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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 A World In Birth (L’enfantement) (1933)
Translated by Amalia de Alberti
No manure was required to nourish the mushrooms in the bed of pacifism, which had sprung up suddenly in a night. Marvelous yield! But yesterday peace was banned. To mention it was a crime of treason. And today it was quite the style. All were hurrying to stick the flower in their mouths, like the cigarette girls of Seville – or into the points of their pens. These doves of the Ark came from afar! There were some who ten years before had been crows of the battle fields croaking to demand the heads of premature, unlicensed pacifists. If you had expressed surprise, no doubt they would have replied that there is a time for everything; yesterday, war; today, peace. Marc, whose native “inopportunism,” inherited from his mother, suspiciously smelled out all “opportunism” at twenty paces, observed with troubled eyes the sudden rush of these strange “guardians of the peace.” Where did they get the pass-word?…He did not have to seek long. The peace, officiously encouraged by State, Church, and University, was a right-minded peace: the peace that oils the mouths of those curés whom the great masters of industry have established in their churches, built like a porter’s lodge at the gate of their factories, opposite the bar and the brothel. so as to sanctify their exploitations, and instill into the exploited, together with syphilis and alcohol, evangelical resignation; the peace of signed and legalized robbery; the profit-making peace of the treaties; the peace of the profiteers of peace (profiteers of yesterday’s war, and of tomorrow’s – they are the same people). Poor men are not of the confraternity. They have nothing. They are had. They are given preaching instead of profits: the God of the rich is always ready to let fall upon men with empty stomachs his manna of peace, idealism and love. Old Jesuses of the Palais-Bourbon throw out their line for fish, while reciting their twisted Sermons on the Mount; they exhort fishes and fishers to love each other, the despoiled to sacrifice their possessions for the fair sake of Peace. As to preaching such sacrifice to those grown fat on the spoils, nothing doing!…These old Jesuses had made the war – “Say no more about it! What is done is well done. We will do better…Peace on earth to men of good will! (The will is good when it leads to success!) And blessed be the established order!”
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