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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
A few days later the Vicar became aware that after four years of war and the sight of all that suffering in their great convalescent home, the minds and prayers of the monks were set solely on a speedy end to the war, the suppression of hatred, and the reconciliation of the combatants…It was with a stirring of the heart that Winfried looked upon Germany. Green and golden it lay there, sunk in the deepest peace. Grey mounds of corpses by the hundred thousand had set a wall about that empire…
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Something had been said that really did concern him…”of one man by another” – he had it on the tip of his tongue, yes: maltreatment or abuse of one man by another. Was that permitted? In civil life it was not permitted. But in military life it happened – not merely happened, it was regarded with respect. It played a main part hereabouts, and most of all in war…Was not the whole nation in the army? And must they not grow used to being abused, and to the privilege of abusing their inferiors? This pleasure of humiliating and hurting one’s fellow-men, and ordering them about – what a pleasant thing to be a soldier! Everyone had grown used to the business, including himself, for he could rise ever higher, and so be at the call of ever fewer people. But when one thought for a moment, how much brutality, and folly, and tyranny, was practiced on those who for their part had acquiesced in that sort of life only in order to defend their country…
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What sense was there in the life of man if he ended as food for rats or crows or ravens, or filled the bellies of jackals, about which that sergeant from the Palestine front had been telling such tall stories yesterday?
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He did indeed tell her, while they were resting and her light form lay half across his own, that women must not imagine that soldiers missed them very much. War concentrated all the forces of the soul on self-preservation and the killing of others – no word of love, my child, except for a dirty joke or two.
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“…We are not living on the moon. All things are rooted in people and circumstances, aren’t they? And especially in those that contain and carry on the general misery of mankind. I always see these people as a wall, stone beside stone, that keeps us imprisoned in this awful war and misery. Everyone who, for reasons of his own, pokes a stick into a crack and shakes that wall a bit – every such individual is helping the community. Every day this butchery goes on – every day, just think of it! A breach must be made somewhere, or we shall all perish…”
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“This war is going to end this year. By that time, men like this young man of ours will have learned something; they will demand a reckoning of those who have brought this horror upon us, and they will found a new life in a better age.”
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