Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Emmanuel Roblès
From Vesuvius (1961)
Translated by Milton Stansbury
I looked through Patrie, the French Expeditionary Corps paper, and read an article on the liberty of Europe. Then, to play a trick on time, to quicken its creeping pace, I tried to drowse for a bit. Between half-closed lashes I watched Moroccans, West Indians, Hindus, Senegalese pass and I wondered what “the liberty of Europe” signified for these colonial soldiers from whom Europe had taken away that, all liberty.
***
Guided by my flashlight, I plunged into the darkness through squalls of wind and icy rain. A few yards away – while I was urinating – I made out a cubic mass which I supposed to be a stock of boards, but it somehow made me feel uneasy. Buttoning my coat, I went up to it and found it to be a batch of soldiers in English uniform, all quite stiff, placed like tree trunks, ten in one direction and ten laid across them, in this way forming an orderly heap over six feet high. In the blue beam of my flashlight, I saw the head of a very young man thrown backward, the mouth wide open, a mouth filled with rain which was overflowing in rapid trickles. Drops of water shone on the closed eyelids, now so strangely swollen.
I returned to the barracks where the gravediggers looked at me in surprise mixed with vague alarm.
“Why don’t you put those bodies under shelter?” I said in a low and irritated tone. “Why didn’t you dispose of them in some sort of decent order?”
I was filled to the marrow of my bones with a sensation of horror as if I myself had participated in a monstrous sacrilege.
“There’s not much room here,” the oldest of them said gently. “Look…”
That, indeed, was evident, and they were not going to spend the night outdoors themselves in order to shelter a few corpses to whom nothing mattered any more. Bristling with indignation, I said:
“It is a question of respect!”
The peasants understood very well what I meant, but one of them replied:
“Respect is first due to the living.”
***
I let her talk to me of Monte Cassino, of the monastery. Was it true that they were going to demolish it, that an American senator had declared that in spite of its prestige and glamour, it was not worth the life of a single G.I.? Wasn’t the present war being waged in order to preserve a civilization? And not only its moral and spiritual values, but the entire material heritage from which it drew its strength, its pride, its confidence, its convictions?
***
We waited for them under an embankment which contained five German tombs, the crosses marked by insignia which I did not recognize. I climbed up to read the names. Where are you at present, Erhart Heneschel, Franz Goth, Werner Alstadt, Emil Quast, Werner Fahrer? And could I still call you enemies?
Source