Upton Sinclair: War can inflict on civilization more damage than it can endure
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Upton Sinclair: Selections on war
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Upton Sinclair
The Book of Life
Because I perceive that civilization is impossible without sympathy, and because sympathy makes it impossible for me to be happy while my fellow men are ignorant and degraded, therefore I dedicate my energies to the extermination of poverty, war, parasitism and all forms of exploitation of man by his fellows.
Professor William James is the author of an excellent essay entitled “A Moral Equivalent for War.” He sets forth the idea that men have loved war through the ages because it has called forth their highest efforts, has made them more fully aware of the powers of their being. He asks, May it not be possible for man, of his own free impulse, born of his love of life and the wonderful potentialities which it unfolds, to invent for himself a discipline, a code based, not upon the destruction of other men and their enslavement, but upon cooperative emulation in the unfoldment of the powers of the mind? That this can be done by men, I have never doubted. That it will be done, and done quickly, has been made certain by the late world conflict, which has demonstrated to all thinking people that the progress of the mechanical arts has been such that man is now able to inflict upon his own civilization more damage than it is able to endure.
Joseph Dana Miller: These I hate – war and its panoply, the lie that hides its ghastly mockery
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
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Joseph Dana Miller
The Hymn of Hate
And this I hate – not men, nor flag, nor race,
But only War with its wild, grinning face.
God strike it till its eyes be blind as night
And all its members tremble with affright!
Oh, let it bear in its death agony
The wail of mothers for their best-loved ones,
And on its head
Descend the venomed curses of its sons
Who followed her, deluded, where its guns
Had dyed the daises red.
All these I hate – war and its panoply,
The lie that hides its ghastly mockery,
That makes its glories out of women’s tears,
The toil of peasants through the hardened years,
The legacy of long disease that preys
On bone and body in the after-days.
God’s curses pour,
Until it shrivels with its votaries
And die away in its own fiery seas,
That nevermore
Its dreadful call of murder may be heard;
A thing accursed in very deed and word
From blood-drenched shore to shore.
James Anthony Froude: If they had known that war would result
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
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James Anthony Froude
The Science of History
Gibbon believed that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few years ago we believed the world had grown too civilised for war, and the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was to be the inauguration of a new era. Battles, bloody as Napoleon’s, are now the familiar tale of every day; and the arts which have made greatest progress are the arts of destruction. What next?
***
Luther would have gone to work with less heart, could he have foreseen the Thirty Years’ War, and in the distance the theology of Tubingen. Washington might have hesitated to draw the sword against England, could he have seen the country which he made as we see it now (1864).
***
If it can tell us little of the past, and nothing of the future, why waste our time over so barren a study?
First, it is a voice for ever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last: not always by the chief offenders, but paid by some one. Justice and truth alone endure and live. Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at last to them….
Vachel Lindsay: Selections on war
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Vachel Lindsay: Selections on war
Vachel Lindsay: Above the Battle’s Front
Vachel Lindsay: Speak Now for Peace
Vachel Lindsay: Strange Easter. I cannot think of the resurrection but of the cannon fodder.
Brent Dow Allinson: To him when he beholds war’s desecration
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
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Brent Dow Allinson
Overtones
To one whose listening spirit is attune
With beauty there are overtones of meaning:
Glory and strength and joy in the unhewn
Unconquerable hills, and in a leaning
Storm-ravaged pine above the summer sea
Norn-melodies of ancient hope and yearning,
Patience and fortitude and sanctity; –
And in a rose-hedge love forever burning!
To him when he beholds war’s desecration,
Or when in fear or grief he stands aware
Of man’s fell infamy and degradation, –
Be then, O pine-crowned hills and hedge-rows fair
Where Beauty dwells a chastening consolation,
And still the anguish of a vast despair!
Erwin Markham: A Song of Peace
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
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Erwin Markham
A Song of Peace
(At the end of the World War)
Now, above the thunder of the drums,
Hark to a mighty sound
A cry out of the ground:
Let there be no more battles: field and flood
Are weary of battle blood.
Even the patient stones
Are weary of shrieking shells and dying groans.
Lay the sad swords asleep;
They have their fearful memories to keep,
And fold the flags: they weary of battle days,
Weary of wild flights up the windy ways.
Quiet the restless flags,
Grown strangely old upon the smoking crags;
Look where they startle and leap –
Look where they hollow and heap –
Now greatening into glory and now thinned,
Living and dying momentarily on the wind,
And bugles that have cried on sea and land
The silver blazon of their high command –
Bugles that held long parley with the sky –
Bugles that shattered the nights on battle walls –
Lay them to rest in dim memorial halls;
They are weary of that curdling cry
That tells men how to die.
The cannons worn out with their work of hell –
The brief, abrupt persuasion of the shell –
Let the shrewd spider lock them one by one,
With filmy cables glancing in the sun;
And let the bluebird in their iron throats
Build his nest safe and spill his rippling notes.
Let there be no more battles, men of earth!
The new age rises singing into birth!
John Galsworthy: I’ve never said a word against our soldiers. It’s the government I condemn for putting them to this, and the press for hounding on the government.
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
John Galsworthy: Selections on war
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John Galsworthy
The Mob
TALL YOUTH. Silence for the blasted traitor?
A youth plays the concertina; there is laughter, then an abrupt silence.
MORE. You shall have it in a nutshell!
A SHOPBOY. [Flinging a walnut-shell which strikes MORE on the shoulder] Here y’are!
MORE. Go home, and think! If foreigners invaded us, wouldn’t you be fighting tooth and nail like those tribesmen, out there?
TALL YOUTH. Treacherous dogs! Why don’t they come out in the open?
MORE. They fight the best way they can.
[A burst of hooting is led by a soldier in khaki on the outskirt.]
MORE. My friend there in khaki led that hooting. I’ve never said a word against our soldiers. It’s the Government I condemn for putting them to this, and the Press for hounding on the Government, and all of you for being led by the nose to do what none of you would do, left to yourselves.
***
MORE. Sir John! Our men are dying out there for, the faith that’s in them! I believe my faith the higher, the better for mankind – Am I to slink away? Since I began this campaign I’ve found hundreds who’ve thanked me for taking this stand. They look on me now as their leader. Am I to desert them? When you led your forlorn hope – did you ask yourself what good you were doing, or, whether you’d come through alive? It’s my forlorn hope not to betray those who are following me; and not to help let die a fire – a fire that’s sacred – not only now in this country, but in all countries, for all time.
Vincent Godfrey Burns: The March of the Ghosts
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Vincent Godfrey Burns: An Ex-Serviceman Makes a Vow
Vincent Godfrey Burns: Hell à la mode
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Vincent Godfrey Burns
The March of the Ghosts
Chattering, clattering, here they come!
With a shrieking fife and a funeral drum.
Some are headless and some are blind,
Some drag a shattered limb behind,
Some are carried and some must crawl,
Some have no limbs or face at all,
Some are foolish and some are mad,
Some are gallant – but all are sad!
Clattering, chattering, here they come!
Making time to the Skeleton’s drum!
Uproaring, imploring, these soldier ghosts
Are the broken and bleeding battle-hosts
Of the kings and commanders since time began,
Red grist of the war-mill of conqueror Man,
Dead toys of the war-men’s age-long play,
Roman and Teuton and British prey.
Young men, old men – with slow, dull tread
Come the hapless, hopeless, betrayed dead!
Imploring, uproaring, these slaughtered hosts
Are an endless column of marching ghosts!
Bemoaning and groaning a horrible song,
They rattle their bones as they march along,
German and Frenchman, side by side,
Turk and Armenian – all who died.
With no regard to their native place,
With no respect to their flag or race,
Made angry foes at the battle-posts,
They now are brothers in the army of ghosts!
Bemoaning and groaning, the phantom throng
Moves down the ages with the sorrowful song!
Enthralling, appalling, one clear voice cried,
“Have you forgotten the hosts who died?
Must you forever our dread ranks swell,
Brand men forever with the scars of hell?
Men of the nations let your sorrow be
Healed with the hand of fraternity:
Sealed with the symbol of the Son of Man
Pledge the peoples to the peaceful plan!”
Appalling, enthralling, comes one last plea,
“Let peace prevail through eternity!”
Max Ehrmann: Peace Shall Live
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
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Max Ehrmann
Peace Shall Live
The guns are still, the dead sleep on,
The blind and crippled walk the streets,
Bereavèd hearts bright colors don,
Again the pulse of factories beats;
Nightmares and grimy days have fled,
Forgotten are the dead.
Around the world from every land
The prayers and pleadings never cease –
For swords and men? Nay, heart and hand
To build the dream eternal peace.
Disdainfully we speak reproof;
Proudly we stand aloof.
Was it indifference that sent
Our sons the tides of war to stem?
Through flaming fields and blood they went.
Shall we not keep our faith with them
Whose bodies lie on foreign leas
Or toss in many seas?
The keen, cold sword the flesh will feel,
If once again the world shall quake
And men back to the jungle steal.
O Countrymen, the hour to stake
Our all is here, lest grim alarms
Again shriek out, “To arms!”
A question burns within man’s breast:
In bloody wars shall man expire –
Or by the arts of peace be blessed
That lift his soul forever higher?
My Countrymen, stand forth and give
Your answer, “Peace shall live!”
Arthur Miller: Mars and Mammon
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
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Arthur Miller
All My Sons
Posted for fair use only.
Keller: Well, that’s what a war does. I had two sons, now I got one. It changed all the tallies. In my day when you had sons it was an honor. Today, a doctor could make a million dollars if he could figure out a way to bring a boy into the world without a trigger finger.
***
Mother: Look what happened to you because you wouldn’t listen to me! I told you to marry that girl and stay out of the war!
***
Mother: Steve was never like that.
George: He’s like that now. He’d like to take every man who made money in the war and put him up against a wall.
Chris: He’ll need a lot of bullets.
George: And he’d better not get any.
***
Mother: I don’t know. I’m beginning to think we don’t really know him. They say in the war he was such a killer. Here he was always afraid of mice. I don’t know him. I don’t know what he’ll do.
***
Keller: …Who worked for nothin’ in that war? When they ship a gun or a truck outa Detroit before they got their price? Is that clean? It’s dollars and cents, nickels and dimes; war and peace, it’s nickels and dimes, what’s clean? Half the Goddam country is gotta go if I go! That’s why you can’t tell me.
Brent Dow Allinson: Harvard Declares War!
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
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Brent Dow Allinson
Harvard Declares War!
Hang out the flags!” the college president said,
“The war we dreaded is at last declared!”…
Crimson and white and bright arterial red –
Hang out the valiant gonfalons that shared
With Yale’s o’ersicklied blue the football cheers!
Plant cannon in the Yard facing the town,
Turn seniors into sergeants; make them drill
Young sophomores in the goose-step up and down;
Conveniently forget the boast of years,
And where three hours’ tramp from Bunker Hill
The ancient elm of Washington still rears
Its riven arms, stand up in cap and gown
Among the ranked alumni now and sing
With proud and lusty hearts: “God Save the King!”
Give all of them degrees who’ll learn to kill
The Germans and their own creative will;
Exhort them into excellent credulous slaves,
Inspire, bedazzle, threaten, lash the waves
Of youth’s fine frenzy; give to hate release!
Fair Harvard must be first in war as well as peace!
Why hang this classic crimson in the Yard?
Why all this bunting for the vulgar’s seeing?
Is it to bless the iron and the shard, –
Or in some football way to gladden being?
What has this brawl to do with art or learning?
Because stampeded men have now begun it
Do we pretend they have already won it?
Is there not quite enough for us to do
To keep the lamps of wisdom faintly burning –
To light this darkness with the just, the true?…
For very shame to be thus sold, defrauded
Because the captains and the goths applauded!
To see our citadel to plunderers bartered
And seal our eyes and lips while Truth is martyred! ..
O rather, Harvard, in this shameful hour
When lamps are quenched and Madness rides on Power
Go place a fool’s cap on thy founder’s head
And where thy banners burn O, hang instead
White sheets devised with cross-bones twain, and drape
Thy hallowed ivied walls with strands of sable crépe!
Elinor Lennen: Poor piteous trophies of the war-god’s hunt
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Women writers on peace and war
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Elinor Lennen
‘No Quiet’
At last, ‘All quiet on the western front’;
No shrapnel singing fiercely as it came,
Intent to blight and mutilate and maim;
No big guns barking madly as their wont,
Upon their fiendish mission, born to stunt
The prey that crossed their path, small human game
Marked out for death, or fated to go lame,
Poor piteous trophies of the war-god’s hunt.
