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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Jules Romains: Fraternization versus fratricide, the forbidden subject of peace
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
The “duration” began to be reckoned in ever increasing lengths of time; foundation stones were laid for buildings intended for war production; orders for munitions plants were given abroad – at first the machinery had to be made outside the country – much as trade agreements are signed for long-term deliveries; financial transactions were set on foot with the slow deliberation usual of the building up of political alliances or the plotting of international treacheries, the benefit of which will not be felt for several years, or in the methodical dissemination of ideas among distant peoples, which can lead to action only after much patient waiting. In this way, slowly and piecemeal, the whole world was gradually caught up in the chaos of war.
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The average soldier had, at first, been to a certain extent deceived, but not entirely. God knows he had had no love for war, but he had, to some extent, believed in it. Now he could no longer be in two minds about it. He could see that war was something positively evil, an enterprise of sheer stupidity. Its benefits were as nothing compared to its cost. Nothing in the world could be worth a war, unless it was the destruction of war itself, its suppression for ever, its deletion from the pages of history.
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The new method was tried in January in the Champagne. On a short length of the German trenches the High Command poured a hundred thousand shells in forty-eight hours. Meanwhile assembly trenches were dug close to the enemy front line. At the last moment, just as the assault troops were preparing to swarm over the parapet, a completely new device was employed – that of rolling, or drum, fire, a sudden acceleration of every battery engaged, on the point to be attacked. The object of this was to give to the few men remaining alive in the opposite trenches, the handful who had survived the rain of a hundred thousand shells, the impression that this time the very heavens were falling on their heads, that the world was collapsing upon them in a torment of flame, that a vast hand of earth and steel armed with a million clutching fingers was about to crush them finally, and that it would be sheer childish folly to try to escape this ultimate hurricane of death. The final convincing touch was given to the picture by the detonation of a number of mines which turned communication trenches, front line and parapet into one huge crater and hurled into the air fragments of dismembered men.
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These small-scale massacres set the men brooding. The more they thought the thing out, the more bitter did their reflections become: “The truth is they want to leave us lying out there; they want to get rid of us. That’s what’s really behind it.”
They could not help guessing too that the motive for much of this minor slaughter lay in the personal ambition of some local commander. It might be that a brigadier was impatient for a third star. In such a case he would not hesitate to argue that the capture of a strong-point would advance him with his friends at headquarters. Since he was not naturally cruel, he carefully avoided considering the fact that his promotion would be obtained at the cost of a hundred killed, eighty “missing,” and three hundred wounded. A divisional general’s expectations were pitched higher; a corps commander’s higher still. A strong-point would not be enough. The enterprise must be planned on a bigger scale – and so, too, the losses (but it didn’t do to think about that). Such a line of argument very soon came to envisage hundreds of yards of trenches and thousands of casualties.
But quite often these small-scale attacks owed their inspiration to General Headquarters itself, whence they filtered down the various degrees of the military hierarchy. Now, if General Headquarters wanted, quite naturally, to put a feather in its own cap, small local operations certainly would not do the trick. Nothing really was of any use short of a major offensive with a casualty list running into tens of thousands killed.
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