Paul and Victor Margueritte: Selections on war

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Paul and Victor Margueritte: Selections on war

Paul and Victor Margueritte: Ah! war, the horrible, odious thing!

Paul and Victor Margueritte: At the idea of war his heart was filled with disgust

Paul and Victor Margueritte: An indefinite feeling of fraternity seized him

Paul and Victor Margueritte: The masses voted for peace but were given war

Paul and Victor Margueritte: Should war break out, he also might disappear

Gabriel Chevallier: Let those who love war wage it

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Gabriel Chevallier: Selections on war

====

Gabriel Chevallier
Fear
Translated by Malcolm Imrie

All those who are removed are destined to become corpses, battlefield debris that no longer evokes pity in anyone. The dead get in the way of the living, wear them out. They are forgotten completely during periods of high activity, until their smell becomes insistent.

A soldier, just another grain of the inexhaustible raw materials of the battlefield, little more than a corpse since he is destined to become one by chance in the great, anonymous massacre….

“I’ve been taught a great many things – like you – and I’m aware that one has to choose between them. War is nothing but a monstrous absurdity and nothing good or great will come from it.”

The God of infinite mercy cannot be the God of the plains of Artois. The good God, the just God, could not have allowed such bloody carnage to be carried out in His name, could not have wanted such destruction of bodies and minds to further his glory.

The artillery thunders, obliterates, disembowels, terrifies. Everything is roaring, flashing, shuddering. We are in the middle of a monstrous maelstrom, pieces of sky come crashing down and cover us with rubble, comets collide and crumble, sparking like a short circuit. We are caught in the end of a world. The earth is a burning building and all the exits have been bricked up. We are going to roast in this inferno….

The horror of war resides in this gnawing anxiety. It resides in the continuation, the incessant repetition of danger. War is permanent threat. “We know not the place or the hour.” But we know the place exists and the hour will come. It is insane to hope that we will always escape.

Young men, from the land of Balzac and the land of Goethe, whether they were taken from universities, workshops or the fields, were provided with daggers, revolvers and bayonets, and were pitched against each other, to butcher and maim….

“I am not responsible for others’ mistakes. I have nothing to do with their ambitions and their appetites, and I have better things to do than pay for their glory and their profits with my blood. Let those who love war make it, I want nothing more to do with it….I have no faith in those who organize massacres, I despise even their victories for I have seen what they are made of….I demand to live in peace, far away from barracks, battlefields and military minds and machinery in any shape or form.

Paul and Victor Margueritte: At the idea of war his heart was filled with disgust

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Paul and Victor Margueritte: Selections on war

====

Paul and Victor Margueritte
The Disaster
Translated by Frederic Lees

“It is a triumph for which we have had to pay, and which will cost us dear.”

Du Breuil thought of the death-rattle of the wounded, the pallor of the dead. The terrible vision, with the fields strewn with corpses, again rose up.

***

There was a report, and almost immediately a black point, a shell, whistled in a straight line, increasing in size as it came. Brutus, frightened, sprang forward, and the shell burst in the midst of the group of officers. A moment of bewilderment followed, during which, in a red flash, the wind from the wings of Death struck his temples, and the horrible picture appeared before him of a head clean cut from the body, three bodies which were falling, and on the ground, in a pool of blood near the folding stool, still upright, the Colonel, – as white as a sheet, his stomach and legs shattered.

Here were companies lying on the ground to allow the storm of bullets to pass, the officers flat upon their stomachs joking, encouraging the men with a merry word; there, deserted fields strewn with arms, knapsacks, shakos; a few wounded soldiers, some dead ones marking out the passage of a troop. At a bound, Brutus grazed a very young Second Lieutenant, who was stretched upon his back. His twitching right hand convulsively clenched the hilt of his sword. One of his legs was missing. Where was it? The poor fellow was still alive. That look!…Ah, the batteries!…There they were spread out, facing a wood.

He fired his revolver, he dashed forward like a madman, uttering shrill, murderous cries. Then he comprehended to the full the horror of it all. At the idea of war his heart was filled with disgust. He vowed indefinite hatred towards these frenzied brutes – Germans as well as Frenchmen. Murderers! Murderers! All inspired in him boundless repulsion.

“Isn’t it curious to think that we are surrounded by an invisible force, by a network of death, the meshes of which we can only break by tearing ourselves and letting fresh blood? Do you know the number of our last losses? – 12,273 men. Our wounded? More than 15,000, the Marshal was saying just now.”

In the ambulances and hospitals, already full in the town, crowded the three thousand five hundred men who had been wounded in the last fight. Public buildings, like private houses, gave forth the perpetual odor of death. Everywhere were beds, stretchers, straw, and upon these sick-beds of misery poor, motionless, or gesticulating forms, hollow and yellow faces, acute, savage, and stupefied eyes. Death-rattles arose near wounded in a state of coma, the forerunner of the great sleep; the piercing screams of those who were under the knife issued from the walls; putrid expirations made one think of flesh eaten up by gangrene.

Michael Arlen: Then the war, and that, of course, buried him

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

Michael Arlen: Better build monuments to poets and philosophers than to warriors

====

Michael Arlen
The Green Hat

“Years ago,” she said, “before the war, Gerald had a very great friend. Gerald, you see, is a hero-worshipper. In spite of his air and everything, that is what Gerald is, a hero-worshipper. And no hero, no Gerald. And so, when his hero died, Gerald died too. Funny, life is, isn’t it? Then the war, and that, of course, buried him. And now….”

I was of the race that is surviving the England of Horatio Bottomley, the England of lies, vulgarity, and unclean savagery….

…some one who had by a mistake of the higher authorities strayed into our world from a land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who, the perfection of our imperfections, were awaiting their inheritance of this world of ours when we, with that marvellous indirectness of purpose which is called being human, shall have finally annihilated each other in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality.

…enter six-foot-two of the Brigade of Guards with a face as dark as night and the nose of a hawk and the eyes of one who has seen Christ crucified in vain. The panoply of war sat superbly on Gerald. He looked a soldier in the real rather than in the technical sense of the word: he looked, you know, as though he had accepted death and was just living anyhow in the meanwhile.

To you, it seems a worthy thing for a good man to make a success in the nasty arena of national strifes and international jealousies. To me, a world which thinks of itself in terms of puny, squalid, bickering little nations and not as one glorious field for the crusade of mankind is a world in which to succeed is the highest indignity that can befall a good man, it is a world in which good men are shut up like gods in a lavatory.

Gabriel Chevallier: His screams were terrible, enough to shame God

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Gabriel Chevallier: Selections on war

====

Gabriel Chevallier
Fear
Translated by Malcolm Imrie

In war all instincts are given free rein, with nothing to impede or stop them, except for death’s arbitrary intervention.

The mouth was fixed in the last screams of a terrible death agony, with a rictus of the lips baring the teeth, a mouth wide open, spitting out the soul like a clot of blood. I wish I could have kept this mask that death had fashioned, on which its fatal genius had achieved a synthesis of war, so that a cast could be made and given to women and zealots.

We were a troop of ghosts and old men, and all we could do was keep crying out for a breather. For always the whistles would summon us back up on our feet, set in motion our onerous role as beasts of burden, until it no longer felt like a march with a destination but a journey to the end of a night that spread across the earth into infinity.

There was not a single meter of conquered ground that wasn’t paved with a corpse, not a hectare that had not cost a battalion.

Cadaverous and caked in mud, they had lost most of their kit and looked like fugitives; there was a glint of madness in their eyes, the madness that comes from proximity to death. They staggered away in groaning groups, holding each other up. We could not take our eyes off the white patches of field dressings, with blood seeping through. Blood still dripped from them, marking their trail. Next came the silent stretchers, from which hung white, contorted hands. Four medical orderlies transported on their shoulders one unfortunate whose arm and had been torn apart, exposing the frayed muscles. His screams were terrible, rising up to the impassive heavens, enough to shame God.

Paul and Victor Margueritte: Ah! war, the horrible, odious thing!

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Paul and Victor Margueritte: Selections on war

====

Paul and Victor Margueritte
The Disaster
Translated by Frederic Lees

Yes, the century was crumbling into dust. That death, to which they had consecrated themselves by their profession, was there, crouching around them, within them. Du Breuil, horrified, felt the passing breath of the invisible Mower. The Borny battlefield stretched out under the moon its harvest of corpses. The battlefields of Gravelotte, Rezonville, Mars-la-Tour, Amanvillers, Saint-Privat, and Servigny, appeared before him, ploughed up with shells, and sown over with bones. The rich, ruddy soil of Lorraine turned his stomach. Through the walls he breathed a pestilential musty smell, which was the breath even of Metz, of the streets infected with phenol and chlorine, and of the stinking cemeteries. And he, Du Breuil, was dying like the others. Ah! war, the horrible, odious thing!

***

Still the cart rolled on, moving by the side of women, carriages full of wounded, wagons and canteen carriages. Du Breuil, cut to the heart, turned round. A shrill, strident cry ground out the words: “To Berlin! To Berlin!” Who was jeering in this manner? With a sobbing laugh the hoarse voice again cried: “To Berlin! To Berlin!” What recollections these words called up! And on the top of a canteen-carriage, its claws fastened with string to its perch, Du Breuil saw a green parrot, bristling all over, screaming aloud and flapping its wings.

“We are sold!” cried a voice, so guttural and so raucous that he started. Du Breuil also turned round. Attached by one leg to its perch on the sill of a window, an enormous green parrot, its horny eyelids half open and its beak inclined, was looking at them sardonically. Du Breuil, pricked to the heart, recalled the Forbach rout, the great flapping of the wings of the green bird which was sobbing in the night: “To Berlin! to Berlin!” He shrugged his shoulders and passed on. Vedel, indignant, jeered: “Is he not stupid with his air of a stuffed bird! Sold! He repeats the catchword of simpletons and cowards. Sold!…And showing his fist, he cried: “Shut your beak, imbecile!”

