Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Claude Roy
From The Misfortune of Love (1958)
Translated by Peter Wiles
“Perhaps it’s just something this old carcass of mine has secreted, the way a nettle secretes its poison. But, Alain, just think of what men of my generation have been through. We live in a graveyard of strangled hopes. There was a time when I believed that the brotherhood of man was a possibility, that mankind was slowly working toward unity and today I see a world more divided, possibly, than ever it has been. I believed in peace, and I’ve lived through two great wars, without counting those which weren’t great, but which killed just effectively. I believed in the coming of a world in which men would acknowledge one another basically as equals. I started out in life just at the time when Dreyfus was finally proclaimed innocent, but these later years…Dreyfus is imprisoned every day. I believed in science and its civilizing influence, but all I’ve seen it do is gives races greater power to exterminate one another. I believed in tolerance, in justice, in liberty, and we see an endless expanse of concentration camps, scientific extermination, irate nationalism, frenzied upheaval; the reign of the toughest and richest; the international game of grab; tyranny revealing itself more of less hypocritically and democracy reduced to a mockery or a mask…”
***
“No, we shall not have lived and fought for nothing if we can pinpoint the fundamental question: What is man capable of? He is capable of anything, once he realizes he is not capable of everything. In half a century we have seen immense advances and monstrous regressions. What we have to pinpoint, Alain (and this is no abstract problem, no fanciful undertaking), is the sum total of sixty years’ ethnography, fifty years’ psychoanalysis, and a whole century’s thought. And even if, after all that, we find we have simply rediscovered the existence of…the devil, well, we must say so – say so to encircle him, hem him in, isolate him, leaving man free at last to be entirely a man, with the knowledge of what it is within him which refuses to be man.”
***
Le Bloch would take nothing from them but a glass of white wine in the Café Renaud. This café-general store, tobacconist-post office establishment was in the tiny village square, facing the war memorial which bore the names of the sons of Saint-Gilles who had died for France. They were all called Renauld or Penauld or Bordage, and in a small porcelain frame weathered by the rains were the photographs of three of them. They were poilus, of the kind one remembered from vaudeville, in the peaked caps of an old war – the dead of a war already outstripped. Death itself becomes antiquated, thanks to time, which follows in our tracks like a straining bloodhound.
Source