All quiet? But a harshly mocking sound
Disturbs humanity’s narcotic rest.
A host of voices shriek from out the ground,
‘No quiet while you scoff at our behest,
While lust for war has held you gagged and bound,
While greed has charted and empowered your quest.’
Upton Sinclair: War and morality
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Upton Sinclair: Selections on war
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Upton Sinclair
The Book of Life
What avails it if, when they are fully grown, we can think of nothing better to do with them than to take them by millions at a time and dress them up in uniforms and send them out to be destroyed by poison gases?
***
Is it too much to hope for, that some day we shall have a race of young fighters for truth and justice, who are willing to live abstemious lives, and consecrate themselves to the task of delivering mankind from wage slavery and war?
***
I say that if men and women would recognize the perpetuation of the honeymoon as the purpose of marriage, and would devote to that end one-hundredth part of the intelligence and energy they now devote to the killing of their fellow human beings in war, we might have an end to the wretched “romantic tradition” which makes the most sacred emotion of the human heart into a sneak-thief skulking in the darkness, entering our lives by back alleys and secret stairways – while greed and worldly pomp, dullness and boredom, parade in by the front entrance.
***
I will add one little anecdote, giving you a glimpse of the sex conventions of war. The American army made desperate efforts to keep down venereal disease, and required all men to report to their regimental surgeon immediately after having had sex relations. Our army moved into Coblentz, and the regulations strictly forbade any fraternizing with the inhabitants. But immediately it was discovered that there was an increase of disease, and investigation was made, and revealed that men had been ceasing to report to the surgeons, because they were afraid of being punished for having “fraternized with the enemy.” So a new order was issued, providing that having sexual intercourse would not be considered as “fraternizing.” I do not know any better way to distinguish my ideal of morality from the military ideal, than to say that according to my understanding of it, the sex relationship should always and everywhere imply and include “fraternizing.”
For peace, against war: literary selections (M-Z)
For peace, against war: literary selections (A-L)
For peace, against war: literary selections (M-Z)
***
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Selections on war
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Drive for transatlantic dominion leads to endless wars, empty treasuries
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Gratuitously cutting throats in Asia and America
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Loving war for its own sake
Thomas Babington Macaulay: The real fruits of even triumphant war
Thomas Babington Macaulay: The self-perpetuating role of the army
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Such a fiend is an army
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Taxes to effect wild schemes of foreign conquest
Thomas Babington Macaulay: What it is the nature of armies to become
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Why local wars, growing into world wars, are really fought
Hugh MacDiarmid: A war to save civilization, you say?
George MacDonald: War-cry of every opinion. Battle of the dead.
Machado de Assis: Let the reader decide between the soldier and the priest
Charles Mackay: Awake the song of peace!
Charles Mackay: Hung the sword in the hall, the spear on the wall
Charles Mackay: War in all men’s eyes shall be a monster of iniquity
Archibald MacLeish: The disastrous war, the silent slain
Maurice Maeterlinck: Bloodshed, battle-cry and sword-thrust are the joys of barbarians
Antonine Maillet: One day war got declared
Antonine Maillet: That’s enough to give you some idea of what war is
Antonine Maillet: War succeeding war
Antonine Maillet: When are the soldiers are dead, bombs dropped, maybe we’ll have some peace
Joseph de Maistre: The soldier and the executioner
Nicolas Malebranch: Ignorance, brutality and training for war
André Malraux: Do you think that the army budget is meant to pay for war?
André Malraux: I cannot see my compatriots turned into cannon fodder
Elizar Maltsev: Suddenly people would discover that there was no war at all
Albert Maltz: A children’s wartime bestiary
Albert Maltz: Conquering the world but losing your son
Albert Maltz: “Ten thousand dead today. That’s what the war means.”
Bernard Mandeville: How to induce men to kill and die
André Pieyre de Mandiargues: Mercy and Peace squares
Heinrich Mann: Selections on peace and war
Heinrich Mann: Children, there is peace
Heinrich Mann: I am young and not familiar with warfare
Heinrich Mann: I must have my battle
Heinrich Mann: Mission of letters in a world in rubble with 10 million corpses underground
Heinrich Mann: Montaigne thought nothing more alien to religion than religious wars
Heinrich Mann: Next war will sacrifice most of humanity to advanced technology
Heinrich Mann: Nietzsche, war and the butchery of ten to twenty million souls
Heinrich Mann: “No! The less force exercised in the world the better!”
Heinrich Mann: Nowadays the real power is peace
Klaus Mann: The whole country was transformed into an armed camp
Thomas Mann: Selections on war
Thomas Mann: By nature evil and harmful, war is destructive even to the victor
Thomas Mann: Dirge for a homeland wasted by war
Thomas Mann: Fatal hour when hysterical citizens revel in the shedding of blood
Thomas Mann: Goethe in wartime
Thomas Mann: In search of the land of peace
Thomas Mann: The man of war and the man of words
Thomas Mann: Parallel, oracle and warning
Thomas Mann: Tolstoy, a force that could have stopped war
Thomas Mann: War is a blood-orgy of egotism, corruption, and vileness
Thomas Mann: William Faulkner’s love for man, protest against militarism and war
Frederic Manning: Selections on war
Frederic Manning: Blow, wind! Drown the senseless thunder of the guns.
Frederic Manning: From tragic heroes to mere derelicts in a wrecked and dilapidated world
Frederic Manning: “Let them as made the war come an’ fight it, that’s what a say.”
Frederic Manning: Out of one bloody misery into another, until we break
Frederic Manning: Shells hounding through air athirst for blood
Frederic Manning: The Trenches
Frederic Manning: The very mask of God, broken
Alessandro Manzoni: The havoc of war devastated the state
Gabriel Marcel: Modern war is sin itself, the suicide of the human race
Gabriel Marcel: War depersonalizes enemy, dehumanizes self
Gabriel Marcel: War is disaster from which no counterbalancing advantage can be reaped
Marcus Aurelius: Military conquests lead but to the grave
Paul and Victor Margueritte: Selections on war
Paul and Victor Margueritte: Ah! war, the horrible, odious thing!
Paul and Victor Margueritte: At the idea of war his heart was filled with disgust
Paul and Victor Margueritte: An indefinite feeling of fraternity seized him
Paul and Victor Margueritte: The masses voted for peace but were given war
Paul and Victor Margueritte: Should war break out, he also might disappear
Paul and Victor Margueritte: So-called victory was in reality purely ineffectual butchery
Jacques Maritain: What good one can expect from such a war and its pitiless prolongation?
Edwin Markham: Peace Over Africa
Edwin Markham: Semiramis, the conqueror
Erwin Markham: A Song of Peace
Georgi Markov: War is a glutton. Its terrible hunger is never sated.
Christopher Marlowe: Accurs’d be he that first invented war!
Christopher Marlowe: Parricide and filicide. While lions war, poor lambs perish.
José Martí: Oscar Wilde on war and aesthetics
Martial: Let the mad be eager for wars and fierce Mars
Roger Martin du Gard: Selections on war
Roger Martin du Gard: From Nobel Prize in Literature speech
Roger Martin du Gard: All the pageantry of war cannot redeem its beastliness
Roger Martin du Gard: “Anything rather than the madness, the horrors of a war!”
Roger Martin du Gard: Be loyal to yourselves, reject war
Roger Martin du Gard: Deliberately infecting a country with war neurosis
Roger Martin du Gard: “Drop your rifles. Revolt!”
Roger Martin du Gard: General strike for peace
Roger Martin du Gard: A hundredth part of energy expended in war could have preserved peace
Roger Martin du Gard: How make active war on war?
Roger Martin du Gard: Nothing worse than war and all it involves
Roger Martin du Gard: Romain Rolland
Roger Martin du Gard: A thousand times more honor in preserving peace than waging war
Roger Martin du Gard: Tragedy of war, like that of Oedipus, occurs because warnings are ignored
Roger Martin du Gard: War breeds atmosphere of lies, officials lies
Roger Martin du Gard: War’s “serviceable lie” costs tens of thousands of lives
Andrew Marvell: War all this doth overgrow
Andrew Marvell: When roses only arms might bear
E. P. Marvin: War Disenchanted
Caroline Atherton Mason: Enemy, oh, let our warfare cease!
William Mason: Il Pacifico: Joys that peace inspires
Gerald Massey: Curst, curst be war, the World’s most fatal glory!
Gerald Massey: Sweet peace comes treading down war’s cruel spears
Philip Massinger: Famine, blood, and death, Bellona’s pages
Philip Massinger: Mustn’t change ploughshares into swords
Edgar Lee Masters: “The honor of the flag must be upheld”
Edgar Lee Masters: The Philippine Conquest
Edgar Lee Masters: The words, Pro Patria, what do they mean, anyway?
Grant Matevosian: The great general
Guy de Maupassant: Selections on war
Guy de Maupassant: The Horrible
Guy de Maupassant: How and why wars are plotted
Guy de Maupassant: I only pray that our sons may never see any wars again
Guy de Maupassant: Military hysteria, military presumptuousness
Guy de Maupassant: Why does society not rise up bodily in rebellion at the word “war”?
Francois Mauriac: The Bloody Dawn of Peace
Peter Maurin: Disarmament of the heart
André Maurois: Selections on war and peace
André Maurois: The civilization of war
André Maurois: Drilling in jest, dying in earnest
André Maurois: The killing machine started up with pitiless smoothness
André Maurois: The logic of war
André Maurois: Was it possible that such sweetness could serve as the prelude to such horror?
André Maurois: World rendered pitiless and perilous by the disorders of war
André Maurois: The worst of compromises is better than the best of wars
Vladimir Mayakovsky: Hurl a question to their faces: Why are we fighting?
John McGovern: War: three letters, fifty million plunged into worst misfortune
Thomas McGrath: Against the False Magicians
Thomas McGrath: All the Dead Soldiers
Thomas McGrath: Nocturne Militaire
Thomas McGrath: Ode for the American Dead in Asia
Thomas McGrath: Senators mine our lives for another war
Ivan Melezh: Threatening, alarming, fearful: in a word, war
Grenville Mellen: The Lonely Bugle Grieves
Grenville Mellen: Slaughter rides screaming on the vengeful ball
Herman Melville: Selections on peace and war
Herman Melville: All the cruel carnal glory wrought out by naval heroes
Herman Melville: Butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all military commanders
Herman Melville: Characterological drawback of consorting with cannon
Herman Melville: Gaining glory by a distinguished slaughtering of their fellow-men
Herman Melville: How can a religion of peace flourish in a castle of war?
Herman Melville: In the solace of the Truce of God, the Calumet has come
Herman Melville: Minister of the Prince of Peace serving the God of War
Herman Melville: Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend
Herman Melville: Trophies of Peace
Herman Melville: War-pits and rattraps. Soldier sold to the army as Faust sold himself to the devil.
Herman Melville: When shall the time come, how much longer will God postpone it?
Albert Memmi: So the war had caught up with us, a celebration in honor of death
Menander: Inglorious military vainglory
H.L. Mencken: New wars will bring about an unparalleled butchery of men
Louis Sebastian Mercier: Selections on war and peace
Louis Sebastien Mercier: Peaceful heroism far outweighs warlike heroism
Louis Sebastien Mercier: Preemptive cure for desire to wage war
Louis Sebastien Mercier: The torch of war, once extinguished, will never more be relumined
Louis Sebastien Mercier: War dishonors a state as robbery dishonors a private individual
George Meredith: Selections on peace and war
George Meredith: All your gains from War resign
George Meredith: Bellona’s mad halloo
George Meredith: Nations at war are wild beasts
George Meredith: The Olive Branch
George Meredith: On the Danger of War
George Meredith: Peace is the Goddess we court for the hand of her daughter Plenty
George Meredith: Think war the finest subject for poets?
George Meredith: You fight to subjugate, to enslave
George Meredith: War wife, as good as widowed
George Meredith: War’s rivers of blood no crown for future generations
George Meredith: We pray to be let live peacefully
George Meredith: Women and war
George Meredith: The work of hands not pledged to grind or slay
Dmitry Merezhkovsky: His God is not at all the God of the Christians, but the ancient, pagan Mars
Prosper Mérimée: Commemorating the heroes of war
Prosper Mérimée: To the shame of humanity, horrors of war have their charm
Robert Merle: The present war, and all the previous wars, and all the wars to come
Robert Merle: There’s no such thing as a just or sacred war
Thomas Merton: Simone Weil and why nations go to war
Lillian Rozell Messenger: Seeking a new world of peace
Lillian Rozell Messenger: Why this feast of shells each day, the fury, blood and wail of war?
