, it was different from classical and from biblical mythology (Williamson, 2004, p. 1).At the same time, cultural agents were salvaging pagan practices, which followed from Aryan heritage, widening the gap between belief in these ideas and reality (Williamson, 2004, p. 2).To an author like Grimm, Christianity represented a tragic episode in European development, bringing down Germanic deities like Wotan.However, thanks to folklorists, we can understand that, despite Christianity, pagan beliefs were still alive in popular practice.For instance, peasants were accustomed to giving a wreath of grain to Wotan's horse or yelling words in invocation of this deity (Williamson, p. 106).In parallel to the Christian pantheon, with its series of celebrations, there was a pantheon composed by national mythology, whose invention by cultural agents created an ancestral scenery that could be appreciated from a myth poetic perspective (Williamson, 2004, p. 120).Jay Y. Gonen, in his work The Roots of Nazism Psychology: Hitler's Utopian Barbarism (2013), postulated that national socialism was derived from theories born with Herder and Grimm in the nineteenth century, in which there were ideological elements full of representations, making them crucial to the power of the myths in the Nazi leader's Weltanschauung (Gonen,p. 10).Richard J. Evans, in his work The Coming of the Third Reich (2004), elaborated a meticulous archeology of the Third Reich's historical roots.His findings echoed Ibáñez's prophetic literary construction.The scholarship of Gonen and Evans seems to confirm the Spanish author's perspective; the origins of Nazism and the German revenge are found in the Hohenzollern Empire of the nineteenth century, reverberate throughout the Great War and, as prophesied by Ibáñez, flourish in the bitter years of the post-war period in the Weimar Republic (Evans, 2010, p. 190).

The German Empire
As noted by Arno Mayer, in 1914, Europe was predominantly agrarian andmonarchical (2010, p. 133).Decades before, Engels, with proverbial clarity, realized that as long as society was becoming more bourgeois and industrial, the political order would remain feudal (Mayer, 2010, p. 124).The Constitution of the German Empire in 1870 succeeded a hard peace between France and Germany (Jeinsmann, 1992, p. 19).Unequivocally, the ascension of this political form brought the definitive balance of power in Europe; although, to James Joll, it erected a powerful centralized German state under the Prussian aegis.The economy of this new country came to know dizzying economic growth, which elevated the German production of coal to a level equal to that of England and France combined (Joll, 1973, p. 1).
At the same time, its industries triggered the second industrial revolution with the science of chemistry, the combustion engine and electricity (Joll, 1973, p. 2).The most remarkable achievement was the substitution of raw materials, unobtainable by the empire through its colonies, for synthetic substitutes.Prodigious population growth was channeled into this industrial expansion.Its population of 41 million inhabitants in the 1870s grew to 60 million in 1910.The conservative and reactionary environment of German politics was dominated by the military, the Junker nobility and the bureaucracy while the masses were maintained from a distance by the political power of the Imperial State (Braucher, 1970, p. 148).
The feverish growth of national feeling among European countries, typical of the time, was the result of a minority culture.It conceived the nation as an expanded community in which the process of identity formation determined the patrimony of each citizen and promulgated their civic religion (Thiesse, p. 12).Jeinsmann considered that, in the nineteenth century, the notion of a permanent threat of national aggression by a foreign country was a recurrent theme in international European police forces.The ruling elites practiced a form of negative inclusion as a means to perpetuate their own power (1992, p. 17).
Through the last decades of the nineteenth century, in the camps of the German intelligentsia, the notion of the nation being conceptually similar to its people was consolidated.However, they argued that the German people could only be defined through racial concerns.So racial construction, explanatory of world history, emphasized the virulent and racial character of German nationalism.German intellectuals created and sustained racial theories, with the assistance of science, in the imaginary construction, identity and politics of nations (Evans, 2010, p. 129).

Discussion: The Context of the European Civil War
Recent studies on the centenary of this tragic conflict have led us to broaden the discussion of its global, industrial, mass, modern and public contexts as well as its publicity and cinematography.Taking as a starting point the theoretical and cultural presuppositions that we set out for the debate, we will discuss the problems that have arisen.The discussion will focus on this now mostly ignored book, which was applauded at the time of its publication.