War intoxicated him with disgust. This time he descended to the very depths of misery and solitude.

He contemplated the covered tomb where, in all probability, the guardian explained to him, the Prussian officer was at rest in the midst of two thousand bodies of both nations, buried eight high. Not far away a yawning trench awaited new hecatombs. Twenty-four corpses, in shrouds open to the air, were stretched at the bottom side by side, some showing an arm, some a head. There was something terrifying about their immobility. They received the rain with a death-like stiffness, the ludicrousness of which was chilling.

Many came to ask themselves if a fresh butchery was necessary. Without horses to drag the cannon, without cavalry, forced with nothing but foot soldiers to pass beyond a terrible circle of shells and balls, was it not going to a monstrous massacre?

Andy Corbley: A Poem for Gaza

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

American writers on peace and against war

====

Andy Corbley
A Poem for Gaza

A red cloud in the dead of night
Beyond the sea, beyond the storm.
What idle mind could dream the sight,
I saw in April, far advanced of morn?

T’were all alike a thing possessed.
The gentle moon, her light abridged
that fell upon the clouds coalesced,
and dyed an ell with tempered rage

The clouds were spun like linen twine.
And Pale Lady wove them tight.
Beyond was dark like England’s Tyne,
In sum: a tricolore dim, and bright.

Much like a certain desert banner
Which flutters only when winds abound
To gather souls from murdered clamour
From dust and bodies on the ground

If those souls see not the clouds arouge
We both still share the luna muse

Gabriel Chevallier: Selections on war

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Gabriel Chevallier: Selections on war

Gabriel Chevallier: All the threats and horrors summed up in that small word – war

Gabriel Chevallier: The general’s fatal domestic campaign

Gabriel Chevallier: Let those who love war wage it

Gabriel Chevallier: His screams were terrible, enough to shame God

Gabriel Chevallier: This fact makes armies and wars possible

Gabriel Chevallier: War is not edifying, purifying or redemptive

Gabriel Chevallier: War ruins armies

Paul and Victor Margueritte: An indefinite feeling of fraternity seized him

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Paul and Victor Margueritte: Selections on war

====

Paul and Victor Margueritte
The Disaster
Translated by Frederic Lees

“This way: come, come…’ whispered these breathless mouths.

Oh, that death-rattle of dying men – so low, so low! It made Du Breuil’s heart bleed.

“Yes, yes!” cried Bersheim’s fine voice into the darkness. “Yes, yes, my friends.”

But the dying, as if they had given up hope, were now silent; and Bersheim, his eyes full of tears, said to Du Breuil:

“I cannot see any longer. All these poor fellows!…it is terrible!”

Then, as they stumbled forward a few steps – the moon having just disappeared – and as they heard the creaking of the wheels of the wagonette, the voice of a foreigner issued from the hollow of a ditch:

“Camarates!”

Both had the same idea, the same feeling. Without a word, without looking, they passed on. The voice again cried in a supplicating tone:

“Oh, camarates! camarates!” The accent was so poignant that the two Frenchmen stopped. A pale face, that of a red-haired Christ, came to view in the light of the lantern; clasped hands were stretched out; they saw the soldier’s gashed and bleeding neck. Bersheim began to tremble, and spoke very low and very quickly, as though in a fever fit.

“I cannot. There are Frenchmen. It’s not my business to pick up enemies -“

There was a brief silence. In the presence of this white face, discomposed by fear and suffering, Du Breuil was overcome by a new, until then unexperienced, confused sensation, one of intense emotion. Nothing was left in him of the blind rage which he had formerly felt when he imagined the face of the Enemy with his ruddy complexion, hard blue eyes, and tawny beard. And the feeling of hatred against the stirring, impersonal masses of the enemy was also gone. An indefinite feeling of fraternity seized him. His heart was drowned in an irresistible flood of human compassion, and he only saw before him an unfortunate man. The Prussian looked upon them with eyes dilated by a great hope. His features were exalted. His smile would have softened stones.

“My God!” groaned Bersheim.

And Du Breuil saw distinctly that he dare not help this German before him because of himself, an officer, so many of whose comrades and unknown brothers were lying pell-mell bleeding there. He was seized with a sudden feeling of anguish. What a pity this butchery! This Prussian was a man!

“Take him,” he said in a low voice.

“Yes, yes,’ said Bersheim. “Thibault, assist me.”

“Thank you, thank you, camarates!” repeated the wounded man. He made an effort to rise, but blood spurted from his mouth. They let him fall. He was dead.

Du Breuil, overcome with disgust, could not say how he left Bersheim. It seemed to him that he left him walking about with his lantern suspended over the faces of the dead, touching their cold cheeks, searching for wounded; but he was not sure. Alone, upon the back of Cydalise, who walked with fatigued step, he proceeded towards Metz. Other burning villages flared out on the heights of the plateau. In the direction of Noisseville could be heard cheers, and the distant strains of a German band, like to a song of victory. Our tramping troops, men, horses, and cannon, slowly continued their retreat. The moon had disappeared. In her place one, two, three, four, and then a whole multitude of stars shone out, blossomed in the sky, pure, fresh, eternal.

He thought of the thousands of dead men stretched out, whose eyes were closed to this splendor – thousands of bodies which had been men like himself, but which were now inert masses of flesh. He thought of the wounded, the appalling horror of the wounded; the feeble death-rattle which he had recently heard seemed to him to still sweep along the plain, and everywhere were corpses; the roads, houses, fields, and woods were full of them. He could see nothing but corpses lying flat upon their stomachs, upon their backs; in furrows and in ditches were stiffened, bloody corpses -nothing but dead men in heaps.

The stars still shone brightly in the black azure. He almost cried out with sorrow. Why, why this idiotic carnage? An imperceptible breeze blew. The stars twinkled. Never had they been more beautiful.

Gabriel Chevallier: This fact makes armies and wars possible

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Gabriel Chevallier: Selections on war

====

Gabriel Chevallier
Fear
Translated by Malcolm Imrie

Men are stupid and ignorant. That is why they suffer. Instead of thinking, they believe all that they are told, all that they are taught. They choose their lords and masters without judging them, with a fatal taste for slavery.

Men are sheep. This fact makes armies and wars possible. They die the victims of their own stupid docility.

When you have seen war as I have just seen it, you ask yourself: “How can we put up with such a thing?” What frontier traced on a map, what national honor could possibly justify it? How can what is nothing but banditry be dressed up as an ideal, and allowed to happen?

They told the Germans: “Forward to a bright and joyous war! On to Paris! God is with us, for a greater Germany!” And the good, peaceful Germans, who take everything seriously, set forth to conquer, transforming themselves into savage beasts.

They told the French: “The nation is under attack. We will fight for Justice and Retribution. On to Berlin!” And the pacifist French, who take nothing at all seriously, interrupted their modest little rentier reveries to go and fight.

So it was with the Austrians, the Belgians, the English, the Russians, the Turks, and then the Italians. In a single week, twenty million men, busy with their lives and loves, with making money and planning a future, received orders to stop everything to go and kill other men. And those twenty million individuals obeyed the order because they had been convinced that this was their duty.

***

Nineteen years old and I had not yet come to believe that there was anything great or noble in sticking a bayonet into a man’s stomach, in rejoicing in his death.

Paul and Victor Margueritte: The masses voted for peace but were given war

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Paul and Victor Margueritte: Selections on war

====

Paul and Victor Margueritte
The Disaster
Translated by Frederic Lees

He heaped scorn upon the shameful mockery of a Parliament; it was simply duping the people. The mass of the nation did not want war. For example, this famous garde-mobile could not be constituted. The deputies had only secured their election by promising to vote for peace.

The plebiscite was a fraud. He rose brusquely, and took from a drawer a picture which was being scattered broadcast by the million. At the head of one column was the word ‘No,’ underneath a pictorial representation of pillage – the burning of cottages and harvests; at the top of another, the word ‘Yes,’ with a pleasing picture of peace – barns overflowing with plenty, and cellars full of wine. The peasant had voted ‘Yes,’ for peace, and they had given him war.

***

War might be the means of raising souls above themselves, but it also let loose the fierce animal natures of brutes.

***

An officer had just put a bullet in his head.

“Such misfortunes must happily be rare,” said Mme. Bersheim, moved to pity.

Boisjol, again helping himself to asparagus, replied:

“It is true that the officer has a higher conception of duty than the common soldier, but suicides among the rank and file are common. More than one blow out their brains when a comrade, worn out by fatigue, marching continually under the sun, sets them the example. Examples came under my notice in Africa.”

***

“Yes; there is something great about war. War is a terrible angel. There is not a man of us at the present time who is not ready to do his duty….But when one thinks of those who meet with their death, and the grief of those who loved them with their whole heart and soul, is it not enough to accept this curse as a necessary evil without hoping for it?”

Paul and Victor Margueritte: Should war break out, he also might disappear

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Paul and Victor Margueritte: Selections on war

====

Paul and Victor Margueritte
The Disaster
Translated by Frederic Lees

“How gracious the Prince Imperial is! What an admirable disposition! Do you know, he really wants to set off, to place himself in the front rank. A very Napoleon!”

“Poor child!” exclaimed Chartrain, who, stout and ridiculous though he was, had suddenly assumed the air of a very fine fellow. “I hope that God will spare him the spectacle of such a horror.” He turned towards Du Breuil, and said very simply, as though in excuse for his words: “You see, I myself have a son who is going with the army. He is so timid and delicate that his mother and I shall be very anxious.”

Mme. Langlade eyed him from head to foot.

“The very idea! I also have a son, but he is dying to fight. If he were otherwise disposed I should renounce him.”

