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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
The event to which all this elaboration was leading up to would be a sort of combination of large-scale industry and sport. The battle was going to be a game based on material equipment comparable to that employed by great blast-furnaces and giant factories. A game in which the balls would be made of steel and and explosives and would weigh anything from from half a pound to half a ton; in which the teams would be composed of three hundred thousand men; in which scattered brains and torn guts in abundance would take the place of falls and sprained ankles…
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For once allow that this million [of deaths per year], by reason of its very elasticity, has imposed on warfare its seemingly impossible aspect, how can the wheels be reversed when numbers began to melt away like snow?
It is possible, of course, to go through the country with a small-tooth comb, to rout out the men with soft jobs at the depots and in the administrative services, lower the standards of the medical boards, diminish the number of non-combatants, call up and train the younger classes; in short, bring pressure to bear upon the civilian population in order to increase the number of front-line troops, of men capable of being killed – squeeze the country to its last drop. Unfortunately, such methods, when used on either side, soon reach the exhaustion point. The hope is that the enemy will reach its first, and it is always permissible to believe they will, short of conclusive evidence to the contrary. At any rate, the great thing is to kill as many of the “fellows opposite” as possible, even though to do so may serve no strategic end nor exploit any particular tactical theory. Just kill because the more dead there are, the fewer living will remain.
War of attrition carried to its maximum. Attrition of flesh and blood, but also of all that depends for its existence on flesh and blood, of all the work of men’s hands, of everything he has accumulated and made.
The economists had argued that the war must be short, because all their calculations had been worked out on a basis of real money. If there had been nothing but that to fall back on, the available funds would have been exhausted ages ago. But the peoples of Europe had learned how to keep the war going on a diet of fictitious gold, of something they called credit. Just as in the old romantic tales gamblers fumbling in their empty pockets would say suddenly: “Ah, there’s that ring of mine…that field…that house. Why shouldn’t I stake them?” so now the nations, even while ruin stared them in the face, realized that they were richer than they had ever guessed, and that, having turned all their real money into guns and shells, they could transform into paper wealth the soil, the forests, the houses, the harbours, the railways, the lighting system of their native land – and so produce still more guns and still more shells.
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