For peace, against war: literary selections

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Paul and Victor Margueritte: Selections on war

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Paul and Victor Margueritte
The Disaster
Translated by Frederic Lees

Yes, the century was crumbling into dust. That death, to which they had consecrated themselves by their profession, was there, crouching around them, within them. Du Breuil, horrified, felt the passing breath of the invisible Mower. The Borny battlefield stretched out under the moon its harvest of corpses. The battlefields of Gravelotte, Rezonville, Mars-la-Tour, Amanvillers, Saint-Privat, and Servigny, appeared before him, ploughed up with shells, and sown over with bones. The rich, ruddy soil of Lorraine turned his stomach. Through the walls he breathed a pestilential musty smell, which was the breath even of Metz, of the streets infected with phenol and chlorine, and of the stinking cemeteries. And he, Du Breuil, was dying like the others. Ah! war, the horrible, odious thing!

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Still the cart rolled on, moving by the side of women, carriages full of wounded, wagons and canteen carriages. Du Breuil, cut to the heart, turned round. A shrill, strident cry ground out the words: “To Berlin! To Berlin!” Who was jeering in this manner? With a sobbing laugh the hoarse voice again cried: “To Berlin! To Berlin!” What recollections these words called up! And on the top of a canteen-carriage, its claws fastened with string to its perch, Du Breuil saw a green parrot, bristling all over, screaming aloud and flapping its wings.

“We are sold!” cried a voice, so guttural and so raucous that he started. Du Breuil also turned round. Attached by one leg to its perch on the sill of a window, an enormous green parrot, its horny eyelids half open and its beak inclined, was looking at them sardonically. Du Breuil, pricked to the heart, recalled the Forbach rout, the great flapping of the wings of the green bird which was sobbing in the night: “To Berlin! to Berlin!” He shrugged his shoulders and passed on. Vedel, indignant, jeered: “Is he not stupid with his air of a stuffed bird! Sold! He repeats the catchword of simpletons and cowards. Sold!…And showing his fist, he cried: “Shut your beak, imbecile!”

War intoxicated him with disgust. This time he descended to the very depths of misery and solitude.

He contemplated the covered tomb where, in all probability, the guardian explained to him, the Prussian officer was at rest in the midst of two thousand bodies of both nations, buried eight high. Not far away a yawning trench awaited new hecatombs. Twenty-four corpses, in shrouds open to the air, were stretched at the bottom side by side, some showing an arm, some a head. There was something terrifying about their immobility. They received the rain with a death-like stiffness, the ludicrousness of which was chilling.

Many came to ask themselves if a fresh butchery was necessary. Without horses to drag the cannon, without cavalry, forced with nothing but foot soldiers to pass beyond a terrible circle of shells and balls, was it not going to a monstrous massacre?