The Perception of the Industrial Apocalypse
Published in 1916, Ibáñez's work analyzes the first months of the conflict, focusing on a time when the hope of a fast victory was over: the beginning of trench construction.The work is a criticism of the European Civil War-that it did not need to happen and would not have were it not for the Hohenzollern Empire's intransigence.The author argues that the lessons of European civilization and rationality could be easily dismantled by war, which might produce concentric shockwaves across the globe.In this regard, the Indian historian, K. M. Panikkar, has shown that, for Asians, the conflict assumed aspects of a civil war between Europeans.It did not just radiate from the Old World to its colonies but occasioned the Soviet Union's emergence and the rise of Imperial Japan (260-261).
The novel analyzes two great hidden protagonists: the Germanic cultures from Imperial Germany and from Republican France.They should be complementary as they are both European, but they are presented as antagonistic, each demonizing the other.Through the last decades of the nineteenth century, national speech had become representative talk, presenting national narratives through works such as novels with emblematic characters touched by imperialism (During, 2002, p. 138).The nationalistic arguments were nourished from remote sources, the holders of an allusive authority, and valorized proto-national people who had resisted the conquest of the Roman Empire, integrating these people into the nation's narratives as a foundation that reinforced the national identity.The biggest celebration of this trend happened in 1875, when a large statue honoring the Germanic proto-hero, Hermann, was inaugurated (Schamma, 1995, p. 121).On the other hand, as Ernest Gellner says, the association between the distorted Darwinism of Bernhardi, with its insistence on the rights of the strongest over the weakest, and the communalism of Herderian, mediated by the romantic Nietzsche, was explosive (1997, p. 70).Ibáñez's argumentation attributed to Imperial Germany the estimation of the European realm, introducing the Germans as methodical, accurate and rational.

Romanesque Technique in Los Cuatro Ginetes
In writing a novel during the conflict-which he lived as if he were French-Ibáñez's authorial posture followed the Barthesian model of an author completely absorbed by his task: "N' etant plus celui qui écrit quel rue chose mais qui écrit, absolument: ce passage est certainement le signe d'um changement important des mentalités" (No longer being the one who writes which street thing but who writes, absolutely: this passage is certainly the sign of a major change in mentalities) (Barthes, 2003, p. 35).His narrative is carefully elaborated and, without using realistic resources, he offers a faithful picture of the scenery and characters.By using a pictorial palette in his writing, he captures psychological states through plentiful descriptions of color play (Lang, 1997, pp. 5-7).In contrast, despite his modernist line, some critics affirm that Ibáñez did not abandon the romantic ethos; he granted exaggerated characteristics to all his characters, both those fated to fail and those destined to achieve fame.His perception of life's transience and the hopeless, almost nihilist, quality of human actions is by far the most modern element of his writing.
According to Swain, Ibáñez did not plan his work but was conducted by it as it unfolded (1959, p. 108).The novel Los cuatro ginetes seems to carry an existential and symbolical weight that is reminiscent of Georg Lukács (as written about by Barthes) when he talks about the novel as the destiny of a civilization.In this case, it is about European civilization, seen in a decisive moment of confrontation.One of the greatest writers of western modernism, James Joyce, who went into exile in Switzerland despite having verbalized reservations concerning the Great War, makes this one of his modernist critical charges.This is the case in Ulysses, in which he fought against excessive Irish nationalism with the weapons of parodies and satires (Fairhall, 1990, p. 36).On the other hand, The Four Horsemen is a novel that discusses and questions other important works and is equally loquacious concerning European literature, particularly La récherche do temps perdu by Marcel Proust and Guerre et Paix by Leon Tolstoy (Barthes, 2003, p. 41).
In The Four Horsemen, Metaphors for France and Germany, committed to a European Civil War, are provided in a narrative that is intermediated by two central characters.One is French and the other is German, reflecting the antagonistic perception of the 1870s war.This conflict in Ibáñez's narrative becomes the Nemesis of the Great War, marking the internal collision between two big European countries that became opponents.The characters represent the culture and the history of their respective countries in their historical construction.The Frenchman, Marcelo Desnoyers, is the Latin who, in disregard of war and militarism, immigrates to the distant Argentinian Republic.The other character, German Karl Hartrott, decides to immigrate to the same distant country, ready to purge the shame associated with delinquency and degrading poverty.
