Achille Delaroche: At thy feet the tribes will lay down the sacrilege of their homicidal swords, O Seer!

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

French writers on war and peace

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Achille Delaroche
The Conquering Dream
Translated by Stuart Merrill

The sinister thunder of war-horns crashes in the bloody West.

Under the livid West the lawless dances circle around the swords rusted with ruddy clots.

The thatched huts, the granite ramparts, the white tents of the nomads smoke in anguish towards the indifferent stars.

The horde of the males rolling in a wind of panic!

Mothers in tears, heavy with the hope of childbirth, lifting their palms, with prayers or imprecations, towards the dumb hostility of heaven!

The red pride of the Barbarians is about to trample under the steel of their horses’ hoofs the prostrate and panting flesh of the vanquished.

The war-horns sound the supreme knell.

But thou! while the white robes redden in the purple of the bloody West,

While the helmets and battle-axes glisten in the seething fight,

Who art thou, ascetic and solitary, who heardest not the cry of thy brethren?

Who? The Dreamer! with thy hand upon thy Vedic staff, deaf to the vain tumult of the cities, scrutinizing the algebra of the cosmic arcana!

Lifting thy purified will towards the new God, conqueror of gods, thou listenest to the sublime rhythm of the spheres echoing in thy bosom.

And thou causest to spring for the future, from the mystic symbol, the divination of a peaceful strife of ideas.

At thy feet the tribes will lay down the sacrilege of their homicidal swords, O Seer!

O Magician whose brow is aureoled with the new dawn which will force the steel and purples to pale before thy triumphant Eureka!