Thomas Mann: In search of the land of peace
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
German writers on peace and war
Thomas Mann: Selections on war
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Thomas Mann
The Holy Sinner
Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter
At Arras it was, in the lofty hall, there consulted and resolved, as I say, the counts of castles, gentlemen of rank, and heads of cities. For now the word went round, this country late so full of need had mastered its misfortune and once more flourished in peace….
***
“Great and weighty must the matter truly be, that has set you stately noblemen on the road and makes you indifferent to hardships you are not used to I well understood that you came from far away and have covered great stretches of ground.”
“That have we,” confirmed the one with the white hair and black eyebrows. “From so far we come as from the land of Italy, where stands the new Jerusalem. But not out of rashness, which would not beseem our age, have we set out on our journey and sought throughout Christendom; no, but instead by direction from on high.”
“With reverence I hear it,” answered the woman. “And with reverence not meddlesomeness it is that I ask what might you be searching for through Christendom?”
“That you will learn,” said the shorter man, ‘together with all the world when the Word has fulfilled itself in us: ‘Seek and ye shall find.’ Not much can fail of it being fulfilled, and we can no longer be far from our goal, according to our instructions. We have crossed the cities and dominions of Italy, on horseback, in wagons and litters, and thus approached the fearsome Alps, in whose gorges the water foams down from horrible rocks and where our path mounted climbing through dampness and mist on long-foretold paths to heights and slopes at whose desolation the soul is benumbed. There grows no tree or bush, in glassy light, the desert rubble spreads, whereon snow-covered peaks look menacingly down and the pure arc of sky stretching over it seems desolate too. We breathed light, our hearts were in our mouths, and by virtue of a sort of intoxication which overcame us and suited ill the awfulness of our surroundings, my companion, the clerical gentleman there, quite contrary to his nature and physical constitution, began to expend himself in jests for which I reproved him because of the nighness of God.”
“You cannot say,” the taller one defended himself, “that my words were light.”
“They could only be called so on account of their gushing abundance,” responded the other, “and I speak of it only to give this good woman an idea of the monstrousness of the spheres whereinto our journey led us. But it went down thence too a as we expected, we arrived in Germany, where men love usefulness and gain; sturdy men grub up woods into heath and meadow; distaff and shuttle support considerable towns, and learning flourishes in peaceful cloisters. We have lingered for naught but needful rest. Even renowned St. Gall could not tempt us to pause. Our mission brooked no delay. Westward and northward it urged us on, through many bishoprics, palatinates, and kingdoms, till we came to this country which borders on the North Sea and of which it is said that it was overspread with ravaging war, from which a firm-holding hand delivered it….”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Selections on war
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
French writers on war and peace
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Selections on war
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Back at home in the peace of our villages
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Building peace is persuading God to enfold all in his shepherd’s cloak
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Charred flesh of children viewed with indifference
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Gone was the feeble spark of humanity
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Man-made volcanoes in China or Spain
William Lyon Phelps: War, poets and spiritual despair
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
William Lyon Phelps: Selections on war
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William Lyon Phelps
The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century
[Francis] Thompson planned a series of Ecclesiastical Ballads, of which he completed only two – Lilium Regis and The Veteran of Heaven. These were found among his papers, and were published in the January-April 1910 number of the Dublin Review. Both are great poems; but Lilium Regis is made doubly impressive by the present war. With the clairvoyance of approaching death, Thompson foresaw the world-struggle, the temporary eclipse of the Christian Church, and its ultimate triumph….
***
The publication of poems written when he was about twenty-five is interesting to students of Mr. Hardy’s temperament, for they show that he was then as complete, though perhaps not so philosophical a pessimist, as he is now. The present world-war may seem to him a vindication of his despair, and therefore proof of the blind folly of those who pray to Our Father in Heaven.
The title of Mr. Hardy’s latest volume of poems, Moments of Vision, leads one to expect rifts in the clouds – and one is not disappointed. It is perhaps characteristic of the independence of our author, that steadily preaching pessimism when the world was peaceful, he should now not be perhaps quite so sure of his creed when a larger proportion of the world’s inhabitants are in pain than ever before.
***
The shadow of the war darkens nearly every page of this volume [Wilfred Wilson Gibson’s Hill-Tracks], and the last poem expresses not the local but the universal sentiment of us who remain in our homes.
We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun, or feel the rain,
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly, and spent
Their all for us, loved, too, the sun and rain?
A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings –
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?
***
Mr. Housman’s poems are nearer to the twentieth century in spirit than the work of the late Victorians, and many of them are curiously prophetic of the dark days of the present war. What strange vision made him write such poems as The Recruit, The Street Sounds to the Soldiers’ Tread, The Day of Battle, and On the Idle Hill of Summer? Change the colour of the uniforms, and these four poems would fit today’s tragedy accurately.
***
Then came the war. As every soldier drew his sword, every poet drew his pen. And of all the poems published in the early days of the struggle, none equalled in high excellence August 1914, by John Masefield. And its tone was precisely the opposite of what his most famous efforts had led us to expect. It was not a lurid picture of wholesale murder, nor a bottle of vitriol thrown in the face of the Kaiser. After the thunder and the lightning, came the still small voice. It is a poem in the metre and manner of Gray, with the same silver tones of twilit peace – heartrending by contrast with the Continental scene.
How still this quiet cornfield is to-night;
By an intenser glow the evening falls,
Bringing, not darkness, but a deeper light;
Among the stocks a partridge covey calls.
The windows glitter on the distant hill;
Beyond the hedge the sheep-bells in the fold
Stumble on sudden music and are still;
The forlorn pinewoods droop above the wold.
An endless quiet valley reaches out
Past the blue hills into the evening sky;
Over the stubble, cawing, goes a rout
Of rooks from harvest, flagging as they fly.
So beautiful it is I never saw
So great a beauty on these English fields
Touched, by the twilight’s coming, into awe,
Ripe to the soul and rich with summer’s yields.
Maurits Dekker: Soldiers were robbers, pirates on land
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Maurits Dekker
Beggars’ Revolt
Translated by Irene Clephene and David Hallet
These envious people behaved in politics as in war; they committed stupidities, and then, when the evil consequences came to light, they reproached someone else for not having committed the same stupidity.
***
Why so much enthusiasm for a war for which nobody could see the need?
***
The country was in a state of perpetual unrest….Indulgences were no longer bought, and even faithful Catholics had fewer Masses read for their beloved dead. When receipts fell, less was spent. The citizens too were living more economically now that times were bad, and they had to meet the demands of the King, who needed money for soldiers and war material.
***
…the work of an honest sailor on a merchant ship could not be compared with that of a soldier: soldiers were robbers, pirates on land.
***
In the city people were praying in cellars, in attics, in darkened rooms. The streets were narrow channels through which pushed a motley stream of soldiers clad in colorful uniforms. Scraps of color moved, changed shape, blended and separated again. The blue of English uniforms supplanted the yellow and gold of the Spanish; the brown of the Germans advanced, for a moment filled the whole street, and then was replaced by the green and gray of the Walloons. Sunlight glinted on cuirasses and on the shining steel of swords, pikes and daggers. Doors were shattered with the butt ends of harquebuses, windows were shivered to atoms with pikes and rapiers. The tinkle of the splintered glass was like the sound of falling gold pieces. The white wounds in the wooden doors, from which the mightily driven hatchets could scarcely be withdrawn, made the marauders think of the flesh of women’s bodies that would soon be in their hands.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Gone was the feeble spark of humanity
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
French writers on war and peace
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Selections on war
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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Wind, Sand and Stars
Translated by Lewis Galantière
Stretched out on the parapet I do not care a curse for the rules of war. For justifications or for motives. I listen. I have learned to read the course of these gurglings among the stars. They pass quite close to Sagittarius. I have learned to count slowly up to five. And I listen. But what tree has been sundered by this lightning, what cathedral has been gutted, what poor child has Just been stricken, I have no means of knowing.
That same afternoon I had witnessed a bombardment in the town itself. All the force of this thunder-clap had to burst on the Gran Via in order to uproot a human life. One single life. Passers-by had brushed rubbish off their clothes; others had scattered on the run; and when the light smoke had risen and cleared away, the betrothed, escaped by miracle without a scratch, found at his feet his novia, whose golden arm a moment before had been in his, changed into a blood-filled sponge, changed into a limp packet of flesh and rags.
He had knelt down, still uncomprehending, had nodded his head slowly, as if saying to himself, “Something very strange has happened.”
This marvel spattered on the pavement bore no resemblance to what had been his beloved. Misery was excruciatingly slow to engulf him in its tidal wave. For still another second, stunned by the feat of the invisible prestidigitator, he cast a bewildered glance round him in search of the slender form, as if it at least should have survived. Nothing was there but a packet of muck.
Gone was the feeble spark of humanity. And while in the man’s throat there was brewing that shriek which I know not what deferred, he had the leisure to reflect that it was not those lips he had loved but their pout, not them but their smile. Not those eyes, but their glance. Not that breast, but its gentle swell. He was free to discover at last the source of the anguish love had been storing up for him, to learn that it was the unattainable he had been pursuing. What he had yearned to embrace was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark, the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.
Thomas Mann: The man of war and the man of words
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Selections on war
German writers on peace and war
Thomas Mann: Selections on war
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Thomas Mann
The Beloved Returns
Lotte in Weimar
Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter
“I marvel, or rather I rejoice, to think of the advantage the man of heroic thought has over the man of heroic deeds. The awful tragedy of Waterloo had made the way for my father to enjoy the hospitality of the Gerbermühle. Of the two who had conversed in Erfurt [Napoleon and Goethe], one sat chained to a rock in the middle of the sea; whilst the other was left free by a favoring destiny to enjoy the moment to his heart’s content.”
“I see but justice in it,” Charlotte remarked. “Our dear Goethe had done naught but good and friendly deeds to men, whereas the other chastised them with scorpions.”
“Still,” answered August, throwing back his head, “no one can persuade me that my father too is not a tremendous and dominating force.”
“No one would try,” responded she, “and no one would dispute. But it is like Roman history, where we read of good and back emperors. Your father is one of the good and mild ones, while the other was a blood-reeking demon. Their diverse destinies mirror the difference you so aptly point out….”
***
“…the happiest means to resolve and banish all one’s own personal problems is of course the gift of poesy. In that confessional lies power to spiritualize our memories, to convert them into terms of universal humanity and make them issue in enduring works of art.”
***
“I realized that the great poet is a ruler of men; that the course of his fate, his work and his life is effective far beyond the confines of his person, and conditions the character, the culture and the future of the nation!”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Man-made volcanoes in China or Spain
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
French writers on war and peace
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Selections on war
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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Wind, Sand and Stars
Translated by Lewis Galantière
Every week men sit comfortably at the cinema and look at the bombardment of some Shanghai or other, some Guernica, and marvel without a trace of horror at the long fringes of ash and soot that twist their slow way into the sky from those man-made volcanoes. Yet we all know that together with the grain in the granaries, with the heritage of generations of men, with the treasures of families, it is the burning flesh of children and their elders that, dissipated in smoke, is slowly fertilizing those black cumuli.
***
In civil war the enemy is inward; one as good as fights against oneself.
***
A colony of bees, I said to myself, once it was established so solidly within the boundaries of an acre of flowers, would be assured of peace. But peace is not given to a colony of men.