While Desnoyers is bold and open to new points of view, Hartrott is elusive and disguised, recalling the Germanic proto-hero Herman (or Arminius).This German pretended to be friends with a Roman, Varo, whom he seduced while planning a Germanic revolt.He ultimately defeated Varo in the Battle of the Teutoburg Wald.In France, the proto-hero Vercingetórix likewise rose against Roman power but was defeated, imprisoned and finally killed by Cesar.
Authors such as Hagemann, Quataert and Tacke, when analyzing the myth of Arminius and the equally mythic French hero Vercingetórix, observe that both were honored with national monuments.However, these were erected by regional authorities in Lippe and Detmold, Germany, and in Auvergne and Clemont-Ferrand, France, leading Charlotte Tacke to conclude that many of the national characteristics of these heroes would serve to explain broader European phenomena (1995, p. 52).As monuments, they were associated with regions, the cultures of which play an important role in the definition of national identity.They comprise an abstracted "imagined community".These monuments represent an image of harmony in religion as much as in the concept of nationhood.At the same time, they represent the social hierarchy of class and gender, which fight each other in the national arena (Tacke, 1995, p. 224).This truly industrial action instrumentalizes the imaginary and serves, in regimes of discretionary power, as a true violation of conscience, as an insistent and clandestine persuasion.This act against the imaginary may not be the method of a government, but it becomes an instrument of power and conditioning nonetheless (Wunenburger, 2001, p. 56).
Continuing with the narrative, we see that, in Argentina, Marcelo Desnoyers has become foreman for the Spaniard Madariaga, a horseman of the pampas.This exuberant and bold Latin lifted himself out of extreme poverty to become a very rich land and cattle owner.As the absolute lord of his people, he is also the father of two girls.Although he is a secondary character, he constitutes one of the most powerful and attractive figures in the novel (Swain, 1959, p. 57).After winning the horseman's sympathy, Desnoyers marries his boss's older daughter.German Karl Hartrott, now a clerk and amanuensis, arrives to work on Madariaga's property.The subservient and humble Hartrott is, in actuality, a former military man now destitute and degraded-a proud man who must pay a debt of honor.Madariaga does not like the German, whose dissimulation and fake humility bothers him.However, his younger daughter, who has a romantic temper, marries Hartrott against her father's will.Both end up expelled from Madariaga's "kingdon".Hartrott, after making a fortune in Argentina, returns as a wealthy man to Germany, bringing along his wife and children and reestablishing ties with Imperial German society.
After Madariaga's death, Desnoyers becomes lord of his father-in-law's fortune.Returning to France with his wife and children, Julio and Chichi, he acquires a castle by the river Marne as well as other several properties in Paris.Julio, his son, is a careless youth whose life is full of exciting sensuality.Young, beautiful and rich, Julio becomes a brilliant and sought-after tango dancer and seduces the beautiful and young bourgeois, Margarite Laurier, who is married to an eminent industrial engineer.
In typical romantic novels from the nineteenth century that involve a married woman and her younger lover, the heroine would end up victimized by the evil caused by society.Ibáñez treats this question differently from those novelists, who explored themes of money, social class and politics.In Ibáñez's novel, as Peter Gay notes, all of the characters fall victim to love.And the love lived seems to have been transient, shocking the bourgeois family structure.Desnoyers and Marguerite love each other, and this tragedy lasts throughout the narrative to its end, when the hero dies and the woman is saved.
