Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Charles Morice
From The Re-Appearing (Il est ressuscité) (1911)
Translated by Coningsby Dawson
“Woe to ye enemies of peace, for you shall be called the children of the devil. Woe to ye who live among your brothers as wolves among a fold. All men are your enemies and you are perpetually at war with them. You beat your children and you ill-treat them. or even, and this is far worse, you are mere strangers to them. To the weak you are torturers, to the strong you are rogues. You call them up for judgment. You rob them by stratagem, hiding under the cloak of the laws. You have no faith, and no love, and yet you pretend to be honourable men because your crimes escape the legal definition of a crime, and would therefore be a danger for anyone to reproach you with them. But you will be reproached for them one day. On the formidable Day of Universal Witness.”
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As they walked the lights grew fewer, and at the end it was quite dark. It seemed to Narda that these pilgrims of emptiness represented humanity, as it is, the immense neutral wave of time. These wise men did their day’s work every day, straightforwardly and proudly, sadly and patiently, and with no appreciable motive. If they now and again listened to the seers and the apostles, who tried to tell them of a motive which should ennoble their activities, who tried to show them beyond the dark streets where the town ended a brightness greater and purer than that of the lamps, they very soon realised that there was no truth in the words of the seers and the apostles. They soon turned away from them again to begin or continue their labour, to build great houses by the river side, to wait comfortably for death, or to carry heaps of stones from one side of the road to the other, to heap gold up in the cellars, to judge one another and to sentence one another, to torture one another ingeniously, to murder trees and animals, to make innumerable objects which were necessary to their useless lives…”
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