Vols. XV & XVI

VERDUN--Jules Remains--Knopf ($3).

Pettish critics have sometimes said that reading Jules Remains' serial novel, Men of Good Will, is like reading backfiles of French newspapers from Oct. 6, 1908. The New York Times's hardworking Critic Ralph Thompson once remarked in a fit of exasperation that Remains' "theory of fiction is almost intolerable." But The New Yorker's Clifton Fadiman has stuck to his opinion that Men of Good Will "is the Comedie Humaine of and for the 20th Century." Tired critics and trustful critics have divided over the question whether the finished job (in 27 volumes, as planned) will rank as one of the great novels of modern times or merely as the longest.

No ordinary installment is Verdun (Vol. 8 in the U. S. edition, Vols. XV and XVI in the French). With it, Remains comes to World War I. This is the event for which his unhurried previous volumes, his 400-odd characters, his encyclopedic portrayal of French pre-War society, have formed the deliberate prelude. The most popular volume so far in France it will almost certainly be just as widely read in the U. S. (where it is Book-of-the-Month choice for January). One reason: the subject. Another: as narrative it is simpler, faster, more sharply focused than its predecessors. Third and most important: it is a superbly good book.

All by itself Verdun will not resolve for good and all the questions about Remains' pattern and Remains' gifts. Many threads of narrative are left hanging in the past, many characters remain A. W. O. L. There are eleven volumes still to come. But all by itself Verdun makes clear Remains' distinction as a novelist, and it is considerable. It lies in the fact that he has been able to fuse the detachment of a social historian with the vision of a creative artist. From a formal standpoint Verdun proves him at least the equal of any modern writer who has employed the same method.

Romains' countryman, Andre Malraux, achieved in Man's Fate (1934), a story of the 1927 Chinese civil war, a more vivid and at times more exalted work of dramatic craftsmanship than Verdun. But Malraux was working within far narrower limits, in what physicists by analogy might call a closed field--more exotic, more melodramatic, less austere than Romains'. John Dos Passes' ambitious trilogy of pre-War to post-War U. S. A. appears nearer to Romains' in scope, but his great powers of narrative and evocation are spent on a host of minor characters, his structure weakened by journalistic sketches and personal asides, his style a brilliant feat of skating fast over thin ice.

Probably no modern work of history or fiction ranks as such a thorough, lucid, conclusive payoff on war as Verdun. This it is, not through a mere presentation of the sickening personal truth of "combat" (Remarque) nor through scorn and excitement crystallized in art (Hemingway), but through a grownup, sympathetic intelligence. If Romains goes on so, he will have given the first grand perspective on war since War and Peace.

Prelude. The first (precise) half of Verdun is a Prelude and opens with a leisurely description of the Western Front and its strategy in 1915, done in a dispassionate tone between solemnity and irony. "The two High Commands had taken the field with a whole dossier of formulas guaranteed to be infallible by such experts as Napoleon or Moltke and perfected by generations of professors in the military art. All this printed accumulation of tactical genius, which ought to have ensured victory in three weeks, turned out to be no less productive of almost immediate defeat -- though not car ried to extremes, and, on the whole, pretty equally divided between the combatants. . . . With genuine compunction [the High Command] reckoned its misdeeds, and each day urged itself to greater efforts. . . ."

It was discovered that, once dug in, the opposing armies were remarkably hard to penetrate; but after each foozled attack the respective High Commands merely concluded that the next one would have to mass still more men, concentrate still more artillery fire. Thus dryly at first, in terms of headquarters thinking, Romains begins to prepare the reader for the terrific attack that is to come. His camera is still high enough to take in the whole front: "a continuous scratch over which [the troops] formed like a scab and at every point of which they faced the opposing lines with a ceaseless crackling of fire, a lethal trembling, as though something tormented, burning, and unapproachable had become installed as a natural feature of the landscape." The camera narrows to young Jerphanion, who first appeared in the first vol ume as a sensitive, acute, idealistic student arriving in Paris to attend the Normal School. Jerphanion, as a second lieu tenant, returns from leave in Paris. He renews his acquaintance with the trans forming fact of trench fear. He and his sardonic pal Fabre get relief in a joke, adapted from an article by Foch. Jerphanion asks Fabre what he thinks will happen that winter. Fabre clenches his fist. "This," he says, "that when the time comes, we shall charge the foe and let cold steel decide." Then they go off into gales of laughter.

Romains next provides a piece of war realism that belongs with the most gagging examples: a description of a trench on an other sector of the front, cut through a graveyard on a hill smashed and harrowed into a corpsy pudding by gunfire. The next chapter is a letter from Jerphanion to his wife in which he tells her of the rumor that G. H. Q. is about to form "shock troop" battalions, of his canny hope of getting a job in the rear as an instructor. The camera now turns to General Duroure, who is about to take his regular morning horse back ride.