On the eve of conflict, Julio Desnoyers travels from Argentina to Europe on board a steamboat, where he has for company a happy and noisy group of Germans.In their interactions, they seem friendly and complacent, although their condescending and superior attitude irritates Julio.Provoked by his questioners-and because the last name of "Desnoyers" indicates his French identity-he calls himself an Argentinian, but he fails to convince his counterparts of his nationality; for them, "Desnoyers" is French, and they are German.Julio's name negates his connection to a land that, even if it is not his native country, is the cradle of the values that are dear to him.Among the questioners is a happy German trader whose pudgy wife feels attracted by the Latin masculinity of the Franco-Argentinian.The encounter emerges as a premonition of tragedy because, at the end of the narrative, Julio, attached to a French infantry regiment, overruns a German trench where he kills an enemy army officer whom he recognizes as the sympathetic trader.
The civil and fratricidal nature of the war is suggested by the visit of his cousin, son of Karl Hartrott, a young academic Julius Hartrott, pays to his cousin, Julio Desnoyers, in Paris.They meet in the atelier of the émigré Spaniard Argensola, a dedicated friend.The conversation between the three of them is an ideological one because although Hartrott, after declaring his love for France, notes that it is a lovely and beautiful country, he nonetheless insists that it is inhabited by a childish and reckless people.This condescending posture irritates Julio and Argensola as a type of Nordic censorship of Latin vitality and spontaneity.
The racist and historicist characteristics of Julius Hartrott show the tension that imbues the discursive debate between the national states.Such a trend, of drawing the hidden lines on the map of Europe that predated Imperial Rome, was very popular in the last decades of the nineteenth century.Richard J. Evans argues that some historians mystify the origins of National Socialism while making an archeology of German culture.From their point of view, men of the caliber of a Herder or Luther would be the foundations of this German mentality, which is fixed in the origins of National Socialism.Evans maintains that, conversely, Herder and Luther showed sympathy for others' nationalities, preaching tolerance and free will and non-blind obedience to power (Evans XXV).
Hartrott considers himself a representative of the virile Germania that rebuffed Rome.Julio Desnoyers, whose first name is Roman, represents the effeminate France under the guardianship of Rome, while the Spanish Argensola represents nothing more than a Celt equally servile to Rome.After advising them about the future, the professor Julius Hartrott returns to his own Germany.However, his mother, who is Marcelo Desnoyer's sister-in-law and Julio and Chichi's aunt, misses the train to Berlin.With the borders closed because of the war, she must stay with the Desnoyers in France for almost its entire duration.She fights constantly with Chichi and Marcelo, they being ardently French and she being passionately pro-German.

Conclusions: The Four Horsemen and the War
The novel is divided in two parts.The first precedes the conflict and explains the origin of the families whose children fight in the war.The second centers on the war itself, from its beginnings until the creation of the first trenches.In the book's first part, the characters and the cultural scenarios are delineated, leading us toward the notion of civil war between Europeans.The French and the Germans, born from the same stock, collide in the last decades of the nineteenth century, in the imperialist race.Bismarck-a complex and contradictory figure, full of prejudiced rigidity and excessive pride in exercising command over the German Empire-is as much French as German and as much modern as traditional and conservative-like most of Europe, he remained monarchical, nobiliarchic and agrarian (Mayer, 1981, p. 130).On the other hand, Andrew Evans, reinforcing Ibáñez's prediction, notes that only fifty years separate Bismarck's legacy from the ascension of Nazism (2010, p. 2).
The writing, which until here is soft, colorful and even anecdotal, when the second part of the novel begins, acquires the dramatic tone of the apocalypse that begins in August 1914.Using impressions derived from personal testimonies and balanced by his own memories, the author composes scenes of remarkable strength.One of them is the moment when Julio Desnoyers encounters Argensola.To this meeting, a mysterious neighbor of Argensola is added, a quite mystical Russian socialist, an émigré named Tchernoff, whom Arthur Day considers to be one of Ibáñez's most instigative characters (Day & Knowlton, 1972, p. 95).With a hallucinatory and mystical forcefulness, Tchernoff describes the present as the time for the arrival of the beast and of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, each one with an aspect most horrible than the last (Debauche, 1997, p. 168).
In the book's second part, after the outbreak of hostilities, the narrative takes place in Paris, where a mass of citizens moves to the train stations in obedience to the general mobilization order.In Ibáñez's creation of an assemblage of deployed soldiers, there appear different and antagonistic elements, such as the anarchistic worker, who employs his antibourgeois speech, desirous to avenge social exploitation.His speech reaffirms the idea that, in the army, everyone is equal, from the bourgeois to the proletarian.Wearing the same uniform, they share the same bread.
