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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 Battle (1938)
Translated by Gerard Hopkins
Over the whole front, from the Bois d’Haumont to Herbebois, taking in the Bois des Caures and the Bois de Ville, to a depth of several kilometres, the same dance of dust, smoke, and debris went on, to a thunderous accompaniment of noise. Thousands of men, in groups of two, of three, of ten, sometimes of twenty, bent their backs to the storm, clinging together at the bottom of holes, most of which were no better than scratches in the ground, while many scarcely deserved the name of shelter at all. To their ears came the sound of solid earth rent and disembowelled by bursting shells. Through cracks in the walls that protected them they could breathe in the smell of a tormented world, a smell like that of a planet in the process of being reduced to ashes. Most of them had given up all hope of surviving, though a few still clung to a belief in their lucky star. These were the men who, as like as not, would be killed just as they thought it was all over. The rest were content to wonder whether the next shell, or, rather, one of the next dozen or so, since no one could count them individually, would send their number up and release them from this agony. Sooner or later, certainly before nightfall, they must be in for it.
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In the experience of both, it was one of those days, rarely seen in such perfection, when war seemed intent, before flinging them into its ultimate horrors, on displaying for their benefit its lesser, its secondary, abominations; on showing them that in addition to its power of destruction on a grand scale, which could at least produce a sort of intoxication of terror, it had in its gallery of “effects” a power of squalidly degrading everything that the civilization of mankind had created, a power that the human spirit seems capable of noting with a sort of calm and scornful reaction. War, in such circumstances, seemed bent on taking the spectator into the sordid wings, the back-stage of the show, bare of any and all illusion. This side of war was like the squalid suburbs of some great city, which are never shown to visitors; a world of filthy alleys, of shoddy plaster workshops, of rag-pickers’ huts, and swarming children with dirty legs and unwashed faces. War’s sordid slum.
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