Pierre Gascar: One could read the whole world kindling another war

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

French writers on war and peace

Pierre Gascar: Inside the forest, beyond the touch of war

Pierre Gascar: A kind of temple. The war had stopped at the door.

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Pierre Gascar
The Fugitive
Translated be Merloyd Lawrence

They hated, they lied, by themselves in the rain, and when they thought no one was looking at them in the deserted street, strained expressions would appear on their faces. There, in these faces, one could read the whole world in its hatred and lies, the whole world kindling another war.

Increased hardship for the working classes was no kind of justice, and certainly not a lesson for Germany, but only a way of accentuating, beneath a cloak of righteousness, the inequality which profits the eternal victors in war: those who possess. There was no longer any Germany, no longer any France. For Paul and the people standing in the trams there were no countries at all, only the oppressive duties of a stubbornly held patriotism. This mystique of stockholders were imposed on them. They themselves held nothing.

From Leeuwarden to Pinkiang, several million human beings had died during the war without creating any luxuriant landscapes in the world, or in the life of those who survived. Their deaths had dug no streams running between reeds and the roots of nut trees, no valleys; it had created no silent and shadowy orchards gilded by bees; no medieval or Renaissance-tinted cities with seventeenth-century sculpted balconies, none of those cities full of History, tranquility and sunshine, none of those orchards of the past; it had left nothing more than a rather cold plain on which the trees, the plants, even the houses were scattered further and further apart, as though they impeded flight, as though they were a distraction from the naked truth.