Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Paul Nizan
From Antoine Bloyé (1933)
Translated by Edmund Stevens
The last week of peace rolled by. The orders for general mobilization flashed over Europe like streaks of lightning. The last diplomatic telegrams winged through the sky. Even those shocks barely ruffled the town’s serenity. The number of men who were worried slightly increased. Antoine Bloyé was finally among them. In the railroad world, there was already a certain bustle, a certain noise of preparation perceptible to a man as familiar as he with his company’s atmosphere. Instructions began to pour down from the main office. He discovered that war was completely assembled, like a mighty engine. To start it moving all that needed was to press the button. On July 31, Antoine bought l’Humanité as though to find a ray of hope. He guessed that the only voice capable of truth was to be found there. He read:
Crowds may yield to such insane panics and we cannot be sure that governments will not do the same too. They spend their time (delightful occupation) frightening each other and reassuring each other. And this, if we are not mistaken, can go on for weeks. Today we must appeal to the people’s intelligence, to their reason, if we want them to retain self-mastery, subdue the panic, overcome nervousness, and dominate the course of men and events, that the human race may be spared the horrors of war…
Antoine was a man without political ideas. He was merely a man who wanted to continue doing the work he knew how to do in peace, and he turned toward his workers as toward the sole force capable of protecting his own life, his own peace. There were millions of men in France like him – men who, like him, had no knowledge of why wars occurred. Antoine telegraphed his wife to return from Brittany immediately.
The evening of the thirty-first Jaurès was killed.
The white notices of the general mobilization were pasted up on the walls. Under the August sun, a tremendous patriotic exaltation suddenly filled the peaceful hearts of of this town, too remote, too steeped in its ancient happiness to believe itself endangered by the ill outcome of battles. Processions swept through the streets and Jewish stores hastily drew down their blinds. On the Rue de Bordeaux, the Maggi branch was burned. The café habitués felt civic, warlike hearts surged within them. They embarked on adventure. They let their fighting instincts and their hatred, long wrapped up in the cotton wool of bourgeois life, take their course. The tales the newspapers started to print fanned their ardor. The stories and the songs they had learned in school, the reflex motion of saluting the flag, the legends of far-off Alsace, the words which were part of their vocabulary – right, civilization, science, liberty – were all brought to bear. In the squares, they discussed the first war news. Men would announce, “I am leaving in two days, in three days.”
***
Beyond the railway tracks, a chemical products factory reared its white brick walls. The surrounding air was charged with the pungent smell of chemicals. They manufactured poison gases there, and on some days, when the wind was bad, Antoine and his workers wore gas masks on the job. The poison of war blighted the wild plants that had grown along the edges of the tracks. The men spat and wiped their eyes, fearful lest an explosion should let loose a torrent of gas and death from the factory across the way. Occasionally a container exploded and the air suddenly gagged in the workers’ throats. There was a casualty in the plant across the way.
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