Arnold Zweig: War was in the world, and war prevailed

====

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

German writers on peace and war

Arnold Zweig: Selections on war

====

Arnold Zweig
From Young Woman of 1914 (1931)
Translated by Eric Sutton

Rough hands, indeed, had seized him, brutal and bloody was the task to which they would put him…War was in the world, and war prevailed…The genius of life and indeed of humanity cared nothing for individual existences; over the most gifted of them it passed unheedingly. It recked only of the expansion of species, the onflowing surge of forms and types in which it found embodiment. Mutual adaptation rather than war best served its ends; but sometimes, after long labours with such instruments of peace, units called nations, turgid with their strength, dash upon each other, and grasp at what shall make them greater…

***

A fine rain sprinkled the glimmering roofs of the great city, wreaths of cloud-like mist moved over the houses, sank into the abysses of the streets, and enveloped the lamps in a pale globe-like radiance. They whirled over the whole North German plain, they swept in from the West, and even reached the entrenchments in the East. No voice spoke in them, they brought no sound of grief nor lamentation. And yet beneath the earth, or on the naked ground, already lay armies of dead Germans: two hundred thousand in the West alone, two hundred thousand in the East. Of wounded there were near a million, apart from the missing, who lay mouldering in the marshes, or ate their hearts away in prison. For their sake there was agony, and tears, and bitterness, in countless closed rooms; but never for other eyes to see.

***

In that hour of pallid morning light, when the wind and rain howled round the corners of the isolated house, Colonel Schieffenzahn grasped the indefeasible outlines of what was to come. If the present crisis could be surmounted, it was still possible to conquer. True, the War would then last for years, more than could be counted on the buttons of a tunic. The question of food supplies might become difficult, many raw materials would run short, and the nation itself might lose its nerve; but a few stout hearts would preserve the will to victory, and all might be well! It was therefore essential to forestall any possible disorders: everyone not doing indispensable work in field or mine or factory must be sent to the war as soon as possible, or at least put into an army tunic and subjected to military law. Properly considered, the non-combatant services were an important section of the army. In the beleaguered fortress that was Germany there must be no vacillations of mood; a man who was not in the firing line was, in any event, a very fortunate person. Thus would he shut the mouths of all those gentlemen for whom a war lasted a little too long, the trade unionists, the unskilled workmen, and the so-called intellectuals from the liberal professions. He would bundle them all into uniform and train them gradually for the battles to come.