Heinrich Mann: Selections on peace and war
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
German writers on peace and war
Heinrich Mann: Selections on peace and war
Heinrich Mann: I am young and not familiar with warfare
Heinrich Mann: Mission of letters in a world in rubble with 10 million corpses underground
Heinrich Mann: Nietzsche, war and the butchery of ten to twenty million souls
Heinrich Mann: “No! The less force exercised in the world the better!”
Henryk Sienkiewicz: They had lost all human feelings, and grown wild, like the beasts of the forest
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Nobel prize in literature recipients on peace and war
Henryk Sienkiewicz: Selections on war
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Henryk Sienkiewicz
Pan Michael: An Historical Novel of Poland, the Ukraine, and Turkey (1888)
Translated by Jeremiah Curtin
The hetman thought always, what he said later on at Vienna, that Pani Wojnina might give birth to people, but that Wojna (war) only killed them.*
***
“Here are the soldiers’ gravediggers!” said Zagloba, pointing at the birds with his sabre; “let us only go away, and wolves will come too, with their orchestra, and will ring with their teeth over these dead men….”
***
This meeting showed her what people in those regions were, and what might be looked for from them. It is true that this knowledge was not unexpected. From her own experience, and from the narratives at Hreptyoff, she knew that the former peaceful settlers had gone from those wilds, or that war had devoured them; those who remained were living in continual alarm, amid terrible civil disturbance and Tartar attacks, in conditions in which one man is a wolf toward another; they were living without churches or faith, without other principles than those of bloodshed and burning, without knowing any right but that of the strong hand; they had lost all human feelings, and grown wild, like the beasts of the forest.
***
The living wall trembles, bends, breaks. The dry crash of broken lances drowns for a time every other sound; after that, is heard the bite of iron, the sound, as it were, of thousands of hammers beating with full force on anvils, as of thousands of flails on a floor, and cries singly and collectively, groans, shouts, reports of pistols and guns, the howling of terror. Attackers and attacked mingle together, rolling in an unimaginable whirl. A slaughter follows; from under the chaos blood flows, warm, steaming, filling the air with raw odor.
***
The whole immense camp was streaming with blood, mixed with snow and rain. So many bodies were lying there that only frost, ravens, and wolves prevented a pestilence, which comes usually from bodies decaying.
***
*Translator’s note: I have not been able to verify the saying said to have been uttered by Sobieski at Vienna. In the text he is made to say that Pani Wojnina (War’s wife) may give birth to people, but Wojna (War) only destroys them. Who the Pani Wojnina was that Sobieski had in view I am unable to say at this moment, unless she was Peace.
Thomas Mann: Fatal hour when hysterical citizens revel in the shedding of blood
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
German writers on peace and war
Thomas Mann: Selections on war
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Thomas Mann
The Beloved Returns
Lotte in Weimar
Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter
“…enthusiasm is beautiful. But not without enlightenment. When hysterical citizens revel metaphorically in the shedding of blood, because the historic hour has given the rein to their evil passions, I must admit that things are painful to behold….”
“Not for the first or last time I made the observation that the warlike national spirit is connected with an increased enthusiasm of man for his own sex. The phenomenon is an inheritance from the customs of the ancient Spartans. It has a strange, harsh flavor not very acceptable to us women.”
“The German, instead of confining himself to himself, must take in the whole world in order to have an effect on the world. Our goal must be, not hostile separation from other peoples, but rather friendly association with all the world, cultivation of the social virtues, even at the expense of our inborn feelings or even rights.”
“Nothing is less my wish, Herr Doctor, than to hurt your feelings [on fighting for the fatherland]. I know you mean well. But it is not enough to mean well, or even nobly. One must also be able to see the consequences of one’s activities. I shudder at yours, because they are the first manifestation, as yet quite high-minded and harmless, of something frightful, to be displayed some day by us Germans in the form of the crassest follies. You yourself, if you could know of them, would turn in your grave.”
Arthur Wing Pinero: War’s psychic disfigurement
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
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Arthur Wing Pinero
The Enchanted Cottage
OLIVER.
[Raising his head.] My eccentric line of conduct! You see, they don’t realize – these stupid belongings of mine – my mother and stepfather, and my busybody of a sister – they don’t realize that I’m done – finished – down and out. They’re so beastly normal, they haven’t imagination enough to grasp that my chief object for the future is to avoid those who have known me as I was.
HILLGROVE.
Tsch! Rubbish!
OLIVER.
As I was – healthy, strong, active! [Beating his fists upon his knees.] Rubbish or not, I tell you I hate and despise myself. No words can describe the loathing, the contempt I have for my shrivelled face and shrunken carcass. I can’t bear to catch sight of myself in the glass. It’s agony to me. There are days – this is one of them – when I simply can’t bear it.
***
OLIVER.
Pretty girls! Pretty! It’s the pretty girls I’ve splashed about with in town that I can’t face – that I
haven’t the courage to face! [Opening his arms.] Look at me. A hideous casualty for the rest of my life! An eligible husband for a pretty girl I am!
***
OLIVER.
[Brokenly.] Forgive me. I – I’m a blundering ass. What I – what I meant was – oh, I wouldn’t have hurt you for the world! [Moving about the room distractedly.] What I meant was, no woman would marry me except from compassion; and the girls in my set, as you call them, are not the sort who’d give up their dancing and racketing to devote themselves to a helpless, unsightly, neurotic chap such as I’ve become. That’s the point – whether you can bring yourself to take pity on me. [Sitting in the chair on the right of the round table.] Oh, I know there’d be no romance in our marriage – couldn’t be. But we could be pals, you and I. I can’t offer you anything else. Simply pals. [Seeing that she is furtively drying her eyes.] Oh, I am sorry I’ve hurt you!
***
LAURA.
[Beaming upon him.] Oh, Major Hillgrove, I am pleased that you can see! [He bows to her smilingly.]
Don’t you think I am very, very beautiful? [He bows again.] Far, far beyond what you imagined me to be when you could only hear?
[He gives her another bow and makes way for OLIVER, who strides in at that moment. OLIVER also is in khaki, but his clothes are soiled and ragged, his boots heavily caked with mud, and his handsome face is burnt to brick-colour. He goes straight to LAURA and stands before her.]
LAURA.
[Gazing at him as though he were a stranger.] You have just come from the trenches?
OLIVER.
[Nodding.] Yes.
LAURA.
That muffler round your neck – does it comfort you?
OLIVER.
[Nodding.] Yes.
LAURA.
It’s one I have knitted and sent out.
***
HILLGROVE.
[Rising and standing at his full height.] Rector – Mrs. Corsellis – Mr. and Mrs. Smallwood – do any of you believe in miracles? Modern miracles – miracles that may happen to you, to me, today, tomorrow; that may relieve misfortune, retrieve disaster, alter the whole current of our lives; that may heal the sick, make the lame walk, and the blind – the blind! – see! If not – if you don’t – an awakening is in store for you, for I tell you that this man and his wife have been touched by a Power which is beyond earthly power and are wonderfully, gloriously transformed.
HlLLGROVE.
Yes. [In a firm voice.] Mrs. Smallwood, your son is no longer the wretched caricature of himself they sent you back from France. When you see him, you’ll see again the straight, lissom chap who said goodbye to you at the end of his last leave; you’ll find him as handsome as ever and as full of vigour and activity.
Heinrich Mann: I am young and not familiar with warfare
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
German writers on peace and war
Heinrich Mann: Selections on peace and war
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Heinrich Mann
The Youth of King Henri IV
Translated by Eric Sutton
“You let the land be ravaged. Lord Admiral, I am young and not, like you, familiar with warfare. Yet surely it’s monstrous that these aliens, instead of fighting at our side, should be let loose to burn our villages and torture our peasants until they give up all they have. Your stragglers are massacred by the country folk as though they were noxious beasts, and we indeed take a viler vengeance every time on those of our own speech.”
“But not of our own creed,” replied the gaunt of Protestant. Henri set his teeth, horror-struck at the blasphemy within him that strove for utterance.
“This cannot be God’s will,” he said.
***
Henri was glad to be with his mother….He was indeed happy too, so long as he did not stop to think. But during the advance he fell sick and lay in bed in a town; then he had time to remember the horrors of the war and mark them firmly on his memory….
He did not hide his inner conflict from the Admiral.
“Lord Admiral,” he said, ” do you truly conceive that religious freedom can be enforced by treaties and decrees? You are a great commander, you have outwitted the enemy and outwitted the king of France in his own capital. Nonetheless, the provincials who we have terrorized go on speaking of the Huguenot rebels and will never let us worship in peace where we have robbed and slaughtered.”
And Coligny, the conqueror, replied:
“Prince, you are still young, and, moreover, you lay sick while we were fighting the good fight. Men soon forget, and only God will remember what we were constrained to do in His cause.”
This Henri did not believe – or indeed, so much the worse, thought he, if God, like himself saw visions of wretched men strung up over a fire until they revealed where they had hidden their money. Fearful of what he might say, he bowed and left the presence of the conqueror.
Mór Jókai: All the nations of the world pursued a bitter warfare one against another
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Hungarian writers on war and peace
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Mór Jókai
Debts of Honor
Translated by Arthur B. Tolland
“Your father was older at the time of this event – seventeen years of age. Ever since his birth the world has been rife with discord and revolutions; all the nations of the world pursued a bitter warfare one against another. I scarce expected my only son would live to be old enough to join the army. Thither, thither, where death with a scythe in both hands was cutting down the ranks of the armed warriors; thither, where the children of weeping mothers were being trampled on by horses’ hoofs; thither, thither, where they were casting into a common grave the mangled remains of darling first-borns; only not hither, not into this awful house, into these horrible ranks of tempting spectres! Yes, I rejoiced when I knew that he was standing before the foe’s cannons; and when the news of one great conflict after another spread like a dark cloud over the country, with sorrowful tranquillity, I lay in wait for the lightning-stroke which, bursting from the cloud, should dart into my heart with the news: ‘Thy son is dead! They have slain him’…”
***
“This was the doom of God, a curse of man upon us!” continued grandmother, now no longer with terrifying voice. Besides, she spoke as calmly as if she were merely reciting to us the history of some strange family. “Your great-grandfather. Job Áronffy, he who lies in the first niche, bequeathed this terrible inheritance to his heirs; and it was a brother’s hand that hurled this curse at his head. Oh, this is an unhappy earth on which we dwell! In other happy lands there are murderous quarrels between man and man; brothers part in wrath from one another; the ‘mine and thine,’ jealousy, pride, envy, sow tares among them. But this accursed earth of ours ever creates bloodshed; this damned soil, which we are wont to call our ‘dear homeland,’ whose pure harvest we call love of home, whose tares we call treason, while every one thinks his own harvest the pure one, his brother’s the tares, and, for that, brother slays brother! Oh! you cannot understand it yet.”
Thomas Mann: Goethe in wartime
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Selections on war
German writers on peace and war
Thomas Mann: Selections on war
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Thomas Mann
The Beloved Returns
Lotte in Weimar
Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter
“The disaster of Jena had brought with it serious consequences, not alone at the hands of the victorious French soldiery but even before the battle from the Prussians billeted in Weimar: they broke into his [Goethe’s] garden house and smashed up doors and furniture to kindle their fires. In all that followed he certainly bore his share. They say the visitation cost him fully two thousand thaler, not to mention twelve casks of wine; and the marauders molested him even in his sleeping-chamber….”
