SOURCE: Knapp, Bettina L. “‘You Hear! You Hear! It's War!’.”¹ In Georges Duhamel, pp. 46-57. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972.

In the following essay, Knapp maintains that Georges Duhamel's two short fiction collections focusing on World War I, The New Book of Martyrs and Civilization, express the inhumanity of war and the need for compassion in the world.

No sooner had hostilities broken out in 1914 than Duhamel volunteered as an army doctor. He served for fifty-one months, he tells us in his biography, in a mobile surgical unit not far from the front. In his four years of service, he performed two thousand operations and cared for four thousand wounded.

The ghastly sights Duhamel saw about him, coupled with the constant toil required of a surgeon, had a traumatic effect upon this sensitive young man. He was seeing life for the first time, in its most painful, primitive, brutal...