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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
Above all, he took care not to forget the real game which was being played behind the screen and the thunder of the Devil’s ballet – the great international battles between the firms, in which he had to serve his own. The ultra-nationalism of language was the necessary mask of international interests. It was damned well indifferent to Timon and his peers (who were not Peers of England…Patience! they will be some day or other), and it was double damned indifferent to him, whether it was under this or that flag that he cornered the steel market, and whether it was to be used in peace or war. Color made no difference to the business; and the business welcomed all colors. True, at first, before the Great War, which was a massacre of ideas, almost as much as of men, Timon, as well as his masters, still cultivated in a corner of their exploitation their national flower, a rose with thorns, red with the blood it had cost; and it was even on this point that their games did not always agree…War of the two roses…they cheated each other. But the Great War taught them that they would be very stupid to limit their field to the profits and losses of a single nation, when they had a chance of totalizing, to their personal profit, the ruin of all nations.
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Annette got her political education. She penetrated behind the scenes. She learned the complete saying of the Chancellor of Sweden, which the parrots of history repeat for us: he said with how little wisdom the world was governed, but he spoke only of the mannequins who are on the stage. Annette saw those who pulled their strings. Assuredly, the Sovereigns, Parliaments, and their ministers, all those who are called the directing powers, figure as mere marionettes, their speeches gramophone records to amuse the gallery; all their wisdom put together would not furnish ten horse-power to drive the enormous machinery of States. But others take it in hand, behind the curtain, and set it going, and those bell clappers with it. The master ringers are Business and Money; Politics have had their day. Economics reigns. And it certainly cannot be said that wisdom chokes them! For they have not always a human countenance. They are often octopuses, formless anonymous monsters, whose thousand arms grope, and whose blind trunks lap in the dark. And the few individuals whose personalities, generally undesirous of making themselves conspicuous, still keep afloat in the vortex of myriads, are nearly all, to-day, artificial products, without roots or seeds, without ancestors of descendants, without ties, associates or future. And they and their works are destined to disappear, they aspire to no more than their hour of super-power – but beyond measure. A frenzy drives them on. The wise “to-morrow” does not intervene in their destiny, to insure its equilibrium and duration. They seem to say: “After me, the deluge!” At least, the cynical and clear-sighted king who said it saw the deluge coming, calculating with secret satisfaction: “When it comes, I shall be gone.” But they, the uncrowned kings, see nothing but their “to-day”; and nothing beyond. They would open the dykes for the deluge, if they thought its coming would bring them wreckage to pounce upon, before it washed them away, wreckage in their turn. Has not the oil king, for the last ten years, played the double game of stirring up the world of reaction against the Russian revolution, and trying to treat with it against the world?
Timon revealed to Annette the new powers that govern the nations. He spoke with unbounded contempt of the old professional politicians and of the narrow circle of passions, prejudices, and dead ideas in which they blindly turn. The new masters achieved progress beyond the old, they repudiated superannuated nationalism; they threw overboard its crushing and imbecile baggage of hereditary vanities, rancors, hates and pride, transmitted from father and son for centuries. They overthrew the barriers, they worked to found an international of business and profits.
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There is no longer any escape. Just as in the wars of the future all will suffer – civilians, women, old men, the helpless, and the children – so in the model prison of international capitalism everyone will have his number, not a single independent person will be tolerated…Oh! without violence. The mechanism will be so perfect that there will be no choice but to submit or die of hunger. Liberty of the press and of opinion will be chimeras of ancient times. And not a country left to escape to from the oppression of others. The meshes of the net are being gradually tightened round the world.
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Timon…insisted on the strength of the net. Not a flaw: and he counted under that heading the moral scruples which still hampered the old political nationalism. The new internationalism of money left to the nations it exploited and to the back numbers of politics their old idealistic follies. It did business indifferently with friend or foe. It planned in expectation of war, and the death of one nation or another – yours or mine. Such was that Society of torpedoes, in which were associated the names of the princes in war, the great Lords of Hungarian and German diplomacy, Bismarck and Hoyos, the great barons of the Anglo-Saxon forges, Armstrong and Whitehead, under the presidency of a French Admiral, and under the control of a Levantine. Several condottieri of industry, several gangsters of finance, waving around their necks, not the hangman’s rope which they deserved, but the ribbons of all the orders of honor in the old West, played their game, not without noise, but without compass, amidst the Trusts and holdings of England and America, their heavy hand weighing upon both continents. The power of the proconsuls or the shrewdness of the adventurers did not preclude their mediocrity. They did not so much govern the enormous forces, clashing or associated, as they were governed by them, and by their machinery once set in motion. The blind play of economic forces was all the more overwhelming. According to the implacable rhythm of flux and reflux, they imposed alternately peace and war, fortune and ruin.
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