Gabriel Chevallier: This fact makes armies and wars possible

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

French writers on war and peace

Gabriel Chevallier: Selections on war

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Gabriel Chevallier
Fear
Translated by Malcolm Imrie

Men are stupid and ignorant. That is why they suffer. Instead of thinking, they believe all that they are told, all that they are taught. They choose their lords and masters without judging them, with a fatal taste for slavery.

Men are sheep. This fact makes armies and wars possible. They die the victims of their own stupid docility.

When you have seen war as I have just seen it, you ask yourself: “How can we put up with such a thing?” What frontier traced on a map, what national honor could possibly justify it? How can what is nothing but banditry be dressed up as an ideal, and allowed to happen?

They told the Germans: “Forward to a bright and joyous war! On to Paris! God is with us, for a greater Germany!” And the good, peaceful Germans, who take everything seriously, set forth to conquer, transforming themselves into savage beasts.

They told the French: “The nation is under attack. We will fight for Justice and Retribution. On to Berlin!” And the pacifist French, who take nothing at all seriously, interrupted their modest little rentier reveries to go and fight.

So it was with the Austrians, the Belgians, the English, the Russians, the Turks, and then the Italians. In a single week, twenty million men, busy with their lives and loves, with making money and planning a future, received orders to stop everything to go and kill other men. And those twenty million individuals obeyed the order because they had been convinced that this was their duty.

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Nineteen years old and I had not yet come to believe that there was anything great or noble in sticking a bayonet into a man’s stomach, in rejoicing in his death.