No Words to Describe It
“I take no credit for any special courage in the field. If I was brave it was because I had to be so. We were all brave who kept our senses. We became accustomed to a large degree to the incessant intimacy with dangers and death. We could look at frightful things without wincing.”
He knows no word with which to describe war as he saw it. Hell is far too weak a word. “It is more horrible than the slaughter house, because the forms of death planned are more cruel, more mad, more devilish. We fight underground and under sea. We fight with fire, with steel, with lead, with poison, with burning oil, with gases. We are lower than the brutes, lower than the most degraded forms of life.... I am only Roméo Houle, a barber. But I have lived—God! I have lived. All the slaughter of heroes by the Meuse and on the Belgian border and in Northern France has passed before my eyes. And I, Roméo Houle, am forced to write this: ‘We cannot make ourselves better nor the world more worth while by killing each other like beasts gone mad.... I hope never to fight again.’”
And here is a final reflection of the soldier who confesses “I do not know why we fought.”
“No Archduke’s little life was worth the titanic butchery of the world war. The beginning was petty and small. And I, looking back at horror, horror, horror, cannot forget the extraordinary friendships we made with the men in the enemy’s trenches. We were both only human beings, after all, Fritz and I. We had no wish to kill each other. We had much rather sit at the same table, with our wives and children around us, and talk of gardens, of fair pictures, and of great books. But for our officers and the nations which they represented peace would have been declared right there in the trenches—and that by the soldiers themselves.”