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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
French writers on war and peace
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François Coppée
On the battleship Trident:
“Pray God we may never have to us this fearful machine of war. I was stifled in the iron monster, where all the inventions of modern genius are united for destruction and death. The enormous guns sphered like bottles, the great mortars for throwing shells, all the strange and fearful appliances from which the touch of the commander on an electric button placed in his cabin can call forth fire and death inspire mysterious terror, a shudder at the tragic mystery. As I left the floating citadel I could but curse the progress which results in these refined cruelties and horrors. God preserve us, I repeat, from scientific war, the worst of any; and let us hope the moral effect of these structures, which have cost so much labor, talent and money, will be an avoidance, a prevention of the conflicts for which they are made.”
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