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Arnold Schoenberg: Peace on Earth
Alice Meynell: The true slayers are those who sire soldiers
Jules Michelet: My book is a book of peace
Jules Michelet: This vile and loathsome war
Adam Mickiewicz: The transient glory of military conquerors
Thomas Middleton: Selections on peace and war
Thomas Middleton: All made to make a peace, and not a war
Thomas Middleton: Blood-quaffing Mars, who wash’d himself in gore
Thomas Middleton: Let them that seek Peace, find Peace and enjoy Peace
Thomas Middleton: O thrice-peaceful souls, whom neither threats nor strife nor wars controls!
Thomas Middleton: The Peacemaker
Thomas Middleton: The soldier’s fate
Thomas Middleton: Warfare and lawfare
John Middleton and Thomas Dekker: Or have the wars drink your immaculate blood
Ephraïm Mikhaël: Why have not my brethren of the army known the dream of God?
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Conscientious Objector
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Lament
Pierre Mille: I’ve killed a man! You must turn away from me, for I’ve killed a man!
Arthur Miller: Mars and Mammon
Emily Huntington Miller: Hymn of Peace
Joaquin Miller: The People’s Song of Peace
Joseph Dana Miller: These I hate – war and its panoply, the lie that hides its ghastly mockery
John Milton: Selections on war
John Milton: He all their ammunition and feats of war defeats
John Milton: Men levy cruel wars, wasting the earth, each other to destroy
John Milton: No war or battle’s sound was heard the world around
John Milton: Singing of theme more heroic than war
John Milton: What can war but endless war still breed?
John Milton: Without ambition, war, or violence
Minucius Felix: War and the birth of empire
Octave Mirbeau: Selections on war
Octave Mirbeau: To the Soldiers of all Countries
Octave Mirbeau: War, apprenticeship in man-killing
Gabriela Mistral: Dance of Peace
Ruth Comfort Mitchell: He Went for a Soldier
Mary Russell Mitford: Sheath thy gory blade in peace
Ferenc Molnár: The first fruits of war
Ferenc Molnár: War is a rough, harsh word; it sounds like miniature thunder
Harriet Monroe: The Hope of Peace
Harriet Monroe: Over me wash the seas of war
Charles Edward Montague: Selections on war and its aftermath
Charles Edward Montague; Aloof, detached officers lead to thousands of little brown bundles
Charles Edward Montague: The disconcerting bombs of Christian pacifism
Charles Edward Montague: Post-war prescription for peace
Charles Edward Montague: War must first slay natural sentiment of brotherhood
Charles Edward Montague: War propaganda leaves bill to be settled in peacetime
Charles Edward Montague: War’s demoralization
Montaigne: Blood on the sword: From slaughter of animals to slaughter of men
Montaigne: The ignominy of lopsided military conquest
Montaigne: Invasion concerns all men; not so defense: that concerns only the rich
Montaigne: It is enough to dip our pens in ink without dipping them in blood
Montaigne: Monstrous war waged for frivolous reasons
Montaigne: This furious monster war
Montaigne: War, that malady of mankind
Eugenio Montale: Poetry in an era of nuclear weapons and Doomsday atmosphere
Hubert Monteilhet: Empire’s mercenaries will devour the metropolis
Hubert Monteilhet: Slain by their own swords
Montesquieu: Distemper of militarism brings nothing but public ruin
Montesquieu: Military glory leads to torrents of blood overspreading the earth
Montesquieu: Wars abroad aggravate conflicts at home
James Montgomery: Selections on war and peace
James Montgomery: Farewell to War
James Montgomery: Fratricidal war speeds on inexorability of Death
James Montgomery: The poet tracks not the warrior’s fiery road
James Montgomery: ‘Twas but a dream. But one word found utterance – “Peace, peace! peace!”
James Montgomery: War, that self-inflicted scourge of man
Robert Montgomery: Field of Death
Henry de Montherlant: A constant state of crime against humanity
Henry de Montherlant: We too are widows
William Vaughn Moody: Bullet’s scream went wide of its mark to its homeland’s heart
George Moore: Murder pure and simple, impossible to revive the methods of Tamburlaine
George Moore: War and disillusionment
Marianne Moore: I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war
Thomas Moore: No trophies but of Love
Paul Morand: The magic disappearance of ten millions of war dead
Paul Morand: Nations never lay down their arms; death which is still combative
Paul Morand: The War for Righteousness ends in the burying of moral sense
Paul Morand: You did not believe in the war
Marcel Moreau: Children playing at war, the actual weapon of a crime
Alberto Moravia: Selections on war
Alberto Moravia: “Ah well, war is war, you know”
Alberto Moravia: Even in uniform and with a chest covered with medals, always a thief and a murderer
Alberto Moravia: That is what war is like, the war is everywhere
Alberto Moravia: Torn colored posters inciting people to war
Alberto Moravia: War destroys all things seen and unseen
Alberto Moravia: War survives in our souls long after it is over
Thomas More: Battles result from lust for fame and glory
Angela Morgan: Selections on war and peace
Angela Morgan: For the moment’s red renown. Battle Cry of the Mothers.
Angela Morgan: God prays for peace
Angela Morgan: In Spite of War
Angela Morgan: Mothers “Go, fashion the Future’s laws that war shall be no more”
Angela Morgan: Tell us the battlefields have lied, that men are still immaculate
Angela Morgan: War! Shall you be our lover? War! Shall you be our mate?
Angela Morgan: Whether to yield in meekness to War’s devouring curse
Charles Morice: Woe to you enemies of peace
Christopher Morley: Selections on peace and war
Christopher Morley: The book that could prevent all future wars
Christopher Morley: Gunpowder and printer’s ink
Christopher Morley: Humanity’s most beautiful gift, Peace
Christopher Morley: Men are traitors to humanity who don’t pledge to make war impossible
Christopher Morley: No enthusiasm for hymns of hate
Christopher Morley: Printer’s ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years
Christopher Morley: War, how many aeons lost
Jean Lewis Morris: A Patriot I!
Lewis Morris: Selections on war and peace
Lewis Morris: The blight of war surges in waves of blood
Lewis Morris: The evil blight of war torments the race from age to age
Lewis Morris: Filled with love of peace
Lewis Morris: Put off the curse of war
Lewis Morris: Red war, the dungeon, and the stake
Lewis Morris: When the cannons roar and the trumpets blare no longer
Lewis Morris: White-winged Peace triumphs over War’s red rapine
Lewis Morris: Who will free us from the dreadful past of war and hatred?
Lewis Morris: The world rang with the fierce shouts of war and cries of pain
William Morris: No man knew the sight of blood
William Morris: The role of soldiers and how they will disappear
William Morris: War abroad but no peace at home
Philip Stafford Moxom: The Palace of Peace
Sergei Mstislavsky: Germ warfare of the future
Luise Mühlbach: Battle-field writes names of its heroes in blood
Iris Murdoch: The soldiers should all just throw down their arms
Iris Murdoch: You don’t have to kill people fighting for social justice
John Middleton Murry: Selections on peace and war
John Middleton Murry: The choice, democracy or modern warfare
John Middleton Murry: For England, peace or destruction
John Middleton Murry: The machine of war
John Middleton Murry: Modern warfare is the deliberate massacre of the innocents
John Middleton Murry: The morality of bombing civilians is not arithmetic
John Middleton Murry: Non-intervention versus the universal peace of universal destruction
John Middleton Murry: The pacifism of luxury and the pacifism of sacrifice
John Middleton Murry: Weapons of modern war involve bestialization of humanity
Alfred de Musset: “No, none of these things, but simply peace.”
Stratis Myrivilis: War’s human flotsam
Thomas Nabbes: Peace is emblemed in doves that have no gall
Lilika Nakos: Selections on war
Lilika Nakos: The dead man, the living, the house; all were smashed to bits
Lilika Nakos: Do I know what makes men kill each other?
Lilika Nakos: Do you think the war will ever end?
Lilika Nakos: The grandmother’s sin
Lilika Nakos: “Surely God didn’t intend this butchery”
Lilika Nakos: “What’s the war got to do with God?”
Thomas Nashe: Swords may not fight with fate
George Jean Nathan: Clarence Darrow on the spurious and futile heroism of war
Robert Nathan: Harder to make peace than to make war
Pablo Neruda: Bandits with planes, jackals that the jackals would despise
Alfred Neumann: Selections on war
Alfred Neumann: Debunking the glory of twenty murderous years, the greatest mass-murderer in history
Alfred Neumann: Empire destroys peace, converts liberalism into harvest of blood
Alfred Neumann: European hegemony emerges from piled-up corpses, out of recent graves
Alfred Neumann: Four thousand miles of fratricidal murder
Alfred Neumann: Modern war, the murderous happiness of the greatest number
Alfred Neumann: The morals and manners of the War God
Alfred Neumann: Sacred recalcitrance toward the black hatred of war
Alfred Neumann: The stench of burning flesh. That happens sometimes.
Alfred Neumann: Ten million lives for one man’s glory; the emperor changes his hat
Alfred Neumann: Twilight of a conqueror
Alfred Neumann: The ultima ratio of all dictatorships: war
Alfred Neumann: War and the stock market
Alfred Neumann: War, the Great Incendiary, the everlasting prototype of annihilation
Alfred Neumann: War is not ambiguous after all, but a horribly intelligent affair
Alfred Neumann: The War Minister
Alfred Neumann: War nights were never silent
Alfred Neumann: War: Sad, hate-filled, hopeless and God-forsaken
Alfred Neumann: War’s arena, a monstrous distortion, a blasphemous coupling of life and death
Martin Andersen Nexø : From warlike giant to hysterical popinjay
Pierre Nicole: Peacemakers warrant highest title men are capable of
Pierre Nicole: Scripture obliges us to seek and desire the peace of the whole world
Adela Florence Nicolson: Doubtless feasted the jackal and the kite
Roger Nimier: Selections on war
Roger Nimier: I saw war in its stark reality
Roger Nimier: Soldiers are like that
Roger Nimier: Thankful for divine justice: a horrible wound rewarded me for all the harm I had done
Roger Nimier: Those who fall in love with war will surely die in her arms
Paul Nizan: War completely assembled, like a mighty engine
Nobel prize in literature recipients on peace and war
Charles Nodier: Fruitless is the glory of battles
Charles Nodier: Painful to the eyes and the heart of he who cherishes liberty
Nonnos: Brother-murdering blade. Disarming the god of war.
Ibraragi Noriko: When I Was at My Prettiest
Grace Fallow Norton: O I have heard the drums beat for war!
Evgeny Nosov: What a single shell destroys
Novalis: Celebrating a great banquet of love as a festival of peace
Alfred Noyes: Selections on war
Alfred Noyes: And the cost of war, they reckoned it In little disks of gold
Alfred Noyes: The Dawn of Peace
Alfred Noyes: Medicine driven back in defeat by the nightmare chaos of war
Alfred Noyes: Out of the obscene seas of slaughter
Alfred Noyes: Scarecrows that once were men
Alfred Noyes: A shuddering lump of tattered wounds lifted up a mangled head and whined
Alfred Noyes: Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter!
Alfred Noyes: They say that war’s a noble thing!
Alfred Noyes: Turning wasteful strength of war to accomplish large and fruitful tasks of peace
Alfred Noyes: The Victory Ball
Alfred Noyes: War, hypocritical word for universal murder
Alfred Noyes: War they tell me is a noble thing
Alfred Noyes: When they talked of war, they thought of sawdust, not of blood
Sara Louisa Oberholtzer: The dawn of peace is breaking!
Sean O’Casey: Battles of war changed for battles of peace
Sean O’Casey: The dead of wars past clasp their colder arms around the newer dead
Sean O’Casey: The Prince of Peace transformed into the god of war
Vladimir Odoevsky: City without a name, system with one
Kenzaburō Ōe: Categorical imperative to renounce war forever
Kenzaburo Ōe: Nuclear war and its lemmings
Liam O’Flaherty: The foul horror of war
Liam O’Flaherty: Sounds from a dead world. Nothing but worms and rats feeding on death.
Georges Ohnet: Selections on war
Georges Ohnet: Better to erect statues to those who preserve than those who take life
Georges Ohnet: Less murderous but no less costly
Georges Ohnet: Pillaging in the wake of victorious armies
Georges Ohnet: The thunderbolt of war
Georges Ohnet: Victory to that adversary which most scientifically assures massacre and death
Bulat Okudzhava: The song of the trampling boots
Bulat Okudzhava: Why do we keep writing blood words on the sand?
