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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Romain Rolland: Selections on war
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Romain Rolland
From Mother and Son (1926)
Translated by Van Wyck Brooks
A ball had gone through his temples, from one side to the other. He had been left for two days, blind, on the battle-field. Slowly the sight had seemed to come back. And then it waned again. It had gone out for good and all. Losing it, he had lost everything. He was a painter. It was his joy and his livelihood. And he was not sure that even his brain was not affected. He was living in torture.
But this was nothing. In his night, he wept, without tears, sweating blood. He had nothing left. Everything had been taken away from him. He had gone into the war without any feeling of hatred, through love for his own people, for humanity, for the world, for sacred ideas. He was going to put an end to war. He was going to free humanity from it. Even his enemies. He had dreamed of bringing them liberty. He had given everything. He had lost everything. The world had made sport of him. He had seen too late the enormous iniquity, the ignoble calculations of those who played at politics – in which he had been a mere pawn on the chess-board. He had ceased to believe in anything. He had been tricked. And he lay there, broken, with no desire even to revolt…To sink down swiftly as possible into the quicksand, where one ceased to exist, where one no longer remembered that one had existed – at the bottom of the abyss of eternal oblivion!
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“It’s strange! Before the war neither of us was a pacifist.”
“Don’t utter that word!” said Annette.
“True enough. They have dishonored it. Those who used to have it in their mouths have denied it.
“If they had only the frankness to deny it! But they have been false to it, they simply go on dressing themselves up in it.”
“Let them keep it,” said Marc. “But we, who disown the war, did not use to be against it. I remember it made me very happy when it began. And you accepted it. What has changed us?”
“The baseness of it, said Annette.
“Its falseness,” said Marc.
“When I see,” said Annette, “that contempt for the weak, for the unarmed, for prisoners, for human suffering, for sacred sentiments, that exploitation of the basest instincts, that oppression of consciences, that cowardice in the face of public opinion, those sheep who are painted as heroes and become so in their very sheepishness, those good people who are driven to killing that feeble mass which does not know itself and allows itself to be led by a handful of misled men – my heart sickens with shame and misery.”
“When I see,” said Marc, “this ignoble war that hides its snout, this troop of masqueraders, these merry-andrews of a rapacious Right who, behind their backs, pick the pockets of the world, this atrocious slavery that imagines it is fooling us by gargling its throat with that empty word Liberty, that hypocritical heroism – I laugh in all their faces!”
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