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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
Frenchmen and Germans, you have been fooled.
This war has been represented to you in both camps not only as a defensive war but as a fight of the rights of nations, for justice and liberty. Why? Because they know that not one German peasant or workman, not one French peasant or workman, would have let his blood be shed in an offensive war, a war to win new territories or markets.
On both sides they have told you you are fighting to stamp out militarism, your neighbours’ militarism, to check their bid for world power. As though there was anything to choose between one militarism and another; as though militant nationalism hadn’t as many champions, of recent years, in France as it has had in Germany! As though both your governments alike had not been deliberately courting the same risks of war! Yes, you have been bamboozled. All of you have been led to think that you were going to defend your country against the dastardly attack of an aggressor nation, while in actual fact both General Staffs, French and German alike, have been studying for years, with the same cynical effrontery, the best method of getting in the first lightening blow. While, all along, in each army alike, the High Command has aimed at reaping the advantage of an “act of aggression,” the act at which they now hold up their hands in pious horror, so as to justify in your eyes the war they have deliberately brought upon you.
You have been fooled. The best among you believe in good faith that they are giving up their lives for the cause of justice among the peoples of the earth. Whereas neither justice nor the people of any country have been taken into the least account – except in official speeches – and nowhere have the wishes of the nation been ascertained by a plebiscite. No, you are all being sent to your deaths in consequence of old, stupid, secret treaties, of the contents of which you knew nothing and which, had you known them, not one of you would have endorsed. Both sides have been fooled. You Frenchmen have been led to think that it was your duty to bar the way to the invaders and defend civilization against the hordes of barbarism. You Germans have been led to think that your country was encircled, that its existence was at stake, and its prosperity was imperilled by the greed of outsiders, against whom it was your duty to defend it. German and Frenchman, each of you has been fooled; each of you has believed in all good faith that this war is a holy war – on his side only. Each has felt he owed it to his country to sacrifice unreservedly his happiness, his liberty, his life, to the national “honour” and the “triumph of justice.” But you have been fooled. The campaign of lying propaganda has done its work in a few days; you have been inoculated with the war-fever – you, even you, who will be the victims of the war! And you have marched heroically against each other at the first call to arms from your country – your country that was never in any real danger. You did not realize that on both sides alike the ruling-classes were using you, the workers, as their cat’s-paw. You did not realize you were being asked to bear the brunt of their criminal schemes, to serve as the small change of conquest, helpless accomplices and victims of their insatiable greed for power and gold.
It is exactly with the same lies that the powers that be in France and in Germany have tricked you. Never until now had the European governments shown such utter lack of scruple and such devilish skill in piling calumny on calumny, suggesting false motives and spreading false news – in a word, employing every method of creating hatred and alarm – so as to make sure of roping you in as their accomplices. Within a few days, without even been given the time to look around and count the dreadful cost of what was being required of you, you have been herded into base-camps, supplied with equipment, and hounded on to murder and to death. All your rights as free men have been wiped out. On both sides, on the same day, martial law was declared, a ruthless military dictatorship established. Anyone who tried to think for himself, who dared to ask: “What’s it all about?” was in for it! In any case, who of you was capable of taking a clear view? Of the true facts you had not been given an inkling; your only source of information was the national press, the official lie-factory! All-powerful within its own closed frontiers, the press has come to speak with a single voice of the men in command, for whom your ignorance, credulity, docility, were essential to enable them to attain their ends.
Your mistake lay in failing to forestall the conflagration while there was yet time. For, although you had on your side an overwhelming majority of pacifist-minded men, you failed to organize it, to bring it into action when the need rose, and to launch against the war-mongers a concerted movement of all classes in all lands that would have forced the governments of Europe to bow to your desire for peace.
Now, everywhere, an iron discipline has gagged the voice of individual protest. Everywhere you have been reduced to the blind subservience of animals in blinkers. Never before has humanity been brought so low, intelligence so completely stifled. Never before have governments forced men’s minds into so total an abdication of their rights; so brutally repressed the aspirations of the masses.