Zoé Oldenbourg: War provides a feast for the vultures
John Oldham: The cup and the sword
Eugene O’Neill: The hell that follows war
E. Philips Oppenheim: Black tragedy leaned over the land
Amelia Opie: Grant, Heaven, those tears may be the last that war, detested war, shall cause!
Origen: Vanquish all demons who stir up war
Charles d’Orléans: Pray for Peace
Julio Ortega: The fall of the great warrior empires
George Orwell: Kipling and glorifying the horrors of war
Frances Sargent Osgood: Peace and the olive branch
Thomas Otway: A rogue in red, the grievance of the nation
Ovid: Selections on war and peace
Ovid: Add incense, ye priests, to the flames that burn on the altar of Peace
Ovid: Golden Age, before weapons were warm and bloodstained from killing
Ovid: I had naught to do with war, guardian was I of peace and doorways
Ovid: Instead of a wolf the timorous ewes dread war
Ovid: Pray for perpetual peace and a peace-loving leader
Wildred Owen: Selections on war
Wilfred Owen: Arms and the Boy and Disabled
Wilfred Owen: From gloom’s last dregs these long-strung creatures crept
Wilfred Owen: Multitudinous murders they once witnessed
Wilfred Owen: The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
Wilfred Owen: Pawing us who dealt them war and madness
Wildred Owen: Rushed in the body to enter hell and there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
Wilfred Owen: The sons we offered might regret they died if we got nothing lasting in their stead
Wildred Owen: Strange meeting: I am the enemy you killed, my friend
John Oxenham: “I can imagine a World-Wide Women’s League for Peace”
John Oxenham: The Stars’ Accusal
John Oxenham: Thank God For Peace!
John Oxenham: “War is the devil,” said the man soberly, and hurried on
Amos Oz: “Best of all, write for the peace”
Thomas Parnell: Lovely, lasting peace, appear!
Blaise Pascal on war: An assassin if he kills in his own country, a hero if in another
Blaise Pascal: Archimedes shared discoveries, didn’t fight battles
Blaise Pascal: Observations on the causes of war
Blaise Pascal: Why kings go to war
Walter Pater: What are they all now, and the dust of their battles? Deity of Slaughter.
Coventry Patmore: Peace in life and art
Pausanias: Peace cradling Wealth in her arms
Konstantin Paustovsky: All conquerors are mad
Konstantin Paustovsky: Cervantes slain in war
Cesare Pavese: Every war is a civil war
Cesare Pavese: A moment of peace, to be reborn into a bloodless world
Josephine Preston Peabody: Harvest Moon
Josephine Preston Peabody: Whose strength is this you spill in war?
Thomas Love Peacock: Selections on war and peace
Thomas Love Peacock: Frenzied war’s ensanguined reign
Thomas Love Peacock: The god of battle, the last deep groan of agony
Thomas Love Peacock: I’ll make my verses rattle with the din of war and battle
Thomas Love Peacock: Ne’er thy sweet echoes swell again with war’s demoniac yell!
Charles Péguy: Cursed be war, cursed of God
Benjamin Péret: Little song for the maimed
Benito Pérez Galdós: Cannon should be cast into church bells
Benito Pérez Galdós: Good God! why are there wars?
Fernando Pessoa: War afflicting the world with its squadrons
E. J. Peterson, Jr: What youth discerns his shell-rocked tomb?
Petrarch: Return, O heaven-born Peace!
Petrarch: Wealth and power at a bloody rate is wicked, better bread and water eat with peace
William Lyon Phelps: Selections on war
William Lyon Phelps: No more terrible protest against war has ever been written than Andreyev’s
William Lyon Phelps: On what the greatness of a nation does, and does not, consist
William Lyon Phelps: Tolstoy’s lifelong dread of war
William Lyon Phelps: Tolstoy’s uncompromising opposition to war
William Lyon Phelps: Vsevolod Garshin, truthful witness to the meaningless maiming and murder of war
William Lyon Phelps: War, poets and spiritual despair
David Graham Phillips: Captains of industry, industrial warfare, marauders and renegade generals
David Graham Phillips: Hate war and fightin’ and money grabbin’
Stephen Phillips: Appalled at bloody trophies
Eden Phillpotts: Not exactly inhuman. The war changed the face of the world forever.
Eden Phillpotts: We are suffering from a sort of universal shell shock
Philo: “Ah, my friends, how should you not hate war and love peace?”
Philo: Casting off the warlike spirit in its completeness
Philo: “Nourished” for war and all its attendant evils
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Holy peace wherein men become angels
Mariano Picón-Salas: From dream of warlike soldiers to nightmare of flames and ashes
John Pierpont: Not on the Battle-Field
Pindar: Shall war spread unbounded ruin round?
Arthur Wing Pinero: War’s psychic disfigurement
Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics
Plato: All wars arise for the sake of gaining money
Plato: Excessive desire for a warlike life
Plato: A good city has peace, but the evil city is full of wars within and without
Plato: The highest good is not war but peace
Plato: The love of luxury leads to war
Plato: Never teach youth the blasphemy that the gods wage war
Plato: No true statesman looks only, or first of all, to external warfare
Plato: Socrates on the eulogizing of war heroes
Plato: They both hate and are hated. Silver and gold and war.
Plato: The tyrant is always stirring up war, the oligarchy uses force of arms to gain power
Andrei Platonov: Will the world become inured to bombing?
Pliny the Elder: Crime and slaughter and warfare. Humanity’s war against its mother
Pliny the Elder: Curious disease of the sublunary, sanguinary human mind
Plotinus: Let earth be at peace and sea, air and the very heavens
Max Plowman: The dead soldiers. Killing men is always killing God.
Max Plowman: The Goddess of War
Max Plowman: Resignation from war, enlistment in life. Killing men is always killing God.
Joseph Mary Plunkett: Till blooms the bud on olive branch, borne by the bird of peace
Plutarch: Selections on war and peace
Plutarch: Always remain grateful for the blessing of peace
Plutarch: Culture benefits the family, city, nation, whole human race more than war
Plutarch: Entire and universal cessation of war
Plutarch: Instruct not by examples from war
Plutarch: Lover of peace changed the first month of the year
Plutarch: Motivations and consequences of war
Plutarch: Numa’s guardians of peace
Plutarch: On war and its opponents
Plutarch: The privilege of being wounded and killed in war for the defense of their creditors
Plutarch: That God sanctions wars
Plutarch: Venus, who more than the rest of the gods and goddesses abhors force and war
Leonid Pochivalov: Strange to see fighting with one own’s eyes, like watching a war film
Edgar Allan Poe: The Valley of Unrest
Polybius: The bestialization of man by war
Polybius: Diplomacy versus war
Polybius: Peace is a blessing for which we all pray to the gods
Polybius, Appian: Today’s military conquerors….
Polybius: Why war is really waged
Ernest Poole: Apply for death certificates here. War’s house of death.
Ernest Poole: War cuts off the past from the future
Ernest Poole: War was the fashion. War was a pageant, a thing of romance.
Alexander Pope: Peace o’er the world her olive wand extend
Alexander Pope: War, horrid war, your thoughtful walks invades
Alexander Pope: Where Peace scatters blessings from her dovelike wing
Jessie Pope: Black, solemn peace is brooding low; peace, still unbroken
Titus Popovici: Flying in fives, the airplanes made their appearance, like silvery scales
Titus Popovici: The war was over, like a nightmare which you have got to forget
Alexander Posey: The dew, the bird more glorious than the conqueror, the bard of war
Anthony Powell: Selections on war
Anthony Powell: Bombing raid, the penumbra of Pluto’s frontiers
Anthony Powell: The close of an epoch, the outbreak of Armageddon
Anthony Powell: One of the many disagreeable aspects of war
Anthony Powell: The war blew the whole bloody thing up
Anthony Powell: When the bombing begins, clearly civilians will play as dangerous a role as soldiers
Anthony Powell: When 1,000 deaths at a time was still considered a large number
Anthony Powell: “Which of us is going to keep alive, I wonder, when the next one starts?”
Anthony Powell: Widespread human dissolution in time of war
Anthony Powell: The world after the bombs
John Cowper Powys: To Eugene Debs, in prison for opposing war
Vladimir Pozner: Mars and Ceres
Winthrop Mackworth Praed: Take the sword away
George Preedy: One gigantic symbol of war, a cloudy impersonal cohort of Mars
J.B. Priestley: Insane regress of ultimate weapons leads to radioactive cemetery
Thomas Pringle: After the slaughter, the feast
Thomas Pringle: Resistless swept the ranks of war, the murder-glutted scythe of death
Matthew Prior: A new golden age free from fierce Bellona’s rage
Adelaide A. Procter: Let carnage cease and give us peace!
Marcel Proust: Every day war is declared anew
Prudentius: Cruel warfare angers God
Publilius Syrus: Better plow than weapon
Samuel von Pufendorf: Perverted animals wage wars for superfluities
Hester Pulter: Must the sword this controversy decide?
Alexander Pushkin: Unsparing war
Salvatore Quasimodo: In every country a cultural tradition opposes war
Eça de Queiroz: The English in Egypt, a case study
Eça de Queiroz: Saving life of a child far more worthy, beautiful thing than battle of Austerlitz
Francisco de Quevedo: Metal against metal: Learning causes peace to be sought after
Francisco de Quevedo: The soldierly virtues of ardor, candor, honor and valor
Arthur Quiller-Couch: Man shall outlast his battles
Quintilian: War, the antithesis of justice
Quintus Smyrnaeus: Ares and his sister maddened there
Quintus Smyrnaeus: Mass murder’s tropes: Dread Ares drank his fill of blood
Quintus Smyrnaeus: While here all war’s marvels were portrayed, there were the works of lovely peace
François Rabelais: Born for peace, not war
François Rabelais: The magnanimity of peace
François Rabelais: Strictures against war
François Rabelais: Waging war in good earnest
C.F. Ramuz: Little by little the war spreads
Herbert Read: Bombing Casualties
Herbert Read: The Happy Warrior
Charles Reade: To God? Rather to war and his sister and to the god of lies
Charles Reade: War is sweet to those who have never experienced it
Thomas Reid: State of nature versus state of war
Frank C. Reighter: Victim of War’s murd’rous tyranny
Erich Maria Remarque: Selections on war
Erich Maria Remarque: After the war: The day of great dreams for the future of mankind was past
Erich Maria Remarque: The front begins and we become on the instant human animals
Erich Maria Remarque: It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation
Erich Maria Remarque: Like a dove, a lonely white dove of assurance and peace
Erich Maria Remarque: Now, for the first time, I feel it; I see it; I comprehend it fully: Peace.
Erich Maria Remarque: On every yard there lies a dead man
Erich Maria Remarque: War dreams
Erich Maria Remarque: The war has ruined us for everything
Erich Maria Remarque: War, mass production of corpses
Erich Maria Remarque: War turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God only knows what devils
Erich Maria Remarque: A war veteran’s indictment
Erich Maria Remarque: War was everywhere. Everywhere, even in the brain and the heart.
Erich Maria Remarque: War’s conqueror worms
Erich Maria Remarque: We want to be men again, not war machines!
Erich Maria Remarque: We were making war against ourselves without knowing it
Erich Maria Remarque: What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over?
