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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 Education Before Verdun (1935)
Translated by Eric Sutton
Existence was always uncertain…But war systematized such disasters, and hideously multiplied them tenfold behind the lines, and in the trenches many hundredfold. Not death, but the escape from death, was now the exceptional event…
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What could be the matter with him? He was twenty-eight years of age, but he felt like a hundred. Had he not entered the war full of enthusiasm for Germany’s cause, and thrilled indeed that he might have been privileged to live in this glorious age, and fearful that he might miss the great experience owing to physical weakness? And now, after barely two years, all his aspirations lay in ashes. He was faced with a bleak, derisive world – a world in which force held sway – blank violence, open and unadorned. It was not the justice of a cause that mattered; the jack-boot closed the issue. This war was a conflict of opposing boots; the German boot against the French boot, the Russian boot against the German, the Austrian against the Russian, and the British shoe, sturdier than them all but more elegantly cut, planted a well-placed kick where it was needed. And now the American shoe had made its appearance. The world had gone mad. All the amenities of peace had been crushed…
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What was the harm in stealing a bit of food in time of war; war itself was one long process of organized robbery, at home and in the field, prolonged for three years and practised every second of the day and night. A scrap of food? – that was nothing. Soldiers must be provided with what they need, and an army needs a great deal and needs it for a long time; and since an army does not produce, it must clearly steal. If it steals with care and caution, its depredations may continue for a long time, but if it grows too rapacious, there may be trouble…Break bread for the hungry, says the Bible; steal the bread of the hungry, is the practice of war…He well remembered the gaunt soldier, with his rusty overcoat and rusty skin, shuffling up the path to the third platoon hut, and whining – “Bread, for God’s sake; bread!” And his look of ecstasy as he had stuffed the hard black bread into his overcoat pocket! Bertin slung his rifle from his shoulder, crossed his hands behind his back, and staring upon the ground, strolled back and force on his beat, muttering at intervals in a tone of astonishment and horror: “God help us all…!”
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Many illusions had been unmasked in the last two years, and one of them was the ancient legend that it was glorious to die for one’s country. Not at all! It was an abominable thing that a young life should be thrown away before it had come to fullness. And yet, though he hated to think so, it was often unavoidable. Women and children and old people could not be exposed to the onslaught of the barbarian hordes by whom his Silesian home had so often been overrun. And Bertin cursed himself for his crude Prussian patriotism, his callow folly in seeking adventure, without suspecting that he was being gradually inveigled into the service of the ultimate enemy of mankind – force. It was a little late to make this discovery, after sinking to the level of the plundering nomads, whose exploits were held up to horror in the history books of his boyhood. He and his like plundered the Silesian peasants and townsmen of the food which they provided against their own needs. He was, in fact, no better than a barbarian marauder.
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Hurtling steel and riven earth, wreathing fumes, the shattering fury of the guns, the whistling hail of bullets, all the vast upheaval and wreckage of war, all that was no more than the outburst of exasperated weakness; anyone could press a button.
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