Jean Blewett: The doves are nesting in the cannons grim
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Women writers on peace and war
Jean Blewett: Above the din of martial clamor, a crying in the dark
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Jean Blewett
Quebec
Quebec, the gray old city on the hill,
Lies, with a golden glory on her head,
Dreaming throughout this hour so fair, so still,
Of other days and her belovèd dead.
The doves are nesting in the cannons grim,
The flowers bloom where once did run a tide
Of crimson when the moon rose pale and dim
Above a field of battle stretching wide.
Methinks within her wakes a mighty glow
Of pride in ancient times, her stirring past,
The strife, the valor of the long ago
Feels at her heart-strings. Strong and tall, and vast
She lies, touched with the sunset’s golden grace,
A wondrous softness on her gray old face.
***
Peace
Unbroken peace, I ween, is sweeter far
Than reconciliation. Love’s red scar,
Though salved with kiss of penitence, and tears,
Remains, full oft, unhealed through all the years.
Recent Posts
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- Sinclair Lewis: The democracy of death
- Willi Heinrich: If the women had their own way there would be the death penalty for making or bearing arms
- Willi Heinrich: A people proud of its war dead has learned nothing from war
- Hans Hellmut Kirst: “Just a dirty, rotten business from beginning to end”
- Willi Heinrich: “It’s quite enough that I know it”
- Hans Hellmut Kirst: Nothing – absolutely nothing – can justify war
- Hans Hellmut Kirst: It was as if the whole world had become simply one vast graveyard
- Hans Habe: Constituent battles of the Third World War. You can’t pick your battlefields once war is in progress.
- Hans Habe: Hiroshima-born realization of man’s destructibility by man
- Heinrich Böll: I saw the fateful gleam in his eyes too late
- Eric Ambler: The Law did not think killing for money was insane
- Villiers de L’Isle-Adam: Vox Populi
- Eric Ambler: It is not good for those who fight to know too much. Speeches, yes. The truth, no!
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- Alejo Carpentier: War’s long reach
- Francis Bebey: They all come into the world speaking the same language of peace and friendship
- Edgar Wallace: War
- Edgar Wallace: Or wars would be impossible
- John Buchan: That night I realized the crazy folly of war
- E. Philips Oppenheim: Black tragedy leaned over the land
- Leo Tolstoy: As if there were any rules for killing people
- Leo Tolstoy: How is it that millions of men commit collective crimes – make war, commit murder, and so on?
- Leo Tolstoy: “For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?”
- Leo Tolstoy: He who kills most people receives the highest rewards
- Leo Tolstoy: War began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature
- Leo Tolstoy: Then why those severed arms and legs and those dead men?
- W. H. Auden: The shield of Achilles
- Stephen Leacock: War-Time Christmas
- Leo Tolstoy: Men attribute the greatest merit to skill in killing one another
- Leo Tolstoy: Dialogues on war
- F. Marion Crawford: The real issue is between civilization and barbarism, between peace and war
- Stephen Leacock: Merry Christmas
- F. Marion Crawford: When everyone understands war it will stop by universal consent
- Lucy Aikin: Freedom and Peace with radiant smile now carol o’er the dungeon vile
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- Nathaniel Hawthorne: Selections on war
- Henri Fauconnier: A chance encounter on the evening of a day of slaughter
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: Did iron-hearted War itself ever do so hard and cruel a thing as this before?
- Elizabeth Inchbald: War, a choice of words
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: Every warlike achievement involves an amount of physical and moral evil
- Horace Walpole: I wish there were an excuse for not growing military mad
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: How glorious it would have been if our forefathers could have kept the country unspotted with blood!
- C. S. Lewis: The folly and danger of noble and humanitarian war
- Horace Walpole: We peaceable folks are now to govern the world
- John Erskine: Dedication
- William Morris: The role of soldiers and how they will disappear
- C. P. Snow: Their day is done
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- Richard Jefferies: The raven, a fable
- Hervey Allen: Hands off our dead! To war orators.
- Angela Morgan: War! Shall you be our lover? War! Shall you be our mate?
- Lillian Rozell Messenger: Why this feast of shells each day, the fury, blood and wail of war?
- André Pieyre de Mandiargues: Mercy and Peace squares
- H. Lavinia Baily: Recall
- D. H. Lawrence: If they do not kill him in this war
- Emmanuel Roblès: The war has changed my soul
- G. B. Stern: Conventions of war? War itself is the outrage.
- H. Lavinia Baily: A New Earth
- Clément Richer: The impatience of dead generals
- G. J. Whyte-Melville: Death is gathering his harvest – and the iron voice tolls on
- H. Lavinia Baily: A Lost Song?
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: War has tricked us
- Maurice Druon: Why I exhort you not to threaten each other with your armaments
- Henri Bosco: Man kills just for the sake of killing
- G. J. Whyte-Melville: A soldier who fattens a battlefield, encumbers a trench, has his name misspelled in a gazette
- Jean Blewett: The doves are nesting in the cannons grim
- Hilaire Belloc: War, propaganda and lies
- Jean Renoir: War’s solemn human sacrifice
- Angela Morgan: The Summons
- W. H. Hudson: A mother’s plea
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- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Selections on peace and war
- Marguerite Steen: The wreckage of the wars
- Frances Ellen Harper Watkins: Grant that peace and joy and gladness may like holy angels tread
- Paul Morand: You did not believe in the war
- Gabriela Mistral: Dance of Peace
- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Home from war
- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Furl the banners stained with blood, ’till war shall be no more
- Claude Tellier: The king who drags his people to those vast slaughter-houses known as battle-fields is a murderer.
- Claude Tellier: At first sight you may think our enemies are men. You can tell them from human beings by the color of their uniforms.
- Marguerite Steen: The sheer destructiveness of war made him angry
- Hugh Walpole: War killed Henry James
- Ambrose Bierce: Demonic war
- Thomas Hobbes: There was never such a time of war all over the world
- Thomas Hobbes: War, where every man is enemy to every man
- Erasmus: War is a betrayal of Christianity
- Erasmus: What is more foolish than war?
- Baruch Spinoza: Selections on war and peace
- Baruch Spinoza: Fleeing peace for the despotic discipline of war
- La Rochefoucauld: The petty causes of great wars
- Baltasar Gracián: Who are the true conquerors?
- Horace Walpole: Selections on war and peace
- Horace Walpole: Oh! where is the dove with the olive-branch!
- Horace Walpole: Peace and propagation
- Horace Walpole: How end all our victories?
- Jerome K. Jerome: Go for a soldier
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