Verdun

[Knopf, $2.50]

Verdun is not the sort of occasional ‘war literature’ which so enraged and incensed the men in the trenches. Its publication at this time, when France is again at war, is accidental, but it is impossible to read these pages today without being obsessed by their timeliness, or perhaps their timelessness, by analogies and contrasts. ‘When I think of the thousands of men of good will for whom the whole thing has merely been adjourned, I am filled with great anger and tremendous pity,’ a friend wrote to me, upon completing Verdun. Anger and pity. I know of no better words to characterize Jules Romains’s own mood in these latest chapters of Men of Good Will.

‘There was no single brain capable of envisaging the war as a whole. . . . Even minds highly trained and well placed for observation could get but a sectional and indirect view. . . . The connection between these partial visions could be seen only by some watcher far removed from humanity.’ This total vision, which was impossible twenty-five years ago, the watcher Jules Romains, armed with both telescope and microscope, now approximates in the pages of his Verdun. It is not, as the American publisher’s jacket states, ‘a novel by the author of Men of Good Will,’ but rather a section of Men of Good Will, the still unfinished work defined by the author as a single novel of ‘unusual dimensions.’

Those men of good will, whom readers first glimpsed on the sixth of October, 1908, have not yet, in this eighth volume, attained the peace promised by the heavenly host, but are enmeshed, with the others, in war.

Drawn from all walks of life, they provide the partial views which enable Romains to present his ’unanimist’ vision of Verdun, the prelude and the battle. We see these events through the mind and eyes of Jerphanion, Clanricard, and Wazemmes in the front-line trenches, from the vantage point of the High Command at Chantilly, from Mme. Godorp’s salon, from the munitions factory where Edmond Maillecottin was employed, from Haverkamp’s grenade and shoe factories.

The quality of Romains’s writing is such that parts of his work can be enjoyed for themselves, like fragments of sculpture torn from a cathedral. ‘I have never believed that the magnitude of a whole or the breadth of a synthesis could render unnecessary an acute and infinitely accurate sense of detail’ — nowhere is this article of Romains’s literary creed better exemplified than in Verdun, where the habitat and habits of each individual are noted with a biologist’s scrupulousness, their conversations recorded with phonographic fidelity, and where variations in soil texture, smells, and sounds are all minutely differentiated. Such writing taxes to the utmost a translator’s skill: Gerard Hopkins has here achieved remarkably fine results. The chaotic mud of Vauquois and the hallucinating ’march down to Verdun in flames,’for example, are as vivid in their English version as in the original.

These images of the front, although only part of the whole picture, nevertheless dominate the pages of Verdun. Some ten years ago, in a work entitled Témoins, Jean Norton Cru examined the several hundred war diaries and other eyewitness accounts then published in France, conscientiously winnowing fact from fancy, and attempting to evaluate the authenticity of their testimony.

Jules Romains must have undertaken a somewhat similar labor, but he has done even more, by fusing this testimony into a single whole. A reviewer who has not personally experienced war, especially when he has Jerphanion’s scornful remarks on literary profiteers ringing in his ears, can hardly pass judgment on the authenticity of this synthesis. He can, however, point out that since the publication of these volumes in France, at the end of 1938, confirmation of their veracity has come from many different quarters.

Jules Romains has done for his readers what Jerphanion was able to do for his noncombatant friend Jallez — ’made the moment live again.’

HOWARD C. RICE