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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
Now they preferred to conclude that if victory couldn’t be achieved in conditions which they, in their sterling good sense, had regarded as almost perfect, then it could never be achieved at all. There was no reason why this unnatural war should ever stop, or rather it will only stop when everybody, on both sides, had been killed, There was going to be another winter, that was obvious; but one winter more or less wouldn’t change matters. The soldiers were beginning to think that they were in for a life sentence. The end of the ordeal would come only with the end of their lives.
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Why had morale fallen to such a low pitch? Because the men felt that the lives of their comrades had been just thrown away wantonly (and who would say that they were wrong?); and also because they had lost all faith in the war’s ever ending (again, who would say that they were wrong?). Absurd, childish perhaps; yet not so absurd as might at first appear. What was much more absurd was the attempt to see this war in the light of arguments drawn from the lessons of earlier wars. All the wars of recent history of course had ended, had, as a matter of fact, been fairly short, including those of Napoleon. No doubt they had begun again almost at once, but they had ended. But the records of humanity did not hold memory of wars that had practically been endless, practically, that is to say, when reckoned by the scale of human life. If this war was going on in ten years’ time, it would, for those taking part in it, be to all intents and purposes eternal. Most of them would be dead. As to the rare survivors…well, the arguments in favour of a short war drawn from the deadliness of modern weapons, from considerations of economy and finance, had been shown to be worthless. After fifteen months of fighting didn’t the prospects of peace seem just as far off as they had done on the day of mobilization? The nations of Europe were so fast caught in the toils of war that they no longer knew how to break free. The only thing they thought about now was how they might involve the few countries that had so far remained outside.
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If he was to get any sleep at all, he must find a grain of moral comfort somewhere. He needed much more than the illusion of his own personal security. He must create for himself the further illusion that the world was somehow to remain habitable, that, in some way or other, it would be possible to come to turns with it. Otherwise the human spirit, shaken and torn to its ultimate depths, would simply refuse to provide the minimum of vitality which human beings require if they are to remain animate at all, if they are even to sleep, since the act of sleeping implies the willingness to face tomorrow and the days that are to follow, assumes a degree of confidence sufficient to force the sleeper into the effort required by renewed wakefulness.
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