Henry de Montherlant: We too are widows

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

French writers on war and peace

Henry de Montherlant: A constant state of crime against humanity

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Henry de Montherlant
The Girls
Translated by Terence Kilmartin

I belong to the sacrificial generation, the girls whose chances of love were decimated by the war with its toll of men; we too are widows.

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Costals had a friend called M. Armand Pailhès, an excellent man, a splendid paterfamilias, who was secretary-general of a big firm of robbers (a company formed for the reconstruction of the war-torn North).

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In the waiting-room of the War Pensioners’ Review Board, awaiting examination, two hundred average Frenchmen.

From time to time an assistant appears at the door of one of the consulting rooms and calls out the names of the men whose turn it is. Those whose civilian lives are on a par with their military ones for wretchedness, the eternal second-raters, answer “Present!” like keen young recruits….They are suddenly right back at the front.

As the hours go by, the exhaustion begins to set in. Even the cripples have given up standing. The herd has become stupefied. When one sees how they have acquiesced, how one has acquiesced himself, in waiting from half-past eight until ten minutes to twelve, one understands how it lasted four and a half years….