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Now you have sampled it, their war. You have heard the bullets whining past your ears and the groans of wounded, dying men. Now you can gauge the horrors of the shambles they have in store for you. Already most of you have awakened to realities and deep down in yourselves feel a first inkling of shame – of disgust at having let yourselves be fooled. Memories of home, of the dear ones you were so absurdly ready to forsake, are crowding back into your thoughts. Under the impact of reality your minds are beginning to work again. your eyes are opening. What will it be when you have realized the squalid motives, the lust for conquest and world power, the greed for gain of which none of you will ever see a penny, the stranglehold of world finance – the hidden hand behind this war – what will it be when you realize that it is for the sake of these that you are being asked to lay down your lives?
What have they made of your liberty, your consciences, your human dignity? What of the happiness of your homes? What of the only precious thing a worker has to safeguard – his life? Has the French state, has the German state, the right to tear you away from your families and your work and dispose of your lives against your most obvious personal interests, against your will, your convictions, your most human, most sacred and legitimate instincts? What gave them this appalling power over you, the power of life and death? Your ignorance. Your apathy.
All that is needed is to stop and think if only for a moment, to make one fervent effort of revolt, and you can still break free.
Are you incapable of it? Will you tamely wait under a storm of shellfire, suffering hideously in mind and body, for the far-off day of peace? A peace which you will never know, you the first victims of the war. Very likely even the younger generation called to replace you in the firing-line and sacrificed like you in “glorious” carnage, will not survive to see that day.
Do not say that it is too late, that nothing is left to you now but to see it through and submit like sheep led to the slaughter. That would be a coward’s pretext. And it would be a lie.
On the contrary, this is the moment to throw off the yoke. Liberty, safety, the joy of life – all the happiness that has been snatched from you – you can regain them; it rests with you and you alone.
Take thought, take action, before it is too late. You have a means, an infallible means, of making it impossible for your High Commands to keep up this fratricidal butchery one day longer. It is – to refuse to fight. To cut the ground under the feet of those in power by a simultaneous revolt.
You can do it.
You can do it tomorrow morning.
You can do it without incurring any risk of reprisals.
But, to bring it off, there are three absolute conditions: that your revolt should be sudden, that it should be general, that it should be simultaneous.
Sudden, because you must not give your officers time to take precautionary measures. General and simultaneous, because your success depends on mass action begun at the same moment on both sides of the frontier. If there were only fifty of you who refused to do their “duty,” inevitably they would end up before the firing-squad. But if you were five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand – if you rose like one man in both armies on your sector, if your movement of revolt spread like wildfire from regiment to regiment, if at last you brought into play the invincible force of the greatest number – no courts-martial could cope with the situation. And your officers, and the governments that have set these officers over you, would in a few hours’ time find that their powers for evil had been scotched, paralysed, smashed for ever.
Try to realize the tremendous importance of this crucial moment in your lives. To regain your independence forthwith, only three things are needed and those three things rest with you alone: your revolt must be sudden, it must be unanimous, and it must be simultaneous.
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Frenchmen and Germans, you are all men, all brothers, For the sake of your mothers, wives, and children, for the sake of all that is noblest in you, for the sake of that creative impulse transmitted from the dawn of civilization which tends to shape man into a just and rational being – grasp this last chance! Safety is within arm’s reach. Rise up and act, before it is too late!
Thousands and thousands of copies of this appeal are being broadcast today in France and Germany, along the whole front. At this very moment, in both camps, thousands of French and German hearts are thrilling with the same hope as yours, thousands of fists are brandished, thousands of men declaring for revolt, the triumph of life over lies and death.
Courage! Do not hesitate! The least delay may ruin everything. Your revolt must break out tomorrow and no later.
Tomorrow, at the same hour, at sunrise, all together, French and Germans, fired by the same heroism and the same fraternal love, throw down your arms and join your voices in a great shout rolling along the lines, the cheers of men set free.
Rise up all together and refuse to take part in the war, compel your governments to declare immediate peace!
Up tomorrow, all of you, with the first ray of dawn!
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