Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
C.F. Ramuz
From The End of All Men (Présence de la mort) (1922)
Translated by Allan Ross Macdougall
All over the countryside now there are bands of prowlers who take possession for a day or two of homes that have perforce been abandoned. Little by little it spreads thus, the war spreads. And also destruction, for they destroy everything, setting fire to houses, stripping the trees of their fruit, finally attacking even the trees themselves.
***
A rifle shot. Two. Night is falling; the guards are doubled. In the east, if you notice closely, higher and further up than here, not quite so close to the water, half way between the lake and the top of the hill no longer seen, is that fog, funny sort of thing!
Or might it really be smoke? Ah, you see?
Rifle shots. Impossible to sleep. So much the worse as long as we can go on.
They still have a bit of sky up here, then they will have none, and nobody will have any no matter how far they go, with this separation of the sky from men which intervenes, so that one no longer knows what goes on there; and this evening the sun was seen as quite round, no longer the sun.
It was like a moon, although three or four times larger than the moon. Like one of those enormous round tin plates on which cakes are baked hereabouts.
An enormous sun, dark red, which could be looked at.
It no longer hurts the eyes. It was as though without light, as though completely made of heat.
Rifle shots.
***
Thus with men, comes war, and war has come right up here with men. These few had thought: “Up there they have everything necessary, and we have only to take their place.” And they came and climbed up there with the shadows which overflowed before them, over the last of the escarpments before you come to the pasturage, then they covered the grassy slope which made there three great waves, set one upon the other.
***
For a little while they stirred about therein – they no longer stir about. They shouted, they have become silent. All over the large world, on one or the other of its sides – those beneath us, those near us, those further away, having called, having supplicated, having long continued shouting, the whiteskins, the red, the blackskins, the yellow – having kneeled before their visible and invisible gods, painted, unpainted, in stone or wood, imagined without or within – having prayed to them, having cursed them; having danced, made rounds, having played for them their musical instruments: the large tom-toms, the drums, the single-stringer fiddle, the trumpets of brass or ramshorn; having plucked the psaltery, having made music, prayed, danced…
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