Erich Maria Remarque: With the melting came the dead
Erich Maria Remarque: Worse than a slaughterhouse
Ernest Renan: Demoralizing effect of military institutions
Ernest Renan: No military path to the kingdom of God
Jules Renard: Almost succeed in making you accept the butcheries of war
Jean Renoir: War’s solemn human sacrifice
Ernest Rhys: Enough of war, enough of death
Elmer Rice: The expediency of choosing the right side in a war
Charles Richardson: The Dawn of Peace
Charlotte Richardson: Once more let war and discord cease
Clément Richer: The impatience of dead generals
Jean Paul Richter: The arch of peace
Jean Paul Richter: The fathers of war
Jean Paul Richter: The Goddess of Peace
Edgell Rickword: Winter Warfare
James Whitcomb Riley: Sang! sang on! sang hate – sang war –
Rainer Maria Rilke: War is always a prison
Marilynne Robinson: The sign was ignored and since then we have had war continuously
Mary Robinson: Selections on war
Mary Robinson: Anticipate the day when ruthless war shall cease to desolate
Mary Robinson: Dread-destructive power of war
Mary Robinson: Impetuous War, the lord of slaughter
Mary Robinson: The soldier sheds, for gold, a brother’s blood
Mary Robinson: Spread once more the fostering rays of Peace
Mary Robinson: The wise shall bid, too late, the sacred olive rise
Emmanuel Roblès: Respect is first due to the living
Emmanuel Roblès: The war has changed my soul
Samuel Rogers: War and the Great in War let others sing
Samuel Rogers: What tho’ the iron school of War erase each milder virtue…
Romain Rolland: Selections on war
Romain Rolland: A father’s plea against war
Romain Rolland: The abominable war crimes of intellectuals
Romain Rolland: Above The Battle
Romain Rolland: America and the war against war
Romain Rolland: Ara Pacis and Ave, Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant
Romain Rolland: Centuries to recreate what war destroys in a day
Romain Rolland: Chorus of war’s secular high priests and intellectual carpet knights
Romain Rolland: Civilized warfare allows victims choice of how to be slaughtered
Romain Rolland: The collective insanity, the terrible spirit of war
Romain Rolland: Content with having said “No!” to war
Romain Rolland: The enormous iniquity, the ignoble calculations of war
Romain Rolland: The equivocating sages of Armed Peace
Romain Rolland: Gandhi and the Satanic nature of war
Romain Rolland: Gandhi vs Einstein: War must be stopped before it starts
Romain Rolland: Hatred and holy butchery; the deadly sophistry, carnivorous poetry of war
Romain Rolland: He loathed brutal militarism
Romain Rolland: The heroism of war resisters
Romain Rolland: The intellectual drunkeness of war propaganda
Romain Rolland on Henri Barbusse: The isolated bleating of one of the beasts about to die
Romain Rolland: Letter to Gandhi on confronting age of global wars
Romain Rolland: Letter to Gandhi on total inadmissibility of war
Romain Rolland: Letters on conscientious objection
Rolland Rolland: Letters to Tagore on peace
Romain Rolland: The life that would have been, the life that was not going to be
Romain Rolland: A little idealism to make the war booty more delectable
Romain Rolland: Message to America on the will to conquer the world
Romain Rolland: Mobilization of all the forces in the world for peace
Romain Rolland: Oh, fair diplomats, you rid us of irksome peace
Romain Rolland: Our Neighbor the Enemy
Romain Rolland: Pacifism only allowed when it is not effective
Romain Rolland: Peace and war are in the hands of those who hold the purse-strings
Romain Rolland: Real peace demands that the masters of war be eliminated
Romain Rolland: Reawakening of old instincts of national pride, lapping of blood
Romain Rolland: Recurrence of the hell of war
Romain Rolland: To Gandhi on mental unbalance leading whole world to destruction
Romain Rolland: To the Murdered Peoples
Romain Rolland: To the undying Antigone; waging war against war
Romain Rolland: Tolstoy and peace among men
Romain Rolland: Totalizing, to their personal profit, the ruin of all nations
Romain Rolland: Tragedy of scientists at the disposal of military powers
Romain Rolland: War, a divine monster; half-beast, half-god
Romain Rolland: War, a pathological fact, a plague of the soul
Romain Rolland: War and the factories of intellectual munitions and cannon
Romain Rolland: War enriches a few, and ruins the community
Romain Rolland: The way to peace is not through weakness
Romain Rolland: When we defend war, dare to admit we are defending slavery
Romain Rolland: Where to rebuild the world after war?
Romain Rolland: Youth delivered up to the sword of war
Jules Romains: Selections on war
Jules Romains: Colloquy on God and war
Jules Romains: Communion of saints opposing war’s mutual massacre, human sacrifice
Jules Romains: Condign punishment for war profiteers and professional patriots
Jules Romains: Dawning of new century shot with sinister streaks of war
Jules Romains: Deadening effects of war on human sensibilities, defeat of civilization by barbarism
Jules Romains: Destruction of war itself, its deletion from the pages of history
Jules Romains: Even the very word was new: war
Jules Romains: Fraternization versus fratricide, the forbidden subject of peace
Jules Romains: If mankind could put two and two together, there’d be no more war
Jules Romains: Just kill because the more dead there are, the fewer living will remain
Jules Romains: Living under the curse of war since childhood
Jules Romains: Never occurred to me that I might find a peaceful and a smiling sky
Jules Romains: Romantic view of war played a dirty trick on the warriors
Jules Romains: Squalidly degrading everything that the civilization of mankind had created
Jules Romains: Unnatural war will only stop when everybody, on both sides, is killed
Jules Romains: War means a golden age for the munitions makers
Jules Romains: War: symphony of death, vast pudding concocted of corpses
Jules Romains: War turns murder into a public and highly praiseworthy action
Jules Romains: War under modern conditions has need of everything that man produces
Ronsard: Far away from Europe and far from its wars
E. Merrill Root: And they died in what forgotten war?
E. Merrill Root: Drill, like sheep with wolves’ fangs, meek to kill
E. Merrill Root: Military drill. Murder’s witless marionettes.
E. Merrill Root: We crucify Him still upon a cross of war
Isaac Rosenberg: Break of Day in the Trenches
Isaac Rosenberg: Dead Man’s Dump
Isaac Rosenberg: O! ancient crimson curse! On receiving news of the war
Isaac Rosenberg: Soldier: Twentieth Century
Christina Rossetti: They reap a red crop from the field. O Man, put up thy sword.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet?
Joseph Roth: Black and red, death fluttered over them
Joseph Roth: His son was dead. His world had ended.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau on peace and war
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The advantages of peace
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Hire yourself at high wages to kill men who never did you any harm
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: No nobler, more beautiful scheme than lasting peace
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: No such thing as a successful war
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The scheme of founding a lasting peace is the most lofty ever conceived
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The State of War
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: War and despotism reinforce each other
Claude Roy: Great wars and those which kill just as effectively
Gabrielle Roy: This was the hope that was uplifting mankind once again: to do away with war
Rick Rozoff: Mars, only Olympian whose veins flow not with ichor
Viktor Rozov: War cripples people not just physically; it destroys a man’s inner world
John Ruskin: The arts of peace will supersede the arts of war
Bertrand Russell: Selections on war and peace
Bertrand Russell: Man can destroy civilization or abolish war
Bertrand Russell: War sheds centuries of civilization in one moment
George William Russell: Gods of War
Russian writers on peace and war
Rutilius Namatianus: Races of demigods who knew not iron-harnessed Mars
Edwin L. Sabin: Where Will the War be Next?
Margaret Sackville: Selections on peace and war
Margaret Sackville: How is it that men slaughter men even here upon the earth?
Margaret Sackville: Nostra Culpa
Margaret Sackville: The Pageant of War
Margaret Sackville: The Peacemakers
Margaret Sackville: Quo Vaditis?
Margaret Sackville: Reconciliation over our mutual dead
Margaret Sackville: So quietly and evenly they walked these million gentle dead
Margaret Sackville: To One Who Denies the Possibility of a Permanent Peace
Margaret Sackville: We are the mothers, and each has lost a son
Margaret Sackville: Who shall deliver us from the memory of these dead?
Vita Sackville-West: Man’s war on his fellow creatures
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Selections on war
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Back at home in the peace of our villages
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Building peace is persuading God to enfold all in his shepherd’s cloak
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Charred flesh of children viewed with indifference
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Gone was the feeble spark of humanity
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: I do not care a curse for the rules of war
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Man-made volcanoes in China or Spain
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Such a war is won by him who rots last
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: War has tricked us
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve: Massillon on peace, Frederick on war
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve: Théophile Gautier, lover of peace
George Saintsbury: The odious profession
Miguel de Salabert: I first learned about men from their bombs
Miguel de Salabert: “What have you done with my legs?”
Miguel de Salabert: When they gave me a rifle to carry, I knew my life was over
Sallust: Lust for dominion the reason for war
Sallust: One may become famous in peace as well as in war
Edgar Saltus: Soldiers and houses
Edgar Saltus: Soldiers and no farmers; imperial sterility…and demise
Francis Saltus Saltus: Selections on peace and war
Francis Saltus Saltus: Deem you one ambitious whose subjects bleed and perish on a field?
Francis Saltus Saltus: If we saw but a century of peace
Francis Saltus Saltus: Peace to see our Love and Law arrived to witness cruel War
Francis Saltus Saltus: Thy theme was one of utter peace
Francis Saltus Saltus: The wind favors poets over conquerors
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin: The grandeur, the selflessness of war
George Sand: Trader in uniformed flesh and the religion of self
Carl Sandburg: Selections on war
Carl Sandburg: The grass grows over Austerlitz and Waterloo
Carl Sandburg: A spider will weave a web over discarded weapons
Carl Sandburg: What it costs to move two buttons one inch on the war map
George Santayana: Selections on war
George Santayana on war and militarism
George Santayana: Epicurus and the utter hatred of war
George Santayana: Fatal wars: equally needless, equally murderous
George Santayana: His parents’ admonitions against war
George Santayana: The morality of war entirely contradicts the maxims of the Gospels
George Santayana: Only the dead have seen the end of war
George Santayana: Slaughter by the indistinguishable million
George Santayana: Such blind battles ought not to be our battles
George Santayana: Wars prove the world has turned its back on reason
George Santayana: We want peace and make war
Mary McDermott Santley: The serene light of peace to all mankind
Sergei Sartakov: I fervently wish for universal peace
Sergei Sartakov: No to eternal war
Jean-Paul Sartre: They lift their heads and look up at the sky, the poisonous sky
Jean-Paul Sartre: When staging a massacre, all soldiers look alike
Jean-Paul Sartre: When the rich fight the rich, it is the poor who die
Siegfried Sassoon: Selections on war
Siegfried Sassoon: Arms and the Man
Siegfried Sassoon: At the Cenotaph
Siegfried Sassoon: “The bullet and the bayonet are brother and sister”
Siegfried Sassoon: Creatures whose faces knew nothing of War’s demented language
Siegfried Sassoon: The foul beast of war that bludgeons life
Siegfried Sassoon: Gloom and disaster of the thing called Armageddon
Siegfried Sassoon: In war-time the word patriotism means suppression of truth
Siegfried Sassoon: Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace
Siegfried Sassoon: No doubt he loathed the war and longed for peace
Siegfried Sassoon: Our deeds with lies were lauded, our bones with wrongs rewarded
Siegfried Sassoon: Repression of War Experience
Siegfried Sassoon: To Any Dead Officer
Siegfried Sassoon: The Tombstone-Maker
Siegfried Sassoon: The unheroic dead who fed the guns, those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones
Siegfried Sassoon: War, remorse and reconciliation
Siegfried Sassoon: We left our holes and looked above the wreckage of the earth
Julian Jay Savarin: Intimations of thirty years of war
Scandinavian writers on peace and war
Ethel Talbot Scheffauer: The sun shall rise upon a newer world that has forgot to kill
Joseph Victor von Scheffel: The Muses heal what Mars has wrought
Joseph Victor von Scheffel: The wood of peace
Friedrich Schiller: Selections on peace and war
Friedrich Schiller: Beauty, peace and reconciliation
Friedrich Schiller: Nothing attests them but devastation
Friedrich Schiller: Oh, blessed peace, may the day of grim War’s ruthless crew never dawn
Friedrich Schiller: War makes gold out of iron
Friedrich Schiller: War will not spare the tender infant in his cradle
Friedrich Schiller: Why draw our swords in a kind of craze?
August Wilhelm Schlegel: Aristophanes, tragedian of peace
Arthur Schnitzler: Cannot praise war in general and oppose individual wars
Arthur Schnitzler: Remold the structure of government so that war becomes impossible
Arthur Schnitzler: War, making fathers pay wages to their sons whom we sent to their deaths
Lawrence Schoonover: Accursed powder
Lawrence Schoonover: An entire nation praying for peace at one time
Arthur Schopenhauer: Beasts of prey in the human race
Olive Schreiner: Give me back my dead!
Olive Schreiner: The bestiality and insanity of war
Olive Schreiner: I have never met a human creature who hates war as I hate it
Albert Schweitzer: On nuclear weapons in NATO’s hands
Clinton Scollard: Selections on war and peace
Clinton Scollard: Can mankind win to heights of peace and perfect amity?
Clinton Scollard: The Carnival of war
Clinton Scollard: Mars’ mad and holocaustal rite
Clinton Scollard: The Night Sowers
Clinton Scollard: Prayer: bid this reign of hate and horror end!
