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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Roger Martin du Gard: Selections on war
Romain Rolland: Selections on war
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Roger Martin du Gard
From Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort (unfinished novel)
Translated by Luc Brébion and Timothy Crouse
What brings me much closer to you is the death of Romain Rolland. Tonight’s broadcast will, I hope, give us a few details. You are certainly as saddened by it as I am. He was born in 1866, scarcely four years our elder. Yet another contemporary who passes away; and a great one. It was young Darcieux who got me to read Above the Battle. You were not yet at Headquarters with us. December, 1915, I think. We were billeting at Béthune. Darcieux had dug the book up somewhere, and he brought it to the mess.
What vituperation! They were all outraged, astounded. Far more removed from a Rolland and his state of mind than from Neanderthal man.
If the author of Above the Battle had been shot, they would all have enthusiastically requested the honor of commanding the firing squad…After those first four months of war, Rolland’s call seemed to me like a personal message. A revelation! The word is not too strong.
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All this to underline that, at the end of 1914, when Above the Battle fell into my hands, Rolland’s book did not reveal anything at all to me; it simply found in me a reader particularly predisposed to receive it. And if it meant so much to me, it was not because it opened up new horizons to me but only because it confirmed, buttressed, gave order to my latent convictions. How to describe it? You did not know me at the beginning of the war. I found myself in quite an uncomfortable position. The colonial major that I was had in no way been prepared for that European war; neither technically nor, what is more important, morally…Yes, it was I who wanted to be part of the fighting army, and I carried out my duty as best I could, but mechanically. My fervor subsided with the first skirmishes, at the Belgian border. I have never forgotten my first German. I was coming back from a mission one morning at dawn. Suddenly, a hundred meters off, I saw five or six Uhlans on patrol who were riding towards us on the deserted road, singing. To avoid an encounter and keep them at a distance for a moment, I jumped out of the car and, while my driver quickly made a U-turn, grabbed my carbine and, taking cover behind one of the trees at the side of the road, fired. I saw one of the riders bend over in his saddle and fall from his horse in a slump, while the others scattered over the plain at a gallop. Two hours later we were back at headquarters. I did not tell anyone about the incident, but for several days in a row, I kept thinking about that young man whom I had shot like a game bird. No, I could not bring myself to regard that war…between brothers, as being really justified. I fought it without believing in it, without liking it. You can guess the echoes that the voice of Romain Rolland awoke in me!
***
Already in 1915 the superpatriots were accusing Rolland of refusing to take a position in the quarrel between the French and the Germans; some even blamed him for daring to publish, in the middle of a war, an apologia for the enemy. Nothing could be less true, though, or more unjust. If Rolland goes out of his way to distinguish each side’s responsibilities fairly in what seemed to him a fratricidal conflict, his book nonetheless remains a painful but very clear indictment of the megalomania of Pan-Germanisn and the damaging misdeeds of Prussian militarism.
…Events have gone so very far since 1915! Never has the breach between the immediate past and the present been so sudden, so general, so marked. Nevertheless, language like the following – which lends such dignity to the opening of the Introduction – affects me the same way it did long ago: “A great nation beset by war has not only its frontiers to defend, but also its reason. It must be saved from the hallucinations, the injustices, the stupidities unleashed by the scourge. To each his duty: to the armies that of guarding the soil of the homeland; to the intellectuals, that of defending thought…Someday, history will make a reckoning of each of the countries at war; it will weigh up the sum of their errors, lies, and hate-filled madness. Let us strive to make sure that in its eyes, ours will be slight.”
***
Mediocrity, even a certain baseness, has spread like an oily stain, laxly tolerated in the widespread lassitude. In every domain, spiritual virtues are in decline, weakened, unappreciated: and yet never have they been more indispensable for holding in check those evil forces – violence, money – which triumph openly and divert mankind not only from a considered effort to recover its balance, but also from a valid concept of the future.
Just look at what is happening here. In our France, still smarting from its wounds, impoverished to the point of destitution, starving, looted, reeling with humiliations that are not washed away in a day, do you make out, anywhere, signs of that moral greatness, that strength of soul, that patient and courageous wish for salvation which we must have if we wish to rise out of our present chaos? And how many countries in the world, how many ruined, terrorized, enslaved populations lie even lower than us? To emerge from this general stagnation, we would need guides, “prophets”: the calls of those my old Uncle Éric called “the great mediators,” the Emersons, the Erasmuses, etc., would have to be heard in the land.
Roman Rolland might have been such a one. Too late: he is no longer here to restore yet again, to those who have lost it, their faith in man. Who will arise in his place to defend and save the fundamental – and seriously endangered – values of that spiritual civilization for which, during half a century, he so steadfastly fought?
***
No matter how hard I look, I don’t see anyone who could lay claim to the rights of independent thought with the same nobility and authority, with the same prestige of a life devoted to pure causes. Until yesterday, simply by his presence among us, Romain Rolland bore testimony that the human conscience, as it had been shaped by centuries of moral culture, had not foundered in our disasters. And that, more than anything, grieves me about his death.
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