A sadness came upon the fat-cheeked face; a silent reproach appeared momentarily in his large eyes, which filled with tears. Du Breuil was touched. His own family in their chateau in the department of the Creuse rose up before him – the manly face of his father, an officer who had fought in the first African campaign, and who had retired when young with the rank of Major, when his right arm was shattered by a Kabyle bullet; the sweet, thoughtful face of his mother. They would be getting alarmed at the news – the father stoical, the mother keeping back her tears; both silent, as was their wont. He knew the full meaning of this silence between two beings who adored each other. His younger brother, a Lieutenant of Zouaves, had fallen a victim to the Mexican expedition. His parents did well never to speak of their dead son; they never ceased to think of him. Should war break out, he also might disappear.

Maxime Formant: They would know the ecstasies of sacking conquered cities

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

====

Maxime Formant
The She-Wolf
A Romance of the Borgias
Translator not identified

…others would ride at the heads of armies; others would sleep in tents, whilst the warrior’s star kissed their brows….They would force the chief towns of their foes, and, under a hail of bullets, assault and scale ramparts carried by storming troops. They would stand on the tops of walls in red glory, bleeding, burnt, terrible, magnificent as gods. They would know the ecstasies of sacking conquered cities, and all the joys that fire and sword and rape could provide. Theirs would be the brutal and glorious destinies….

“To be Caesar or nothing!”

A phantom rose up before him clothed in a toga; upon his brow was a wreathe of laurel and with imperious features and outstretched arm he pointed to the road, a white and motionless figure. The silent mouth cried aloud, “No victims, no glorious destiny! Look on me; I am as pale as a marble god, not because of the blood which ran from my wounds when Brutus slew me, but because of that which sprang from the veins of the Roman people to make my glory. I have cost the world so much, that it worships me for evermore. Give up my name, or make to thyself a soul like mine. Thou art not worthy to march beneath my standard if, in following me, thou art afraid lest thou stumble upon a corpse.”

Don Caesar raised his head and, with a sigh of joy, breathed in the first fresh breath of air. In the midst of the harmony of perfumes which rose from the blossoming box-trees and the tufts of lavender he could distinguish strange odors, the delicious scent of murder….

Michael Arlen: Better build monuments to poets and philosophers than to warriors

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

====

Michael Arlen
Man’s Mortality

“They can rebuild their column and their arch and stick a poet on one and a philosopher beneath the other. The world would be a better place now if England had ever thought of sticking Shakespeare on a higher monument than Nelson and surrounding him with flowers instead of lions.”

***

“Madam Abazar, will you tell me this: Do you anticipate that Italy and China will plunge the world into war?”

“They will try.”

“No. This will happen. The ultimatum lapses at midnight next Monday. Two minutes later the admiral of Air Command, Knut Helgar, will cross the Italian frontier at the head of an adequate fleet of airships and police units. The Italian-Chinese fleet will no doubt be concentrated in Lombardy, north of Milan. Well armed as they are, I fear they must retreat before full police strength, and it is probable that by two in the morning the industrial section of Milan will cease to exist. That will end hostilities.”

Count Piero Branca’s emotions were too deep to permit him to frown. He passed his handkerchief over his forehead.

“Madam, you will murder Italy.”

“Only Milan. It is regrettable, of course, that the operation must cause so much destruction. We have calculated that the loss of life in Milan will be between fifty and eighty thousand….”

Branca’s aide asked in a flat voice: “What are they saying in there? You look as though you had seen a ghost.”

He felt suddenly as though his brain contained the world. He saw endless avenues of towers soaring into the sky. He saw they were crammed with men and women. Then in absolute silence the towers, one by one, then altogether, began shivering and falling down. Then the dust, whirling and eddying in circles, gradually settled….

Branca’s aide asked: “Is there going to be war?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think there will be war.”

***

Thus the world was set for its plunge into animalism, the first attempt at internationalism had failed, and this story is over.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Celebrate return of peace by directing readers to noblest works of peace

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selections on peace and war

====

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Principles of Genial Criticism

When storms blow high in the political atmosphere, the events of the day fill the sails, and the writer may draw in his oars, and let his brain rest; but when calm weather returns, then comes too “the tug of toil,” hard work and little speed. Yet he not only sympathizes with the public joy, as a man and a citizen, but he will seek to derive some advantages even for his editorial functions, from the cessation of battles and revolutions. He cannot indeed hope to excite the same keen and promiscuous sensation as when he had to announce events, which by the mere bond of interest brought home the movements of monarchs and empires to every individual’s counting-house and fire-side ; but he consoles himself by the reflection, that these troublesome times occasioned thousands to acquire a habit, and almost a necessity, of reading, which it now becomes his object to retain by the gradual substitution of a milder stimulant, which though less intense is more permanent, and by its greater divergency no less than duration, even more pleasureable. – And how can he hail and celebrate the return of peace more worthily or more appropriately, than by exerting his best faculties to direct the taste and affections of his readers to the noblest works of peace? The tranquillity of nations permits our patriotism to repose. We are now allowed to think and feel as men, for all that may confer honor on human nature….

H.G. Wells: This little planet everywhere scarred and disfigured by long wars

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

H.G. Wells: Selections on war

====

H.G. Wells
The Shape of Things to Come

This little planet of which he was now at last in mentally untroubled possession was not simply still under-developed and waste; its surface was everywhere scarred and disfigured by the long wars he had waged so blindly for its mastery. Everywhere in 2059 the scenery of the earth still testified to the prolonged war….

To cry “End the war” ended nothing, because it gave no intimations of what had to replace belligerent governments in the control of human affairs. The peace the masses craved for was as yet only a featureless negative. But peace must be a positive thing, designed and sustained, for peace is less natural than warfare. We who have at last won through to the Pax Mundi know how strong and resolute, how powerfully equipped and how vigilant, the keepers of the peace must be.

The industrialists and financiers built up these monstrous armaments and imposed them on the governments of the time, with a disregard of consequences that seems now absolutely imbecile. Most of these armament propagandists were admirable in their private lives: gentle lovers, excellent husbands, fond of children and animals, good fellows, courteous to inferiors, and so on. Sir Basil Zaharoff, the greatest of munition salesmen, as one sees him in the painting (ascribed to Orpen) recently discovered in Paris, with his three-cornered hat, his neat little moustaches and beardlet, and the ribbon of some Order of Chivalry about his neck, looks quite a nice, if faintly absurd, little gentleman. Those shareholding bishops and clergy may, for anything we know to the contrary, have had charming personalities. But they wanted their dividends. And in order to pay them those dividends, the dread of war and the need of war had to be kept alive in the public mind.

George Santayana: Wars prove the world has turned its back on reason

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

American writers on peace and against war

George Santayana: Selections on war

====

George Santayana
Persons and Places

The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably. The two great wars (so far) of the twentieth century were adventures in enthusiastic unreason. They were inspired by unnecessary and impracticable ambitions….

***

She planned to have at least eight children, four boys and four girls; but a husband had not turned up. The war had depleted the ranks of elder solid reasonable suitors….

***

From the country each city still draws its wealth and sustenance, as well as the fresh hands required for its multiplying trades, the servants for its great houses, and the young soldiers to be enlisted, by force or by bribes, in its feuds and conquests.

***

If any community can become and wishes to become communistic or democratic or anarchical I wish it joy from the bottom of my heart. I have only two qualms in this case: whether such ideals are realisable, and whether those who pursue them fancy them to be exclusively and universally right: an illusion pregnant with injustice, oppression, and war.

***

Those who advise resignation to a life of industrial slavery (because spiritual virtues may be cultivated by a slave, like Epictetus, more easily perhaps than by rich men) are surrendering the political future to an artificial militant regime that cannot last unaltered for a decade anywhere, and could hardly last a day, if by military force it were ever made universal.

Gabriel Chevallier: War is not edifying, purifying or redemptive

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Gabriel Chevallier: Selections on war

====

Gabriel Chevallier
From the preface to the 1951 edition of Fear
Translated by Malcolm Imrie

When I was young we were taught – when we were at the front – that war was edifying, purifying and redemptive. We have all seen the repercussions of such twaddle: profiteers, arms dealers, the black market, denunciations, betrayals, firing squads, torture; not to mention famine, tuberculosis, typhus, terror, sadism. And heroism, I agree. But the small, exceptional amount of heroism does not make up for the immensity of evil. Besides, few people are cut out for true heroism. Let those of us who cam back have the honesty to admit it.

H.G. Wells: Blood as printers’ ink

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

H.G. Wells: Selections on war

====

H.G. Wells
The Shape of Things to Come

You could buy a big newspaper in those days, lock, stock and barrel, for five or ten million dollars, and the profits made on one single battleship came to more than that. Naturally, and according to the best business traditions, the newspapers hired or sold themselves to the war salesmen. What was wrong in that? Telling the news in those days was a trade, not a public duty. A daily paper that had dealt faithfully with this accumulating danger would quite as naturally and necessarily have found its distribution impeded, have found itself vigorously outdone by more richly endowed competitors, able because of their wealth to buy up all the most attractive features, able to outdo it in every way with the common reader.

It wasn’t that the newspaper owners and the munition dealers wanted anyone hurt. They only wanted to sell equipment and see it used up. Nor was it that the newspapers desired the wholesale mangling and butchering of human beings. They wanted sales and advertisements. The butchery was quite by the way, an unfortunate side issue to legitimate business. Shortsightedness is not diabolical, even if it produces diabolical results.

