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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Alfred Neumann: Selections on war
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Alfred Neumann
From The Friends of the People (1940)
Translated by Nora Wydenbruck
…Leonie would have had time to go to sleep again, but…there was something which awakened her fully, something quite unaccustomed – a deep silence. For the war-nights were never silent: they contained everything pertaining to nightmares, they were so close that they took one’s breath away, and so dark that they choked one, it was like a gag in one’s mouth and bonds around one’s limbs – but they were never quiet, they were always thundering and growling. There might have been other explanations for the complete silence, it might have been chance, a breathing space before or after a round of firing – she might have closed her eyes and attempted to go to sleep again if not every one of the five days after the terrible 22nd of January had not been a preparation for the fateful silence of the guns.
Now the great chiming of midnight began outside, a garland of chiming bells, near and distant, deep-toned and high, mingling their strokes in a strangely grave and portentous manner, unceasingly resuming the tale of the hours farther and farther away, with more and more unfamiliar bells – this was the near-by Notre Dame des Champs, this was the little bell of the Sisters of the Poor near the Luxembourg, that must be St. Sulpice, and from the east, St. Jacques and the Church of Val-de-Grâce, and from the far distance that might be from St.-Germain-des-Prés, perhaps from Notre-Dame – and it was not enough for the bells to chime twelve times, they were proclaiming overwhelming midnight over the city, over the world, endless, persistent, and terribly uninterrupted…
Then a cannon-shot burst through the midnight concert of the clocks. Leonie raised herself up in bed and murmured: “Thanks be to God…” Had this ever happened before, that a woman should thank God because the cannons were thundering again, annihilating the eager, chiming bells? Perhaps it was a sacrilege, which the Lord would punish then and there – though He rarely did that. Leonie opened her mouth, as though her ears alone were not sufficient for listening – but all she heard was a last distant chime which seemed to triumph into infinity – and then there was silence. There was no more shooting. The last shot had mingled with the strength of midnight, as though it were only stressing its importance – or God was answering Leonie’s sacrilegious thanksgiving by laying his almighty hand over the cannons’ mouths in their thousands.
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