Jules Romains: Condign punishment for war profiteers and professional patriots

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Jules Romains: Selections on war

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Jules Romains
From Verdun: The Battle (1938)
Translated by Gerard Hopkins

“…If you were to ask me who it is we despise and hate the most, whom it would give us the greatest pleasure to punish, my answer would be: First of all, the war profiteers, business men of all kinds, and, with them, the professional patriots, the humbugs, the literary gents who dine each day in pyjamas and red leather slippers, off a dish of Boche. Why, only yesterday, I was reading an article on Verdun by that swine George Allory, on ‘the holocaust of Verdun’ – the ‘heroes of Verdun’! I needn’t quote it; you must know it all beforehand. I even started a letter to him, in which I rubbed his nose in his own beastly excrement, signing with my rank in full and a statement of my qualifications. But I tore it up. A letter is too tame a retort. Stuffed figures like that ought to be killed, stabbed to death with the bayonet, that bayonet which they celebrate so eloquently and christen ‘Rosalie’ with such a sickening parade of sentiment…Whom else should I mention? Certain ambitious generals, with hearts of stone, to whom the lives of thousands or tens of thousands mean nothing if, by sacrificing them, they can assure their own advancement or, moved by slightly less selfish motives, carry through pet schemes of their own…”

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Jallez said that, for the comfort of his soul, he would have liked to be able to regard the vast crowd of soldiers in their horizon blue as so many pitiable victims who not only had had to pay the price of all the political idiocies of peace-time, but were now forced in addition to endure silently all the kicks that came their way as a result of the no less blatant idiocies of war. But certain simple truths were only too obvious. Hadn’t all these soldiers been civilians once? And, as civilians, hadn’t they taken their share in applauding the asinine antics of a policy which had been directed solely to maintaining national prestige? Hadn’t they applauded Millerand’s army-pension scheme? Hadn’t they welcomed the advent of Poincaré to power? Hadn’t they shouted with the rest that Caillaux and Jaurès were in German pay? Hadn’t they, in their own fashion, and to the best of their ability, played a part in shaking the foundations of European peace? Was it for them to start whining now that the stones of the building were beginning to fall about their heads?

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While he negotiated the last crossing before reaching his home, lifting his pain toward the rainy sky already dark with approaching nightfall, he suddenly said to himself:

“If somebody asked you: ‘Would you really like the war to end tomorrow, would you really like it if the men at the front stopped killing one another with the shells that you are turning out, and all started to come home – if that meant that you would have to begin working at your old wage of ten or twelve francs a day…what would you say?”

He searched his conscience; then “I should say yes,” he thought.