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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
“Just listen to this! Do you know who distributes those Russian subsidies among the leading French newspapers? It’s our Finance Minister himself…[E]ver since the last Balkan wars the press in Western Europe has come to be almost entirely in the pay of the powers that are out for war. That’s why the public in those countries is kept in such ignorance of the abominable rivalries which, in Central Europe and in the Balkans, have for the past two years have been bringing war nearer every day – for those who have eyes to see. But that’s enough about the press. There’s more to tell. Wait a bit!…One could go on talking about Poincaré for hours – I can’t explain everything to you, off-hand, like that. Let’s turn to his policy at home. It lines up with the other. Naturally enough. To begin with, a general speeding up of armaments – a godsend for the steel and iron industries, whose power behind the scenes is simply tremendous. Next, the period of military service has been increased to three years. (I suppose you followed the debates in the Chamber? You remember Jaurès’s speeches?) Then, they’ve been working on public opinion. You were saying just now: ‘Nowadays no one in France dreams of military glory.’ Do you mean to say you haven’t noticed how a jingoistic, war-mongering spirit has been gaining ground in France during the last few months, especially among the younger generation? Here, too, I’m not exaggerating, I assure you. And this, too, is Poincaré’s doing. He has his scheme. He knows that when mobilization does come the government will need the support of a public opinion heated to fever-pitch and ready not only to accept and follow his lead but to back him up and cry him on. The France of 1900, the France of the Dreyfus affair, was too peace-minded. The army was under a cloud; people had lost interest in it. They took security for granted. Somehow, then, the nation had to be roused, alarmed. The young folk, especially of the middle class, provided a favourable soil for sowing the seeds of chauvinist propaganda. And they were not long in striking root.”
“That a certain number of youngsters have turned nationalist, I won’t deny,” Antoine broke in. He was thinking of his young assistant Manuel Roy. “But they’re a very small minority.”
“A minority that’s growing larger every day. A very truculent minority. Their greatest joy is forming in groups, wearing badges, waving flags, marching in military formation. On the slightest pretext, nowadays, you will find them staging a demonstration round Joan of Arc’s monument or the Strasbourg statue. And there’s nothing more catching. The man in the street – the petty clerk, the small shopkeeper – is not indefinitely proof against such sights, such appeals to fanaticism; particularly as the press, at the bidding of the government, is working on people’s minds along the same lines. It’s gradually being hammered into the French people that they’re in danger, that their security depends upon their ability to use their fists, that they’ve got to show their force and put up with a huge rearmament plan. The country has been deliberately infected with what you doctors call a neurosis – a war neurosis. And once that collective apprehension, that frenzied panic, has been injected into a nation, it’s child’s play to drive it into the most suicidal follies.”
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