Gabriel Chevallier: Let those who love war wage it

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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

All those who are removed are destined to become corpses, battlefield debris that no longer evokes pity in anyone. The dead get in the way of the living, wear them out. They are forgotten completely during periods of high activity, until their smell becomes insistent.

A soldier, just another grain of the inexhaustible raw materials of the battlefield, little more than a corpse since he is destined to become one by chance in the great, anonymous massacre….

“I’ve been taught a great many things – like you – and I’m aware that one has to choose between them. War is nothing but a monstrous absurdity and nothing good or great will come from it.”

The God of infinite mercy cannot be the God of the plains of Artois. The good God, the just God, could not have allowed such bloody carnage to be carried out in His name, could not have wanted such destruction of bodies and minds to further his glory.

The artillery thunders, obliterates, disembowels, terrifies. Everything is roaring, flashing, shuddering. We are in the middle of a monstrous maelstrom, pieces of sky come crashing down and cover us with rubble, comets collide and crumble, sparking like a short circuit. We are caught in the end of a world. The earth is a burning building and all the exits have been bricked up. We are going to roast in this inferno….

The horror of war resides in this gnawing anxiety. It resides in the continuation, the incessant repetition of danger. War is permanent threat. “We know not the place or the hour.” But we know the place exists and the hour will come. It is insane to hope that we will always escape.

Young men, from the land of Balzac and the land of Goethe, whether they were taken from universities, workshops or the fields, were provided with daggers, revolvers and bayonets, and were pitched against each other, to butcher and maim….

“I am not responsible for others’ mistakes. I have nothing to do with their ambitions and their appetites, and I have better things to do than pay for their glory and their profits with my blood. Let those who love war make it, I want nothing more to do with it….I have no faith in those who organize massacres, I despise even their victories for I have seen what they are made of….I demand to live in peace, far away from barracks, battlefields and military minds and machinery in any shape or form.