And even those soldiers? Freudheim, in his analysis of the soldierly mind, shows a picture of that Sir Henry Wilson we have already mentioned, arrayed in shirt-sleeves and digging modestly in the garden of his villa during a phase of retirement, and the same individual smirking in all his glory, buttons, straps and “decorations”, as a director of military operations. It is an amazing leap from the suburban insignificance of a retired clerk to godlike importance. In peace time, on the evidence of his own diaries, this Wilson was a tiresome nobody, an opinionated bore; in war he passed beyond criticism and became a god. One understands at once what a vital matter employment and promotion must have been to him. But so far as we can tell he desired no killing AS killing. If he had been given blood to drink he would probably have been sick. Yet he lived upon tanks of blood.

***

How all these hideous devices of the New Warfare were to be brought together to effect the definitive subjugation of the Will of a belligerent Power was apparently never thought out, or, if it was, the plans were kept so secret that now they have perished with their makers. After the millions had choked, after the cities were a stench of dead bodies – what then?

***

The British and Americans, who hoped to keep out of the conflict to the end, had experienced an exhilarating revival of exports and found their bills against the belligerents mounting very hopefully. Once more Tyneside echoed to hammering; steel, iron and chemical shares boomed and the iron and steel industry, like some mangy, toothless old tiger, roused itself for the only quarry it had now the vigour to pursue – man-eating. It had long ceased to dream of new liners or bridges or railways or steel-framed houses. But it could still make guns and kill. It could not look far enough ahead to reckon whether at last there would be any meat on the man’s bones.

George Santayana: His parents’ admonitions against war

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

American writers on peace and against war

George Santayana: Selections on war

====

George Santayana
Persons and Places

Letter from his mother.

No date (about 1880)

“I am glad that our son has no inclination to be a soldier. No career displeases me more, and if I were a man, it would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior. Barbarous customs that I hope will disappear when there are no kings and no desire for conquest and when man has the world for his country and all his fellow-beings for his brothers. You will say that I am dreaming. It may be so. Adieu.”

I suspect that the words may have come from her father’s lips, or out of the book of maxims drawn from all sages, from Confucius to Benjamin Franklin, that my grandfather had collected and published….

***

…he (Santayana’s father) was no soldier, not merely no soldier temperamentally in that personally he shrank from conflicts rather than provoked them, but no soldier morally or religiously, in that he saw nothing worth fighting for. Of course, you fought for your life if attacked: that was a mechanical reaction of the organism. But he could have felt no sympathy with the martial regimen and the martial patriotism of an ancient city.

H.G. Wells: Chemistry at the service of mass murder

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

H.G. Wells: Selections on war

====

H.G. Wells
The Shape of Things to Come

Research for the latest improvements soon led the now almost morbidly progressive military mind to some horrifying discoveries. Some of the soldiers concerned were certainly badly scared by the realization of what evils it was now possible to inflict in warfare. It leaked out in their speeches and books. But they kept on. They kept on partly because they had a stout-hearted tradition and refused to be dismayed…because it was the only job they could do. Throughout the three decades that followed the Congress of Versailles, thousands of highly intelligent men, specialist soldiers, air soldiers, engineering soldiers, chemical, medical soldiers and the like, a far ampler and more energetic personnel than that devoted to the solution of the much more urgent and important financial riddles of the time, were working out, with unstinted endowments and the acquiescence and approval of their prospective victims, patiently, skillfully, thoroughly, almost inconceivably, abominable novelties for the surprise and torture of human beings.

***

The people engaged in this business were, on the whole, exceptionally grave, industrious and alert-minded. Could they revisit the world to-day individually we should probably find them all respectable, companionable, intelligible persons. Yet in the aggregate they amounted to an organization of dangerous lunatics. They inflicted dreadful deaths, hideous sufferings or tormented lives upon, it is estimated, about a million of their fellow creatures.

***

Other war poisons followed upon this invention, still more deadly: merciful poisons that killed instantly and cruel and creeping poisons that implacably rotted the brain. Some produced convulsions and a knotting up of the muscles a hundred times more violent than the once dreaded tetanus. There is a horrible suggestiveness in the description of the killing of a flock of goats for experimental purposes in these researches: “All succumbed to the effect of the gas except three, which dashed their brains out against the enclosure.” And to assist these chemicals in their task of what Dr. Woker calls “mass murder” there was a collateral research into incendiary substances and high explosives, to shatter and burn any gas attack shelter to which a frightened crowd might resort.

H.G. Wells: The New Warfare, transition to total war

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

H.G. Wells: Selections on war

====

H.G. Wells
The Shape of Things to Come

Everywhere the War Offices stirred with novel conceptions of strange inventions, secret novelties and furtive systematic research. Everywhere the obscure reports of spies and informants, carefully fostered by the armament dealers affected, stimulated this forced inventiveness.

It was realized that the old warfare had in fact perished in a state of lumpish hypertrophy in the trenches. It had indeed been a “war to end war” – and the old war was done for. The new warfare had to replace it – and quickly. The Foreign Offices demanded it. They could not do without war of some sort….

The glorious victories during the romantic ages of human warfare all amounted to battles of practically the same pattern, to a great central battering with pikes, swords, bayonets, maces or suchlike implements, a swiping, pushing, punching, pelting, stabbing, poking and general clapperclawing amidst a shower of comparatively light missiles, that went on at longest for a few hours, and ended in a break, a flight, a cavalry pursuit and a massacre. This “open warfare” alternated, it is true, with long sieges, less sportsmanlike phases, in which the contending hosts refused battle and squatted unwholesomely in excavations and behind walls, annoying each other by raids and attempts to storm and break through, until hunger, pestilence, the decay of discipline under boredom, or the exasperation of the surrounding population broke up the party. Non-combatants suffered considerable temporary and incidental molestation during warfare, there was a certain amount of raping and looting, devastation to destroy supplies, pressed labour and spy-hunting on a scale which amounted in most cases to little more than an exacerbation of normal criminality. Wholesale devastation, such as the break-up of the irrigation of Mesopotamia by the Mongols, or the laying waste of Northumbria by William the Conqueror of England, was, when it occurred, a measure of policy rather than a war measure. War had to go on for many decades before it could produce such disorganisation as that of Asia Minor in the wars between Byzantium and Persia. The Islamic invasions were at first made additionally disagreeable by religious propaganda, but this was speedily replaced by discriminatory taxation. The long distance campaigns of Roman, Hunnish and Mongol armies again spread various once localized infectious and contagious diseases very widely; but the total influence of the old warfare upon human destiny was enormously exaggerated by the nationalist historians of the old régime. It was of infinitely less importance than migration. The peasant life went on unchangingly, squalid and laborious, as it had been going on for the majority of human beings since agriculture began. The various “Decisive Battles of the World” were high points in that fantasy of the pedants, the great “drama of the empires”, with which they befogged the human mind for so long during its gropings from the peasant state of life towards a sane and orderly way of living.

But with the Napoleonic wars, the soldier began to invade and modify the texture of normal life as he had never done before, by conscription, by unprecedented monetary levies, indemnities and taxes that dislocated economic processes; and conversely, quite uninvited by the soldier, as we have shown, the expanding forces of power industrialism and of mass manipulation through journalistic and other sorts of propaganda, invaded both the military field and the common life. War, which had been like the superficial ploughing of our ancestors, became a subsoil plough, an excavator that went deeper and deeper, that began presently to deflect underground springs and prepare extensive landslides.

The Generals of the World War were all in the position of inexperienced amateurs in charge of vast mechanisms beyond their power of control. War, which formerly had been fought on the flat along a “front”, suddenly reached through and over the contending armies, and allowed no one to stand out of it any more. The New Warfare, it was already being remarked by 1918, was a war of whole populations, from which all respect for the non-combatant was vanishing. People said this, and some few even tried to understand in detail what it meant. And now all over the world military gentlemen, many of them still adorned with the spurs, epaulettes, froggings, buttons, stripes, ribbons, medals, residual scraps of armour and suchlike pretty glories of the good old times, set themselves most valiantly to work out the possibilities and methods of the New Warfare.

***

An unarmed man could go about in reasonable security in most of Europe, India, China, America. Nobody offered him violence or attempted open robbery. Even the policeman in the English-speaking and Western European communities carried no weapon but a truncheon.

But the World War broke down many of the inhibitions of violence and bloodshed that had been built up during the progressive years of the nineteenth century and an accumulating number of intelligent, restless unemployed men, in a new world of motor-cars, telephones, plate-glass shop windows, unbarred country houses and trustful social habits, found themselves faced with illegal opportunities far more attractive than any legal behaviour-system now afforded them….

George Santayana: Slaughter by the indistinguishable million

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

American writers on peace and against war

George Santayana: Selections on war

====

George Santayana
Persons and Places

My two Guardsmen were apparently thinking of resigning their commissions; something that surprised me a little in the case of A, who I knew had made a special study of gunnery. As for B, soldiering was what any obligation is for the vaguely young….I was sorry for the poor chap. Most enviable of men, I should have thought him, in his person and surroundings; yet for that very reason he seemed to have no future. The garden that had bred him, having seen him bloom, had no further use for him. It is indeed in the nature of existence to undermine its best products, and also its worst. This may be an acceptable reflection to the philosopher, who dwells in the eternal, but not for the fatted calf being led to the slaughter.

To the slaughter he was being led without suspecting it, like any placid wreathed bullock marching to the sacrifice. His generation had just endured the carnage of the Boer War, but that of 1914 was approaching. After all this was the traditional calling of his class, but in a simpler, smaller, clearer phase of society, when there could be chivalry in the master, and devotion in the servant. Now all that was outmoded, and the ethics of it sounded hollow. The gentleman no longer felt at home in the saddle or in the field; he was no longer the ruler of his land and his country; he was a tax-payer submerged and forced to sell his estates by the very war he had helped to wage. Nor could he escape by becoming a plain citizen. Slaughter would continue, slaughter now by the indistinguishable million. It would be a question of victims without a vocation to die, conscripts and mechanics buried by chance in an avalanche of missiles.

