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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 Epilogue to Les Thibault (1940)
Translated by Stuart Gilbert
“When one reckons up dispassionately all that stands in the way of ‘peace among men’ – it’s appalling. How many centuries will elapse before the course of moral evolution (assuming there is such a process) has purged man of his congenital intolerance, his innate respect for brute force, and the insensate pleasure the human animal feels in beating an enemy to his knees and forcibly imposing his own ways of living and feeling upon others weaker than himself, who live differently, feel otherwise? And then, of course, there’s the political factor, the self-interest of governments. When a government’s in a tight corner, it’s always a temptation for the men in power, the men who can start a war and make others bear the brunt of it, to fake a casus belli – and save their precious skins. It’s such an easy way out; one hardly dares to hope that governments will never have recourse to it again. Which can only be if that way is marked: No thoroughfare; if pacifist ideas have taken root so firmly in men’s minds and become so widespread as to set up an impassible barrier against the war-mongers…”
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“For three years Mamma has been living in daily contact with the beastliness of war. And one would think she’d lost the capacity for pity, that all her decent feelings have been blunted by the degrading occupation she has taken up.”
“By hospital work, you mean?”
“No.” Her voice was stern. “By the occupation which consists in nursing young men back to health with the sole object of enabling them to return to duty and be killed. Like the wretched horses used by the picadors in bull-fights that are sewn up and sent back again and again into the bull-ring.”
***
“They’re absolute brutes! Their poison gas and flame-throwers were bad enough. But this slaughtering of mere civilians, innocent civilians, it’s simply monstrous, it’s inconceivable! They must have lost every spark of decency, every human feeling, to behave like that!”
“Does the slaughter of innocent civilians,” Antoine suggested, “really strike you as much more inhuman, more immoral, more monstrous, than the butchery of young soldiers at the front?”
…
“Don’t forget this,” Antoine continued. “Any attempt to impose rules on war, to restrict it, organize it – ‘humanize’ it, as they say – to declare that this or that is ‘barbarous’ or ‘immoral,’ implies that there’s another way of making war, a way that’s perfectly humane and moral.”
…
“What is it that’s so monstrous?” he went on. “Is it really that it’s more cruel to kill men in one way rather than another? Or that certain people are the victims rather than others?”
Jenny stopped feeding the child and set down the mug so violently that the milk splashed on the tablecloth. “What is monstrous,” she said through her clenched teeth, “is the apathy of the masses. They have the numbers, they have the last word. No war can be carried on against their will. Why don’t they do something? They have only to say No, and the peace which they’re all eager for will follow instantly.”
***
“We may live,” Philip continued, “to see the end of the war. But what we shall not live to see is – peace. I mean a stability in European relations that can be counted on to last.” Slightly flustered, he caught himself up. “I said ‘we,’ young though you are, because, to my thinking, it will take several generations to achieve that stability.” Again he paused, shot a discreet glance at Antoine, stroked his beard abstractedly, then went on, with a gesture of discouragement: “Is a stable peace even to be thought of under present conditions? This war has been a nasty blow for the democratic ideal. Sembat was right: democracies aren’t made for war; they melt, like wax in an oven, when a war breaks. And the longer the war lasts, the less chance Europe has of remaining, or becoming, democratic. One can easily picture such men as Clemenceau and Lloyd George playing the despot in their respective countries when the war is over. The people won’t protest; they’re broken in to martial law. And gradually they’ll surrender even their pet ‘republican’ pretensions to sovereignty. Just look at what’s happening in France: the distribution of foodstuffs is state-controlled, consumption is rationed, officialdom’s rampant in every field of action, in trade and industry; it controls private enterprise with the moratorium and freedom of thought with the censorship. We put up with all these things as emergency measures; we persuade ourselves they’re unavoidable in wartime. To my mind they’re premonitory symptoms of the total servitude that’s coming; and once people are well inured to the yoke, they’ll be no shaking it off.”
***
There’s nothing epic, no heroic glamour, about this war (or any war, for that matter). It has been a brutal, sickening business and is ending, like a nightmare, in a cold sweat of remembered dread. Whatever deeds of heroism it called forth were submerged in horror. In the shambles of the trenches, in blood and filth. Men fought with the courage of despair. With the loathing men feel when a dirty job has been assigned them and they have to see it through. It will leave none but odious memories. All the pageantry of war – its bugle-calls, parades, saluting of the colours, and so forth – cannot redeem its beastliness.
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