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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
German writers on peace and war
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Georg Ebers
From Uarda
A Romance Of Ancient Egypt
Translated by Clara Bell
Here men were lamenting and casting dust upon their heads, there women were rending their clothes, shrieking loudly, and crying as they waved their veils “oh, my husband! oh, my father! oh, my brother!”
Parents who had received the news of the death of their son fell on each other’s neck weeping; old men plucked out their grey hair and beard; young women beat their forehead and breast, or implored the scribes who read out the lists to let them see for themselves the name of the beloved one who was for ever torn from them.
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“Can you read?” he asked her; “up there on the architrave is the name of Rameses, with all his titles. Dispenser of life, he is called. Aye indeed; he can create widows; for he has all the husbands killed.”
Before the astonished woman could reply, he stood by a man sunk in woe, and pulling his robe, said “Finer fellows than your son have never been seen in Thebes. Let your youngest starve, or beat him to a cripple, else he also will be dragged off to Syria; for Rameses needs much good Egyptian meat for the Syrian vultures.”
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He had listened with affable condescension to the complaint of a landed proprietor, whose cattle had been driven off for the king’s army, and had promised that his case should be enquired into. The plundered man was leaving full of hope; but when the scribe who sat at the feet of the Regent enquired to whom the investigation of this encroachment of the troops should be entrusted, Ani said: “Each one must bring a victim to the war; it must remain among the things that are done, and cannot be undone.”
The Nomarch [Chief of a Nome or district.] of Suan, in the southern part of the country, asked for funds for a necessary, new embankment. The Regent listened to his eager representation with benevolence, nay with expressions of sympathy; but assured him that the war absorbed all the funds of the state, that the chests were empty…
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