H.G. Wells: Means of destruction kept pace with increase in wealth of mankind

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

H.G. Wells: Selections on war

====

H.G. Wells
The Shape of Things to Come

…the reader will not be able to understand the world-wide tolerance of growing armaments and war preparations during this period unless he realizes the immediate need inherent in the system for unremunerative public expenditure. Somewhere the energy economized had to come out. The world of private finance would not tolerate great rehousing, great educational and socially constructive enterprises, on the part of the relatively feeble governments of the time. All that had to be reserved for the profit accumulator. And so the ever-increasing productivity of the race found its vent in its ancient traditions of warfare, which admitted the withdrawal of a large proportion of the male population from employment for a year or so and secreted that vast accumulation of forts, battleships, guns, submarines, explosives, barracks and the like, which still amazes us. Without this cancer growth of armies and navies, the paradox of over-production latent in competitive private enterprise would probably have revealed itself in an overwhelming mass of unemployment before even the end of the nineteenth century. A social revolution might have occurred then.

Militarism, however, alleviated these revolutionary stresses, by providing vast profit-yielding channels of waste. And it also strengthened the forces of social repression. The means of destruction accumulated on a scale that well-nigh kept pace with the increase in the potential wealth of mankind. The progressive enslavement of the race to military tyranny was an inseparable aspect, therefore, of free competition for profits. The latter system conditioned and produced the former. It needed the former so as to have ballast to throw out to destruction and death whenever it began to sink. The militarist phase of the early twentieth century and the paradox of over-production are correlated facets of the same reality, the reality of the planless hypertrophy of the social body.

It is interesting to note how this morbid accumulation of energy in belligerence and its failure to find vent in other directions became more and more evident in the physiognomy of the world as the twentieth century progressed. The gatherings of mankind became blotched with uniforms. Those admirable albums of coloured pictures, Historical Scenes in a Hundred Volumes, which are now placed in all our schools and show-places and supplied freely to any home in which there are children, display very interestingly the advent, predominance and disappearance of military preoccupations in the everyday life of our ancestors. These pictures are all either reproductions of actual paintings, engravings or photographs, or, in the case of the earlier volumes, they are elaborate reconditionings to the more realistic methods of our time of such illustrations as were available. Military operations have always attracted the picture-maker at all times, and there are plentiful pictures of battles from every age, from the little cricket-field battle of the Middle Ages to the hundred mile fights of the last Great War, but our interest here is not with battles but with the general facies of social life.

H.G. Wells: He enjoyed the war. His soldiers are toy soldiers and he loves to knock over a whole row of them.

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

H.G. Wells: Selections on war

====

H.G. Wells
The Shape of Things to Come

Few of us could write even a brief account now of the World War….Nearly all the commanders concerned had dull and unattractive personalities and the business was altogether too unwieldy for them. Most of their operations were densely stupid, muddled both in conception and execution. One would as soon listen to a child reciting not very accurately and at endless length the deals and tricks of some game of cards it has played, or imagines it has played, as read their memoirs – packed as they too often are with self-exculpation, personal resentments and malice.

For the rodomontade of the conflict the curious cannot do better than glance through the eager narrative of Winston Churchill’s World Crisis. There one finds all the stereotyped flourishes and heroisms of nineteenth-century history from the British point of view; the “drama of history” in rich profusion, centred upon one of the most alert personalities in the conflict. He displays a vigorous naïve puerility that still gives his story an atoning charm. He has the insensitiveness of a child of thirteen. His soldiers are toy soldiers and he loves to knock over a whole row of them. He enjoyed the war. He takes himself and all the now forgotten generals and statesmen of the war with a boyish seriousness. He passes grave judgments on their tragic fooleries and distributes compliments and blame, often in the most gracious manner, convinced that he is writing for a meticulously admiring and envious posterity.

George Santayana: William James and Philippines: losing his country by annexing another

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

American writers on peace and against war

George Santayana: Selections on war

William James: Selections on war

====

George Santayana
Persons and Places

One afternoon in the autumn of 1898 we were standing in (George Herbert) Palmer’s library after a brief business meeting, and conversation turned on the terms of peace imposed by the United States on Spain after the Cuban war. James was terribly distressed. Addressing himself rather to Palmer, who was evidently enjoying the pleasant rays of the setting sun upon his back, and the general spacious comfort of the library (he then lived in the old President’s house at the corner of Quincy Street), James felt that he had lost his country. Intervention in Cuba might be defended, on account of the perpetual bad government there and the suffering of the natives. But the annexation of the Philippines, what could excuse that? What could be a more shameless betrayal of American principles? What could be a plainer symptom of greed, ambition, corruption, and imperialism?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Fleeing from yelp of cur, we took shelter at feet of vicious warhorse

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selections on peace and war

====

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Biographia Literaria

To this hour I cannot find reason to approve of the first war either in its commencement or its conduct.

I regarded it as some proof of my not having laboured altogether in vain, that from the articles written by me shortly before and at the commencement of the late unhappy war with America, not only the sentiments were adopted, but in some instances the very language, in several of the Massachusetts state papers.

…in England, when the alarm was at its highest, there was not a city, no, not a town or village, in which a man suspected of holding democratic principles could move abroad without receiving some unpleasant proof of the hatred in which his supposed opinions were held by the great majority of the people; and the only instances of popular excess and indignation were on the side of the government and the established church….Like children we ran away from the yelping of a cur, and took shelter at the heels of a vicious war horse.

***

O! if it should be permitted by Providence, that without detriment to freedom and independence our government might be enabled to become more than a committee for war and revenue! 

Gabriel Chevallier: All the threats and horrors summed up in that small word – war

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Gabriel Chevallier: Selections on war

====

Gabriel Chevallier
The Euffe Inheritance
Translated by Jocelyn Godefroi

Even in Grenoble itself all branches and ranks of the army were to be seen, and the peaked cap held sway; on the pavements in front of the cafés it was almost universal. One feature of the war was almost entirely without precedent, the plunging of part of Europe into darkness owing to the fear of attacks from the air: the effects of the shock to people’s minds caused by the terrible blasting of Warsaw was very strict. The only consolation for the lack of any form of shelter was a great profusion of whistles and cries of “Lights out!”

***

She left the station, weeping and stumbling, in the somber darkness of this night in war. Over and again, in her despair, she kept repeating these words: “I commit him to your care, I commit him to your care!” She was addressing her protectress, the Virgin of St-Laurent….But while making this appeal she failed to recall the familiar features. The Lady of Heaven remained hidden in the unfathomable blackout, as though she too had taken fright at all the threats and horrors summed up in that small word – war.

***

He was conscious of her having received a blow that struck at the roots of her life’s work, in the same way that war – always war! – when it had struck him in the hip twenty-six years before had destroyed the best parts of himself, the horseman and the warrior. He knew that time is needed – sometime much time – to recover from these severe, these fundamental amputations….

Gabriel Chevallier: The general’s fatal domestic campaign

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Gabriel Chevallier: Selections on war

====

Gabriel Chevallier
The Euffe Inheritance
Translated by Jocelyn Godefroi

The general’s widow was reputed to be an unusually capable woman with an exceptionally good head on her shoulders, though it was not with her head only that she had fought the battle of life, in which by means of four consecutive husbands she has achieved no little success: there were the late M. Prunavent, chemist; the late M. Mathias, barrister; the late M. Larbois, manufacturer; and lastly, the general himself.

Forty years earlier the intrepid Natalie had plunged into marriage in the spirit of a suffragette; and her numerous unions had left her with such a terrible hatred of men that it seemed that the only object of her multiplicity of marriages could have been to take reprisals. It was at the age of forty-seven, when she was already well provided for, that she marked down the general, a feeble man outside his military duties and a perfect coward in face of love. It was, however, regarded as a rash undertaking on the part of this slayer of husbands, for it is well known that generals, hardened by healthy open-air life, live to a great age, aside from accidents, which are rare and unlikely to occur….After continually storming at him as though he were a second lieutenant, to such an extent that the wretched man had often hoped for a European conflagration in order to get a little enjoyment and peace, she killed off her general as she had the others.

On the death of her soldier, Natalie, who was then fifty-seven, remained the “general’s wife,” an entirely suitable designation, and strongly upheld her position.

“…Now when the general was alive…oh, the poor man didn’t know much outside his reviews and parade grounds….but he was interested in military painting on account of the uniforms. In my drawing room we had two Detailles, battle-scenes or something like that: you knew what it was meant to be….”

“…As the general used to say…oh, he didn’t do much thinking, poor man, but he reduced everything to a simple system. ‘I start by telling ’em to go to blazes. Then one can think it over afterwards,” he used to say. And afterwards the thing was settled. My word! – if I’d listened to the reasons of my four rascals….”

***

“Oh,” said the general’s wife “…In four marriages I’ve had nothing but softies hanging round me!”

“What!” Edmond said. “There was the general.”

“Oh, my poor friend. That thunderbolt of war was a man who at home loved his fireside and slippers and couldn’t say boo to a goose. He was afraid of another general who had a tiny bit more on his sleeve. Oh, I’ve had more than enough of the Army! I am very sorry indeed that the flying man arrived too late for women of my generation. I should have liked to sample…”

***

…the widow of the General de Saint-Foy, a sort of cuirassier in corsets, as formidably corpulent as ever, as fully prepared to lead troops of maidens to assaults on the god of love, and whose activities were resembling those cavalry charges at the period of our fourteenth of July, when a military display is at the height of its glory….

****

“I have seen generals at close quarters – having married one. If they are all of the same stamp as my old man, I can tell you straightway that it’s all up with us….”