Punctual, enthusiastic, pompous, slightly mischievous, Duroure has taken a new lease on life since the war began. He had been only a colonel near retirement age. "What wonderful luck," he thinks, to have been at the very age -- between 50 and 65 -- at which generals are made. Now he wants an Army Corps. Backed by the dubious Gurau, the rising radical young Deputy who in a previous volume subtly sold out to the oil interests and is now a cabinet minister, Duroure entertains two visiting deputies by provoking an artillery duel which goes wrong, nearly turns his little party into a wake.

To his old friend, the philosopher Jallez, Jerphanion writes: "It has taken civilization centuries of patient fumbling to teach men that life, their own and that of others, is something sacred. Well, it's been so much work thrown away. We shan't, you'll see, get back to that attitude in a hurry."

The Focus appears almost casually as Gallieni, the sharp, sickly Minister of War, sends Gurau to drop a word to the Commander in Chief about the weak de fences at Verdun, so far an inactive part of the front. Gurau is charmed by the apple-cheeked, comfortable Joffre, reassured at lunch but beset by doubts later. The French Intelligence has positive proof that the Germans plan no offensive at Verdun: they have prepared enormous dug outs there but no assault trenches. Nevertheless . . . from that moment the reader is treated to an extended, coolly elaborated piece of such dramatic irony as the Greek tragedians loved: the actors apparently oblivious, or troubled by portents, working at cross purposes, while the suspense mounts in an audience that knows what the actors do not.

A famous international journalist calls on the Kaiser, finds him weary, baffled, eager for disinterested advice on the risky plan of General von Falkenhayn, who believes that a tremendous blow at Verdun and Belfort will catch the French napping, end the war. Hindenburg opposes.

A committee of deputies visits quiet Verdun. In a scene of delicate comedy they are given the run-around by officious officers, reflect dazedly afterwards that if the famed Citadel of Verdun really only contains four field pieces . . . perhaps they should have insisted. . .

Duroure plays suave army politics, gets himself talked about as a coming saviour in the wire-pulling Paris salon of Mme Godorp, Gurau's mistress, whose friends are out to stab Joffre in the back over a rumored neglect to fortify Verdun.

Along the front there is something in the air. Jerphanion is moved back to a reserve position, blessedly peaceful. During February the Army hears slightly intensified artillery fire from the Verdun sector, hears news that French guns are being sent up.

On the morning of February 21, the heavens open.

The Battle is a great showpiece of Remains' descriptive powers, but this second part of the book is, no more than the first, merely another work of realism intended to horrify readers with the horror of war. The pitiful French advance positions pulverized over a sector miles wide, miles deep by a bombardment of unheard of intensity; the silence finally falling "like a sheet laid upon the face of a dead man," the grey German assault lines straggling like smoke wisps from their trenches, slowly growing into trudging multitudes: from all this Remains turns to French headquarters, where a stiff-necked major refuses to admit a major attack, delays for hours any countermeasures; to General Duroure, shocked to the depths of his soul because a Zeppelin has dropped a bomb on his headquarters, destroying his "things"; to an expensive restaurant in Paris, where the manufacturer, Haverkamp, turns a neat deal in grenades over partridge and Burgundy. These characters are not satirized; they don't have to be.

After 19 days in the battle, Jerphanion is on leave in Paris. Through a long discussion between him and Jallez, two of his "men of good will," Remains searches out the meaning of war, places responsibility for it not on Generals or Governments alone, not on the stupidity and baseness of "people at the rear," but on the rank & file of men whose fear of society is greater than their fear of shells. As Jerphanion has previously said: "It is now proved beyond power of contradiction that millions of men can tolerate, for an indefinite period and without spontaneously rising in revolt, an existence more terrible and more degraded than any that the numberless revolutions of history were held to have terminated forever."

A character named Quinette was conspicuous in the first volume of Men of Good Will as a sadistic bookbinder whose murder of a murderer made the book a psychological study of criminality. Gradually, through the succeeding volumes, he dimmed out of the story. Near the end of Verdun the reader recognizes him in a middle-aged man with a long black beard and deep-set, small black eyes whom Jerphanion glimpses in a Paris subway.

Jerphanion overhears the old fellow say to a companion: "I am just back from Verdun. . . ." He is not named--the individual murderer overshadowed completely by the mass murder of war.

As a novelist, many-minded, 54-year-old Jules Romains has been unaffected by the present war except that now he spends most of his time, with pretty Mme Romains, at his tiny, Henry IV portaled chateau at Grancour, in Touraine. He often works from 8:30 a. m. to midnight in his 17th Century study, is now engaged on Vol. XIX. For his portrait of his time he draws on a life-long recollection of himself and dozens of friends, later verifies historical facts. His principle is to "follow the line of most resistance." It seems improbable that World War II will distract him from finishing his novel.

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