Clinton Scollard: Sunset Trees
Clinton Scollard: The Vale of Shadows
Clinton Scollard: The Watcher by the Tower
Clinton Scollard: The Winds of God
John Scott: I hate that drum’s discordant sound
Walter Scott: Selections on war
Walter Scott: Bloody, lamentable wars inspired by ambition, love of plunder
Walter Scott: Combat would have been accounted a profanity worthy of excommunication
Walter Scott: The diffusion of knowledge, not the effusion of blood
Walter Scott: Ghastly harvest of the fray, the corpses of the slain
Walter Scott: Heathenish to believe God’s blessing goes with the longest sword
Walter Scott: Her heart would break amid the constant wars and scenes of bloodshed
Walter Scott: His sword makes as many starving orphans and mourning widows as his purse relieves
Walter Scott: I know what war is
Walter Scott: Man of buff and Belial. Soldier versus clergyman.
Walter Scott: Profession which lives by killing other people
Walter Scott: So great was his aversion to this symbol of war
Walter Scott: Total absence of armed men and soldiers in this peaceful country
Walter Scott: Trade of war should be feared, avoided since it converts men into wolves
Walter Scott: War, calamity inflicted and endured by God’s creatures on each side
Walter Scott: War’s cannibal priest, druid red from his human sacrifice
Walter Scott: The worst sort of frenzy, military frenzy, hath possessed man, woman and child
Walter Scott: “You are a soldier, then?”
Étienne Pivert de Senancour: Lottery of war amid heaps of the dead
Étienne Pivert de Senancour: War, state-sanctioned suicide
Seneca the Elder: It is this that drives the world into war
Anna Seghers: War enthusiasm, brewed from equal parts of age-old memories and total oblivion
Alexander Serafimovich: Down with war!
Anna Seward: Fierce War has wing’d the arrow that wounds my soul’s repose
Shaftesbury: Improvement of arts and scholarship requires rest from war
William Shakespeare: Selections on war and peace
William Shakespeare: Blessed is the peacemaker
William Shakespeare: Contumelious, beastly, mad-brained war
William Shakespeare: Death of twenty thousand men for fantasy and fame
William Shakespeare: Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace
William Shakespeare: Naked, poor, mangled peace, dear nurse of arts, plenties, joyful births
William Shakespeare: Never a war did cease…with such a peace
William Shakespeare: Nor more shall trenching war channel her fields, bruise her flowerets
William Shakespeare: O bloody times. When lions war, sons kill fathers, fathers sons
William Shakespeare: O war, thou son of hell
Shakespeare: On driving a husband to none-sparing war
William Shakespeare: Out of speech of peace into harsh tongue of war
Shakespeare: So inured to war that mothers smile as their children are slain
William Shakespeare: Soldier, a creature that I teach to fight
William Shakespeare: Take heed how you awake our sleeping sword of war
William Shakespeare: Tame the savage spirit of wild war
William Shakespeare: War’s exactions
William Shakespeare: Works of poetry outlast the works of war
Ivan Shamyakin: As a physicist, she feared for the fate of mankind
George Bernard Shaw: Selections on war
George Bernard Shaw: The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the victors
George Bernard Shaw: Gadarene swine running violently into a hell of high explosives
George Bernard Shaw: It was innocent men killing one another
George Bernard Shaw: Little Minds and Big Battles
George Bernard Shaw: The Long Arm of War
Militarist myopia: George Bernard Shaw’s Common Sense About the War
George Bernard Shaw: Rabid war maniacs reversed the order of nature
George Bernard Shaw: Religion as antidote to war
George Bernard Shaw: Religion of ruthless competition inevitably leads to war
George Bernard Shaw: The shallowness of the ideals of men ignorant of history is their destruction
George Bernard Shaw: “That was war.” “It was ME.”
George Bernard Shaw: War and frivolous exultation in death for its own sake
George Bernard Shaw: War and the sufferings of the sane
George Bernard Shaw: War Delirium
George Bernard Shaw: War, governments and munitions manufacturers
George Bernard Shaw: War, the Yahoo and the angry ape
George Bernard Shaw: The way of the soldier is the way of death
Mary Shelley: On peace and war
Mary Shelley: The fate of the world bound up with the death of a single man
Mary Shelley: I do not sympathize in their dreams of massacre and glory
Mary Shelley: I turned to the corpse-strewn earth and felt ashamed of my species
Mary Shelley: Men have slain each other by thousands, now man is a creature of price
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selections on war
Juvenilia: Percy Bysshe Shelley on war
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Earth cleansed of quivers, spears and gorgon-headed shields
Percy Bysshe Shelley: The fatal trump of useless war to swell
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Man fabricates the sword which stabs his peace
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Peace, love and concord once shall rule again
Percy Bysshe Shelley: The soldiers dreamed that they were blacksmiths
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Titled idiot kindles flames of war
Percy Bysshe Shelley: The unholy song of war
Percy Bysshe Shelley: War and the decline of poetry
Percy Bysshe Shelley: War with its million horrors shall live but in the memory of time
William Shenstone: Ah, hapless realms! that war’s oppression feel.
William Shenstone: Let the gull’d fool the toils of war pursue
William Shenstone: War, where bleed the many to enrich the few
Kate Brownlee Sherwood: This one soft whisper – Peace
Robert Sherwood: War is essentially a false, hideous mistake
Taras Shevchenko: The civilizing mission…at sword’s point
James Shirley: Some men with swords may reap the field and plant fresh laurels where they kill
Mikhail Sholokhov: Selections on war
Mikhail Sholokhov: His entire face a cry, screaming without opening his lips
Mikhail Sholokhov: People worse than wolves. And it was called a heroic exploit.
Mikhail Sholokhov: Visit to a military hospital
Mikhail Sholokhov: War’s bitter harvest
Mikhail Sholokhov: Who was he calling for in his hour of death?
Mikhail Sholokhov: With innumerable hands the soldiers reached out to the phantasmal word “peace”
Vasily Shukshin: How many lives destroyed
Nevil Shute: Children crying in memory of horror they had seen
Philip Sidney: Abjuring wars of conquest, paid for with the blood of subjects
Philip Sidney: Contrasting scenes of war and peace
Henryk Sienkiewicz: Selections on war
Henryk Sienkiewicz: The approach of war
Henryk Sienkiewicz: Famine, the brother of war
Henryk Sienkiewicz: I thought that war was terrible, but I did not think it was so terrible
Henryk Sienkiewicz: They had lost all human feelings, and grown wild, like the beasts of the forest
Henryk Sienkiewicz: War is not a mother
Lydia Sigourney: Peace was the song the angels sang
Louise Morgan Sill: I am the Hell-god, War!
Ignazio Silone: Resorting to the bloody diversion of war
Ignazio Silone: They have been warned of wars and rumors of wars
Ignazio Silone: War with today’s hereditary enemy
Victor Domingo Silva: Cain, the fratricide
Simonides: Dirges for the victims of the impetuous War-God
M. C. Sinclair: Peace is not upon the winds of spring
Upton Sinclair: Selections on war
Upton Sinclair: After war, the color revolution cleanup
Upton Sinclair: American people asked to shed their blood to make the world safe for war loans!
Upton Sinclair: A banker’s post-war nightmare
Upton Sinclair: Decade of national cynicism, corruption followed “war for democracy”
Upton Sinclair: Few men could contemplate the possibility of wholesale bloodshed in Europe
Upton Sinclair: Gigantic stir of war preparation for global territorial aggrandizement
Upton Sinclair: He hated this war, and all wars, now and forever
Upton Sinclair: How wars start, how they can be prevented
Upton Sinclair: The Juggernaut of war flattens out all opposition
Upton Sinclair: Millions of men were organized in armies, engaged in slaughtering one another
Upton Sinclair: Murder is permitted if perpetrator dons a special uniform
Upton Sinclair: New Lysistratas: Women must refuse to have babies until men stop killing
Upton Sinclair: The plea of Nicola Sacco, “What is war?”
Upton Sinclair: The real horrors of war didn’t begin until it was over
Upton Sinclair: Secret undeclared wars
Upton Sinclair: She didn’t care who won, if only the fighting would end
Upton Sinclair: Spending several times as much money to prepare for an even greater war to end war
Upton Sinclair: Using all the machinery and brains of civilization to slaughter one another
Upton Sinclair: War and morality
Upton Sinclair: War can inflict on civilization more damage than it can endure
Upton Sinclair: The war system, bankers recouping the costs of war propaganda
Upton Sinclair: War’s one-sided boost to the economy
Upton Sinclair: What it costs a woman to keep the world at war
Upton Sinclair: World war as a business enterprise
Ina Duvall Singleton: The Women’s Litany
Edith Sitwell: Dirge for the New Sunrise
Osbert Sitwell: Totally out of place in a war-mad world
Osbert Sitwell: Wilfred Owen, poetry and war
Vasily Sleptsov: I read there are wars going on all over
Christopher Smart: Rejoice with the dove. Pray that all guns be nailed up.
M. B. Smedley: Where is the ministry of peace?
Charlotte Turner Smith: The lawless soldiers’ victims
Charlotte Turner Smith: Statesmen! ne’er dreading a scar, let loose the demons of war
Charlotte Turner Smith: Thus man spoils Heaven’s glorious works with blood!
Charlotte Turner Smith: To bathe his savage hands in human blood
Horace Smith: Selections on peace and war
Horace Smith: The hero-butchers of the sword
Horace Smith: Manufactured to machines for killing human creatures
Horace Smith: The trade of man-butchery. The soldier and the sailor.
Horace Smith: Weapon gathering dust
Horace Smith: When War’s ensanguined banner shall be furl’d
Rembert G. Smith: O bid the wars of men to cease
Sydney Smith: War, hailing official murderers as the greatest and most glorious of human creatures
Thorne Smith: Make statues of war’s wholesale butchers before they strike
Tobias Smollett: War contractors fattened on the blood of the nation
Tobias Smollett: The war glories of a demagogue
C.P. Snow: As final product of scientific civilization, nuclear bomb is its ultimate indictment
C.P. Snow: Even if moral judgments are left out, it’s unthinkable to drop the bomb
C.P. Snow: Hiroshima, the most horrible single act so far performed
C.P. Snow: Hope it’s never possible to develop superbomb
Leonid Sobolev: Glittering tear falling from the sky, yellowish-black cloud rising above the roofs
Vladimir Soloukhin: Shadow of this beautiful world being incinerated
Charles Hamilton Sorley: The blind fight the blind
Charles Hamilton Sorley: When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Frédéric Soulié: The pedestal of conquerors rests on an army of lifeless bodies
Robert Southey: Selections on peace and war
Robert Southey: The Battle of Blenheim
Robert Southey: Preparing the way for peace; militarism versus Christianity
Robert Southey: The Soldier’s Wife
Robert Southey: Wade to glory through a sea of blood
Robert Southey: Year follows year, and still we madly prosecute the war
Soviet writers on peace and war
Wole Soyinka: Africa victim, never perpetrator, of theo/ideological wars
Wole Soyinka: Civilian and Soldier
Spanish writers on war and peace
Fanny Bixby Spencer: The shame of the cannonade
Fanny Bixby Spencer: Will your son kill mine or will mine kill yours?
Herbert Spencer: No patriotism when it comes to wars of aggression
Stephen Spender: Selections on war
Stephen Spender: Lecture on Hell: battle against totalitarian war
Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum
Stephen Spender: The Woolfs in the 1930s: War the inevitable result of an arms race.
