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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Arthur Schnitzler: Cannot praise war in general and oppose individual wars
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Arthur Schnitzler
From Some Day Peace Will Return (Und einmal wird der Friede wiederkommen)
Translated by Robert O. Weiss
1915
Many feuilletonists claim that after this war humanity will somehow be cleansed and purified.
The reasons for this assumption are not clear: none of the wars thus waged have produced this result.
Political reaction is almost invariably the consequence of victorious wars; revolution the consequence of lost ones. Both consequences are, as it were, conditions of exhaustion.
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Who will be purified? Those who have lost a leg or an eye? The parents who have lost a child, the woman who has lost her husband? The people who perished? The people who made millions from defense contracts? The diplomats who planned the war? The monarchs, victorious or defeated? The journalists who stayed at home? Those who will be purified – I venture to suspect – have already been so before.
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The only thing specific to war is the wound, the senseless physical wound, and hostility, the senseless hostility, i.e., the hostility between human beings who, as individuals, might be facing each other without hate, perhaps even with love.
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Even during a bloody war the king feels – although sometimes unconsciously – closer and more related to the other king, the king with whom he is at war, than to his equerry, to his prime minister, or even to his adjutant.
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A tremendous disproportion exists between the sensation that motivates the soldier and the way by which he must, perforce, express it. He loads a rifle, fires it, and certainly has no conscious awareness that he is not only annihilating a human life (or, as an artillery man, a hundred lives) but also destroying dozens of relationships…The whole of human history is but an intrigue of the powerful directed against the consciousness and the imagination of the individual or, rather, of the masses.
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War atrocity: a defenseless wounded man was blinded and mutilated on the battlefield – by an enemy, of course.
I can tell a worse tale. A dozen soldiers were sitting in a trench as a shrapnel struck. One was blinded, another had his abdomen slit open, the third had his larynx shredded, the entire face of the fourth was torn off, the fifth had both arms and a leg shattered, and so forth. Those who were not immediately killed lay there for hours suffering thirst, torments, hellish pain, the fear of death. They too had been defenseless, completely defenseless. There was no possibility of defending themselves from the shrapnel. Also, they could not run off, for had they done so, they would have been shot for cowardice, according to law. The obligation to defend their country had rendered them defenseless.
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The thesis of Clausewitz that war is nothing but politics by different means is witty, therefore half-true, therefore dangerous, therefore nonsense.
So also is the dictum that war is a necessity and that therefore one must not oppose it. Plague and cholera too are “necessities.” Only the fact that we do oppose such alleged necessities makes us really human beings.
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Compulsory military service…is the most monstrous violation of the one indubitable possession of man. Moreover it is imposed for the benefit of very dubious ideas – in general as well as in particular – such as dynasty, country, state.
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It remains the same enormity whether so-called civilians, women, and children are killed and maimed from the air, whether one plans to condemn these civilians to death by starvation, or whether young men or older men (just as disinterested and just as innocent as the civilians and – whether or not they are clearly aware of that fact – forced into war service) are killed and crippled by murderous weapons…Everything, absolutely everything, that war brings in its wake is equally gruesome in its senselessness, in its brutality.
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