Practical war divides the Assault into two phases, the first of which is the creation of the original infrastructure of future battlefields. This infrastructure consists of new railroads and stations, telephone installations, enlargement of roads and tracks, the parallel lines of departue, evacuation routes, shelters, etc. The countryside, the earth is henceforth given over, definitively consecrated to war by the cosmopolitan mass of workers, ·an army of laborers speaking every language, the Babel of logistics. 1 Both the arsenal and the war personnel already take on a kind of peaceful, or rather political, air; they return to highway surveillance. Already we find the beginnings of what will become deterrence: reduction of power in favor of a better trajectory, life traded for survival. The starus quo is the depletion of the earth. In 1 924, the military monk Teilhard de Chardin writes in Mon univers: "We still need mightier and mightier cannons, bigger and biger batleships, to materialize our agression on the worU."
Unable Bodies
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