Jay Winter

The end of the 'Cold War' has brought us back not to 1939 or 1945, but in a sense to 1914. Ethnic and nationalist splits that seemed past history are painfully present today.

As Julia Kristeva has observed

the Second World War undermined the very symbols through which meaning - any meaning - could be attached to the

'cataclysm' of war

Diaz is a scientist who works in a glass factory. To prevent another war, he invents an impenetrable form of armour, 'steel

glass' so powerful that it would make war impossible.

he only way the hero can stop the outbreak of war is to go back to Verdun and raise the dead of the Great War from their graves. In a scene of epic grandeur, he gathers up the storm clouds at the vast military cemetery at Douaumont, and recalls the dead of all armies from their eternal sleep: 'My twelve million friends killed in the war, I call you: They rise and terrify the populations of Europe into forming a world government and putting an end to war for ever.

No, you don't have to go, Guillaume

No you don't have to go . . .

the famous refrain of the end of the war:

'You understand, with the flu, with the war, they don' t tell us the names of the dead we put in the ground. There are too many: .

This surrealistic scene took place near the grave of Allan Kardec, the founder of French spiritualism. Cendrars and the other mourners passed the motto on Kardec's grave. It says: 'To be born, to die, to be born again and to progress without end. That is the law.'