Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Back at home in the peace of our villages

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

French writers on war and peace

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Charred flesh of children viewed with indifference

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: War has tricked us

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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Citadelle (The Wisdom of the Sands)
Translated by Stuart Gilbert

After aligning on the virgin sand the dark triangle of my camp, I climbed a hill, there to await the morning and, measuring with my eyes that black patch, hardly larger than a village marketplace, wherein I had massed my men-at-arms, my war gear and my horses, for a while I mused on their fragility. What, indeed, could be more vulnerable than that handful of half-naked men shivering under their blue cloaks, plagued by the night frost whereby the very stars seemed turned to icicles, and threatened by thirst…?

“When,” they asked me, “will the war end? For we, too, wish to learn such things….”

Another of my men said to me: “I have sons who are growing up, and I shall not have taught them. Thus I am vesting nothing in them. And whither will I go when I am dead?”

Then I, clasping them in the silence of my love, looked sadly on my army, which was beginning to melt away into the sands, like those storm-fed rivers that, lacking a clayey bed to save them, die sterile, since they have never changed themselves into grass or trees or food for men along their banks.

But we were fighting without grasping what we won, and all longed for our return. The picture of the empire was dying within them, like a face which one has lost the knack of conjuring up and which is submerged in the diversity of things.

“What matters it to us,” they asked, “if we be somewhat the richer by this unknown oasis, and how will it augment us? Wherewith can it profit us , once we are back at home in the peace of our villages?”

…for a long time I pondered on what is meant by “peace.” It comes only from garnered harvests, from children, a house at long last set in order. It issues from that eternity into which return all things that are fulfilled. It is the stillness of full granaries, of sleeping flocks, of folded linen, of the perfected thing; of that which, well and truly done, becomes a gift to God.