====
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Arnold Zweig: Selections on war
====
Arnold Zweig
From Young Woman of 1914 (1931)
Translated by Eric Sutton
The war, he had long known was a deliberate act; it was not an unavoidable natural catastrophe even if the untamed instincts of the white races, their lust for robbery, slaughter, heroism, and glory, were to be credited to nature. He had always opposed the soldiers when they trespassed upon matters, whether political, social or spiritual, with which they had no concern.
***
In those days life worked very far-flung and surprising patterns into the web of human destinies; remote events conjoined to bring forth consequences that persisted into a distant future. If the English or the Germans in Flanders exploded their mines in the Wytschaete sector, not merely did they transform bodies into scattered food for vermin; they also transformed spoilt young women in London or Breslau into indigent survivors, dependent on the charity of relatives, or on the labour of their hands. Children escaped from school too soon, and learned to be chauffeurs or electricians; girls became cinema attendants – and existence revealed to them much unsuspected cruelty and kindness. Widows, now that their men were dead, saw hopeless years before them; hordes of children found themselves suddenly freed from their fathers’ guidance, support, and – possibly – tyranny.
***
In the vast new silences she envisaged with horror the planet earth, the star upon which its denizens were locked in so terrible a struggle. In the guise of a swollen and pregnant belly it hurtled through the universe, fertilized ever and anon by evil and mysterious radiances, and by the light that rushes through the spaces of the ether. Mother Earth conceived continually, discharging a stream of creatures from her womb, and swallowing them again, sucking them down into the abysm of the tomb; for earth was a sepulchre as well as a womb. True, this frenzy of impregnation, birth, and ravening destruction was the law of life, and the war, which now filled such myriads of graves, did but lend headlong speed to a process that would otherwise have continued, but more slowly. The war was merely the most intensified form of human society. This open war among men did but obscure the fact that there had been an age-long war between men and women, rich and poor, the country and the town, the healthy and the sick. Today, indeed, it was a war of the sick against the healthy, for in these days death and disablement came nearer to him who walked about safe and sound upon his legs.
***
Those who have greatly suffered draw strength from sympathies near at hand. Words of regret and sorrow, when another hand has dealt the blow, pour balsam into the soul; for beyond all sense and reason the soul feels shattered and humbled, cowering beneath the judgment of angry gods, and gentle speech touches the most delicate fibres of her being, inspirits her, and gives her a new impulse toward recovery. For within each one of us today there is a child and a wild animal, and they are especially alert at times of weakness and distress.
Source