Edmund Spenser: Selections on war
Edmund Spenser: Artillery, engines forged in Hell
Edmund Spenser: Blood can nought but sin, and wars but sorrowes yield
Edmund Spenser: Concord, mother of peace and friendship
Edmund Spenser: Evil words, factious deeds often end in bloodshed and war
Edmund Spenser: The first to attack the world with sword and fire
Edmund Spenser: Lovely concord and most sacred peace
Edmund Spenser: Mars and Venus
Edmund Spenser: Never was the name of war there spoken
Edmund Spenser: No war was known, no dreadful trumpet’s sound
Edmund Spenser: Victory they dare not wish to either side
Edmund Spenser: Wars can nought but sorrows yield
Baruch Spinoza: Selections on war and peace
Baruch Spinoza: Fleeing peace for the despotic discipline of war
Baruch Spinoza: Men shouldn’t choose slavery in time of peace for better fortune in war
Baruch Spinoza: Peace is not mere absence of war
Baruch Spinoza: Tyrants and war for its own sake
Baruch Spinzoa: War corrupts civil society
Peter Spiros: What about the happy lives that went unlived, all the children, unborn
Madame de Staël: Voting for war, pronouncing their own death sentence
Marguerite Steen: The sheer destructiveness of war made him angry
Marguerite Steen: The wreckage of the wars
John Steinbeck: Hard to remember how it was when you killed men or ordered them to be killed
John Steinbeck: One of the tendencies of the military mind is an inability to see beyond the killing
Mikhailo Stelmakh: It was hard to believe that there could be war on earth
Mikhailo Stelmakh: Let the blood of man not flow
Mikhailo Stelmakh: War doesn’t make saints, it makes killers
Stendhal: Decorating it with the name of glory
Stendhal: Dreaming of the Marshall and his glory…
Stendhal: You’ve got to learn the business before you can become a soldier
Stendhal and Byron: Military leprosy; fronts of brass and feet of clay
George Sterling: To the War-Lords
George Sterling: War past, present, future
G. B. Stern: Conventions of war? War itself is the outrage.
Robert Louis Stevenson: Peace we found where fire and war had been
Arthur E. Stilwell: The Day of Peace
Margaret Stineback: The Unknown Soldier
Frank Stockton: Battles of annihilation, the Anglo-American War Syndicate
Frank Stockton: The Great War Syndicate: “On to Canada!”
William Stokes: Selections on peace and war
William Stokes: The Angel of Peace
William Stokes: Can fields of blood redeem mankind from error?
William Stokes: Invocation to the Spirit of Peace
William Stokes: The peace of nations to destroy
Strabo: Ares, the only god they worship
Strabo: The Eleians alone had profound peace
Strabo: Result of neglecting education for military training
Strabo: Studying war is wickedness
Lytton Strachey: After the battle, who shall say that the corpses were the most unfortunate?
August Strindberg: Progeny of soulless militarism
August Strindberg: What has become of the sacred promise of peace on our earth?
Hermann Sudermann: Militarism and its terminus
Hermann Sudermann: The somber, the brutal aftermath of war
Hermann Sudermann: War, and its aftermath
Hermann Sudermann: War irrigates the soil with blood, fertilizes it with corpses
Eugène Sue: War, murder by proxy
Suetonius: Caligula and military glory
Suetonius: Not let slip any pretext for war, however unjust and dangerous
Archil Sulakauri: I just can’t believe that people die so simply
Bertha von Suttner: Selections on peace and war
Bertha von Suttner: All Souls’ Day. Field of honor gives way to wasteland of broken hearts
Bertha von Suttner: Among these ills the most dreadful of all – War
Bertha von Suttner: Education hardens children against natural horror which terrors of war awaken
Bertha von Suttner: Higher unity in which every war will appear impious fratricide
Bertha von Suttner: Mounting doubts about war
Bertha von Suttner: Outgrowing the old idolatry for war
Bertha von Suttner: The Protocol of Peace
Bertha von Suttner: Vengeance! War breeds more war.
Bertha von Suttner: War’s sophistry. At last the monster creeps out.
Jonathan Swift: Selections on war
Jonathan Swift: Brutes more modest than men in perpetuating war against their own species
Jonathan Swift: Few of this generation can remember anything but war and taxes
Jonathan Swift: How to select commanders, end wars
Jonathan Swift: Lemuel Gulliver on War
Jonathan Swift: We must have peace, let it be a bad or a good one
Algernon Charles Swinburne: Death made drunk with war
Algernon Charles Swinburne: A gospel of war and damnation for the bestial by birth
Algernon Charles Swinburne: There shall be no more wars nor kingdoms won
Frank Swinnerton: Aerial bombardment, the most stupid and futile aspect of war
John Addington Symonds: Nation with nation, land with land unarmed shall live as comrades free
Arthur Symons: A great reaction: people will be tired of wars
Vitaly Syomin: Prophetic nightmares, nightmares of war
Vitaly Syomin: They decided war was the main culprit
Tacitus: The robbery, slaughter and plunder that empire calls peace
Tacitus: When war bursts on us, innocent and guilty alike perish
Rabindranath Tagore: Secure disarmament, transform it into strength
Hippolyte Taine on the inhuman travesty of war
Hippolyte Taine: Cities perished by hundreds and men by millions
Anton Tammsaare: War, the greatest enterprise of the modern age
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki: A day’s work, a night’s dream
Torquato Tasso: Pastoral refuge from war
Torquato Tasso: War’s devouring minister, the sword
Sara Teasdale: Dusk in War Time
Sara Teasdale: Spring in War-Time
Charles Tennant: Nor shall they learn war
William Tennant: While some sing of Mars’s bloody game…
Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selections on war and peace
Alfred Lord Tennyson: The brazen bridge of war
Alfred Lord Tennyson: I would the old God of war himself were dead
Alfred Tennyson: Ring out the thousand wars of old, ring in the thousand years of peace
Alfred Tennyson: Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
Alfred Lord Tennyson: When shall universal peace lie like light across the land?
Tertullian: As a last test of empire, make war on heaven
William Makepeace Thackeray: Selections on war
William Makepeace Thackeray: Millions of innocent hearts wounded horribly
William Makepeace Thackeray: Not Heaven, but some other power willed them to slaughter each other
William Makepeace Thackeray: Only for brief intervals has the baleful light of war ceased to burn
William Makepeace Thackeray: “Pax in bello.” The death of a single soldier.
William Makepeace Thackeray: True love is better than glory, and books than arms
William Makepeace Thackeray: War taxes men and women alike
William Makepeace Thackeray: War’s slave dealers
William Makepeace Thackeray: What human crime, misery, slavery, go to form that sum-total of glory!
William Makepeace Thackeray: Would rather have written Gray’s Elegy than have won a battle
Theocritus: May spiders spin their slender webs over weapons of war
Theophrastus: Warmongering’s rumormongering
Dylan Thomas: The Hand That Signed the Paper
Edith Matilda Thomas: Air war: They are not humans.
Edith Matilda Thomas: The Altar of Moloch
Edith Matilda Thomas: The Flag
James Thomson: Despise the insensate barbarous trade of war
James Thomson: Peace is the natural state of man; war his corruption, his disgrace
James Thomson: Philosophy’s plans of policy and peace
Mabel Thomson: A child’s ideal of soldiering
Francis Thompson: Flattering the too-much-pampered Boy of War
Francis Thompson: Kingly crown and warrior’s crest not worth a blade of grass
Henry David Thoreau: It is commonly said that history is a chronicle of war
Henry David Thoreau: Taxes enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood
Henry David Thoreau: War belies the claim that civilization is making rapid progress
Thucydides: Admonitions against war
Tibullus: War is a crime perpetrated by hearts hardened like weapons
Thomas Tickell: The Soldier’s late destroying Hand shall rear new Temples in his native Land
H. M. Tickener: What of the empires that are built on beds of dead men’s bones?
Christoph August Tiedge: Give to earth the light of peaceful day
Eunice Tietjens: Children of War
W. R. Titterton: The Silent People of No Man’s Land
Ernst Toller: Corpses In The Woods
Alexei Tolstoy: Selections on war
Alexei Tolstoy: Cycles of war and peace
Alexei Tolstoy: The great future of chemistry
Alexei Tolstoy: The one incontestable result was dead bodies
Alexei Tolstoy: A second war had come and gone
Alexei Tolstoy: War profiteers and speculators
Alexei Tolstoy: War’s campfires burn from time immemorial
Alexei Tolstoy: Why was the world made like that?
Leo Tolstoy: Selections on war
Leo Tolstoy: As if there were any rules for killing people
Leo Tolstoy: The Beginning of the End
Leo Tolstoy: Christian cannot be a murderer and therefore cannot be a soldier
Leo Tolstoy: “For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?”
Leo Tolstoy: He who kills most people receives the highest rewards
Leo Tolstoy: Idealization of military malefactors is shameful
Leo Tolstoy: The Law of Love and the Law of Violence
Leo Tolstoy: Letter on the Peace Conference
Leo Tolstoy: Men attribute the greatest merit to skill in killing one another
Leo Tolstoy: Murder and vengeance are not the will of the people
Leo Tolstoy: Patriotism or Peace
Leo Tolstoy: Prescription for peace
Leo Tolstoy: Then why those severed arms and legs and those dead men?
Leo Tolstoy: “Thou Shalt Not Kill”
Leo Tolstoy: Two Wars and Carthago Delenda Est
Leo Tolstoy: War began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature
Leo Tolstoy: War? War, indeed!
H. M. Tomlinson: Great offensive. Curse such trite and sounding words
H. M. Tomlinson: Greatest evil is unconscious indifference to war’s obscene blasphemy against life
H. M. Tomlinson: The return of the soldier, of he who was once alive
Georg Trakl: Night beckons to dying soldiers, the ghosts of the killed are sighing
Katrina Trask: Selections on war and peace
Katrina Trask: After the Battle
Katrina Trask: Civilized warfare
Katrina Trask: A dialogue on God and war
Katrina Trask: The Logic of War
Katrina Trask: The Statue of Peace
Lucia Trent: Breed, little mothers, breed for the war lords who slaughter your sons
Yuri Trifonov: Our world – the world of peace!
Anthony Trollope: Selections on war
Anthony Trollope: How wars are arranged
Anthony Trollope: Leader appointed to save the empire – with warships
Anthony Trollope: Sports, reading and war
Anthony Trollope: These weary, weary wars!
Anthony Trollope: Wars, wars, wars; I’m sick of the wars with all my heart
Henri Troyat: Selections on war
Henri Troyat: All humanity passing through a crisis of destructive madness
Henri Troyat: I prefer to die, so that I no longer have to see the others die
Henri Troyat: Nothing grand, nothing noble, in the universal slaughter
Henri Troyat: Shedding blood for the motherland: War is ugly and absurd
Henri Troyat: So many men killed, so many towns burned…for a telegram
Henri Troyat: Thoughts stop with a shock: War!
Henri Troyat: Tolstoy’s visceral detestation of war
Henri Troyat: War, that greatest of political crimes
Henri Troyat: War, war, war! Oh, why?
Henri Troyat: “Will a day ever come when there’s no more war, no more lies, no more tragedy!”
Kurt Tucholsky: The White Spots
Kurt Tucholsky: Murder in disguise
Ivan Turgenev: “Militarism, the soldiery, have got the upper hand”
Ivan Turgenev: Thank God, we’re worth more than that
Nancy Byrd Turner: Let Us Have Peace
Julia S. Tutwiler: O, the world has grown weary of battle and strife
Mark Twain: To the Person Sitting in Darkness
Mark Twain: The basest type of patriotism: support for war and imperialism
Mark Twain: The Battle Hymn of the Republic (Brought Down to Date)
Mark Twain: Cain and mankind’s legacy of war
Mark Twain: Epitome of war, the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity
Mark Twain: Grotesque self-deception of war
Mark Twain: Maxims on battleships and statesmanship
Mark Twain: An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war
Mark Twain: Only dead men dare tell the whole truth about war
Mark Twain: Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War
Mark Twain on Western military threat to China: I am a Boxer
Mark Twain: Cecil Rhodes and the civilizing mission: He wants the earth and wants it for his own
Lesya Ukrainka: Do you understand that word called war?
Fritz von Unruh: Crossfire of artillery had shot the Savior down from the Crucifix
Fritz von Unruh: So long will there be another and yet Supreme War Lord or Commander of Legions
Louis Untermeyer: Daybreak after war
Roger Vailland: School days during war
Paul Vaillant-Couturier: The Song of Craonne
Juan Valera: Thou art the God of peace
Paul Valéry on global conflicts, Europe governed by American commission
Paul Valèry: War, science, art and Leibnitz, who dreamed of universal peace
César Vallejo: So much love and yet so powerless against death
Jules Vallès: I hate war and its sinister glory
Henry van Dyke: Stain Not the Sky
Mario Vargas Llosa: More than enough atomic and conventional weapons to wipe out several planets
Henry Vaughan: Let us ‘midst noise and war of peace and mirth discuss
Henry Vaughan: Strife and war are the sword’s prize
Henry Vaughan: What thunders shall those men arraign who cannot count those they have slain?
Vauvenargues: If we could discover the secret of banishing war forever
Thorstein Veblen: Habituation to war entails a body of predatory habits of thought
Velleius Paterculus: License of the sword inevitably leads to wars for profit
Roger Vercel: Boats built for men to live in, ships built to kill
Vercors: Are war crimes only committed by the vanquished?