When Marguerite accompanies her brother, also mobilized, to the train station, she sees her former husband in uniform.This encounter, along with the outbreak of the conflict, causes a huge transformation in Marguerite, who refuses to sleep with her lover, turning instead to her husband, the engineer Laurier, who has been commissioned as an officer.Leaving her frivolous love, she becomes a dedicated nurse.Uniformed, she takes care of the crowd of wounded soldiers in an attempt to repent for her transgressions and to ease her feelings of guilt.
With the commencement of the war, worried patriarch Marcelo Desnoyers leads his family to safety in the seaside town of Biarritz.He then returns to Paris, from which he moves to his castle on the river Marne.The writing becomes tense, describing with vividness and color the shock experienced by a peaceful French village ruled by the mayor and by the priest, which are them, engulfed in war.Retreating from the German advance, regiments and French ordnance pass through the village and over the nearby bridge.Finally, the flow is reduced until the only individuals in transit are the laggards, who build a barricade on the road.From the barricade, they open fire on a German cavalry patrol and then leave.Soon, the first German offensive troops appear on the horizon.As the soldiers who fired have gone, the conquerors attribute the shooting to the actions of franc-tireurs hidden in the village.They decide to punish it and targeting it with artillery fire.When the German infantry enters the village, engaging in an orgy of death, shootings and depredations.Legally, the village is what the German military designates an ettapengebeit, or an area of temporary rest during troop movements.Having abolished French law and suppressed republican authority, power is solely German and essentially military.French civilians are required to unconditionally obey the German occupying force (Chockering, 2014, p. 86).The invaders use the castle to host a bigger contingent, forcing Desnoyers to live in close quarters with the Germans and their brutal shifts in mood.At a certain point, your younger nephew, Otto von Hartrott, now a "vigorous captain" in the high command staff, appears along with his general.There is a tense dialogue between them because, while Desnoyers disapproves of the bombing of the village, the general argues that its destruction-the shooting, the fire, the withdrawal from the castle-was for a purpose greater than them, mere German soldiers.He mechanically repeats, "What do you want?It's war.We have to be brutal to shorten it" (1933, p. 261).
Another German officer appears and seems to be moved for the situation experienced by D. Marcelo Desnoyers, and who talks about his family in Germany, and deplores the miseries suffered in France.Desnoyers finds him sympathetic until, as he withdraws from the castle, the officer, once kindly, acts brutally like as any other soldier who wears the German imperial uniform.In the novel, Ibáñez writes of a modern industrial war that utilizes aircraft and telephone communication among military units.Propaganda also seduces with its hide-and-seek games, although in Ibáñez's narrative, the misuse of it appears only on the German side.In this regard, Harold F. Laswell, in his already classic work, emphasizes the importance of the propaganda machine built by both sides.It was intended to deceive, seduce and drive people into a momentary blindness to reason by demonizing the opponent (1927, p. 3).The construction of the truth and its dissemination to a country's population became a skillful game of convincing, of always demonstrating that the opposing nation was a sanguinary aggressor.
Robert Graves wrote that, in the UK, it was necessary, so that the war could continue in its savagery, "to make the English hate the Germans as they never hated anyone before" (Knightley, 2004, p. 110).
Thus, when the French advance on the Marne, German propaganda affirms that their troops are withdrawing to regroup.In places where there is a small retreat, the French move forward with a bang, proclaiming victory.The Germans argue that this is a lie hiding a non-existent offensive.As Laswell notes, this technique may have a boomerang effect as message reception can be contradictory, by virtue of the historical and political background of the listeners.For example, Laswell remembers that, when Belgian shooters who might have been civilians fired against the German troops invading their country, Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941) sent a vehement protest to United States President Woodrow Wilson (1856Wilson ( -1924)).Outraged, the Kaiser contended that what had happened had broken the law and the conventions of war.However, this Belgian initiative, considered criminal by the Germans, evoked admiration on the part of the American public who, remembering their own revolution, applauded the patriotic gesture of the Belgian marksmen (Laswell,. In Ibáñez's narrative, when the French Army soldiers of General Joffre (1852-1931) stop the German offensive, the castle ceases to be a stronghold and is converted into a hospital for the German campaign.However, the doctors and nurses, in their immaculate uniforms, exhibit the same brutal behavior as the invaders.The castle garden turns into a cemetery for the dead and their amputated limbs.
