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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Jules Romains: Selections on war
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Jules Romains
From Verdun: The Prelude (1938)
Translated by Gerard Hopkins
I’ve noticed that the men are not content with having gained a familiarity with death which hardens them and renders them less susceptible to being shocked, if, indeed, shocked at all, at the idea of doing things that in the old days would have sickened them. Such an attitude is an inevitable result of the deadening effects of war on human sensibilities. But their moral deterioration goes much further than that. In many cases they seem actually relieved at being freed from the particular attitude of respect for human life in which most of them have been brought up. That is something quite different from a mere deadening of sensibility. It is an active satisfaction in loosening the bonds of sentiment, and it worries me very considerably…[They] derive a sort of gutter satisfaction from treating life and its manifestation in the bits and pieces of human beings like so much dirt…
The whole business reminds me vividly of the Middle Ages. We are rapidly taking on again the mental outlook of the Middle Ages: lack of reverence for the human carcass and for mere flesh whether living or dead; the very large part, on the other hand, which we accord, in our preoccupations, to this very flesh; the mocking unconcern which we show for those aspects of the human body which are most degrading, such as excreta, carrion, skeletons; the whole side of medieval consciousness which produced the danse macabre and found delight in setting charnel-houses, gargoyles, obscene bas-reliefs, and latrines in the shadow of the great cathedrals.
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We just let ourselves be swept along; the tide of danger picks us up and carries us with it. It will leave us high and dry precisely where it chooses and how it chooses; dead, mutilated, made prisoner, or even still living – not that that really settles anything.
This, is seems to me, is the one irreparable loss. It has taken civilization centuries of patient fumbling to teach men that life, their own and that of others, is something sacred. Well, it’s been so much work thrown away. We shan’t, you’ll see, get back to that attitude in a hurry.
For people like us, this particular disaster is but one aspect of a far more extensive disaster, from the effects of which I, for one, shall never recover. How can I explain what I mean without making the sceptics smile? (But you’re no sceptic.) Let me put it this way: Without subscribing to the cruder forms of the belief in progress, we did think – I hope you don’t mind my saying “we” – that the last few centuries of Western civilization had given to human nature an orientation, a culture, that, no matter how one viewed it from the point of view of metaphysics, had had certain very important practical results. If we anticipated a continuance of the process, we could not, I think, be accused of undue stupidity. But that’s a thing of the past. The anticipation, like everything else, has been swept away. My most haunting horror is not that I see men now willing to suffer and to act as they do, but that having so seen them, I shall never again be able to believe in their good intentions. Look at the thing how you will, it is now proved beyond power of contradiction that millions of men can tolerate, for an indefinite period and without spontaneously rising in revolt, an existence more terrible and more degraded than any that the numberless revolutions of history were held to have terminated for ever. They obey and they suffer as unquestioningly as the slaves and victims of the most bestial periods known to us.
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We know now that men can be made to do exactly anything – after a hundred years of democracy and eighteen centuries of the Christian faith. It’s all a question of finding the right means. If only we take enough trouble and go sufficiently slowly, we can make him kill his aged parents and eat them in a stew. I foresee appalling developments. We may live to witness the revival of human sacrifice.
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[We] have crossed the Rubicon. However short a time ago the attack began, the fact remains that our defences have been shattered, and we are now in a world where all these things are natural, simple, and, I repeat, only too much a matter of practical politics. It was on the 2nd of August 1914 that the real front was broken, the front held by civilization against barbarism.
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