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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Thomas Carlyle: What blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!
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Thomas Carlyle
From On History (1830)
Which was the greater innovator, which was the more important personage in man’s history – he who first led armies over the Alps, and gained the victories of Cannae and Thrasymene; or the nameless boor who first hammered out for himself an iron spade? When the oak-tree is felled, the whole forest echoes with it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze. Battles and war-tumults, which for the time din every ear, and with joy or terror intoxicate every heart, pass away like tavern-brawls; and, except some few Marathons and Morgartens, are remembered by accident, not by desert…
The time seems coming when much of this must be amended; and he who sees no world but that of courts and camps; and writes only how soldiers were drilled and shot, and how this ministerial conjuror out-conjured that other, and then guided, or at least held, something which he called the rudder of Government, but which was rather the spigot of Taxation, wherewith, in place of steering, he could tap, and the more cunningly the nearer the lees – will pass for a more or less instructive Gazetteer, but will no longer be called an Historian.
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