At this moment, the order of the conflict inverts spectacularly.The offensive triggered by General Joffre causes the Germans to retreat.Situated on the front line, Desnoyers's castle is destroyed by the shelling of the French artillery.Leaving his ruined property and the demolished village, Don Marcelo Desnoyers returns to Paris.He is informed there that his son, Julio, has joined the French army, which is what Desnoyers avoided in 1870.Chichi's fiancée, Renée, is the son of the Senator Lacour; he has been promoted to the rank of adjudant and assigned to the front line of battle.
Using his influence, Senator Lacour obtains permission from the army to visit his son at the front, taking with him D. Marcelo Desnoyers, who is disguised as a personal secretary.Both parents locate their sons, Renée and Julio, in the middle of the battlefield.Upon entering the area that Michel Goya called "the killing zone", they walk around the front line, which consists of miles of destruction with no living beings or vegetation.In a land turned upside down, filled with disgusting smells and the smoke of fires and gunpowder, soldiers hide and learn how to move in a hell where engagements are made at long distances (2012, pp. 304-305).Ibáñez provides us with an extensive description of the path taken by the parents-a tortuous zigzag across muddy ground on which they spend a considerable amount of time crossing hundreds of meters-as well as the characteristics of the men and the destruction of the trenches.After finding their sons in a moving reunion, they learn that Renée and Julio no longer belong to them; they belong to the French army.
The recommencement of battle surprises both fathers and sons.The artillery appears in all its glory and lethality as weapons that have surpassed what Michel Goya termed "mutations of the artillery" (2012, pp. 291-292).Desnoyers stands by the drums and witnesses the following: The vertiginous fire, and the detonations were confused, as a series of dots combined, composing a compact line (…) the air was carried with acrid odors, pungent, beastly, intoxicating.The smell of the explosive comes to the brain through the mouth, the ears, and the eyes.We're experiencing the same exaltation, me, the generals that were yelling and dashing in the middle of the artillery thunder (…) Exalted by this deadly activity, intoxicated by the destructive celerity, submitted to vertigo of the red hours, Lacour and Desnoyers found themselves, suddenly, waving their hats, moving up and down like they're dancing the sacred dance of death, yelling with a dry mouth by the powder steam, Hooray, Hooray!" The French Colonel Michel Goya, writing about the inebriation that overtook the combatants in a 1917 French offensive, stands in front of the "preparation of artillery foregoing the assault in which we will take part.The hundreds of cannons thundered, composing a more maddening concert that all the bugles of the world.Their frenzy exceeded anything we have imagined [...] their fury wins, what we raised launches us forward" (2014, p. 153).
The senator and Desnoyers quickly leave the front line and return to Paris.Sometime later, Julio becomes a hero by capturing an enemy trench, where he kills a German officer.For this act, he is awarded the Médaille Militaire.The man he killed was the friendly bourgeois he met on the ship from Argentina to France.This happy man's wife, a young and pudgy woman, had flirted with a beautiful Latin boy in another time, in another place.Promoted to alférez, Julio gets permission to go to Paris.There, he visits his family and Argensola, who surround the quiet young soldier with care and affection.