***
“It was the worst time of the billeting. Even the beautiful house, though we had hoped it would be spared, was perforce turned into a hostel. For a full week he had twenty-four persons at table every day….”
***
“Did anyone know what would come after the great man’s fall? Russian hegemony instead of French? Cossacks in Weimar? For his part, that was not quite his heart’s desire. Did they behave so much better than the French? These friends of ours would plunder and lay waste, precisely as our foes had done. They took the transport, that was hard to get, away from our soldiers, and our wounded were plundered by their own allies on the field. That was the truth, disguise it as one would with sentimental fables. The poets ruined themselves mixing in politics. They and the people were simply in a state of disgusting and indecent heat. In short, it was awful.”
***
“The wounded came in streams from beleaguered Erfurt; the maimed, the fever and dysentery patients crowded our hospitals; soon the population of the city began to sicken. In November we had five hundred typhus cases – in a population of six thousand souls. There were no doctors, they were all stricken. Johannes Falk, the writer, lost four children in one month; his hair turned white. In some houses not a soul survived. The terror, the feat of contagion, suppressed every sign of life. Twice daily the streets were fumigated with a smudge of white pitch. But the hearse and basket still plied their gruesome trade. There were many suicides, people killed themselves for fear they would starve.”
F. Marion Crawford: With Cicero, preferring most unjust peace to most just war
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
F. Marion Crawford: Selections on war
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F. Marion Crawford
Saracinesca
He believed himself a practical man…not prejudiced for any policy save that of peace – preferring, indeed, with Cicero, the most unjust peace to the most just war….
The men who form the majority…have never had either the intelligence or the education to understand that democracy is the ultimate form of government: instead of forming themselves into a federation, they have divided themselves into hostile factions, calling themselves nations, and seeking every occasion for destroying and plundering each other.
In Germany, the aristocratic body takes a certain uniform hue, so to speak, from the army, in which it plays so important a part, and the patriarchal system is broken up by the long absences from the ancestral home of the soldier-sons.
…when in Italy the hand of every house was against its neighbour, and the struggles of Guelph and Ghibelline were but an excuse for the prosecution of private feuds, England was engaged in great wars which enlisted vast bodies of men under a common standard for a common principle. Whether the principle involved chanced to be that of English domination in France, or whether men flocked to the standards of the White Rose of York or the Red Rose of Lancaster….
William Watson: Ground ‘neath iron war, the golden thought survives
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
William Watson: Curse my country for its military victory
William Watson: Dream of perfect peace
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William Watson
The Yellow Pansy
Winter had swooped, a lean and hungry hawk;
It seemed an age since summer was entombed;
Yet in our garden, on its frozen stalk,
A yellow pansy bloomed.
‘Twas Nature saying by trope and metaphor:
“Behold, when empire against empire strives,
Though all else perish, ground ‘neath iron war,
The golden thought survives.”
Henryk Sienkiewicz: Selections on war
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Henryk Sienkiewicz: Selections on war
Henryk Sienkiewicz: The approach of war
Henryk Sienkiewicz: Famine, the brother of war
Henryk Sienkiewicz: I thought that war was terrible, but I did not think it was so terrible
Henryk Sienkiewicz: They had lost all human feelings, and grown wild, like the beasts of the forest
Stratis Myrivilis: War’s human flotsam
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Stratis Myrivilis
The Mermaid Madonna
Translated by Abbots Rick
After the war of 1912-13, when it was reported that the Turks were going to drive the Christians out of Anatolia, Captain Lias said to the panicking villagers, “Don’t behave like that. Wherever we go, we are only sojourners. Let us be sure that our bundle is tied and ready for departure at any minute and that we have a knife to cut the mooring quickly.”
***
The refugees disembarked pell-mell….
The corpses were rigid and were taken off in old army blankets. There was no weeping, just the words, “Easy now. Take it by the armpits. Throw the rope,” as if they were unloading freight. They put ashore an old man who had been blinded in both eyes. He stood on land, crossed himself, and started for the sea, holding his arms in front of him. A woman took him by the arm and pulled him back saying, “This way, you poor devil!”
The man turned back,. His eyes had been gouged out with a knife and were red, gaping sores.
There was a young mother who held in her arms a very thin little boy wrapped in a red-fringed blanket. His skinny legs dangled back and forth. His pale right arm hung over his mother’s back and his head rested motionlessly on her shoulder.
Those who ran to assist her thought he was sick. But he was dead. He had died only a short while before. The young woman held him as if he were merely ill. She refused to let his head be uncovered lest he should take cold, but she knew he was dead.
***
Here the island women who had lost sons in the war and in the prison camp renewed their grief. Around the family graves they mourned loudly for the unburied dead who had loyally remained in Anatolia.
***
The odd thing…was that for all the readiness with which they described the blessings they had left behind, it was difficult to get anything out of them about the atrocities they had survived. When they undertook to relate such things, their eyes became veiled and their tongues twisted into knots. If one asked them, for example, why such and such a person, whom everybody in Mouria knew, had not come with them, they shrugged their shoulders and said curtly, “They took him away.”
***
The village women invented a scathing name for the newcomers. They called them the “spoils of war.” This enraged the victims….
***
It is a tradition in Greece for generals to turn to politics when they have no war on their hands.
Hungarian writers on war and peace
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Hungarian writers on war and peace
Ödön von Horváth: We must prepare them to be warriors. Just that.
Mór Jókai: All the nations of the world pursued a bitter warfare one against another
Mór Jókai: Bellona is a fair woman. Rain follows all battles.
Mór Jókai: In praise of naval warriors
Mór Jókai: In the soldier’s march to glory each step is a human corpse
Mór Jókai: A trifling war somewhere
Mór Jókai: War’s patriotic pelf: a slaughtered army tells no tales
Attila József: War stirs its withering alarms, I shudder to see hatred win
Frigyes Karinthy: Lost his mind on the battlefield, thought he knew what he was fighting for
Frigyes Karinthy: Started war of self-defense by attacking neighbor
József Lengyel: Somewhere a great war was being waged
Ferenc Molnár: The first fruits of war
Ferenc Molnár: War is a rough, harsh word; it sounds like miniature thunder
Lajos Zilahy: Called, not without justice, the Third World War
Lajos Zilahy: The greatest efforts were concentrated on the greatest of human problems: how to kill.
Carlo Emilio Gaddo: Sad and atrocious tale
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Italian writers on war and militarism
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Carlo Emilio Gaddo
That Awful Mess on Via Merulana
Translated by William Weaver
Reread the sad and atrocious tale in War and Peace, book three, part two, chapter twenty-five: and understand the summary execution of the helpless Vereshchagin, thought a spy, not being one; Count Rostopchin, governor of Moscow, play-acting on the steps of his palace before the grim, waiting crowd, orders the dragoons to kill him with their sabers, there, in the crowd’s presence: on the fine old principle, by God, “qu’il leur faut une victime.” It was in the morning, ten o’clock. “At four o’clock in the afternoon Murat’s army entered Moscow.”
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For fair use only. Posted only to promote the cause of peace.
Viktor Rozov: War cripples people not just physically; it destroys a man’s inner world
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Russian writers on peace and war
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Viktor Rozov
Life Eternal
Translated by Franklin D. Reeve
ANNA…War cripples people not just physically; it destroys a man’s inner world – and maybe that’s one of the most terrible things it does. You understand how the wounded feel when they cry and groan and carry on so that they even interfere with your curing them….
***
ANTONINA You should have seen my apartment in Leningrad. What furniture! A wardrobe of bird’s-eye maple! And just think, I nailed it shut with huge nails; my china’s in there. The crystal I put in the bathtub. Do you really think they’ll steal it? And the people that met at my place that day! Noise, laughter….Toward the end of the evening we just had to take a car and off we went around town. From one end to the other! To Vasily Island, to the Petrograd side, out to the islands – everywhere! Riding around in cars on that night was a tradition. But now….How terrible this war is! It has sort of knocked me out of that life with one stroke, one blow….And you know, Vava, what the most terrible thought is? Suddenly nothing will be the way it used to. Nothing, ever!
Herman Melville: Butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all military commanders
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Herman Melville: Selections on peace and war
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Herman Melville
Moby Dick
Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor. And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies’ plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier’s profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale’s vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
***
I know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty whales. I account that man more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.
Jo van Ammers-Küller: The Republic no longer conducts wars
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Women writers on peace and war
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Jo van Ammers-Küller
The House of Tavelinck
Translated by A.v.A. vanDuym and Edmund Gilligan
“Holland has no need of your pugnacity. The Republic no longer conducts wars. When our grandfathers were generals there was still some glory to be gained. Though Rambouts was so poor in the end that he had to pawn his medals and his swords of honor. Today we are careful to remain at peace with our enemies. On the walls of our fortresses cows are grazing and, although the States would like to build men-of-war, there’s not a single city in the Seven Provinces that is willing to give money for it.”
“But there are still other countries that wage war….”
His pleading became so passionate that his father, willy-nilly, had to take it more seriously than he intended. Angrily he shook his head.
“A stupid occupation – to shed one’s blood for a foreign country! You belong to your own country, son….”
“You must be crazy,” he blazed out. Who has inspired you with this nonsense – that it would be the right thing for the son of an Amsterdam burgomaster to become a soldier and risk his life under a foreign potentate….”
Henryk Sienkiewicz: Hatred in hearts everywhere, as if people were obeying the commands of the Devil and not of the Lord
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Nobel prize in literature recipients on peace and war
Henryk Sienkiewicz: Selections on war
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Henryk Sienkiewicz
Pan Michael: An Historical Novel of Poland, the Ukraine, and Turkey (1888)
Translated by Jeremiah Curtin
Father Kaminski had been a soldier in his youthful years and a cavalier of great courage; he was now stationed at Ushytsa and was reorganizing a parish. But as the church was in ruins, and parishioners were lacking, this pastor without a flock visited Hreptyoff, and remained there whole weeks, edifying the knights with pious instruction. He listened with attention to the narrative of Pan Mushalski, and spoke to the assembly a few evenings later as follows: –
“I have always loved to hear narratives in which sad adventures find a happy ending, for from them it is evident that whomever God’s hand guides, it can free from the toils of the pursuer and lead even from the Crimea to a peaceful roof. Therefore let each one of you fix this in his mind: For the Lord there is nothing impossible, and let no one of you even in direst necessity lose trust in God’s mercy. This is the truth!
“It was praiseworthy in Pan Mushalski to love a common man with brotherly affection. The Saviour Himself gave us an example when He, though of royal blood, loved common people and made many of them apostles and helped them to promotion, so that now they have seats in the heavenly senate.
“But personal love is one thing, and general love – that of one nation to another – is something different. The love which is general, our Lord, the Redeemer, observed no less earnestly than the other. And where do we find this love? When, O man, you look through the world, there is such hatred in hearts everywhere, as if people were obeying the commands of the Devil and not of the Lord.”
“It will be hard, your grace,” said Zagloba, “to persuade us to love Turks, Tartars, or other barbarians whom the Lord God Himself must despise thoroughly.”
“I am not persuading you to that, but I maintain this: that children of the same mother should have love for one another; but what do we see? From the days of Hmelnitski, or for thirty years, no part of these regions is dried from blood.”
“But whose fault is it?”
“Whoso will confess his fault first, him will God pardon.”
“Your grace is wearing the robes of a priest to-day; but in youth you slew rebels, as we have heard, not at all worse than others.”
