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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 Death of a World (1933)
Translated by Amalia de Alberti
Nothingness and death everywhere! This war which is said to be over (it is still going on) has encircled space with its barrage of asphyxiating gases. It blocks the horizon. It is the fact – the only one which imposes itself upon these young men. All the ideologies that deny it, of if they cannot, try to celebrate it, are rotters, faces to be slapped…The war is there. Its claws are in my neck, its putrefying breath in my nostrils.
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Men’s minds were under high pressure in those days. The criminal acquittal of the assassin of Jaurès – that second assassination – during the month of March, had been a blow to the young men…Strange commemoration of a great man, who was defeated not once but twenty million times, defeated in the twenty million assassinated by the war, like himself…
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More than one of our young acquaintances of 1914 threw themselves into the War to escape degrading boredom. If these have, since, purged themselves of their bloody orgy, others have grown up after the War, who, in their turn, are preyed upon by the maddening lust for action.
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Masson’s bitterness had the advantage over Marc’s of being more cruelly justified. The young workman had been gassed in the war; death was in his blood. He burned with indignation against the abominable selfishness and apathy of all these young Frenchmen who had gone through such trials, and did nothing to prevent their recurrence.
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His comrade Masson, the compositor, had just killed himself. Thee poor wretch was eaten up by the double poison of syphilis and gas, both of which he had brought back from the War. His burnt-up body was unable to bear the furious assault of the mind. His disappointments and rancors to awaken old fighters were like oil to the torch. He spat blood, in useless barking at meetings, from their indifference. They turned from him with annoyance, they were angry with him for reminding them of what they would rather forget; and more than one hid discomfort with insult. He came away, worn out, choking with his pain and impotent rage, his brain in a fever, which insomnia increased to madness. A clear hallucination showed him the return of war, making fatal the hypocrisy of the peace of rapine, and the complicity, through weakness, of the French nation. The recommencement of the hell from which he thought he had escaped three years before was beyond his endurance. And the moral treason of his own people deprived him of all reason for existence. He could do nothing. And had he been able, for whom could he have found the energy to fight? For these traitors – traitors to their cause, traitors to their class? For these cowards – One night, choking with coughing and despair, he cut his throat with his trench knife.
Marc found him on his straw mattress, soaked in blood, like a sponge, his body drained, his contorted mouth still barking at the treason of the living.
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