Arnold Zweig: The plague has always played a part in war

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Arnold Zweig: Selections on war
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Arnold Zweig
From The Crowning of a King (1937)
Translated by Eric Sutton

“…We are living now on what can still be wrung out of the land, and on garbage. Farmers cannot get on with their sowing for want of labour. What our working men’s wives have to say about all this, I leave to your imagination. There is a cleavage right through the nation that keeps me awake at night. Again and again I hear them say: We don’t want to be a world power, we want peace, we want to enjoy our children again, and get a little rest before we die…”
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“You are a mother and see only your son, with the very best of reason. I am a plain soldier: I see a hundred thousand mothers, brides, and wives, none of them of less account in her grief than you. I see them without a quiver of an eyelid. When all is reckoned, my share in the Eastern campaign is not less than that of your husband, although I always worked off stage. Well, then, my share in those fallen millions – I permit myself to include the Russians and the Austrians – weighs just as heavy as his…”
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But in the packed transports that left America’s Eastern coasts and unloaded on the Western coasts of Europe, and sent an unceasing flow of men and machines across the quays, in those convoys that no U-boat could reach, came not only Jack and Jim, Bob and Bill, from Texas, ‘Frisco, Chicago, and Seattle, from Boston and Philadelphia, and the human cauldron of New York. Something else also came creeping in, sinister and invisible, infinitesimal and multiplied a millionfold and filled with sinister forces. It clung to clothes and hair and mucous membranes, it made many people sneeze and cough and gave them a touch of fever – no matter, such agglomerations of humanity have always been centres of epidemics, and the plague has always played a part in war. This time it was called influenza. Perhaps the bacillus developed an unlooked-for energy in the new climate, when it made its way into the organs of Europeans, who were not accustomed to it; it was so with syphilis, so scientists said. Perhaps, too, it acquired fresh properties in the new climate. However that may have been, from the seaports a wave of disease spread irresistibly across the earth; over the whole earth, with the possible exception of certain islands or very distant corners of the world. Everywhere else influenza leapt upon the troops, the dug-outs, the leave-trains, the cities, and the plains. In May 1918, the lovely month of May, as the German poets sing, in rivalry with the starlings and the skylarks, a pestilence fell upon the warring lands and on the neutrals, and as it was at first taken for a harmless sort of catarrh and confused with the common cold, it had its fill of victims; the death toll very soon rose to fantastic heights. Those who died were above all young people between fifteen and twenty-five, especially girls and young women and prospective mothers.

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