Jules Romains: Communion of saints opposing war’s mutual massacre, human sacrifice

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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

Since leaving the track they had originally taken for one solitary path after another, they had come across considerably less traffic. How odd it had been – when one could shake off one’s weariness enough to think over what had passed before one’s eyes – that movement of ghosts, many of them so much blood-stained baggage, across the snow, through the woods and valleys, under a diffused and ghostlike radiance; a veiled and waning moon, flickering will-o’-the-wisps, falling stars, and signs and portents in the heavens. A true setting this for processions in the darkness and crimes at dead of night, for secret plottings of a massacre, for the coming and going of wizards and witches on their way to some great meeting in the forest; a little, too, for the vigil and the orgy in the dawn of the Last Day. This war was a thing of glooms and shadows, own brother to Walpurgis Night and the witches’ Sabbath.

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Jerphanion hesitated a moment; then he said: “And your views are still the same as those you expressed, do you remember, in one of the letters you wrote me? – that it’s important there should be a sprinkling here and there of men like you, men who refuse, as far as possible, to get mixed up in the ‘universal crime’? You think it makes a difference, however small?”

Jallez did not respond at once. He weighed his words before uttering them.

“In my heart of hearts, as you may guess, I go a great deal further than that. If one could bring it about that millions of men on both sides should refuse to get mixed up in ‘the universal crime,’ then I should agree with you that the ‘sprinkling’ was not worth bothering about, was a mere childish makeshift. But in the absence of those millions, it is still worth while to give one’s mite to the cause of saving, if only symbolically, the dignity of man, the invisible seed-ground of the future…of that future about which you have become so sceptical. I am convinced that at all periods of the world’s history, particularly in the blackest, this role played by a handful – no matter how small – has been inestimably precious, yes, necessary; far more necessary than the other duties called for by the times. When, for example, human sacrifices were the common rule, I believe that those who managed not to take part in the feast, not to take their share of the body, their platterful of blood when the victim was parcelled out among the onlookers, were not working against the interests of humanity, were not out of sympathy with the future, were not without a value for the ages yet to come. I know that there have been times when you too thought along such lines…You know the dogma of the Communion of the Saints – a very lovely conception? While the barons and robbers of the Middle Ages at their height were pillaging, burning, and slaughtering, while the whole world was more or less given over to a career of mutual massacre, don’t you think that the men who shut themselves up in the remote monasteries in an effort to keep the hands of their fellow-men pure and undefiled were working for the salvation and the absolution of all? There’s no lack of people to do the rest of the world’s work – but for that particular duty there are few enough…There are priests, I know, who boast that they are sharing the dangers of the trenches…All the more reason, then, for a ‘sprinkling here and there’ to think of what is due to God…But enough of me and my concerns. I want to know how you’ve been getting on at Verdun. I’ve thought about you such a lot! I breathed so much more freely when I got your letter saying you were coming on leave. I do hope you’re not going back. Surely you’ve done enough…Naturally I don’t expect you to go into details. But, you see, there’s one thought in particular from which I can never get free, one thought that torments continually: How can human flesh and blood stand it? How can you, of all men, carry on?”