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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Roger Martin du Gard: Selections on war
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Roger Martin du Gard
From Summer 1914 (1936)
Translated by Stuart Gilbert
Taking a notebook from his pocket, he began jotting down phrases as they occurred to him:
Frenchmen and Germans, you are brothers. All alike, and all alike victims. Victims of the lies dinned into your ears. Not one of you has left of his own accord his home, wife and children, his factory, shop, or farm, to serve as a target for other workers exactly like himself. All of you alike fear death, all hate the idea of killing, all believe that human life is sacred. All realize that war is folly. There’s not one of you but longs to escape from this nightmare war, to get back as soon as he can to his wife, children, and work, to peace and liberty. And yet here you are today, facing each other, with loaded rifles in your hands, ready blindly, at the first word of command, to slaughter men you’ve never seen, men whom you have no reason to hate, without having any idea why you are being forced to act as murderers.
***
Jacques settled himself in his corner and took out his notebook again. Feverishly he scribbled:
Within less than two weeks, a monstrous collective madness has come over Europe. The press, lying journalists. All nations doped with the same lies. What only yesterday no self-respecting man could bear to contemplate has come to seem inevitable, necessary, and legitimate. Everywhere we see the selfsame crowds of people, goaded deliberately into fanaticism, ready in a white-hot frenzy to spring at each other’s throats, not knowing why they do it. To die and kill have become synonyms of heroism, badges of honour. Why should it be? Who are the men responsible for this state of things?
He took from his pocketbook a folded sheet of paper; on it was a phrase that Vanheede had copied for him from a book on Wilhelm II; an extract from one of the Kaiser’s speeches:
I am convinced that wars between nations are oftener than not an outcome of the ambitions and intrigues of certain statesmen who use these criminal expedients for the sole purpose of keeping in their hands the reins of power and increasing their popularity.
***
The men responsible. When you want to trace an incendiary, the first thing is to discover who will profit by the fire…Feverishly he scribbled:
A hidden power, the state, has dealt with you as a farmer deals with his cattle. What is the state? Is the French state or the German state truly and effectively representative of the people, does it stand for the interests of the majority? No. In France as in Germany the state represents a mere fraction; it is the mouthpiece of a gang of speculators who owe their power to their wealth alone and who have under their control today the banks, trusts, public utilities, newspapers, munition factories – everything! They are the absolute rulers of a servile social system that promotes the interest of a favoured few at the expense of the majority. We have seen this system at work during these last weeks. We have seen it crushing like a Juggernaut under its wheels every effort to advance the cause of peace. And it is this same system that’s hounding you on today across the frontier with fixed bayonets, in the defence of interests that are no concern of yours, that actually are ruinous to almost all of you. Men who are being sent to their death have surely the right of asking who stands to profit by their sacrifice, of knowing to whom and to what end they are giving up their lives.
Well, those responsible, in the first place, are the small group who exploit the public – the big business men engaged in ruthless competition with each other, nation against nation; who have no qualms against dispatching the helpless herd to the slaughter-house so as to assure their own privileges and pile up greater and greater wealth. Wealth that, far from enriching the masses and giving them a better life, will serve only to enslave still more completely such of you as escape the shambles.
But these exploiters of the people are not the only men responsible. In every land they’ve enlisted confederates in the ranks of their respective governments. Among those responsible are these men, their satellites, that handful of windbag politicians, whom the Kaiser himself denounced.
A gang of swindlers, ambassadors, ministers of state, ambitious generals, who, working behind the scenes in Foreign Offices and High Commands, have by their plotting and scheming callously brought you into peril of death – you, the people of France, and you, the German people, the pawns in their vile game. For that is how things are; in this so-called democratic Europe of the twentieth century no nation has managed to get control of its foreign policy; none of the parliaments you have elected, which are supposed to represent you, is ever informed of the secret commitments which from one day to another may plunge you, every man of you, into the horrors of war.
And behind those arch-criminals, in France and Germany alike, are all those who, more or less consciously, have made war possible – either by conniving at the wildcat schemes of high finance or by encouraging the ambitions of the politicians by their partisan approval. I have in mind the conservative parties, employers’ associations, the nationalist press. The churches, too, are blood-guilty; almost everywhere the clergy plays the part of a spiritual police force acting in the service of the propertied class. Everywhere the churches have played traitor to their spiritual function, and become the allies, or cat’s-paws, of the powers of high finance.
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