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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Jules Romains: Destruction of war itself, its deletion from the pages of history
Jules Romains: Fraternization versus fratricide, the forbidden subject of peace
Jules Romains: Romantic view of war played a dirty trick on the warriors
Jules Romains: War means a golden age for the munitions makers
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Jules Romains
From Verdun: The Prelude (1938)
Translated by Gerard Hopkins
Indeed, since its very beginning this war had caught up in its toils such huge masses of men and material that it was almost inevitably fated to become universal. The whirlpool which it had set in motion exercised a force of attraction that was irresistible…
But this war was fated to become universal in another sense as well. From its very first days it had shown that it was not an affair of the specialists in one field alone, of the professional soldiers. It had enlisted in its service a vast quantity of human activities; little by little it left none unused. Here, too, one thing led to another, and the close bonds that had united them in peace were only made firmer by the necessities of war. War under modern conditions has need of everything that man produces, of everything he can manage to produce, though its avowed end is nothing but destruction. Even the activities of pure thought are mobilized. God was called to play His part, not as a judge between the opposing causes, but as a supporter and champion of both sides alike, to the extent of taking a hand Himself in the carnage.
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A war of attrition. The very word was a horror. The idea it embodied was enough to frighten the bravest. Until then it had entered men’s thoughts, if at all, superficially and with a certain furtive shame. But now it must be looked squarely in the face. Until then no one had been willing to admit that the war might go on indefinitely, still less to consider what would happen if it did…
But a war of attrition! The very thought tears the guts out of a man. It means thinking of the enemy opposite as a dense layer of “millions of soldiers.” No good now breaking through at a single point. The whole front has to be nibbled through. Before anything else can be done, there must be complete certainty that it has nowhere retained its thickness, that it has become tenuous as a sheet of paper. It must be filed thin, scraped, worn down, must become no more than a wood shaving made up of “millions of men,” dead men, mutilated men, men turned into so much sawdust. To produce such an effect will be the work of months, demanding the patience of a saint. If it is done at all it will only be to the ceaseless accompaniment of bloodshed…
Unfortunately, attrition demands tools, and the tools are bodies. Continuous work exhausts the tools. How quickly? That is the whole question, but it is serious enough, in all conscience.
At Chantilly, No. 1 Bureau of General Headquarters works over the casualty lists rendered by the formations. It works out that during the first four months of the war the average of wastage has been at the rate of a hundred and eighty thousand men a month. To be sure, such a figure may be regarded as slightly abnormal, including as it does the losses incurred in the early battles when the war was still a war of movement, and the casualties consequently high…It is only the later figures that are really significant. A hundred and forty five thousand a month for the first half of 1915. That makes a solid basis for calculation, working out at five thousand men a day, just about the total provided by a town the size of Poitiers on mobilization, twice the town of Maçon, four times the total of ordinary little prefectures like Guéret, Gap, Mende, or Draguigan. In other words, merely to feed the war machine on the French side alone, means must be found of shovelling in one whole Poitiers every twenty-four hours, a Maçon every morning and every evening, a Guéret or a Draguigan four times a day. Drop below that figure and the engine will begin to knock…The minimum actual wastage on which intelligent anticipation can be based is not much more than three thousand men a day, considerably over a million a year – that “million” which, simply regarded as a number, has changed the whole art of war…
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