Marcel Moreau: Children playing at war, the actual weapon of a crime

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

Marcel Moreau
From Quintes
Translated by Bernard Frechtman

Children were playing war, there was real hatred in their eyes; that’s always the actual weapon of a crime; what there is in the eyes, the hand obeys the eyes.

***

I saw an extraordinary sight, I saw the thought of a crime run from soul to soul like a password. I saw hands at the ends of arms twist and close and make terrifying clubs of them, I saw the crowd change in a flash from man to wolf, I saw an extraordinary sight: human rage.

***

A community of innocent people isn’t that far from being a demoniacal community. And we have no recourse against a people that has one idea, no attack is possible against a people that has an accepted, cultivated idea. The leader, or rather the inventor of the idea, must overcome three obstacles: the people’s resistance to the idea; the people’s resistance to the resignation it feels as a result of the propagation of that idea; and the people’s resistance to the enthusiasm to which it’s driven by that idea, which is intended to drive them to it.