The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: World at War
Vincente Blasco Ibanez
(Independently published, March 26, 2020)
A Frenchman named Marcelo Desnoyers travels to Argentina in 1870, and he marries the elder daughter of Julio Madariaga, the owner of a ranch. Eventually Marcelo, his wife, and his children Julio and Chichi move back to France and live in a mansion in Paris. Julio turns out to be a spoiled, lazy young man who avoids commitments and flirts with a married woman named Marguerite Laurier.Meanwhile, Madariaga's younger daughter has married a German man named Karl Hartrott, and the Hartrotts move back to Germany. The Desnoyers family and the Hartrott family are thus set against each other with the onset of World War I. However, Julio Desnoyers initially shows no interest in the war, while Hartrott's family eagerly supports the German cause. It is only after Julio's lover, Marguerite, lavishes attention upon her husband after the latter is wounded in battle, that Julio is moved to participate in the war.While young Julio Desnoyers serves as a soldier, the aging Marcelo Desnoyers leaves the shelter and returns to his mansion, where he watches the German soldiers advance and eventually plunder his belongings and eat his food. At last the French soldiers push back the German soldiers, and Marcelo chooses to defend a German man who had earlier spared Marcelo's life.The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse (Spanish: Los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis) is a novel by the Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, first published in 1916, which tells a tangled tale of the French and German sons-in-law of an Argentinian land-owner who find themselves fighting on opposite sides in the First World War. Its 1918 English translation by Charlotte Brewster Jordan became the best-selling novel in the U.S in 1919 according to Publishers Weekly, who hailed it as "a superbly human story told by a genius". The novel was included in the list of 100 best novels of the twentieth century by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.The novel was made into a Hollywood film in 1921, starring Rudolf Valentino, and again in 1962. The 1962 film takes place during World War II, rather than World War I.Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (29 January 1867 – 28 January 1928) was a journalist, politician and best-selling Spanish novelist in various genres whose most widespread and lasting fame in the English-speaking world is from Hollywood films adapted from his works. He was born in Valencia. At university, he studied law and graduated in 1888 but never went into practice. He was more interested in politics, journalism and literature. He was a particular fan of Miguel de Cervantes.In politics he was a militant Republican partisan in his youth and founded a newspaper, El Pueblo (translated as The People) in his hometown. The newspaper aroused so much controversy that it was taken to court many times. In 1896, he was arrested and sentenced to a few months in prison. He made many enemies and was shot and almost killed in one dispute. The bullet was caught in the clasp of his belt. He had several stormy love affairs.He volunteered as the proofreader for the novel Noli Me Tangere, in which the Filipino patriot José Rizal expressed his contempt of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines. He travelled to Argentina in 1909 where two new cities, Nueva Valencia and Cervantes, were created. He gave conferences on historical events and Spanish literature. Tired and disgusted with government failures and inaction, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez moved to Paris at the beginning of World War I. When living in Paris, Ibáñez had been introduced to the poet and writer Robert W. Service by their mutual publisher Fisher Unwin, who asked Robert W. Service to act as an interpreter in the deal of a contract concerning Ibáñez.He was a supporter of the Allies in World War I.He died in Menton, France in 1928, the day before his 61st birthday, in the residence of Fontana Rosa (also named the House of Writers, dedicated to Miguel de Cervantes, Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac) that he built.