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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
One of the most extraordinary things here in the trenches is the apparent inability of the soldier to imagine ant connexion between the tiny movement necessary to release a projectile – whether it’s a single bullet, a machine-gun belt, or a trench mortar shell – a movement that’s usually the result of sheer boredom or momentary nerves, and the effect caused at the other end of the trajectory in the shape of smashed heads or torn bodies. If he does let his imagination work, he certainly doesn’t apply the results to himself. The torn bodies, being Boche, seems to him about as important as partridges or rabbits. They never really put two and two together. If mankind in general could put two and two together, there’d be no more war.
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Gloomily brooding there in his dug-out, Jerphanion set himself to think out rationally what his men outside in the trenches were thinking in an access of despair. “The idea that a catastrophe cannot last for ever is a prejudice born of happy periods of peace. The shattering break-up of the Roman Empire went on indefinitely. We of the West know little of the history of China; but we find no difficulty in imagining the China of ancient days slowly dropping to pieces through two centuries of convulsive collapse. Our natural instincts are not revolted by the idea. If someone told us that modern China, torn by internal violence since the days of the Boxer risings, would not find peace again until the year 2000, should we be profoundly shocked? A catastrophe once started continues by dint of multiplying itself. A war of emperors and great standing armies becomes finally a war of generals and robber bands.”
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I cannot conceive how this war can possible turn out “well,” meaning by “well” something that our idealism could accept. Its main consequences, so far as I can see, will be something of this sort: Entry of the Tsar into Constantinople; or the unchallenged supremacy of Great Britain from Liverpool to Singapore. Nor does my egotism as a Frenchman see anything really comforting ahead. I know perfectly well that my country will be far too exhausted to impose its will on Europe, even assuming that will to be good. Meanwhile I see only too clearly what the positive results – I’m not speaking of intangible things – have so far been: a rich harvest of profiteers; a baseness of soul in people at the rear which leads them to find it perfectly natural that we should continue to act as a bulwark behind which they can carry on their filthy little lives, their filthy little activities of buying and selling. Nor am I forgetting what may be a comparatively unimportant detail, though to me it means a lot – the gutter stupidity of all those gentlemen of letters, those so-called intellectuals, whose words and attitudes are a constant insult to the spirit, to ordinary common sense, for any reasons we may have for continuing the struggle, to us who are continuing it. Never – and I can’t stress this too strongly – never shall I forget the feeling of shame that these oafs induce in me.
Add to all this the bestiality, the gloomy bestiality, into which this business has flung us so that it has become our daily food.
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