Gabriel Chevallier: War ruins armies

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Gabriel Chevallier: Selections on war

====

Gabriel Chevallier
The Euffe Inheritance
Translated by Jocelyn Godefroi

“…If you come to think of it, war ruins armies, because it lowers the level of recruiting. The perfect soldiers are those who never have to go to war and serve as an adornment of peace, by cultivating a tradition of good manners, a fine bearing, and honor. I shouldn’t be surprised if those qualities are seen at their very best among the pontifical zouaves and the bodyguard of the Prince of Monaco. The Swiss army, which hasn’t had a fight for years, is said to be magnificent. War kills off the finest military specimens and they are hard to replace.”

***

She says she’s an officer’s daughter, so I have heard.”

“There’s a sight too many officer’s daughters in that game! I know perfectly well that men in the army don’t make their fortunes and that they’ve got their risks to face in wartime. But that’s hardly a reason why their daughters should become kept women!”

Plutarch: Culture benefits the family, city, nation, whole human race more than war

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Greek and Roman writers on war and peace

Plutarch: Selections on war and peace

====

Plutarch
Moralia
On Music*
Translated by Benedict Einarson and Phillip H. De Lacy

The wife of Phocion the Good said that his feats of generalship were her adornment; for my part I hold that not only my own adornment, but that of all my friends as well, is my preceptor’s zeal for letters. For we know that whereas the most brilliant successes of generals end merely in preserving from momentary dangers a few soldiers, a single city, or at most a single nation, but in no wise make better men of those soldiers or citizens or yet of those fellow nationals, culture, on the other hand, which is the substance of felicity and the source of good counsel, can be found useful not merely to a family or a city or a nation, but to the whole human race. The greater benefit conferred by culture in comparison with all military exploits is the measure of the value that belongs to the discussion of it.

*Sometimes attributed to Plutarch.

Anthony Powell: The war blew the whole bloody thing up

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

====

Anthony Powell
A Dance to the Music of Time

“…People talk of rearming….There is far too much disregard, as it is, of the equilibrium to be maintained between the rate of production and consumption in the aggregate, without the additional interference of a crushing armaments programme. We do not want an obstacle like that in the way of the organised movement toward progressive planning in the economic world of today….No, no, none of that, please. What is much more likely to be productive is to settle things around a table….”

***

The possibility that I might have been “in the war” seemed perfectly conceivable to him.

“Some of it wasn’t so bad,” he said.

“No?”

“Most of it perfect hell, of course. Absolute bloody hell on earth. Gives me the willies even to think of it sometimes.”

“Where were you?”

“Joined up at Thirsk. Started off in the Green Howards. Got a commission after a bit in one of the battalions of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. I’d exchanged from the Duke’s into the Machine-Gun Corps when I caught it in the tummy at Le Bassé.”

“Pretty unpleasant?”

“Not too good. Couldn’t digest anything for ages. Can’t always now, to tell the truth….”

***

“People don’t think the same way any longer,” he bawled across the table. “The war blew the whole bloody thing up, like tossing a Mills bomb into a dug-out. Everything’s changed about all that. Always feel rather sorry for your generation as a matter of fact, not but what we haven’t all lost our – what do you call ’em – you know, somebody used the word in our house the other night – saying much what I’m saying now? Struck me very forcibly. You know – when you’re soft enough to think things are going to be a damned sight better than they turn out to be. What’s the word?”

“Illusions?”

“Illusions! That’s the one. We’ve lost all our bloody illusions….”

Antonine Maillet: That’s enough to give you some idea of what war is

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Women writers on peace and war

Antonine Maillet: One day war got declared

Antonine Maillet: War succeeding war

Antonine Maillet: When are the soldiers are dead, bombs dropped, maybe we’ll have some peace

====

Antonine Maillet
La Sagouine
Translated by Wayne Grady

Jos Chevreu, he came back with two holes where his eyes was, and they gave him a pair of sunglasses and a white cane as well as a pension. And then there was the late Pete Motté’s son, who hadn’t been more than eighteen when he signed up, and who’d been the sole supporter of his mother ever since Pete’s death, seems they found him wandering round the battlefields in France two years after the war was over, on account of he’d lost his wits, the poor thing, when a bullet got lodged in his head between the bottom of his skull and his spinal column. They brought him home and gave him back to his mother, good soldier that he was, but he still don’t recognize her to this day.

***

I live down there, but that ain’t where I was born. I was born higher up, before the war. Not this last war, the first war. I know they say it wasn’t the first war, that there was other wars before that one, and I guess they’re right. But I didn’t know about them. I only know about two wars, but that’s enough to give you some idea of what war is. A small idea, anyways….

Pierre Gascar: A kind of temple. The war had stopped at the door.

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Pierre Gascar: Inside the forest, beyond the touch of war

Pierre Gascar: One could read the whole world kindling another war

====

Pierre Gascar
The Fugitive
Translated be Merloyd Lawrence

She knew he would try to talk about her mother, or her brother who had been killed in the beginning of the eastern campaign. Why couldn’t he leave them in peace! There would be enough dead tomorrow, without reviving those of yesterday. The war was taking its course and the high-sounding ideals they were throwing at one another were already posthumous ones.

Time, momentarily blotted out, began again. After today, there would be another day, then another and another, without end. The sounds of war would fade away completely. People would open their doors.

The silence seemed even deeper than outdoors, where, however, nothing was rustling or moving at that hour. A room outside of time. The war had stopped at the door. A kind of temple.

From high on the wooden hillside, he had seen a landscape stricken by death, and dazzling. The truth of silence.

Antonine Maillet: When are the soldiers are dead, bombs dropped, maybe we’ll have some peace

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Women writers on peace and war

Antonine Maillet: One day war got declared

Antonine Maillet: That’s enough to give you some idea of what war is

Antonine Maillet: War succeeding war

====

Antonine Maillet
La Sagouine
Translated by Wayne Grady

Well now, Gapi, he don’t even believe they’re fighting a real war in Vietnam, that’s how stubborn he is. Just a lot of made-up stories, he says. You don’t fight a war like that, according to him, and he knows what he’s talking about there, because he was in the war in the old country. And what he says is, from what he’s heard about Vietnam, it can’t happen like that. You fight a war between two armies, he says, on a battlefield, not in the streets and in the schools, where there’s women and children. And why would the States go into Vietnam in the first place, is what he wants to know. They don’t live there, they ain’t so much as stuck their noses in there before, what kind of dumb-ass American would want to go fight on the other side of the world in a war that has nothing to do with him?

When all the soldiers are dead and all the bombs are gone off, the maybe we’ll have some peace around here….

If they have to go dropping their bombs and training their soldiers to shoot straight, there won’t be no damage done around here. It’s the people over there who’ll get all the damage done to them, the women and the children in Vietnam. Don’t know what they ever did to deserve it, though. Don’t know at all….It’s probably not given to common folk like us to know about things like that. I mean, it’s not as though the government’s going to come down here and explain why they went to war or why they won’t let us fish in the sea no more. I don’t expect that’s any of our business, either. The way I figure it, the people being killed down there must be people like us, and I doubt they were given any say in the matter. They must have brought the war down on these people’s heads just like they came here and smashed our lobster traps on the beach, without warning or so much as a by-your-leave. That’s government business, and it ain’t none of our business, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The same as with the people in Vietnam. Anyways, once you’re dead there’s damn little you can say about it one way or the other. And don’t think they don’t know that.

John Ruskin: The arts of peace will supersede the arts of war

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

John Ruskin: Peace Song

====

John Ruskin
The Two Paths

We are about to enter upon a period of our world’s history in which domestic life, aided by the arts of peace, will slowly, but at last entirely, supersede public life and the arts of war. For our own England, she will not, I believe, be blasted throughout with furnaces; nor will she be encumbered with palaces. I trust she will keep her green fields, her cottages, and her homes of middle life; but these ought to be, and I trust will be enriched with a useful, truthful, substantial form of art. We want now no more feasts of the gods, nor martyrdoms of the saints; we have no need of sensuality, no place for superstition, or for costly insolence. Let us have learned and faithful historical painting – touching and thoughtful representations of human nature, in dramatic painting; poetical and familiar renderings of natural objects and of landscape; and rational, deeply-felt realizations of the events which are the subjects of our religious faith. And let these things we want, as far as possible, be scattered abroad and made accessible to all men.

Pierre Gascar: One could read the whole world kindling another war

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Pierre Gascar: Inside the forest, beyond the touch of war

Pierre Gascar: A kind of temple. The war had stopped at the door.

====

Pierre Gascar
The Fugitive
Translated be Merloyd Lawrence

They hated, they lied, by themselves in the rain, and when they thought no one was looking at them in the deserted street, strained expressions would appear on their faces. There, in these faces, one could read the whole world in its hatred and lies, the whole world kindling another war.

Increased hardship for the working classes was no kind of justice, and certainly not a lesson for Germany, but only a way of accentuating, beneath a cloak of righteousness, the inequality which profits the eternal victors in war: those who possess. There was no longer any Germany, no longer any France. For Paul and the people standing in the trams there were no countries at all, only the oppressive duties of a stubbornly held patriotism. This mystique of stockholders were imposed on them. They themselves held nothing.

From Leeuwarden to Pinkiang, several million human beings had died during the war without creating any luxuriant landscapes in the world, or in the life of those who survived. Their deaths had dug no streams running between reeds and the roots of nut trees, no valleys; it had created no silent and shadowy orchards gilded by bees; no medieval or Renaissance-tinted cities with seventeenth-century sculpted balconies, none of those cities full of History, tranquility and sunshine, none of those orchards of the past; it had left nothing more than a rather cold plain on which the trees, the plants, even the houses were scattered further and further apart, as though they impeded flight, as though they were a distraction from the naked truth.

