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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
Yes, the sewage was still fresh and living, fresh too the graveyard, and, in a sense, living too. Let but the mind dwell on the thought of it, and the smell, here faint, there dense and obsessive, became a permanent feature of the place. And it was difficult to remain detached where, at one point in the trench wall, a human hand stuck out, a thin sheath of blood and sticky flesh – the colour of black flies – that barely hid the bone beneath, projecting from a torn coat-sleeve.
The hand had been there during the battalion’s last stay in the sector, but then it had been an ordinary hand and of quite a different colour: whitish, like a dead and drooping flower. It was not a large object, but it was horribly suggestive. As one looked, one realized that the ploughshare turning up the mountainous rubbish-heap must have struck many such, and it was borne in on one that to walk here was like walking through the dense thickness of a vast pudding concocted of corpses.
The place appeared in the communiqués as the Butte de Vauquois.
Clanricard had a temperamental dislike of exaggeration. His imagination was mild. He was not one of those men who, the better to face a hideous site, conjure up in thought something three times as bad, finding in the exercise a certain comfort, since thus they are themselves the creators of what they fear. But neither was he of those who hide the truth behind the veil of foolish optimism and lying thoughts. Had the place been moderately depressing, Clanricard would have been perfectly contented (very little satisfied him) to regard it as moderately depressing. But the Butte de Vauquois was not moderately depressing. It was intolerable.
He had had experience – alas, too seldom! – of other sectors of the front. He had contemplated, with no weakening of his sense of indignation and of bitterness, the spectacle of a war which he would find no less hateful in ten years’ time than he did now, assuming that it lasted ten years and that he was there to see it. But what he said to himself was: “It is as hateful as only war can be. It is not easy to see how it could very well be less hateful.”
He was surprised sometime to find himself regarding with a certain equanimity this return of the human spirit to the primitive conditions of the early world. “Three hours of wakeful slumber in the open air, curled at the bottom of a hole smelling of earth and growing things. This sudden waking to a world of green leaves. This learning how to tell, from the call of birds, whether the clouds are messengers of rain or sun. This gathering of twigs to make a fire for coffee…”
On the other hand, this Butte! This heap of ruins stuffed with dead men’s bones!
Besides, there was no excuse. He knew, of course, the official version: “Strategic position of the greatest importance. Wide field of view over the surrounding country – all proved beyond doubt by the obstinacy with which the enemy has disputed its possession.”
Which, if it proved anything, proved only that the enemy was as idiotic as we were ourselves. The strategic argument might have been valid once, but not now. Both sides clung to the position, nose to nose. It could be of no conceivable value to either save a factory of death. If, by some miracle, and at the cost of enormous losses, one of the two adversaries should succeed in loosening the other’s hold upon it, the victory would be but fleeting. The Butte, swept by every battery within a radius of five miles, a famous target for all the gunners of the vicinity, would be smashed to pieces by shells of all imaginable sizes. As things were at present, it was to some extent protected by the very nearness of the enemy lines. The Germans thought twice before sending over heavy stuff which, as like as not, would fall among their own men. Mutual destruction was carried out as far as possible at short range. The two savage beasts, cooped in the same cage, confined their activities to killing one another with bombs, trench-mortars, and mines.
The sensible thing would have been for both sides to give up the place simultaneously and withdraw; by a tacit agreement to leave the cursed spot as neutral ground. The instrumentalists in this symphony of death would have welcomed such a decision, but the conductors had grown to regard the place as a symbol of prestige.
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