Michel Déon: How we wish so many others had escaped the slaughter!

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

French writers on war and peace

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Michel Déon
Letter to Paul Morand
Translated by Euan Cameron

See also excerpts from the World War I journal of Michel Corday:

I’ve been dipping into Journal d’un attaché d’ambassade (1916-1917), that contemptuous indictment of one of the myths of our time, a myth that has unleashed so many terrible wars and buried entire civilizations. Your pessimism is reassuring. In this diary, maintained so methodically when a hectic life left you with little time to sleep, your mind was quick to seize the core of the matter: the confusion of a nation involved in the first of the great massacres of the twentieth century which was governed by men who behaved as though they were running an electoral campaign. We remained in the wings, the main stage is obscured. Pot-bellied, superfluous generals pass through, at times covered in laurels, at others treated as codgers and fools.

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How might we have wished that Péguy, Alain-Fournier, Codet and so many others could also have escaped the slaughter! The sacrifice of your life – or even a left arm, which your friend Giraudoux considered a lesser evil – would not have shortened the endless killing by a single day. Your death, on the other hand, would have deprived the age of a portraitist so brilliant that he might have been taken for its creator.