Ernest Feydeau: First time I found myself with my feet in the blood of a battlefield

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

French writers on war and peace

Ernest Feydeau: Of all the horrors war is the worst

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Ernest Feydeau
The Secret of Happiness

He was one of those men sprung from the people, whom the chances of the conscription have condemned to devote their whole life to a soldier’s toilsome and obscure calling. After twenty years of service, this man had come…to be so perfectly molded by discipline that he fulfilled the duties of his own less from a sense of obligation than an impossibility of doing otherwise. He neither knew nor inquired whether he liked his profession. A machine, indeed, but a conscious machine…he simply obeyed the orders of his superiors without ever discussing them. Had he been ordered to blow out his brains “for the good of the service,” he would have done so. His life belonged not to himself but to the State….

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“No, I never liked our profession. I never shared its spirit, nor its tastes, nor its prejudices, not its faults, nor, perhaps, its virtues even. I always detested dependence. A force that only acts, and does not reason, always revolted me, and the first time I found myself with my feet in the blood of a battlefield, I was horrified.”