Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Jules Romains
From Verdun: The Prelude (1938)
Translated by Gerard Hopkins
Other motives there were, however, which the authorities were less anxious to acknowledge – partly because they had a rather nasty smell of complicity between the opposing Commands; such, for instance, as a peace move having its origin in the ranks, not authorized from the top. This line of thought was apt to develop as follows: Suppose the gangrene set up by the fretting of the front lines were, unfortunately, to find a cure for itself; suppose the men in the trenches got used to long periods of quiet, to fewer and fewer risks, and, ultimately, to none at all, to hanging on resignedly and ingloriously in their mud-holes; suppose they got rid of the idea that “the fellow on the other side” was someone to be killed or to kill, began to think that, after all, he was just a poor devil like themselves; suppose a tacit understanding grew up to do as little damage as possible, to leave one another in peace; suppose, what would be far worse, that the two armies began to exchange jokes, to walk about between the lines, to fraternize. Such beginnings may have terrible results. The men, French and Germans in collaboration, might make some very awkward discoveries; might, in so many words, say to one another: “What are we doing here? Shouldn’t we all be better off if we just went home?”
Methods were found in the daily routine of trench life of neutralizing dangers of this kind. To prevent all those civilians in uniforms from sniffing around the forbidden subject of peace, to keep the two nations in a constant state of sore irritation, it was only necessary – without making any appeal to enthusiasm or heroism – to play on the individual’s craving for distraction, on his pride of skill, on his love of hunting, on his liking for adventure, or the fairly harmless schoolboy brutality that lurks in most of us. It was easy to find men to act as snipers – the job was popular – to pick off the first man who showed his head about the opposite parapet; to get volunteers to crawl out and lob a grenade into a listening-post, or to go on patrol with the object of capturing or killing a few sentries. Reprisals always followed, so there was no fear of the spirit of hostility dying down. Even if the feelings roused were no more than resentment at a neighbour’s dirty trick, if it could be exaggerated into “hatred of the enemy” only by voluble colonels addressing their troops, it was enough to prevent even the humblest private from falling into the error of confusing the “men opposite” with men in general.
But there were times when this daily course of blood-letting became a habit like any other – even wretched horses grow used to harness that irks them – and then recourse had to be made to small combined operations, which plunged all the men of a given formation into danger, into the corrosive bath of death, and had the added advantage of provoking large-scale reprisals. This was what General Headquarters on either side called “maintaining the offensive spirit of the troops.” But it was something that the troops themselves had the greatest difficulty in grasping. They insisted on seeing only the growing total of killed and wounded, the insignificance of the material gains. The survivors shrugged their shoulders when they heard that the Staff, telling over its modest rosary of losses, was boasting of having “nibbled” at the enemy positions. It never occurred to them – and no one had the courage to explain the simple fact – that they were nothing but a lot of animals trained to slaughter, and that those in command had got to treat them as such by employing quite simple means to revive a spirit of pugnacity; which, left to itself, would have been happy enough to go to sleep. Still less were they capable of understanding that the Staffs, having entered the war with a religious belief in the efficacy of the Offensive, felt themselves to be guilty of a lack of faith in sitting still and whining, and were constantly on guard against the temptation of proving false to their dogma. The Staffs were rather like professed Christians forced by circumstances to keep a check on their enthusiasm. But whenever they found it possible to do so, they offered to their God a little, almost furtive sacrifice, just to keep the principle alive while waiting for better times. Local attacks served as the pigeon whose throat is cut upon the altar of fortune to keep the idol in countenance until the time comes for the solemn immolation of the ox.
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