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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Roger Martin du Gard: Selections on war
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Roger Martin du Gard
From Summer 1914 (1936)
Translated by Stuart Gilbert
“No, I’ve no use for that hypothetical utopia you speak of, if it’s to cost a war. Anything’s better than to see justice and reason demolished by brute force and butchery. Anything rather than the madness, the horrors of a war!”
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“Doctor or not,” Jacques began, without looking in his brother’s direction but in a louder tone than he would have used were the words intended for his neighbor only, “any man who obeys the mobilization order is assenting to a nationalistic policy and, by the same token, to war. For, to my thinking, the issue is the same for everyone: Does the mere fact that a government has given you orders to do so warrant your taking part in the butchery?” He bent ever closer to Jousselin. “Even it I weren’t…what I am, even if I were a law-abiding Frenchman, well-pleased with his country’s institutions, I shouldn’t admit the notion that any ‘reason of state’ could force me to overrule what for me is a duty to my conscience. A government that arrogates the right of dictating to the consciences of its subjects must not count on their support. And a social system that doesn’t take account, first and foremost, of the moral standards of its members only gets what it deserves if they despise it and revolt against it.”
***
“The ballot, indeed! It’s a bare-faced fraud, this so-called universal franchise here in France. In a population of forty millions barely twelve millions have the vote. So if six millions and the odd man vote one way it constitutes what they’ve the nerve to call a majority of the nation. Thirty-four million poor benighted fools bow to the will of six million voters, and I needn’t tell you how they vote – with their eyes shut, under the influence of barroom gossip. No, the Frenchman has no real political power. Has he, for instance, any means of altering the Constitution, of protesting against or even discussing the new laws that are foisted on him? He isn’t even asked for his opinion on alliances that are entered into in his name and which may land him in wars that may well cost him his life. So much for what in France we call the ‘sovereign rights of the people’!”
***
An angry frown furrowed Jacques’s brow. “The most exasperating thing,” he was saying, “is to think that a day is bound to come, in the near future very likely, when people simply won’t be able to understand how this business of military service, nations in arms, and so forth, ever came to be regarded as something necessary and warfare as an almost sacred duty; a day when it will seem unthinkable that a representative tribunal could have a man shot for refusing to take up arms. Exactly as it seems preposterous to us today that in the past thousands of men were tried and tortured for their religious beliefs.”
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“Why go over all the ground again, old man? You know quite well what my views are. I’ll never tolerate the idea that a government can force me into taking part in an enterprise I look upon as a crime, a betrayal of truth and justice and human solidarity. Heroism, as I see it, isn’t in Roy’s camp; it doesn’t consist in shouldering a gun and marching to the frontier. No, the truly heroic thing is to refuse to fight, to let oneself be led before the firing-squad rather than submit to being roped in as an accomplice. ‘A futile sacrifice,’ you say? Who knows? What has made wars possible in the past and makes them possible still is the tame submission of the masses to their governments. ‘A one-man mutiny,’ you say? Well, if those with the courage to say ‘No’ are few in number, in can’t be helped. It may simply be because” – he hesitated – “because a certain type of moral courage is pretty rare.”
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