“I slew them, for it was my duty as a soldier to do so; that was not my sin, but this, that I hated them as a pestilence. I had private reasons which I will not mention, for those are old times and the wounds are healed now. I repent that I acted beyond my duty. I had under my command one hundred men from the squadron of Pan Nyevodovski; and going often independently with my men, I burned, slaughtered, and hanged. You, gentlemen, know what times those were. The Tartars, called in by Hmelnitski, burned and slew; we burned and slew; the Cossacks left only land and water behind them in all places, committing atrocities worse than ours and the Tartars. There is nothing more terrible than civil war! What times those were no man will ever describe; enough that we and they fought more like mad dogs than men.
“Once news was sent to our command that ruffians had besieged Pan Rushitski in his fortalice. I was sent with my troops to the rescue. I came too late; the place was level with the ground. But I fell upon the drunken peasants and cut them down notably; only a part hid in the grain. I gave command to take these alive, to hang them for an example. But where? It was easier to plan than to execute; in the whole village there was not one tree remaining; even the pear-trees standing on the boundaries between fields were cut down. I had no time to make gibbets; a forest too, as that was a steppe-land, was nowhere in view. What could I do? I took my prisoners and marched on. ‘I shall find a forked oak somewhere,’ thought I. I went a mile, two miles, – steppe and steppe; you might roll a ball over it. At last we found traces of a village; that was toward evening. I gazed around; here and there a pile of coals, and besides gray ashes, nothing more. On a small hillside there was a cross, a firm oak one, evidently not long made, for the wood was not dark yet and glittered in the twilight as if it were afire. Christ was on it, cut out of tin plate and painted in such a way that only when you came from one side and saw the thinness of the plate could you know that not a real statue was hanging there; but in front the face was as if living, somewhat pale from pain; on the head a crown of thorns; the eyes were turned upward with wonderful sadness and pity. When I saw that cross, the thought flashed into my mind, ‘There is a tree for you; there is no other,’ but straightway I was afraid. In the name of the Father and the Son! I will not hang them on the cross. But I thought that I should comfort the eyes of Christ if I gave command in His presence to kill those who had spilled so much innocent blood, and I spoke thus: ‘O dear Lord, let it seem to Thee that these men are those Jews who nailed Thee to the cross, for these are not better than those.’ Then I commanded my men to drag the prisoners one by one to the mound under the cross. There were among them old men, gray-haired peasants, and youths. The first whom they brought said, ‘By the Passion of the Lord, by that Christ, have mercy on me!’ And I said in answer, ‘Off with his head!’ A dragoon slashed and cut off his head. They brought another; the same thing happened: ‘By that Merciful Christ, have pity on me!’ And I said again, ‘Off with his head!’ the same with the third, the fourth, the fifth; there were fourteen of them, and each implored me by Christ. Twilight was ended when we finished. I gave command to place them in a circle around the foot of the cross. Fool! I thought to delight the Only Son with this spectacle. They quivered awhile yet, -one with his hands, another with his feet, again one floundered like a fish pulled out of water, but that was short; strength soon left their bodies, and they lay quiet in a circle.
“Since complete darkness had come, I determined to stay in that spot for the night, though there was nothing to make a fire. God gave a warm night, and my men lay down on horse-blankets; but I went again under the cross to repeat the usual ‘Our Father’ at the feet of Christ and commit myself to His mercy. I thought that my prayer would be the more thankfully accepted, because the day had passed in toil and in deeds of a kind that I accounted to myself as a service.
“It happens frequently to a wearied soldier to fall asleep at his evening prayers. It happened so to me. The dragoons, seeing how I was kneeling with head resting on the cross, understood that I was sunk in pious meditation, and no one wished to interrupt me; my eyes closed at once, and a wonderful dream came down to me from that cross. I do not say that I had a vision, for I was not and am not worthy of that; but sleeping soundly, I saw as if I had been awake the whole Passion of the Lord. At sight of the suffering of the Innocent Lamb the heart was crushed in me, tears dropped from my eyes, and measureless pity took hold of me. ‘O Lord,’ said I, ‘I have a handful of good men. Dost Thou wish to see what our cavalry can do? Only beckon with Thy head, and I will bear apart on sabres in one twinkle those such sons, Thy executioners.’ I had barely said this when all vanished from the eye; there remained only the cross, and on it Christ, weeping tears of blood. I embraced the foot of the holy tree then, and sobbed. How long this lasted, I know not; but afterward, when I had grown calm somewhat, I said again, ‘O Lord, O Lord! why didst Thou announce Thy holy teaching among hardened Jews? Hadst Thou come from Palestine to our Commonwealth, surely we should not have nailed Thee to the cross, but would have received Thee splendidly, given Thee all manner of gifts, and made Thee a noble for the greater increase of Thy divine glory. Why didst Thou not do this, O Lord?’
“I raise my eyes, – this was all in a dream, you remember, gentlemen, – and what do I see? Behold, our Lord looks on me severely; He frowns, and suddenly speaks in a loud voice: ‘Cheap is your nobility at this time; during war every low fellow may buy it, but no more of this! You are worthy of each other, both you and the ruffians; and each and the other of you are worse than the Jews, for you nail me here to the cross every day. Have I not enjoined love, even for enemies, and forgiveness of sins? But you tear each other’s entrails like mad beasts. Wherefore I, seeing this, suffer unendurable torment. You yourself, who wish to rescue me, and invite me to the Commonwealth, what have you done? See, corpses are lying here around my cross, and you have bespattered the foot of it with blood; and still there were among them innocent persons, – young boys, or blinded men, who, having care from no one, followed others like foolish sheep. Had you mercy on them; did you judge them before death? No! You gave command to slay them all for my sake, and still thought that you were giving comfort to me. In truth, it is one thing to punish and reprove as a father punishes a son, or as an elder brother reproves a younger brother, and another to seek revenge without judgment, without measure, in punishing and without recognizing cruelty. It has gone so far in this land that wolves are more merciful than men; that the grass is sweating bloody dew; that the winds do not blow, but howl; that the rivers flow in tears, and people stretch forth their hands to death, saying, ”Oh, our refuge!”
“‘O Lord,’ cried I, ‘are they better than we? Who has committed the greatest cruelty? Who brought in the Pagan?’
“‘Love them while chastising,’ said the Lord, ‘and then the beam will fall from their eyes, hardness will leave their hearts, and my mercy will be upon you. Otherwise the onrush of Tartars will come, and they will lay bonds upon you and upon them, and you will be forced to serve the enemy in suffering, in contempt, in tears, till the day in which you love one another. But if you exceed the measure in hatred, then there will not be mercy for one or the other, and the Pagan will possess this land for the ages of ages.’
“I grew terrified hearing such commands, and long I was unable to speak till, throwing myself on my face, I asked, ‘O Lord, what have I to do to wash away my sins?’ To this the Lord said, ‘Go, repeat my words; proclaim love.’ After that my dream ended.
“As night in summer is short, I woke up about dawn, all covered with dew. I looked; the heads were lying in a circle about the cross, but already they were blue. A wonderful thing, – yesterday that sight delighted me; to-day terror took hold of me, especially at sight of one youth, perhaps seventeen years of age, who was exceedingly beautiful. I ordered the soldiers to bury the bodies decently under that cross; from that day forth I was not the same man.
“At first I thought to myself, the dream is an illusion; but still it was thrust into my memory, and, as it were, took possession of my whole existence. I did not dare to suppose that the Lord Himself talked with me, for, as I have said, I did not feel myself worthy of that; but it might be that conscience, hidden in my soul in time of war, like a Tartar in the grass, spoke up suddenly, announcing God’s will. I went to confession; the priest confirmed that supposition. ‘It is,’ said he, ‘the evident will and forewarning of God; obey, or it will be ill with thee.’
“Thenceforth I began to proclaim love. But the officers laughed at me to my eyes. ‘What!’ said they, ‘is this a priest to give us instruction? Is it little insult that these dog brothers have worked upon God? Are the churches that they have burned few in number; are the crosses that they have insulted not many? Are we to love them for this?’ In one word, no one would listen to me.
“After Berestechko I put on these priestly robes so as to announce with greater weight the word and the will of God. For more than twenty years I have done this without rest. God is merciful; He will not punish me, because thus far my voice is a voice crying in the wilderness.
“Gracious gentlemen, love your enemies, punish them as a father, reprimand them as an elder brother, otherwise woe to them, but woe to you also, woe to the whole Commonwealth!
“Look around; what is the result of this war and the animosity of brother against brother? This land has become a desert; I have graves in Ushytsa instead of parishioners; churches, towns, and villages are in ruins; the Pagan power is rising and growing over us like a sea, which is ready to swallow even thee, O rock of Kamenyets.”
Jewish writers on peace and war
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Jewish writers on peace and war
Mark Aldanov: War was the only subject she avoided
Sholom Aleichem: War, I tell you, is a worldwide massacre
Yehuda Amichai: Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children’s games
Sholem Asch: Selections on war
Sholem Asch: All I want is to be allowed to go about my work in peace
Sholem Asch: Culture founded on egotism, ambition leads to war
Sholem Asch: He was still a child of the War
Sholem Asch: War-weariness showed itself, and the cry for Peace grew louder
Sholem Asch: The whole world thirsted for peace
Sholem Asch: You must fight war first of all in yourself
Berthold Auerbach: Practicing for mutual manslaughter
Julien Benda: The God of war and the God of peace
Julien Benda: Military mysticism
Walter Benjamin: Self-alienated mankind experiences its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure
Henri Bergson and Henry Bordeaux: Has humanity progressed only to destroy itself?
Georg Brandes: Selections on war
Georg Brandes: An Appeal Against Wholesale Murder
Georg Brandes: War, uninterrupted series of horrors, atrocities, and slaughter
Georg Brandes: The World at War
Georg Brandes: The Praise of War
Georg Brandes: Only officers and ammunition-makers wish war
Georg Brandes: Two million men held in readiness to exterminate each other
Georg Brandes: Wars waged by governments fronting for financial oligarchies
Georg Brandes: Abrupt about-face, the glorification of war
Georg Brandes: Giants of bloodshed; military staffs foster war
Georg Brandes: The future will look on war as the present looks on witchcraft, the Inquisition
Georg Brandes: War not fight for ideals but fight for concessions
James Darmesteter: War and prophecy
Maurits Dekker: Soldiers were robbers, pirates on land
Alfred Döblin: Selections on war
Alfred Döblin: Cry of war – raging death rattle, triumphant howl of the unredeemed creature
Alfred Döblin: It was better in the cemeteries
Alfred Döblin: The law and the police are at the service of the war state and its slavery
Alfred Döblin: Military dragon snaking its way through cities and villages
Alfred Döblin: The old grim cry for war
Alfred Döblin: A perfect metaphor for our masters of war
Alfred Döblin: War is not ineluctable fate
Alfred Döblin: We march to war, Death folds his cloak singing: Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.
