thing. I’ve been killing thirty years now; I need to get some sleep. Let’s leave it to someone else. I know a place where they need some extra pairs of hands for the ploughing. Do you want to do an honest day’s work for your money?’
‘We do.’
The soldiers dug a big hole at the foot of a rock. They buried their weapons. They went for a wash in the river. Then they disappeared, arm in arm, around the bend in the road.
Three Wars
War! Terrible word. To Frenchmen of my generation – the generation whose fiftieth is behind them – it evokes three memories above all: the expedition to the Crimea, the Italian campaign, and the catastrophe of 1870. 1 What victories, what defeats – and what a lesson!
Granted, war is vile. It is sickening to see nations at one another’s throats. Progressive liberals say that there must be no war, envisaging a time when nations will engage one another cordially. There are some thinkers, much admired, who see the world not in terms of nations, but in terms of
humanity
, and who forecast an era of universal concord. But these ideas don’t last five minutes when there’s a threat to the homeland! Even the philosophers grab their guns and start shooting; these declarations of brotherhood are drowned out by the cries of
kill
! that rise up from every patriotic heart. Because we have to have wars; they’re a necessary evil, like death. For civilisation to flourish, you might say, you need to make sure that the dungheap is well stocked. Life is nothing without death, and wars are like those antediluvian cataclysms that made it possible for humans to live on this earth.
We have become soft; we cry over every lost life. But do we even know how many people this planet needs?
Life is sacred
, we let ourselves think. The ancient Greeks beheld terrible massacres, but they didn’t then rush off and advocate some utopian fraternalism. Maybe these stoics had the more honourable view. Be a man, and accept that death goes about its strange work unseen, in the night; accept that people just die, and it so happens that they sometimes die in greater numbers. This is the rational way to think, when all’s said and done, because if you get worked up about war, you have to get angry about every other human failing. Even the bellyaching, bleeding-heart intellectuals must see that war will remainthe tool of progress, until we perfect civilisation and celebrate eternal peace. We are far from perfecting civilisation, and so we’ll surely be fighting for centuries to come. It’s the fashion, these days, to call war a hangover from our barbarian beginnings, and to say that, under the Republic, we’ll be rid of it. But when that siren rings out on the border, and you hear the bugle in the street, we’ll all be reaching for a gun. Because war is in the blood.
Victor Hugo once wrote that only kings wanted war – all their subjects wanted to do was to kiss and cuddle. That’s nothing but a poet’s dream, alas. Hugo has been the high priest of the sort of fantasy that I’m talking about. He celebrated a United States of Europe; he urged the importance of international community, and prophesied a new Golden Age. What could be nicer? But you can be brothers all you like, what matters most of all is that you love each other. And nations do not love each other. Why pretend otherwise? It’s true, I admit, that a vulnerable monarch might take a gamble and declare war against a neighbour, hoping for a victory to tighten his grip on the throne. The thing is, right from the very first battle – win or lose – that war belongs to the people, and they fight for themselves; if they aren’t fighting for themselves, they don’t fight. And that’s to say nothing about wars that really do involve the entire nation. Let’s imagine, for instance, that one day France and Germany find themselve s squaring up to each other again. Everyone will be fired up – and not for the sake of
the Republic
or
the
‘We do.’
The soldiers dug a big hole at the foot of a rock. They buried their weapons. They went for a wash in the river. Then they disappeared, arm in arm, around the bend in the road.
Three Wars
War! Terrible word. To Frenchmen of my generation – the generation whose fiftieth is behind them – it evokes three memories above all: the expedition to the Crimea, the Italian campaign, and the catastrophe of 1870. 1 What victories, what defeats – and what a lesson!
Granted, war is vile. It is sickening to see nations at one another’s throats. Progressive liberals say that there must be no war, envisaging a time when nations will engage one another cordially. There are some thinkers, much admired, who see the world not in terms of nations, but in terms of
humanity
, and who forecast an era of universal concord. But these ideas don’t last five minutes when there’s a threat to the homeland! Even the philosophers grab their guns and start shooting; these declarations of brotherhood are drowned out by the cries of
kill
! that rise up from every patriotic heart. Because we have to have wars; they’re a necessary evil, like death. For civilisation to flourish, you might say, you need to make sure that the dungheap is well stocked. Life is nothing without death, and wars are like those antediluvian cataclysms that made it possible for humans to live on this earth.
We have become soft; we cry over every lost life. But do we even know how many people this planet needs?
Life is sacred
, we let ourselves think. The ancient Greeks beheld terrible massacres, but they didn’t then rush off and advocate some utopian fraternalism. Maybe these stoics had the more honourable view. Be a man, and accept that death goes about its strange work unseen, in the night; accept that people just die, and it so happens that they sometimes die in greater numbers. This is the rational way to think, when all’s said and done, because if you get worked up about war, you have to get angry about every other human failing. Even the bellyaching, bleeding-heart intellectuals must see that war will remainthe tool of progress, until we perfect civilisation and celebrate eternal peace. We are far from perfecting civilisation, and so we’ll surely be fighting for centuries to come. It’s the fashion, these days, to call war a hangover from our barbarian beginnings, and to say that, under the Republic, we’ll be rid of it. But when that siren rings out on the border, and you hear the bugle in the street, we’ll all be reaching for a gun. Because war is in the blood.
Victor Hugo once wrote that only kings wanted war – all their subjects wanted to do was to kiss and cuddle. That’s nothing but a poet’s dream, alas. Hugo has been the high priest of the sort of fantasy that I’m talking about. He celebrated a United States of Europe; he urged the importance of international community, and prophesied a new Golden Age. What could be nicer? But you can be brothers all you like, what matters most of all is that you love each other. And nations do not love each other. Why pretend otherwise? It’s true, I admit, that a vulnerable monarch might take a gamble and declare war against a neighbour, hoping for a victory to tighten his grip on the throne. The thing is, right from the very first battle – win or lose – that war belongs to the people, and they fight for themselves; if they aren’t fighting for themselves, they don’t fight. And that’s to say nothing about wars that really do involve the entire nation. Let’s imagine, for instance, that one day France and Germany find themselve s squaring up to each other again. Everyone will be fired up – and not for the sake of
the Republic
or
the
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