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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Jules Romains: Fraternization versus fratricide, the forbidden subject of peace
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Jules Romains
From The Black Flag (1937)
Translated by Gerard Hopkins
Champcenais went into a book-shop on the boulevard des Italiens with which he had got into the habit of dealing regularly. Business was far from bad with him; in fact, the ease with which he was making money was a little disquieting. Without being a pessimist, he was not one of those people whom success makes careless of the future. There were special reasons why petroleum should be booming. The consumption of fuel was constantly increasing. But petroleum was now the least of his concerns. His chief activity lay in the manufacture of armaments, and results in that field were excellent. Every country in Europe was busy buying machine-guns, armour-plate, torpedoes, and shells…Conditions in the industry couldn’t be better. The chief producers all over Europe, though naturally out to attract custom to themselves, had come to a more or less definite arrangement to keep prices up, and even in some cases to share the available orders. The various governments, intent on getting quick delivery, were not disposed to haggle. Subsidies to newspapers and, in certain countries, bribes paid to politicians, officials, and army chiefs were having the effect of keeping discussion to a minimum. High wages had reduced labor troubles. Champcenais had even found that it was possible to buy the support of some trade-union leaders, provided it were done tactfully. “If only things go on like this it’ll be all right!” he reflected. He had never really wanted war, not even when it had seemed the only cure for social unrest. But now he was actually afraid of the possibility. Not that, viewed superficially, a war wouldn’t mean a golden age for the munitions-makers. But the war contained too large an unknown quantity to be viewed with complacence. A state of increasingly armed peace would be very much better. But he did not disguise from himself the fact that the game couldn’t go on indefinitely. Sooner or later the nations, faced with the alternative of war or bankruptcy, would choose war, if only to justify the sacrifices they had made to be prepared. He sometimes thought that if the manufacturers were really wise they would work for the convening of a new Hague Conference and the signing of a pact for the limitation of armaments. He had hinted as much to Zülpicher, who had taken the suggestion as an example of French humour and laughed in his face. But then Zülpicher believed that war was inevitable. According to him, they would be better employed, instead of uttering amusing paradoxes, in starting to work out means of dealing with the complex situation which was bound to arise, and not waiting until the conflict was on them, and improvising machinery at the last moment. They ought, for instance, to think out some way of ensuring unbroken communication between the industrialists of the warring countries; for some communication there would have to be if they were not to be embarrassed by a shortage of raw material, the awkward topographical situation of many of the factories, and the general complications resulting from hostilities.
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