Maurice Druon: A contempt for all things military
Maurice Druon: The dual prerogatives of minting coins and waging wars
Maurice Druon: Why I exhort you not to threaten each other with your armaments
Georg Ebers: Each one must bring a victim to the war
Georg Ebers: I tremble at the word, the mere word, war
Georg Ebers: Reign of war and reign of peace
Georg Ebers: War is a perversion of nature
Eleanor Farjeon: Now that you too join the vanishing armies
Lion Feuchtwanger: Selections on war
Lion Feuchtwanger: The demand for perpetual peace must be raised again and again
Lion Feuchtwanger: The future national state: A military power beyond conception
Lion Feuchtwanger: The privilege, the courage of fighting for peace
Lion Feuchtwanger: Service at the front gave him a burning hatred for militarism
Lion Feuchtwanger: There is no greater crime than an unnecessary war
Lion Feuchtwanger: War to make the world safe for democracy
Hans Habe: Hiroshima-born realization of man’s destructibility by man
Hans Habe: John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered
Charles Yale Harrison: Selections on war
Charles Yale Harrison: Bombardment, maniacal congealed hatred
Charles Yale Harrison: This is called an artillery duel
Charles Yale Harrison: War and really murdering someone
Charles Yale Harrison: War’s snarling, savage beasts
Charles Yale Harrison: War’s whispered reminder, you must come back to my howling madness
Charles Yale Harrison: We have learned who our enemies are
Stefan Heym: Sure it’s a vicious circle, it’s war
Stefan Heym: The whole scene was immersed in the silence of absolute death
Stefan Heym: The world market…making new wars
Paul Heyse: Abandoning a career that makes man act against his convictions
Josephus: Admonition against war
Frigyes Karinthy: Lost his mind on the battlefield, thought he knew what he was fighting for
Frigyes Karinthy: Started war of self-defense by attacking neighbor
Veniamin Kaverin: A dream of war
Joseph Kessel: In my family, war is in the blood…the blood of others
Joseph Kessel: The monstrous ululation of an air-raid siren
Joseph Kessel: War’s ultimate fratricide, killed for not killing
Karl Kraus: Aphorisms and obloquies on war
Karl Kraus: This is world war. This is my manifesto to mankind.
Karl Kraus: The evolution of humanitarian bombing
Karl Kraus: The Last Days of Mankind
Karl Kraus: War renders unto Caesar that which is God’s
Karl Kraus: In war, business is business
Karl Kraus: Wire dispatches are instruments of war
Karl Kraus: The vampire generation; prayer in wartime
József Lengyel: Somewhere a great war was being waged
Emil Ludwig: Dialogue on “humanitarian war”
Albert Maltz: A children’s wartime bestiary
Albert Maltz: Conquering the world but losing your son
Albert Maltz: “Ten thousand dead today. That’s what the war means.”
Klaus Mann: The whole country was transformed into an armed camp
André Maurois: The killing machine started up with pitiless smoothness
Albert Memmi: So the war had caught up with us, a celebration in honor of death
Ferenc Molnár: The first fruits of war
Ferenc Molnár: War is a rough, harsh word; it sounds like miniature thunder
Alberto Moravia: Selections on war
Alberto Moravia: “Ah well, war is war, you know”
Alberto Moravia: Even in uniform and with a chest covered with medals, always a thief and a murderer
Alberto Moravia: That is what war is like, the war is everywhere
Alberto Moravia: Torn colored posters inciting people to war
Alberto Moravia: War destroys all things seen and unseen
Alberto Moravia: War survives in our souls long after it is over
George Jean Nathan: Clarence Darrow on the spurious and futile heroism of war
Robert Nathan: Harder to make peace than to make war
Alfred Neumann: Selections on war
Alfred Neumann: Debunking the glory of twenty murderous years, the greatest mass-murderer in history
Alfred Neumann: Empire destroys peace, converts liberalism into harvest of blood
Alfred Neumann: European hegemony emerges from piled-up corpses, out of recent graves
Alfred Neumann: Four thousand miles of fratricidal murder
Alfred Neumann: Modern war, the murderous happiness of the greatest number
Alfred Neumann: The morals and manners of the War God
Alfred Neumann: Sacred recalcitrance toward the black hatred of war
Alfred Neumann: The stench of burning flesh. That happens sometimes.
Alfred Neumann: Ten million lives for one man’s glory; the emperor changes his hat
Alfred Neumann: Twilight of a conqueror
Alfred Neumann: The ultima ratio of all dictatorships: war
Alfred Neumann: War and the stock market
Alfred Neumann: War, the Great Incendiary, the everlasting prototype of annihilation
Alfred Neumann: War is not ambiguous after all, but a horribly intelligent affair
Alfred Neumann: The War Minister
Alfred Neumann: War nights were never silent
Alfred Neumann: War: Sad, hate-filled, hopeless and God-forsaken
Alfred Neumann: War’s arena, a monstrous distortion, a blasphemous coupling of life and death
E. Philips Oppenheim: Black tragedy leaned over the land
Amos Oz: “Best of all, write for the peace”
Philo: “Ah, my friends, how should you not hate war and love peace?”
Philo: Casting off the warlike spirit in its completeness
Philo: “Nourished” for war and all its attendant evils
Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics
Vladimir Pozner: Mars and Ceres
Marcel Proust: Every day war is declared anew
Elmer Rice: The expediency of choosing the right side in a war
Isaac Rosenberg: Break of Day in the Trenches
Isaac Rosenberg: Dead Man’s Dump
Isaac Rosenberg: O! ancient crimson curse! On receiving news of the war
Isaac Rosenberg: Soldier: Twentieth Century
Joseph Roth: Black and red, death fluttered over them
Joseph Roth: His son was dead. His world had ended.
Siegfried Sassoon: Selections on war
Siegfried Sassoon: Arms and the Man
Siegfried Sassoon: At the Cenotaph
Siegfried Sassoon: “The bullet and the bayonet are brother and sister”
Siegfried Sassoon: Creatures whose faces knew nothing of War’s demented language
Siegfried Sassoon: The foul beast of war that bludgeons life
Siegfried Sassoon: Gloom and disaster of the thing called Armageddon
Siegfried Sassoon: In war-time the word patriotism means suppression of truth
Siegfried Sassoon: Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace
Siegfried Sassoon: No doubt he loathed the war and longed for peace
Siegfried Sassoon: Our deeds with lies were lauded, our bones with wrongs rewarded
Siegfried Sassoon: Repression of War Experience
Siegfried Sassoon: To Any Dead Officer
Siegfried Sassoon: The Tombstone-Maker
Siegfried Sassoon: The unheroic dead who fed the guns, those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones
Siegfried Sassoon: War, remorse and reconciliation
Siegfried Sassoon: We left our holes and looked above the wreckage of the earth
Arthur Schnitzler: Cannot praise war in general and oppose individual wars
Arthur Schnitzler: Remold the structure of government so that war becomes impossible
Arthur Schnitzler: War, making fathers pay wages to their sons whom we sent to their deaths
Anna Seghers: War enthusiasm, brewed from equal parts of age-old memories and total oblivion
Stephen Spender: Selections on war
Stephen Spender: Lecture on Hell: battle against totalitarian war
Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum
Stephen Spender: The Woolfs in the 1930s: War the inevitable result of an arms race.
Baruch Spinoza: Selections on war and peace
Baruch Spinoza: Fleeing peace for the despotic discipline of war
Baruch Spinoza: Men shouldn’t choose slavery in time of peace for better fortune in war
Baruch Spinoza: Peace is not mere absence of war
Baruch Spinoza: Tyrants and war for its own sake
Baruch Spinzoa: War corrupts civil society
G. B. Stern: Conventions of war? War itself is the outrage.
Ernst Toller: Corpses In The Woods
Yuri Trifonov: Our world – the world of peace!
Kurt Tucholsky: The White Spots
Kurt Tucholsky: Murder in disguise
Louis Untermeyer: Daybreak after war
Jakob Wassermann: Was there ever since the world began a just cause for war?
Franz Werfel: Selections on war
Franz Werfel: Advent of air war and apocalyptic visions
Franz Werfel: Cities disintegrated within seconds in the Last War
Franz Werfel: How describe in a few words a world war?
Franz Werfel: Leaders’ fear of their people drives them to war
Franz Werfel: To a Lark in War-Time
Franz Werfel: Twenty thousand well-preserved human skulls of the Last War
Franz Werfel: Waging currish, cowardly war to plunder the poor
Franz Werfel: War behind and in front, outside and inside
Franz Werfel: War is the cause and not the result of all conflicts
Nathanael West: Selections on war
Nathanael West: Every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition
Nathanael West: The noble motives, the noble methods of war
Nathanael West: Not their fault, they thought they had bombed a hospital
Nathanael West: One live recruit is better than a dozen dead veterans
Nathanael West: They haven’t the proper military slant
Leonid Zhukhovitsky: May the book prove more powerful than the bomb
Arnold Zweig: Selections on war
Arnold Zweig: Conducting the business of murder with embittered reluctance
Arnold Zweig: Education Before Verdun
Arnold Zweig: The final trump in the struggle for world markets: the Gun
Arnold Zweig: From the joy of the slayer to being dimly aware of the man on the other side
Arnold Zweig: In the war you’ve lost all the personality you’ve ever had
Arnold Zweig: Keep the war going to the last drop of – other – people’s blood
Arnold Zweig: The meaning, or rather the meaninglessness, of war
Arnold Zweig: Mere existence of armies imposes upon mankind the mentality of the Stone Age
Arnold Zweig: Military strips nation of all that is worthy of defense
Arnold Zweig: Never again! On reading Barbusse
Arnold Zweig: No joy to be born into world of war
Arnold Zweig: Of course, one had to shoot at crowds of civilians, men, women and children
Arnold Zweig: Only the wrong people are killed in a war
Arnold Zweig: The plague has always played a part in war
Arnold Zweig: Pro-war clerks and clerics are Herod’s mercenaries
Arnold Zweig: Reason is the highest patriotism and militarism is evil its very essence
Arnold Zweig: They won no more ground than they could cover with their corpses
Arnold Zweig: War a deliberate act, not an unavoidable natural catastrophe
Arnold Zweig: War, a gigantic undertaking on the part of the destruction industry
Arnold Zweig: War of all against all, jaded multitudes of death
Arnold Zweig: War transforms rescue parties into murder parties
Arnold Zweig: War was in the world, and war prevailed
Arnold Zweig: War’s brutality, folly and tyranny practiced even on its own
Arnold Zweig: War’s communion, hideous multiplication of human disasters
Arnold Zweig: War’s hecatomb from the air, on land and at sea
Stefan Zweig: Selections on peace and war
Stefan Zweig: The army of the spirit, not the army of force
Stefan Zweig: The bloody cloud-bank of war will give way to a new dawn
Stefan Zweig: The fear of opposing military hysteria
Stefan Zweig: The fruits of peace, the drive toward war
Stefan Zweig: “How much rottenness there is in war”
Stefan Zweig: I would never have believed such a crime on the part of humanity possible
Stefan Zweig: Idea of human brotherhood buried by the grave-diggers of war
Stefan Zweig: The idealism which sees beyond blood-drenched battlefields
Stefan Zweig: Opposition to war, a higher heroism still
Stefan Zweig: Origin of the Nobel Peace Prize
Stefan Zweig: Propaganda is as much war matériel as arms and planes
Stefan Zweig: Romain Rolland and the campaign against hatred
Stefan Zweig: A single conscience defies the madness of war
Stefan Zweig: Stendhal, in war but not of it
Stefan Zweig: War, the ultimate betrayal of the intellectuals
Stefan Zweig: The whole world of feeling, the whole world of thought, became militarized
Ferenc Molnár: War is a rough, harsh word; it sounds like miniature thunder
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Hungarian writers on war and peace
Ferenc Molnár: The first fruits of war
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Ferenc Molnár
The Captain of St. Margaret’s
Translated by Barrows Mussey
“There’s a heavy load on my heart, on my lungs,” said the newspaperman.