Meanwhile, Desnoyers brags about his son's "act of bravery" to everyone and asks Julio to relate the story.However, Julio, no matter how hard he tries, is unable to describe it.He has "grown silent" as have other soldiers who have returned from the battlefield (Benjamin, 2006, p. 362).When the young man goes out with Argensolato have fun, he is not looking for an attractive lady.He would rather watch popular plays in a music hall or visit a cinema in fashionable Paris.After this, he returns to the front while his family descends into anguish at the expectation that combat will commence.At the end of the novel, with the Battle of the Marne River just ending and trench warfare beginning, a red sunset in Paris suggests to the three partners, the two Spanish and the Russian, that the beast of the apocalypse has died.However, the Russian painter, trained in the mysticism of the Orthodox Church, states that the beast is only wounded and can return in about thirty or forty years.It is as if Ibáñezis prophesying the outbreak of World War II, which originated from the Great War, which was rooted in turn in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.This is, curiously, the thesis handcuffed by the authors of the documentary The Lost Legions of Varus (2001), directed by Tony Bulley.The Roman defeat in the Teutoburg forest in 9 A.D. divided Europe in two and is at the root of the world wars.This is the central idea of the documentary which, after discussing the role of the hero Harminius, or Hermann, in the defeat of Varus, shows how German nationalism in his origins is positioned in humble bases of localism, and non-European conception.
Sometime later, the characters are informed that Renée, the senator's son and Chichi's fiancée, is hurt.The engaged couple, defying prejudice, decides to get married and live in a mansion located on Victor Hugo Avenue.Marguerite is now pregnant from her blind husband.When she walks in Paris, she wears black because of her brother's death.
To complete the drama, Desnoyers's sister-in-law, by means of a suspicious people, obtains an American passport, which allows her to travel through Switzerland to Germany.There, she is informed of the death of her two sons, of Karl, the state officer with the rank of major, and of her daughter's fiancée.She sends this tragic news by letter to her sister Luisa who, putting patriotic differences aside, feels sorrow for the loss.
Desnoyers's family receives dismaying news of Julio's heroic death and travels to visit the grave, located on the battlefield.After an erratic pilgrimage, they spend the night in a small town near the frontline.During this time, Renée locates the position of Julio's regiment on a map.In order to find the tomb, he travels through the wreckage of the region, passing peasants who insist on plowing ground full of explosives and dead bodies.Finally, Chichi, after crying over her dead brother, turns to face her husband, whom she kisses lasciviously while the wind highlights her voluptuous curves through her clothes.
Despite the carnage, the right of human reproduction conquers all.Sexual practice stops being the furtive pursuit of lovers and becomes instead a force inside of the sacred bond of matrimony.Desnoyers, thanks to the Great War, sees the meat he was producing in far-away Argentina reach unbelievable prices.While the tragedy in Europe was occurring, his profits from such commodities were astronomic.The controversial French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961), in his novel Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), where he recounts his experience in Paris during the years of World War I, presents the Argentines as fun men who are appreciative of easy-going women.It also suggests that some, like Desnoyers, made a fortune with the meat they sold in the difficult times of war shortages (Céline, pp.76-77).
The Four Horsemen seems, to our judgment, to end a cycle of moralism that marked nineteenth-century literature, but until its end, as Peter Gay suggests, moralism is sustained by authors like Baudelaire, Proust, Queirós and others (1986).Wartime authors, such as Ibáñez, reflect upon the rapid change of values in love triangles that are full of sensuality.But for other modern authors (especially English-speaking ones like Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Virginia Woolf), loves other than the triangular take on a major role.Marguerite and Julio reflect modern sensibilities in their hurried approach to life, their immediacy and their practicality.Julio is a chauvinist; when he is with his beautiful lover, his only desire is to own her.Marguerite, although on her husband's side, still desires Julio.She holds true to herself and decides to give him up voluntarily.This shock between carnality and lamentation for loss is the victory of life overcoming death.War narratives are sexual stimulants because, as pointed out by Georgia E. Brown, the poetry of classic war narratives, like The Iliad, is exciting.It dramatizes sex and the competition for life and the ambiguity and contradictions of existence at the forefront of the fight between life and death (2004, p. 43).Weapon narratives, death and injuries are like a celebration of life, and The Iliad illustrates the splendor of physical existence.This is similar to Hemingway's famous book For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is about war and the loss of love, a lover and humanity but is, essentially, a love story (Meredith, 2004, p. 3).

