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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
“…Here at the Quai d’Orsay, for some days past we all have had the feeling that politics, diplomacy have had their hour. In every country another set of men is taking charge: the army. They have the whip-hand, for they speak in the name of national defence, and the civil administration has to bow to their decisions. Yes, even in the least militaristic countries, the reins of power are already in the hands of the General Staff, and when things have come to that, my dear fellow…It’s as if the gears had got locked somehow of their own accord and the engine out of control. We’re heading straight for the abyss, the brakes won’t act, and we’re being carried downhill by our own momentum, gaining speed every second. It takes one’s breath away…The situation seems to have got out of hand. Nobody wants a war. Not a soul. Neither the statesmen nor the kings. Nobody that we know of. We all have an impression of having been stampeded, reduced to impotence, and of having been tricked – but how or by whom none can say. Everybody’s doing just what he vowed he’d never do, what, only the day before, he was absolutely determined not to do. It’s as if the leading men in every country had suddenly turned into automata, the puppets of ruthless occult powers that are pulling the strings from some infinitely remote point high above our heads…”
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“Our last chance of peace,” Studler sighed, “lies with the working-classes. But they’ll catch on only when it’s too late. There’s a shocking fatalism in the attitude the man in the street takes toward war. And of course it’s easy to account for: people have their minds warped in school – by the way their masters talk to them about past wars, and glory, and the flag, and the fatherland, and so on – and after that, by their military service. Today we’re paying dear for all that tomfoolery.”
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“Everywhere,” Studler cried with a contemptuous gesture, “they’re talking the same damn-fool nonsense! At this end about ‘the honour of France,’ over there about Austrian ‘amour-propre,’ and in Russia about ‘Slav prestige,’ the duty of protecting the Balkan states. As if there weren’t a thousand times more ‘honour’ in preserving peace among the nations – even if one’s got to eat one’s words to do it – than in launching them into the shambles of a war.”
It infuriated him to see the nationalists always claiming for themselves a monopoly in noble sentiments, unselfish motives, and the heroic virtues. For, though not a member of any political party, he was well aware that the militant revolutionaries who in every capital were putting up a desperate fight against the forces making for war were, more authentically than any other group of men, inspired by feelings of the loftiest self-abnegation, by a firm resolve to spare no pains in the pursuit of an arduous ideal, by the valour and great-heartedness that are the stuff of heroism.
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“Honour!” he mused aloud. “I think we’ve made a great mistake in letting moral standards intrude where they have no concern – in the economic struggle that’s going on between the nations of the world. That mistake has falsified, embittered the whole business, and it rules out any realistic compromise. It camouflages as a conflict of ideals and a ‘holy war’ what should be, and indeed is, no more than trade rivalry between competing firms.”
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