“Low air pressure,” said Pharmaco.
“No, Serbia,” said the newspaperman, flinging himself on the bed. The bells came from across the Danube. The wind howled, and a darkness like night came down upon us. The rain was already drumming somewhere on a tin roof. There was a terrific crash high up in the heavens. The twelve trees leaned over sideways. From somewhere beyond the building the storm came rushing out, laying them low. There was the tinkle of broken windowpanes. Curtains of water flapped in the air. A woman gave a scream of fright. Thunder, crashing; not a sign of what we had known as rain – nothing but great curtains of water, everywhere.
At six o’clock we walked across the battered island. The newspaperman had been urgently summoned to the press department of the Prime Minister, Count Tisza, for half past ten that night; there was to be important news for the press. The editor-in-chief nervously smoked one cigarette after another. He paced his room in silence. We stood in a corner, like frightened children.
What was all this today? The Last Judgment? Uprooted trees, lightning, thunder, hurricane, tolling bells, sirens, urgent newspaper conferences at night….
A fellow worker whispered in my ear, “We’re marching on Serbia.” In another corner I caught a scrap: “The Prime Minister has called the city editors in to see him tonight.”
We went to a café. All the telephone booths were occupied. Impatient people stood in line outside the booths.
At eleven-thirty a large car stopped outside the café. Everyone jumped up from the tables. A man came in, whispered something to somebody at a table, and in an instant the place was empty. The big car sped away; twelve people were standing, sitting, or clinging aboard. For the first time I heard the word: “Haboru.” In Hungarian the word haboru, meaning war, is a rough, harsh word; it sounds like miniature thunder. Broadside sheets, printed in haste, lay scattered and trampled in the street.
F. Marion Crawford: Selections on war
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
F. Marion Crawford: Selections on war
F. Marion Crawford: Find a priest for those I have killed
F. Marion Crawford: Military empires, war and the descent of man into ape
F. Marion Crawford: The real issue is between civilization and barbarism, between peace and war
F. Marion Crawford: When everyone understands war it will stop by universal consent
F. Marion Crawford: With Cicero, preferring most unjust peace to most just war
Ferenc Molnár: The first fruits of war
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Hungarian writers on war and peace
Ferenc Molnár: War is a rough, harsh word; it sounds like miniature thunder
====
Ferenc Molnár
The Captain of St. Margaret’s
Translated by Barrows Mussey
I consoled myself with the reflection that it was not enough to be kind, but you also had to have luck. And afterward I saw an incident confirming this theory of mine. It happened in the autumn of 1914, during the first month of the World War. War wounded were arriving in Budapest for the first time, on a long railroad train. A great crowd was standing around the station, gaping as the grisly spectacle to which in the course of years they became so accustomed – bleeding men, handled by the hundreds like railroad freight. This particular load were all Russian prisoners of war. When we newspapermen arrived, their stretchers were already unloaded side by side in the square before the station. The poor fellows were moaning loudly. The doctors went to them by torchlight, and we followed the doctors. K, a reporter, was the one most upset. A really kind and tenderhearted man, he turned pale at the sight, and looked upon this bloodstained misery, still new at the time, with deep pity. Her stopped beside a gigantic black-bearded Russian, who was wailing the loudest of any. Next to him stood the Hungarian doctor, who spoke some sort of broken Russian, and was able to make the soldier understand him.
My friend K inquired, “What’s this fellow bellowing about?”
“He says,” said the doctor, that at the front there was a rumor going around that the Hungarians execute all prisoners of war. Now he’s bawling because he’s afraid of that.”
My friend K was honestly indignant. “Unheard of!” he cried. “Shameful lying propaganda! We must reassure this poor man at once. Let’s show him our love and sympathy.”
So staying, he stepped over to the Russian, smiled tenderly at him, and began to pat him kindly on the shoulder. The Russian replied to this amiability with a frightful roar. That shoulder was where the bullet had lodged.
As I say, it is not enough to be kind: you need luck as well.
Amos Oz: “Best of all, write for the peace”
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Jewish writers on peace and war
====
Amos Oz
Just a Peace
Translated by Maurie Goldberg-Bartura
I say that I have come to visit, to look, and perhaps to write for a newspaper. Later we introduce ourselves without shaking hands. The introduction is stiff, embarrassing: Naif. Hassan. And this one, the gentleman, his name is Abu-Azmi.
Hassan, baby-faced and broad-shouldered, wonders, “What is there to see here?”
Naif says, “Write that the situation is bad.”
And Hassan, “Best of all, write for the peace.”
What sort of peace?
“Peace that the big shots agree on. What do I know? But I think that maybe there’s going to be another war.”
Why?
Hassan shrugs his shoulders.
Naif says bitterly, “Maybe not enough have died yet.”
I ask what will happen after the next war.
“Another war,” decrees Naif. “And after that another war. Another hundred wars.”
And at the end of all the wars?
“In the end maybe they’ll get tired. Maybe there won’t be any soldiers left. Maybe they’ll get some sense.”
====
For fair use only. The sole purpose of reproducing this excerpt is to encourage an end to war.
Sholem Asch: Culture founded on egotism, ambition leads to war
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Sholem Asch: Selections on war
====
Sholem Asch
The War Goes On
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
“They’re all such children, the pre-War generation. And they’re not quite sane. I suppose the War’s to blame for that, and no wonder. Just think how busy they were, all trying to murder each other. They can’t help being a little mad….”
“But the pre-War generation had a strongly developed feeling for art and beauty – perhaps even more than we have; yet it didn’t keep them from murdering each other!”
“What blessing can there be on a culture that is founded, not on serving mankind, but on selfish egotism and making a career? Culture of that kind is capable of anything. We saw it in the War, when the whole world of science set itself to destroy human life.”
***
The War children with their tubercular arms and legs, thin as sticks, had the faces of old men, so deeply graven were they with care and disappointment.
***
“…If the English had only made it clear in 1914, half an hour before the German mobilization, that they were going to side with France, there would have been no war. They’ll do the same thing again….And as for the Americans, all they care about is business. If Wilhelm’s government had had the common sense to run up a big debt in America for war material, as the French and the English did, the Americans would have come into the War on our side and not on the side of the Entente. Our biggest misfortune was the fact that we owed no debts to America!”
***
For some time, especially since Poincaré, the French premier, had begun threatening to occupy the Ruhr, the dreadful pain in the back of his head had been troubling him again. He had been shot in the head during the War, and a portion of his skull had been replaced by a metal plate which was skillfully enough covered by his hair; he had got used to the plate, had indeed almost forgotten about it, until all at once it had begun to press upon his brain like an iron weight, causing him excruciating irony.
F. Marion Crawford: Military empires, war and the descent of man into ape
====
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
F. Marion Crawford: Selections on war
====
F. Marion Crawford
Saracinesca
Darwin’s theories had been propagated, but had not yet been passed into law, and very few Romans had heard of them; still less had any one been found to assert that the real truth of these theories would be soon demonstrated retrogressively by the rapid degeneration of men into apes, while apes would hereafter have cause to congratulate themselves upon not having developed into men….Prussia was still, in theory, a Power of the second class, and the empire of Louis Napoleon was supposed to possess elements of stability. The great civil war in the United States had just been fought, and people still doubted whether the republic would hold together. It is hard to recall the common beliefs of those times. A great part of the political creed of twenty years ago seems now a mass of idiotic superstition, in no wise preferable, as Macaulay would have said, to the Egyptian worship of cats and onions. Nevertheless, then, as now, men met together secretly in cellars and dens, as well as in drawing-rooms and clubs, and whispered together….In the beginning of the year 1865 people crossed the Alps in carriages; the Suez Canal had not been opened; the first Atlantic cable was not laid; German unity had not been invented; Pius IX. reigned in the Pontifical States; Louis Napoleon was the idol of the French; President Lincoln had not been murdered, – is anything needed to widen the gulf which separates those times from these?
Alberts Bels: War, the great equalizer
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Alberts Bels
The Voice of the Herald
Translated by David Foreman
Out on the street the glazier was overtaken by a beggar. Measuring him with a critical eye the beggar hobbled past, his metal-capped wooden leg clattering against the pavement. He was hurrying to his “place of work” on the big boulevards.
The glazier’s lips moved, but he did not utter a sound, and continued on his way.
The war is over, but tell me, I beg,
Where can I get another leg?
A wooden one, a metal one?
Call in at that building yon.
But the building was a government one.
I asked to try a new leg on.
But why, they answered, what about it?
You’re looking just as good without it.
And don’t you dare complain or sue,
If you know what’s good for you.
***
It was only on the fields of Manchuria that the son of a wealthy farmer and a young farm-hand, both torn in pieces by Japanese shrapnel, were buried together in a common grave.
***
Every new generation rediscovers history for itself by reliving all mankind’s woes and joys from Adam to Golgotha. The closer a historical researcher gets to our own day, the more fears and doubts he experiences. He feels that he has lost his way in an unfamiliar and yet amazingly familiar labyrinth, moving from one chamber to another, encountering old vices in new raiment – treachery, viciousness, baseness, deceit, cruelty, exploitation, envy, avarice, cupidity – and he asks himself: how long, how long, and reaching the last chamber, above which the words 20th Century are inscribed in letters of fire and in which he is doomed to remain, to outdate himself, he crosses the threshold with a sinking heart.
Anton Chekhov: Humanity is desperately searching for replacement for war
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Russian writers on peace and war
Anton Chekhov: You can’t remember a single year without war
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Anton Chekhov
Three Sisters
Translated by Constance Garnett
VERSHININ. In old days men were absorbed in wars, filling all their existence with marches, raids, victories, but now all that is a thing of the past, leaving behind it a great void which there is so far nothing to fill: humanity is searching for it passionately, and of course will find it. Ah, if only it could be quickly! [a pause] If, don’t you know, hard work were united with education and education with hard work.
Alfred Döblin: Cry of war – raging death rattle, triumphant howl of the unredeemed creature
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
German writers on peace and war
Alfred Döblin: Selections on war
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Alfred Döblin
November 1918: A German Revolution
The Troops Return
Translated by John E. Woods
“The way the woman sits there so erect in her red wooden chair. By the wat, tasteless, garish chairs, that’s also the result of the war; the screams can’t be loud enough, keep on letting out what’s left of the tensions of the war. We’ll find that we have a dreadful hangover afterward.”
***
In the shelter, misery and despair. The counterattack with flamethrowers, dead, wounded, screams, spasms, death rattles. At the door to the shelter the hole dug by a grenade, we’ll toss our dead comrades in there. One of them with a mangled face kneels, “Shoot me, I’m blind.” But it is forbidden to shoot him.
***
“Peace, sweet peace,” the song broke out in Becker, just as it had in the railroad car as it rolled along. “I greet you, peace, you shall be my friend and brother, I have bound you to me by my blood, you are my blood brother. We have come out of the war, out of a long, hard war. Do not desert me.”
***
“A nation cannot live on glory, it needs work. In the end the most brilliant tactics of war cannot be a substitute for morality. Above war stands peace.”
***
“People all over the world, especially the people of Europe, have had war for four and a half years, for forty-five months. It looks as if between ten and twenty million people died in that war, were killed or starved or died from epidemics. We need a new, a totally new world, a new Europe….”