Discussion: Ibáñez's Writing on War: A Novel between Reception and the Cinema
At the beginning of the Great War, Ibáñez started to write a monumental journalistic chronicle about the ongoing world war, divided into multiple volumes, that the British newspaper The Times published in the spring of 1915 as The Times History of the War (Knightley, 2004, p. 98).Later titled Crónica de la Guerra Europea 1914Europea -1918 (Chronicle of the European War), Ibáñez's work was forgotten until recently, when it was found by accident in a Spanish provincial library.According to its finder, the Spanish intellectual José Maria Lechado (2014), the reason for this disappearance was the libertarian position and militant anti-German sentiment of the work, which caused Spanish dictator Francisco Franco to forbid its circulation in 1940.In addition to being a Germanophile, Franco did not want to spurn his German allies (http://www.esferalibros.com/libro/cronica-de-la-guerra-europea-1914-1918/).
The Four Horsemen was written by Ibáñez at the request of President Alexandre Poincaré (1860Poincaré ( -1934)), who paid the author to serve as a witness to the war.The episode in the book that portrays the visit of D. Marcelo Desnoyers and the senator to the frontline evokes the personal intervention of the French president for the book's author; after negotiating with heads of state, the president obtained for Ibáñez a special military permission that authorized him to visit the battle lines, where Ibáñez witnessed the misery and the pain caused by modern war.Preceding Erich Maria Remarque's short novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), The Four Horsemen' sending is a painful awakening to the sad reality of war and to a troubled peace.Ibáñez's novel anticipates the language of loss as did another work of 1916, Le Feu (Under Fire), written by Henri Barbousse.That novel, one of the first and most influential to describe the war, sold approximately 200,000 copies.Many of the fictional soldiers of Barbousse also found it enormously difficult to recount their experiences in war, as happened to the real soldiers.

Final Considerations
Ibáñez's work has largely disappeared from the annals of contemporary literature.Elena Lamberti and Vita Fortunati, summarizing World War I literature in their book, did not include Ibáñez when discussing the "anti-rhetorical novels published towards the end of 1920 in various national contexts" (2009, p. 13).Why would an author's being non-belligerent or Spanish make a book seem too rhetorical or disjointed?
Another question refers to the so-called best seller's category in the U.S., which is associated with the fabrication of mass-market books, easy reading and lucrative sales (Day, 1972, p. 36).With respect to a dated book, mass-market publication can contribute to the subsequent dimming of the work's luster.
On the other hand, Peter Gay provides an interesting clue based on the notion that, when living in a period of massive suffering, a reader's reception of a text is different.When analyzing the beautiful and dynamic diary of the American Civil War written by Mary Chestnut (1823-1886), Gay recalls that the author, in her native South Carolina, was keeping up with British and French Romanesque productions.However, around 1864, with the war almost finished and the Confederates on the brink of disaster, the author decided to read comedies instead of tragedies.
As a narrative about the European war, The Four Horsemen brought to American readers the opportunity to experience the conflict in the safety of their own homes.The novel enjoyed huge popularity in a country eager to read anti-German stories about the war.The nascent cinema industry, in its turn, soon realized the powerful imagery contained in Ibáñez's work.As Debauche notes, the film brought the story to the screen three years after the war and was very well received (126).It played for five weeks in New York theaters despite being deemed extravagant by Thomas J. Saunders (Dibbets & Hogenkamp, 1995).
Since before the war, modern and urban sensibilities demanded a cinematic experience that would conform to their expectations.Audiences started to require that the movies contain the sensation of physical danger combined with perceptible technical spectacle.Thus, films began to throw around explosions, impacts, rescues and high-speed effects.As Ben Singer has written, besides its connection with the vanguard and aside from crime, the sensational in the movies, with the taste of melodrama, indicated the sensationalistic turn that was guiding the intensification of popular fun.This turn corresponded with new levels of meaning that involved the culture of modern life (Charney & Schwartz,n.d.,. Finally, Ibáñez started to write in Hollywood during a period in which the cinematic industry was consolidating a national system of distribution (Debauche, 1997, p. 4).Sangre y arena (Blood and Sand), another great success in terms of its sales and cinematic adaptation, did not overshadow the strength and protagonism found in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.This demonstrates that, in 1915, the year in which it was written, both war and human lives were, more often than not, interconnected.