Paul Bourget: That dreadful word War

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

====

Paul Bourget
Le Sens de la mort
Translated by G. Frederic Lees

…he comes from the battlefield. He is returning to the battlefield. That dreadful word War has been construed in his brain, during the past few days, into horrible visions, which he knows to be real: shattered limbs, opened stomachs, broken skulls – all the ferocity of the ancestral brute let loose in man – cries, shrieks, death-sobs, death-rattles and, as the culmination, the charnel house.

***

As a result of these modern armaments there are going to be more wounds to the brain and the spinal cord in this war, than in any other. And men will die, men will remain paralyzed or imbecile….

***

The time in which we lived, that threatening entry into a monstrous war, added a more terrifying character to the distress of this illustrious surgeon….

***

How is it possible not to be obsessed with [death] today, when a universal cataclysm, this huge long-drawn-out and terrible war, affirms it every day, every hour, from one end of Europe to the other, to millions of beings, to those who are fighting and to those who remain at home, to those who die and to those who survive, to individuals, to families, to countries, to the whole of our humanity? Has the shedding of so much blood and so many tears a significance elsewhere?

Antonine Maillet: One day war got declared

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Women writers on peace and war

Antonine Maillet: That’s enough to give you some idea of what war is

Antonine Maillet: War succeeding war

Antonine Maillet: When are the soldiers are dead, bombs dropped, maybe we’ll have some peace

====

Antonine Maillet
La Sagouine
Translated by Wayne Grady

Oh yeah, we got them from all over, sailors….Anyways, when the war got itself declared, the last one, there was this big steamship didn’t see the war coming and didn’t have time to clear the harbour. Had a load of Germans onto it, and the Germans weren’t on our side. Well, they grabbed these Germans and threw them in jail, and there was them as said that was a good thing, that we couldn’t have the enemy running around loose, attacking everyone. Well, stands to reason you can’t have th wrong side running around attacking people. But how do you know what sides’ the right side? Then again, are all the good people on the same side? Don’t seem hardly likely, does it? Makes it kind of hard to go to sleep at night, lying on your right side, and thinking you might’ve known a sailor or two in your day who seemed nice enough at the time but was on the wrong side all along.

***

Then one day war got declared. First light. Stopped the steamer at the entrance to the bay and threw all the sailors in jail for the duration, is what they said. For being on the wrong side. That’s why it was all right to shoot them and throw them in prison. That’s the way the sea changed colour all of a sudden and even the gulls didn’t sound like their old selves anymore. A person could hardly got to sleep at night, couldn’t settle down, just kept tossing and turning, trying to figure things out.

Georges Ohnet: Better to erect statues to those who preserve than those who take life

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Georges Ohnet: Pillaging in the wake of victorious armies

Georges Ohnet: The thunderbolt of war

====

Georges Ohnet
Doctor Rameau
Translated by J. C. Curtin

“Your father is a great philosopher. They will erect a statue to him someday, as grand as any raised to the greatest warriors, and he will be more deserving of it, my child, than they, for it is better to win glory in helping men to live than in compelling them to die.”

***

In the freezing garrets, misery reigned supreme and death mowed down the weak and the young. The pall of desolation grew blacker everyday; the suffering grew more intense; the people, murmured, complained….Along the streets, covered with muddy snow, lines of women could be seen at the doors of the bakers’ and butchers’ shops waiting patiently for their rations of black bread and horse flesh to be doled out to them. On the west side of the river the shells fell with a savage regularity. A corpse was removed from the pavement, a wounded passer-by was picked up, the street-gamin walking along stooped an instant to look at a pool of blood, resuming his song as he passed on, and the besieger outside continued the slaughter. The city, so given to pleasure, had quickly grown habituated to pain. And now it slept, rocked by the roar of cannon, as it had hitherto by the gay refrains of the theaters, balls and concerts.

Pierre Gascar: Inside the forest, beyond the touch of war

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Pierre Gascar: A kind of temple. The war had stopped at the door.

Pierre Gascar: One could read the whole world kindling another war

====

Pierre Gascar
The Fugitive
Translated be Merloyd Lawrence

He was escaping from the war, from the landscapes altered by it, from the static light of fear. He was escaping the Germany of today, and going back to the one which, through all the battles and the horror, was secretly pursuing its dream of rushing springs.

Civilian clothes would have made his flight easier. He could have followed the roads. But then he would not have known the sense of primordial liberty, the happiness which he had experienced that morning, in the forest which had suddenly emerged straight, tall and brightly lit from his memory, and not only from his own, but from the memories which were being awakened at this moment, in thousands of men, by the sadness of dying.

On the horizon was the beginning of a forest. It was then that a sense of peace had begun to come back to him, as though, once inside the forest, Paul had put himself out of reach of the town, out of touch with the war.

She looked back at the window. Some trees with young leaves stirred, quite close by. Soon, smoke would begin rising behind these trees, there would be a roar in the sky, as though walls were crumbling in the distance: the war, moving onwards, through woods and fields, breaking into the zones of silence….

Georges Ohnet: The thunderbolt of war

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Georges Ohnet: Better to erect statues to those who preserve than those who take life

Georges Ohnet: Pillaging in the wake of victorious armies

====

Georges Ohnet
Doctor Rameau
Translated by J. C. Curtin

The existence of this family…passed in peace and happiness, when the Franco-German war broke out like a thunderbolt. In an instant all the joyousness of life was changed. The city, so brilliant, luxurious, became a vast camp. The fêtes were succeeded by the clash of arms. The feverish agitation which always precedes battle and the stunning stupor that follows defeat, took possession of that population so habituated to universal idolatry, and so confident of its own invincibility. Wounded pride was transformed into fury. Unable to repel the invasion, the Parisians overthrew the empire. In default of a victory, they inaugurated a revolution. A certain portion of the population approved of it. A wave descended from Belleville to Montmartre, rolled through the muddy quarters of the capital, smashing the imperial eagles and insignia, mutilating monuments, and upsetting a government that was already tottering. Then a dull and mournful silence followed the orgy. The city that was always so ready for a fête now prepared for a siege. The trees of the Bois de Boulogne, in the shade of which, the week before, the most elegant equipages rolled along, were now cut down. A deep melancholy suddenly took the place of unbridled gaiety….

***

An assistant surgeon, followed by two attendants, passed along the line of wounded. Mingled oaths and groans arose from every side, while the rattle of knives explained the tortures these unfortunates were suffering. Amputated limbs were thrown out the door, filling with horror those who were brought in. In the yard, French and Germans were heaped pell-mell, and their numbers were constantly increasing.

Quintus Smyrnaeus: Ares and his sister maddened there

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Greek and Roman writers on war and peace

Quintus Smyrnaeus: In his talons bore a gasping dove. Where never ceased Ares from hideous slaughter.

Quintus Smyrnaeus: Mass murder’s tropes: Dread Ares drank his fill of blood

Quintus Smyrnaeus: While here all war’s marvels were portrayed, there were the works of lovely peace

====

Quintus Smyrnaeus
From The Fall of Troy
Translated by Arthur S. Way

…when the whole host reached the walls of Troy, into the city of Priam, breathing rage of fight, with reckless battle-lust they poured; and all that fortress found they full of war and slaughter, palaces, temples, horribly blazing on all sides; glowed their hearts with joy. In deadly mood then charged they on the foe. Ares and fell Enyo maddened there: blood ran in torrents, drenched was all the earth, as Trojans and their alien helpers died. Here were men lying quelled by bitter death all up and down the city in their blood; others on them were falling, gasping forth their life’s strength; others, clutching in their hands their bowels that looked through hideous gashes forth, wandered in wretched plight around their homes: others, whose feet, while yet asleep they lay, had been hewn off, with groans unutterable crawled mid the corpses. Some, who had rushed to fight, lay now in dust, with hands and heads hewn off. Some were there, through whose backs, even as they fled, the spear had passed, clear through to the breast, and some whose waists the lance had pierced, impaling them where sharpest stings the anguish-laden steel. And all about the city dolorous howls of dogs uprose, and miserable moans of strong men stricken to death; and every home with awful cries was echoing. Rang the shrieks of women, like to screams of cranes, which see an eagle stooping on them from the sky, which have no courage to resist, but scream long terror-shrieks in dread of Zeus’s bird; so here, so there the Trojan women wailed, some starting from their sleep, some to the ground leaping: they thought not in that agony of robe and zone; in naught but tunics clad distraught they wandered: others found nor veil nor cloak to cast about them, but, as came onward their foes, they stood with beating hearts trembling, as lettered by despair, essaying, all-hapless, with their hands alone to hide their nakedness. And some in frenzy of woe: their tresses tore, and beat their breasts, and screamed. Others against that stormy torrent of foes recklessly rushed, insensible of fear, through mad desire to aid the perishing, husbands or children…. Shrieks had startled from their sleep soft little babes whose hearts had never known trouble – and there one with another lay gasping their lives out! Some there were whose dreams changed to a sudden vision of doom. All round the fell Fates gloated horribly o’er the slain. And even as swine be slaughtered in the court of a rich king who makes his folk a feast, so without number were they slain. The wine left in the mixing-bowls was blent with blood gruesomely. No man bare a sword unstained with murder of defenceless folk of Troy, though he were but a weakling in fair fight. And as by wolves or jackals sheep are torn, what time the furnace-breath of midnoon-heat darts down, and all the flock beneath the shade are crowded, and the shepherd is not there, but to the homestead bears afar their milk; and the fierce brutes leap on them, tear their throats, gorge to the full their ravenous maws, and then lap the dark blood, and linger still to slay all in mere lust of slaughter, and provide an evil banquet for that shepherd-lord; so through the city of Priam Danaans slew one after other in that last fight of all. No Trojan there was woundless, all men’s limbs with blood in torrents spilt were darkly dashed.