***
“I too am a Christian after all, and have my own small, vague conception of what religion is. And I know, for example, that during the war both sides, in their trenches and in ours, both Germans and the Allies, had chaplains and millions of Christians, and they merrily tossed hand grenades at one another and bombed one another and shot each other and happily ran each others’ bellies through with bayonets. And do you know what, Becker? Here, shake my hand. I’ll bet you – the bullet that hit you was fired by the tender hand of a Christian.”
***
And then things were ready and they could proceed to open the peace conference, to wind up the affairs of the world war that had begun in August, 1914 and ended on November 11, 1918.
Sixty-five million men had been mobilized for that war. Eight million of them had fallen during the war, twenty-one million had been wounded.
The war had cost $186 billion. Property valued at $30 billion had been destroyed, and the warring nations were $340 billion poorer.
***
And more and more the dagger in an iron grip rips away at the thin wall of paper, the wall of parchment that the world of peace has wrapped around itself.
The hard, strong arm is already pushing its way through the jagged hole.
And the hairy chest, the flat, sloping shoulders become visible. And this creature, half animal, half man…with its deep-set, devilish eyes beneath massive ledges of bone and its low, receding brow, with teeth bared, this human animal rises up to its full height.
Its eyes glitter.
A grim, bloodcurdling cry emerges from its throat, floating out over mankind, the cry of war – the raging death rattle, the triumphant howl of the unredeemed creature.
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For fair use only. The sole purpose of reproducing these excerpts is to encourage an end to war.
József Lengyel: Somewhere a great war was being waged
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Hungarian writers on war and peace
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József Lengyel
From Beginning to End
Translated by Ilona Duczynska
Somewhere in the world outside war has started, a very great war. Behind our barbed wire, we are not even supposed to know of this, but we know, of course. Besides, we soon feel it. For in the cabbage soup in the morning there is less and less; we are given no midday meal, and in the evenings the potato soup smells of mud – there are hardly any potatoes in it. Bread, the reduced ration, now becomes life and death to us.
Three thousand miles away a great war is being waged.
Dying here? This way? Now? I, who once prepared myself to be brave in the face of the enemy….What a pitiable, whining wretch I am. Was it worthwhile to save this? A louse-ridden, strange body, unrecognizable…awaited by no one.
Alfred Döblin: It was better in the cemeteries
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
German writers on peace and war
Alfred Döblin: Selections on war
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Alfred Döblin
November 1918: A German Revolution
The Troops Return
Translated by John E. Woods
With each new day new kings, princes and statesmen arrived in Paris and were received with ceremony and splendidly treated. Occasionally they and their wives would visit the hospitals and charitable institutions to view the victims of nationalist wrath. They would shake hands embarrassedly with one or another of them. They could not escape a feeling of awkwardness, however, as they confronted the maimed in their splendid clothing and with all their medals. It was better at the cemeteries, there you simply stood in front of a stone monument or wooden crosses.
***
At Neuilly near Paris is the American hospital, splendidly equipped and fully up-to-date. One morning they drive out there, prepared for a normal hospital visit with shaking of hands and cordiality. But in those white beds they find horrible mutilated men, ghastly tattered faces, young men who hardly look human any more but who still stammer the same English language their visitors speak, the same language spoken out in the fields, in the factories and homes of America, where their parents are waiting for them, parents who raised them so that they – might not look like this. The American guests are so shocked, so frozen by this visit at Neuilly that they cannot eat lunch.
***
“Ask yourself, take yourself to task. Go to a cemetery for the war dead if you’re unsure. Stand before those crosses, look at them, the rows of them, and ask yourself what you have done, you too, and whether it was enough that you stood row on row with them, whether you were not another another obligation as well. Because they did not know. But we could have known. And, Maus, if we didn’t know it then, we do now.”
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For fair use only. The sole purpose of reproducing these excerpts is to encourage an end to war.
Gottfried Keller: The real purpose of a gun barrel
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Gottfried Keller
Martin Salander
Translated by Kenneth Halwas
…the clear mountain water gushed out of the same ancient wooden pipe and into the same trough and even through the same sawn-off rifle barrel which was set into the pole in place of an iron waterpipe. These re-discoveries stirred up new enthusiasm in the man.
“All hail, venerable token of peaceful protective forces,” he said to himself, half aloud, “this barrel which once spewed fire now dispenses pure waters for man and beast! But there already hangs in each house, I understand, a loaded rifle waiting to be put to the test; long may the homeland be spared this ordeal!”
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For fair use only. The sole purpose of reproducing this excerpt is to encourage an end to war.
Alfred Döblin: A perfect metaphor for our masters of war
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
German writers on peace and war
Alfred Döblin: Selections on war
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Alfred Döblin
November 1918: A German Revolution
People Betrayed
Translated by John E. Woods
[Reproduced for fair use only and solely to promote opposition to war and appreciation for peace.]
“Human knowledge begins in that way. You know that as a scientist. We know we can leave nothing lying there without picking it up, measuring it, weighing, calculating.
“But then you receive – a mobilization order. An agency, an office that you don’t know, writes: go here, go there, go to your death, to your ruin, so that you can lose a leg, so that you can get a bullet in your spine. Be careful, my boy, there will be gas, poison gas, mustard gas; swallow some. And you’ll soon notice it may cost your head, your leg, your lungs, your life, and no one will ever replace them, since your mother gave that to you just once. And you’ve been expecting it for a long time. During peacetime you prepared yourself for it, in the midst of your Kant and Plato. And you – don’t question. You don’t question, you go, you obey. The agency that issues the orders is more than God. You listen, more than to God. But here we hold our peace. Why?…”
***
When the war was over, many thought that peace would now follow, that that was the succession of things, and that they had latched onto the happy ending.
But imagine a man who has had hydrochloric acid thrown on him by some madman or criminal. He screams with pain, and at last someone gets a firm hold on him, rinses the wounds out and neutralizes them. But the poison has already destroyed tissue at a greater depth and has passed into the lymph system, and only with that does the dreadful inflammation and suppuration really begin. The same thing had happened to whole nations when the war was over; only then did they first become truly sick from the war, and they suffered greatly.
***
“Since the war,” she shrugged, “everything has closed over, everything is so earnest, so gloomy, so brutal, as if another race of men were taking over.”
***
“Ah, it would have been a great deal if you had brought just one thing back from the war, Friedrich – a knowledge of how little and poor and wretched we humans are. For the war was certainly a calamity.”
***
…we are reminded of Odysseus’ wanderings, of when that crafty Greek finally meets up with a terrible monster, the Cyclops Polyphemus, son of the sea god and a nymph. These savage, lawless giants did not plant, nor sow, now plough the earth, and were therefore a perfect metaphor of our masters of war.
***
…in war time no solitary ferryman named Charon can suffice in the underworld of Hades for the masses of people arriving to be transported over the tranquil river, and the god of death needs a whole host of oarsmen for the job (a mass flight from the world above that has gone mad)….
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For fair use only. The sole purpose of reproducing these excerpts is to encourage an end to war.
Hermann Sudermann: The somber, the brutal aftermath of war
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
German writers on peace and war
Hermann Sudermann: Militarism and its terminus
Hermann Sudermann: War irrigates the soil with blood, fertilizes it with corpses
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Hermann Sudermann
The Book of My Youth (1923)
Translated by Wyndham Harding
When I tell you today that the butter gradually vanished from the table, that the days on which we tasted meat were few and far between, and that white rolls only appeared on Sundays, that will perhaps scarcely impress you, for we have all passed through still more evil days and the majority are still passing through them.
***
Poor woman, she often cried half the night behind her screen. She could tell us the most wonderful stories. She had seen Napoleon with her own eyes and had been so terrified by the thunder of the guns at the battle of Friedland that she had stopped her ears with cotton wool….
When the north wind howled round our house in the winter evenings and the curtains bellied out in the cold draught, then she came into her own. We sat there enthralled by the tragic story of Prussia’s years of misery. How little we thought that we should see a much greater catastrophe.
***
Then came the winter frost – that pitiless cold the memory of which has been preserved for future generations by historians of the war. It is true that we have since passed through much worse times than that. We have looked up at the moon through four long winters and thought to ourselves, “Our lads are lying in the open in the snowy fastnesses of the Carpathians or on the frozen swamps of the Pripyat, and there is no relief for them.” And there is no one to relieve us from the misery which their victories brought us.
***
What the summer brought besides. It brought war, that great and glorious war as a result of which we are now perishing.
***
There was not much talk about the war. The news in the paper was spoken of briefly and then put on one side. The mighty events which were occurring had not yet penetrated to the brains of these men, and if one or other of them had a son or brother “at the front” he spoke of him as though he had gone on a journey somewhere and would soon be back. I never heard of anyone mourn his losses.
Alexei Tolstoy: Why was the world made like that?
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Russian writers on peace and war
Alexei Tolstoy: Selections on war
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Alexei Tolstoy
Aelita
Translated by Lucy Flaxman
“We got so used to killing ever since nineteen fourteen that a man meant nothing to us – you put a
bullet through him – and there he was. No, it’s not as simple as all that. Once I lay wounded on a cart, looking up at the stars. I felt sick at heart. What’s the difference, I wondered, whether I was a louse or a man? A louse has to eat and drink the same as me. It’s just as hard for a louse to die as for me. The end’s the same for both of us. But then I saw the stars twinkling like diamonds up there in the sky – it was the month of August. And my innards shuddered. I felt as though all those stars were inside of me. No, I wasn’t a louse. No. And I cried like a baby. Why was the world made like that? A man isn’t a louse. It’s a terrible thing to do, a great sin, to crack a man’s skull. And people have invented poison gases too….”
Sholem Asch: War-weariness showed itself, and the cry for Peace grew louder
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Jewish writers on peace and war
Sholem Asch: Selections on war
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Sholem Asch
The War Goes On
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
“Humanity has been in torment for nine years. The world is heavy with the blood of its noblest creatures, men. Wild beasts of the jungles have never been known to wreak such systematized mass murder on each other as mankind carried out in the World War. Millions of young men soaked the earth of Europe and other parts of the world with their life-blood; millions of young bodies are decaying in the earth, in all the cemeteries, in bleak fields, in the thickest brushwood of the forests, in the depths of the sea. Their young lives call to us for revenge; their blood will not stay quiet – it cries to Heaven….”
***
“Our civilization has reduced itself to absurdity; it has outlived itself. We have striven so zealously for external goods that we have lost the inward meaning of goodness and all contact with the Divine – and so produced the senseless mass murder of the War. Our world is ripe like a rotten fruit, leaving room for a new idea, a new faith, which is even now forming, an Unknown, which already exists within us and makes its motions felt. We are now in the very throes of the struggle between good and evil, the continuous process that realizes itself in the history of mankind….”
***
“…they have constricted our world and destroyed our faith and insulted with human blood all that we might have believed in; they have turned the world into a slaughterhouse and butchered human beings like cattle. How could we possibly find our way out? What have they left us, the younger generation, to believe in? They have sullied every spring of faith from which we might have drunk. How can we go on living?”
***
Among the great nations a sporadic war-weariness showed itself, and the cry for Peace grew louder. War-mongers became unpopular. From every side was heard: “The men who made the War cannot bring us peace. Away with them – we want new leaders!”
Alfred Döblin: Selections on war
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
German writers on peace and war
Alfred Döblin: Selections on war
Alfred Döblin: Cry of war – raging death rattle, triumphant howl of the unredeemed creature
Alfred Döblin: It was better in the cemeteries
Alfred Döblin: The law and the police are at the service of the war state and its slavery
Alfred Döblin: Military dragon snaking its way through cities and villages
Alfred Döblin: The old grim cry for war
Alfred Döblin: A perfect metaphor for our masters of war
Alfred Döblin: War is not ineluctable fate
Alfred Döblin: We march to war, Death folds his cloak singing: Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.
Alexei Tolstoy: Cycles of war and peace
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Russian writers on peace and war
Alexei Tolstoy: Selections on war
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Alexei Tolstoy
Aelita
Translated by Lucy Flaxman
As he gazed down at the cliffs, which reminded him of the funereal landscape he had seen on the piece of dead planet, Los espied the overturned skeleton of a ship marooned on the rocks at the bottom of an abyss, and silvery metal debris scattered round it. Farther beyond the rocky ridge jutted the broken wing of another ship. On the right was a third wreck, speared by a granite peak. Everywhere were the remains of large wings, broken frames and jutting blades. It was obviously a battlefield; the demons themselves, it seemed, had been vanquished on these barren rocks.
***
“The temples were stocked with grain, fabrics and spices. The Atlantian ships with their purple sails blazing the image of a snake holding the Sun in its teeth, sailed the seas and rivers of the world. Lasting peace was established on Earth. Men were forgetting the use of the sword.”
***
“The outcome of the war was a foregone conclusion. The sated Atlantians put up a halfhearted defense of their wealth. The nomads, on the other hand, were fired with primeval greed and faith in their preordained success. Still, the struggle was prolonged and bloody. The country was laid waste. Hunger and the plague stalked the land. The armies overran and pillaged the country. The City of a Hundred Golden Gates was taken by storm and its walls were torn down. The Son of the Sun leapt to his death from the top of the pyramid. The fires burning on the temple tops were extinguished. The surviving handful of learned men fled to the mountain caves. It was the downfall of civilization.”
***
“Peace reigned on Earth. The powers of the Earth, called to life by knowledge, served man generously. The gardens and fields yielded bumper harvests. The herds multiplied. Labor was light. The people recalled their old customs and holidays, and there was nothing to hinder them from living, loving, giving birth and enjoying life. The chronicles called this era the Golden Age.
Sholem Asch: Selections on war
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Jewish writers on peace and war
Sholem Asch: Selections on war
Sholem Asch: All I want is to be allowed to go about my work in peace
Sholem Asch: Culture founded on egotism, ambition leads to war
Sholem Asch: He was still a child of the War
Sholem Asch: War-weariness showed itself, and the cry for Peace grew louder
Alexei Tolstoy: Selections on war
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Russian writers on peace and war
Alexei Tolstoy: Selections on war
Alexei Tolstoy: Cycles of war and peace
Alexei Tolstoy: The great future of chemistry
Alexei Tolstoy: The one incontestable result was dead bodies
Alexei Tolstoy: A second war had come and gone
Alexei Tolstoy: War profiteers and speculators
Sholem Asch: You must fight war first of all in yourself
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Jewish writers on peace and war
Sholem Asch: Selections on war
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Sholem Asch
The War Goes On
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
“Do you know, Hans, how a war comes about? It begins first in the individual like a tumor; it is fed by passions, by bad thoughts of one’s neighbor. The thoughts you are nursing against your fellow students are the seeds from which wars arise. You must fight war first of all in yourself, you must eradicate in yourself the dangerous and contagious bacilli of passion. You must fight down your enmity, try to understand your neighbor; you must find firm ground in yourself and seek to discover the reasons that move your fellow men to acts of violence. You must master yourself through an intelligent and understanding will. Begin to fight war in yourself, Hans!”
***
Hans was a post-War child, without ideals. His world had just emerged out of darkness. From the battlefields there still rose the cry of the murdered and the mutilated, demanding an answer: “Why have we been killed – for what end?”
Alfred Döblin: Military dragon snaking its way through cities and villages
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
German writers on peace and war
Alfred Döblin: Selections on war
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Alfred Döblin
November 1918: A German Revolution
People Betrayed
Translated by John E. Woods
[Reproduced for fair use only and solely to promote opposition to war and appreciation for peace.]
During these November days, when the darkness of defeat and collapse settled down over the teeming city, many of its citizens sensed the oncoming gloom, the approaching danger. And just as during the war notices would multiply on village walls and barns reading: “Warning! Cholera!” or “Danger! Typhoid Fever!”, so now more and more houses and villas boasted signs: “Six-room apartment, eight-room apartment, ten-room apartment, with garden , balcony, fully-furnished, unfurnished, as single unit, can be divided, for rent, for sale.” The greasy divinities to which war had given birth had already moved into many of these villas and apartments. These august powers with the heads of vultures fed on the new human miseries – they were the speculators and hangers-on.
***
“…They wanted their own war, their own victories. And we citizens were to hand over our brothers, husbands and sons, but otherwise hold our peace. They didn’t even let us know what was happening out there. They always acted as though it were some sacred rite, some abstract science that we wouldn’t understand anything about anyway. They only wanted to make sure no one saw through their game. And then they lost everything. Including us and our future. And that’s why we’re running around like this.”
***
The military dragon, spotted red, white and black, snaked its way through cities, villages, along the highways. The German nation, which had not known war within its borders, now got to see its shadow.
Sholem Asch: All I want is to be allowed to go about my work in peace
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Jewish writers on peace and war
Sholem Asch: Selections on war
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Sholem Asch
The War Goes On
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
“Isn’t it asking too much of us? Why has the world turned against me, why has it made war on me for years now without stopping? What good would it do me if we occupy other countries? What are Belgium and Poland and Russia to me? What use have I for foreign markets and coal mines and oilfields and colonies? All I want is to be allowed to go about my work in peace. I like my work. I’m happy when I set up a machine and see how nicely everything fits together to the last screw. I’m much happier in the factory than at home where you can’t even read your newspaper in peace….
“By God, there must be something damnably wrong if they can’t manage to come to some arrangement and bring peace to the world and see that everybody has enough to live on. Our comrades over in France can’t eat more than one dinner, and they don’t ask for anything more than their wine and their cheese, anyway: I saw that with my own eyes during the War. They’re just people like ourselves! They didn’t want the War either, and they don’t get anything out of the millions of gold marks and all the raw material that Poincaré takes from us. In God’s name, don’t they want just the same as we do? A chance to work and keep themselves alive? Why can’t people bring order into the world? Why can’t they come to some arrangement among them, so as to let a fellow live in peace? How long is this life going to last? Before you know where you are you’ll be old and unable to fend for yourself, and have to live on the charity of strangers!”
D.H. Lawrence: War and civilization
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
D. H. Lawrence: Selections on war
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D. H. Lawrence
St. Mawr
…the war came, making many men give up their enterprises at civilisation.
Every new stroke of civilisation has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the ‘dragon’, in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half-sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win to the next stage.
For all savagery is half sordid. And man is only himself when he is fighting on and on, to overcome the sordidness. And every civilisation, when it loses its inward vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.
And all the time, man has to rouse himself afresh to cleanse the new accumulations of refuse. To win from the crude, wild nature the victory and the power to make another start, and to cleanse behind him the century-deep deposits of layer upon layer of refuse: even of tin cans.
Sholem Asch: The whole world thirsted for peace
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Jewish writers on peace and war
Sholem Asch: Selections on war
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Sholem Asch
The War Goes On
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
For four years the horror of the war had lasted. To it was subordinated all the knowledge which man in the course of time has wrested from the unknown by his reason and his intuition. Every human invention was used to murder, to rob, to burn cities, to annihilate human beings, to destroy homes and starve children. What had been regarded once as the worst crime was now praised as a patriotic action, as a memorable service for which decorations were given. Like a contagious disease hatred spread through the whole world; the dry land soon became too narrow for it, and the War was carried into the seas, into the wastes, into the air, even into the spaces under the seas. Human imagination was inexhaustible in discovering new means of waging war. Not faith in God, nor devotion to any idea, could preserve mankind from these crimes. All barriers were broken. All the laws that men had acknowledged were void. All the ideals by which men lived were laughed at. Conscience was silenced, conscience by whose help man had risen above his animal state. Only one feeling remained: the desire to murder. The world had sinned for four years, but there was no day of repentance and atonement.
When the delegates appeared at the Peace Conference they should have fallen on their knees to one another, should have struck their breasts, bowed their heads to the dust, and with tears begged forgiveness of one another – forgiveness for the death and destruction they had brought on the world, forgiveness for the innocent blood of countless young men lying dead on the battlefield, forgiveness for the widows and orphans whom the peoples had left as a legacy to one another, forgiveness for hunger and plague, sickness of the body and the soul; forgiveness for turning the world into one great slaughterhouse. With rent clothes, scattering ashes on their heads: so they should have sat at the conference table. Instead, they came in robes of ceremony, decorated with orders which they had earned by their crimes, flaunting the weapons with which they had dealt murder. Thus they arrived to establish the peace of the world! Without the slightest remorse in their hearts, without a trace of conscience, without a scruple of pity for their victims; narrow of heart, short of sight, they proceeded to make a peace based on the victor and the vanquished, the weak and the strong, the saint and the criminal, the master and the servant. At Versailles the German delegates were kept behind iron bars like wild beasts; in the conference chamber they were escorted by four officers representing the four allied armies. They were forced to agree to conditions which they could not keep; to shoulder the guilt of the War and thus acknowledge themselves criminals to be punished and for generations outlawed beyond the pale of human decency. As narrow of heart and short of sight as the Germans themselves, who had now to suffer so harshly for their faults, the victorious Powers founded their peace not on right and justice, but on bayonets and guns. What they created with one hand they unmade with the other. The old tyrannies were destroyed, but the victors created new tyrants, and wakened their greed and tickled their appetite to rule over other and still weaker peoples. The Versailles treaty provided against one thing above all: any eventual recovery of military power by Germany, any possibility of a war of revenge. It also forgot only one thing: to sow the seed of peace on fruitful ground.
The seed of peace was sown with steel and iron, with swords and bayonets and cannon; it was manured with hatred and enmity, and blighted with poison gas; and for that reason the bread of peace would not grow. The whole world thirsted for peace. With anxious hearts the peoples of all lands looked and looked to see if the harvest of peace was beginning to sprout at last. But the meager ears were shriveled and unprotected in the wind and rain; a breath would snap the stalks in two.
One of the means by which these victors tried to prevent the possibility of a German war of revenge was the killing burden of reparations. And the payment of the reparations was imposed not upon the Kaiser, not on the generals and the diplomats who had made the War, but on the innocent German population, who had already cast off the yoke of the Junkers, driven out their generals, and proclaimed the republic. The victors acted as if the German people had started the War of their own free will, as if they had not been driven into it on a wave of false patriotism, artificially fomented, driven into it by a fictitious excitement created from above, but above all by the threat of bayonet and revolver which had forced them to march to battle like the peoples they fought against.
The sum which the German people were asked to pay was infinite. No figures were given; that could be arranged later, if they behaved themselves. The final figure was reckoned in years like astronomical figures: ten light years, forty years of reparation payments.
And so came the outbreak of peace, as it had to come. Not a single day of that peace was free of the poison gas of war: hatred, envy, false witness, espionage, saber-rattling.
For peace, against war: literary selections 