Antonio Buero-Vallejo: We must live to abolish forty centuries of killing children

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Antonio Buero-Vallejo
The Foundation
Translated by Marion Peter Holt

ASEL. …We live in civilized world that still finds the very old practice of killing the most intoxicating sport of all. They…let you starve to death if you’re a prisoner of war….Throughout time, river of blood. Millions of men and women….

THOMAS. Women?

ASEL. And children….The children pay too. We’ve burned them, suffocating their terrifying cries to their mothers, for forty centuries. Yesterday the god Moloch devoured them in a brazier in his belly; today napalm eats at their flesh. And the survivors can’t congratulate themselves either: children who are crippled or blind….Their parents have destined them for that. Because we are all their parents.

[Short silence]

ASEL. …This time it has been our turn to be victims, my poor Thomas. But I’m going to tell you something….I prefer it. If I saved my life, perhaps one day it would be my turn to play the role of executioner.

THOMAS. You no longer want to live?

ASEL. We must live! To put an end to all the atrocities and all the outrages against humanity. But…in so many terrible years, I’ve seen how difficult it is. It’s the hardest struggle: the struggle against oneself….The world is not the landscape you envision. It’s in the grip of plunder, of lies, of oppression. It’s one long calamity. But we must not resign ourselves to endless calamity, and we must abolish it.

Michel Déon: How we wish so many others had escaped the slaughter!

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

====

Michel Déon
Letter to Paul Morand
Translated by Euan Cameron

See also excerpts from the World War I journal of Michel Corday:

I’ve been dipping into Journal d’un attaché d’ambassade (1916-1917), that contemptuous indictment of one of the myths of our time, a myth that has unleashed so many terrible wars and buried entire civilizations. Your pessimism is reassuring. In this diary, maintained so methodically when a hectic life left you with little time to sleep, your mind was quick to seize the core of the matter: the confusion of a nation involved in the first of the great massacres of the twentieth century which was governed by men who behaved as though they were running an electoral campaign. We remained in the wings, the main stage is obscured. Pot-bellied, superfluous generals pass through, at times covered in laurels, at others treated as codgers and fools.

***

How might we have wished that Péguy, Alain-Fournier, Codet and so many others could also have escaped the slaughter! The sacrifice of your life – or even a left arm, which your friend Giraudoux considered a lesser evil – would not have shortened the endless killing by a single day. Your death, on the other hand, would have deprived the age of a portraitist so brilliant that he might have been taken for its creator.

Jules Romains: Never occurred to me that I might find a peaceful and a smiling sky

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Jules Romains: Selections on war

====

Jules Romains
Breaching the Frontiers (Violation de frontières)
Translated by Gerard Hopkins

The house in which I lived (the same house in which I had been born) was situated at one corner of the fatal rectangle. Each stick of bombs that fell missed it narrowly. The glass of the windows was shattered, and large sections of the ceiling collapsed. We took refuge in the cellars, and though the protection afforded by them was, I am inclined to think, illusory, the moral effect was not to be sneezed at. It helped us to endure an ordeal which our lack of preparations had served to intensify.

The hours I spent there are among the least pleasant of my memories. My physical courage is no greater than that of the ordinary run of mankind, but it was not so much fear that I then experienced as indignation. It was aroused in me less by the thought of any specific aggressor than by the knowledge that I was living in a world where such things were possible….

Next day, I went up to look at the ruins. Among them were those of the musical-instrument shop which I had owned (at rather less than a mile from my house). But my eyes took in not only the desolation but the sky as well. It bore, for me, an indelible stain. I regarded it as something definitely hostile and hateful. I wanted never to see it again, to blot it from my consciousness for good and all. I longed to withdrawn into an isolation which would afford me protection, not so much from physical danger as from the sense of impotent shame which had come upon me in the course of the past few days when I thought of the threat which had overhung me.

***

Why, too, should I be ashamed to admit that I had had enough of living under the constant threat of bombs?

***

There was no lack of prophets who declared one fine morning New York would wake up to the sound of bombs….Technically there would be nothing to prevent fifty heavy bombers from crossing the ocean….Few targets could be as tempting as New York. Once the defenses had been penetrated, the extraordinary visibility provided by the air above Manhattan, and the height and density of the city buildings, would mean that almost every bomb would be effective. Even a relatively small discharge would leave behind it a spectacular trail of destruction.

***

I raised my eyes automatically. And then, suddenly, the sky above Fifth Avenue, the New York sky, alive with sunlight and showing with a hard brilliance between the towering walls of masonry, made me catch my breath. In that moment, and without warning, I saw it as ugly and evil. My spontaneous impulse was to get away from it, as I had longed to get away from the sky above Rotterdam on the morning after the great raid….

It never occurred to me that somewhere else I might find a peaceful and a smiling sky.

It was the sky as such, without qualification of locality, which had become odious to me. To be more precise, it was the sense of a sky, any sky, above my head that was poison to me.

I had learned only too well, first in Rotterdam, and later in London, that the presence of a few floors above one’s head is no guarantee of safety. It may, indeed, make matters worse, and add to other perils that of being buried under heaps of ruined masonry.

Jean Lartéguy: What is a monster? The man who starts a war, whichever side he’s on.

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

====

Jean Lartéguy
Black Chimeras
Translated by Xan Fielding

“A pity this Major Volbert left the army when he did. A pity his successor did not see fit to abide by his opinion. No one ever listens to men like Volbert and myself: we are suspected of common sense, and common sense has always appeared undesirable in every army in the world. That’s why soldiers commit such startling blunders.”

***

What is a monster? The hangman is a monster, but also the judge and the man above the judge, and the man who starts a war…whichever side he’s on.

When you’re fighting a war, you mustn’t try to understand, you must simply obey. If you try to understand you start reasoning with the enemy and end up by coming round to his point of view. Then you’re done for, for everyone has good reasons for doing what he does.

***

Men would go on fighting for years to come, not in the big countries anymore – it was too dangerous, what with the atomic bombs – but in the small ones….

Pierre Boulle: Earth’s heritage squandered on dangerous expenditure

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Pierre Boulle: Converting the world’s arsenals into granaries

Pierre Boulle: The long reach of war profiteers

====

Pierre Boulle
Les jeux d’esprit
Translated by David Carter

For a long time they had all deplored the blindness of present governments, which grant derisory funds to their work, whenever they were of no direct interest to national defense. All of them suffered deeply when they saw the Earth’s heritage being squandered on dangerous, frivolous or simply useless expenditure, while pure science had to go begging.

***

…We have given you fire. It was intended to keep you warm in the winter and cook your food. You used it to forge swords and burn down villages.

We have invented machines to bring relief to humanity. You have transformed them into engines of death, on the earth, the sea and the air.

We have given you energy in all its forms. You have used it to raze whole cities to the ground….

***

With no consideration of our respective nationalities, we have all exchanged the results of our most recent research in our various fields. We would like to emphasize that some of the results would be of special interest to you in the improvement of your offensive and defensive armaments. In addition we have vowed that everything discovered by one of us would be immediately communicated to all the others.

***

Soviet scholars and technical experts not only know about the latest scientific theories developed in the United States, concerning anti-matter and cosmic radiation, but also about the practical procedures for the industrial manufacture of our most secret nuclear weapons, their precise range, the precision of the most recently developed American rockets, as well as the number, extent and coordinates, almost to a meter, of their stocks.

In return, American scholars and technical experts are no less well-informed about the military secrets of the Russians, even about the locations of underground shelters for the general staff and the government.

Pierre Boulle: Converting the world’s arsenals into granaries

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Pierre Boulle: Earth’s heritage squandered on dangerous expenditure

Pierre Boulle: The long reach of war profiteers

====

Pierre Boulle
Les jeux d’esprit
Translated by David Carter

All ministries of war would also be suppressed. Armies and armaments would be got rid of, except for those which would be at the disposal of the government for maintaining order.

***

He demonstrated that the problem of hunger was relatively easy to solve, and if it had not been solved yet, it was due to the laziness, ineptitude and the lack of coordination between governments. A provisional solution would be provided right away in the first few months by the mobilization of all available military transport, and God knows there was plenty of it! The capacity alone of the battle fleets with their giant vessels, their thousands of airplanes and helicopters, which could be freed up by a stroke of the pen, would be more than enough (he provided numerical proof) to transport the enormous surpluses from the countries who have too much to the unfortunate regions, which suffer periodically from famine.

***

“…All you other physicists, haven’t you invented weapons weapons against which there is no defense?”

“We have created them, but unfortunately we are no longer in control of them,” Fawell said with regret.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Building peace is persuading God to enfold all in his shepherd’s cloak

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

====

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Citadelle (The Wisdom of the Sands)
Translated by Stuart Gilbert

Thus we made essay of poets’ songs upon our army, now beginning to fall asunder. But a strange thing befell: the songs took no effect, our soldiers laughed at them.

“What care we for all those old wives’ tales?” they said. “Let the minstrels sing our truths: the fountains in our courtyards and the good smell rising from our cooking pots when we come home at nightfall.”

***

Peace is not a state we finally achieve by dint of war….As for peace, I cannot ensure it unless I establish it on sure foundations: to wit, that I receive and draw them towards me, so that each find in my empire the fulfillment of his heart’s desire.

***

Peace is a tree whose growth is slow. Like the cedar we must absorb ever more and more of the stony soil to establish its unity.

Building peace is building the shed large enough for all the herd to sleep in it; building the palace vast enough for all men to gather within it without abandoning any of their belongings. There is no question of maiming them so that it may hold them all. Building peace is persuading God to lend his shepherd’s cloak so that all many be enfolded under it, in the fulness of their desires. Thus it is with the mother who loves her sons; one of them mild and gentle, another bursting with the zest of life, and, perhaps, a third a cripple. All are equally dear to her, in their diversity, and all, in the diversity of their love, enhance her glory.