Giovanni Verga: The Mother of Sorrows
Émile Verhaeren: I hold war in execration; ashamed to be butchers of their fellows
Paul Verlaine: The joy of sweet peace without victory
Boris Vian: I come here to offer you a brand-new modern war
Boris Vian: It’s our job to make war, not to choose the enemy
Giambattista Vico: Mars, the vilest of the gods
Gore Vidal: Navies, colonies, presidents, wars
Alfred de Vigny: Selections on war
Alfred de Vigny: Admiration for military commander turns us into slaves and madmen
Alfred de Vigny: The army is a machine wound up to kill
Alfred de Vigny: It is war that is wrong, not we
Alfred de Vigny: War is condemned of God and even of man who holds it in secret horror
Alfred de Vigny: When armies and war exist no more
Villiers de L’Isle-Adam: Vox Populi
Virgil: The blind passion of unpitying war
Virgil: None heard the trumpet’s blast, nor direful clang of smitten anvils loud with shaping sword
Virgil: Shall impious soldiers have these new-ploughed grounds?
Virgil: The War-god pitiless moves wrathful through the world
Elio Vittorini: Dialogue between a dead soldier and his brother
Elio Vittorini: Slaughter perpetrated in the world; one man cries and another laughs
Voltaire: Annals with no mention of any war undertaken at any time
Voltaire: The arithmetic of war
Voltaire: Armies composed of well disciplined hirelings who determine the fate of nations
Voltaire: Armies used to subject citizens as well as wage war abroad
Voltaire: Bellicose father or pacific son?
Voltaire: Bid war and slaughter cease, and give to Heaven and earth eternal peace
Voltaire: Crimes and calamities are the constant concomitants of war
Voltaire: For a hundred years there was not a single Christian in the armies of the empire
Voltaire: Foreign wars consist in killing one’s neighbors
Voltaire: He did not put a sufficient number of his fellow creatures to death
Voltaire: I am the grandson of Penn. That name alone will suffice.
Voltaire: Illustrious robbers who deluge the earth with blood
Voltaire: Incompatibility of being both Christian and soldier. Bayle versus Montesquieu.
Voltaire: Indifference to the dreadful apprehensions of war
Voltaire: Invoking the gods of war
Voltaire: The laws of robbers and war
Voltaire: Mars the exterminator
Voltaire: Mortals, you’re bound by sacred tie, therefore those cruel arms lay by
Voltaire: Murderers are punished except in large companies
Voltaire: Must Europe never cease to be in arms?
Voltaire: Not a single soldier has enlisted from the principle of virtue
Voltaire: One country cannot conquer without making misery for another
Voltaire: Serve a God of peace with war and slaughter?
Voltaire: Sister of Death! inexorable War!
Voltaire: Societies have always existed which held the perfect horror of war in absolute execration
Voltaire: Societies without armies
Voltaire: They obtained their object, which was peace with their neighbors
Voltaire: War, the greatest of all moral evils
Voltaire: Why prefer a war to the happy labors of peace?
Joost van den Vondel: The heavy bolt of war should not be weighed too lightly
Louise B. Waite: Let There Be Peace
W. S. Walker: Furies learn’d to blush at human crimes
W. S. Walker: One last sanguinary conquest
Edgar Wallace: Or wars would be impossible
Edmund Waller: Less pleasure take brave minds in battles won
Horace Walpole: Selections on war and peace
Horace Walpole: Deplorable success in destroying any of our species
Horace Walpole: The glory of war and soldiering
Horace Walpole: How end all our victories?
Horace Walpole: I prefer the old hen Peace
Horace Walpole: I wish there were an excuse for not growing military mad
Horace Walpole: Oh! where is the dove with the olive-branch!
Horace Walpole: Peace and propagation
Horace Walpole: Peace is the sole event of which I wish to hear
Horace Walpole: Stuffing hospitals with maimed soldiers, besides making thousands of widows!
Horace Walpole: We peaceable folks are now to govern the world
Horace Walpole: Who gives a nation peace, gives tranquility to all
Hugh Walpole: Selections on war
Hugh Walpole: Continual screaming, men without faces
Hugh Walpole: The dark, crippling advent of war
Hugh Walpole: Dream of horror: the false reality of war
Hugh Walpole: It would indeed be a disheartening sight….
Hugh Walpole: War both protracts and strangles youth
Hugh Walpole: War killed Henry James
Rex Warner: These guns were sent to save civilisation
Thomas Warton: Not seek in fields of blood his warrior bays
Jakob Wassermann: Crushed by the iron laws of military organization
Jakob Wassermann: Lies told by both groups of belligerents to maintain the war-spirit were sickening
Jakob Wassermann: The war seized me, rent me in sunder
Jakob Wassermann: Was there ever since the world began a just cause for war?
Gilbert Waterhouse: “This is the last of wars – this is the last!”
William Watson: Curse my country for its military victory
William Watson: Dream of perfect peace
William Watson: Ground ‘neath iron war, the golden thought survives
Albert Durrant Watson: A Prayer for Peace
Isaac Watts: Clamor, and wrath, and war, begone
Theodore Watts-Dunton: Seat above the conflict, power to call Peace like a Zephyr
Edwin Waugh: Who strives to make the world a home where peace and justice meet
Maurice C. Waugh: A Plea for Peace
John Webster: All the murders, rapes and thefts committed in the horrid lust of war
H.G. Wells: The abolition of war will be a new phase in the history of life
H.G. Wells: Armaments: Vile and dangerous industry in the human blood trade
H.G. Wells: Blood as printers’ ink
H.G. Wells: Chemistry at the service of mass murder
H.G. Wells: Either man will put an end to air war or air war will put an end to mankind
H.G. Wells: For the predetermined losing side, modern wars an unspeakable business
H.G. Wells: Mars will sit like a giant above all human affairs and his speech is blunt and plain
H.G. Wells: Massacres of boys! That indeed is the essence of modern war.
H.G. Wells: Means of destruction kept pace with increase in wealth of mankind
H.G. Wells: Nearly everybody wants peace but nobody thinks out the arrangements needed
H.G. Wells: The New Warfare, transition to total war
H.G. Wells: None so detestable as the god of war
H.G. Wells: A number of devoted men and women ready to give their whole lives to great task of peace
H.G. Wells: The progressive enslavement of the race to military tyranny
H.G. Wells: This little planet everywhere scarred and disfigured by long wars
H.G. Wells: Universal collapse logically follows world-wide war
H.G. Wells: War is a triumph of the exhausted and dying over the dead
H.G. Wells: War, road to complete extinction or to degradation beyond our present understanding
H.G. Wells: War will leave the world a world of cripples and old men and children
H.G. Wells: When war comes home
H.G. Wells: Why did humanity gape at the guns and do nothing? War as business
H.G. Wells: The world is weary of this bloodshed, weary of all this weeping
H.G. Wells: The young are the food of war
Franz Werfel: Selections on war
Franz Werfel: Advent of air war and apocalyptic visions
Franz Werfel: Cities disintegrated within seconds in the Last War
Franz Werfel: How describe in a few words a world war?
Franz Werfel: Leaders’ fear of their people drives them to war
Franz Werfel: To a Lark in War-Time
Franz Werfel: Twenty thousand well-preserved human skulls of the Last War
Franz Werfel: Waging currish, cowardly war to plunder the poor
Franz Werfel: War behind and in front, outside and inside
Franz Werfel: War is the cause and not the result of all conflicts
John Werge: Battle in hell if war ye must
Charles Wesley: No horrid alarm of war shall break our eternal repose
Nathanael West: Selections on war
Nathanael West: Every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition
Nathanael West: The noble motives, the noble methods of war
Nathanael West: Not their fault, they thought they had bombed a hospital
Nathanael West: One live recruit is better than a dozen dead veterans
Nathanael West: They haven’t the proper military slant
Rebecca West: The dreams of Englishwomen during war
Phillis Wheatley: From every tongue celestial Peace resounds
Robert Whitaker: The Starred Mother
Robert Whitaker: Whence Cometh War?
Walt Whitman: Away with themes of war! away with war itself!
Anna M. Whitney: The Call for Peace
John Greenleaf Whittier: Selections on peace and war
John Greenleaf Whittier: Disarmament
John Greenleaf Whittier: The Gospel of Christ is peace, not war, and love, not hatred
John Greenleaf Whittier: If this be Peace, pray what is War?
John Greenleaf Whittier: The Peace Convention at Brussels
John Greenleaf Whittier: Nobler than the sword’s shall be the sickle’s accolade
John Greenleaf Whittier: The stormy clangor of wild war music o’er the earth shall cease
G. J. Whyte-Melville: Death is gathering his harvest – and the iron voice tolls on
Margaret Widdemer: A Mother to the War-Makers
Margaret Widdemer: Men have to wage world-wars, children are left to die
Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Selections on peace and war
Ella Wheeler Wilcox: The Paean of Peace
Ella Wheeler Wilcox: A Plea To Peace
Ella Wheeler Wilcox: What We Need
Ella Wheeler Wilcox: When the Regiment Came Back
Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Women and War
Jane Wilde: Peace with the Olive, and Mercy with the Palm
Oscar Wilde: Crimson seas of war, Great Game in Central and South Asia
Oscar Wilde: Who would dare to praise the barren pride of warring nations?
Helen Maria Williams: Heaven-born peace
Helen Maria Williams: Now burns the savage soul of war
Sarah Williams: Groaning for him they slew
John Wilmot: With war I’ve not to do
D. A. Wilson: Who Won the War?
Humbert Wolfe: Paused horror, hate and Hell a moment
Thomas Wolfe: His imperial country at war, possessed of the inspiration for murder
Thomas Wolfe: Santimony and cant of war
Women writers on peace and war
Clement Wood: Seedtime and harvest
Clement Wood: Victory – Without Peace
George Edward Woodberry: American I am; would wars were done
Margaret L. Woods: The forgotten slain
William Wordsworth: Selections on peace and war
William Wordsworth: All merit centered in the sword; battle’s hecatombs
William Wordsworth: Earth’s groaning field, where ruthless mortals wage incessant wars
William Wordsworth: If men with men in peace abide, all other strength the weakest may withstand
William Wordsworth: Peace in these feverish times is sovereign bliss
William Wordsworth: Proclaimed heroes for strewing meadows with carcasses
William Wordsworth: Prophetic harps were singing, “War shall cease”
William Wordsworth: Spreading peaceful ensigns over war’s favourite playground
Wordsworth: We felt as men should feel at vast carnage
Philip Stanhope Worsley: Not with iron steeped in slaughter
Henry Wotton: Pastorale. No wars are seen.
David Henry Wright: The Cruiser Philadelphia
Thomas Wyatt: Children of the gun
Thomas Wyatt: Wax fat on innocent blood: I cannot leave the state to Caesar
Elinor Wylie: Peace falls unheeded on the dead
Xenophon: Selections on war and peace
Xenophon: Begin wars as tardily, end them as speedily as possible
Xenophon: Guile without guilt. Peace and joy reigned everywhere.
Xenophon: Socrates’ prescription for averting the calamities of war
Xenophon: Socrates’ war sophistry; civil crimes are martial virtues
Xenophon: The virtuous prefer untroubled security to sovereignty won by war
Xenophon: War as obsession, warfare as mistress
Ann Yearsley: The anarchy of war
William Butler Yeats: Blood and the Moon
William Butler Yeats: The Rose of Peace
Ivan Yefremov: All the forces expended on war channeled into improving man’s life
Ivan Yefremov: Secret manufacture of weapons in the darkest eras of man’s history
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: Flowers and Bullets
Charlotte M. Yonge: The snow fell far from bloodless
Barbara Young: Peace is not bought with dead men slain
Edward Young: Selections on peace and war
Edward Young: Draw the murd’ring sword to give mankind a single lord
Edward Young: End of war the herald of wisdom and poetry
Edward Young: Reason’s a bloodless conqueror, more glorious than the sword
Edward Young: Such a peace that follows war
Marguerite Yourcenar: Fruits of war are food for new wars
Nikolai Zadornov: Soldiers, two views
Leonid Zhukhovitsky: May the book prove more powerful than the bomb
Lajos Zilahy: Called, not without justice, the Third World War
Lajos Zilahy: The greatest efforts were concentrated on the greatest of human problems: how to kill.
Émile Zola: Encomiums on labor and peace
Émile Zola: The forge of peace and the pit of war
Émile Zola: Haunted by military matters
Émile Zola: The military, necessary apprenticeship for devastation and massacre
Émile Zola: One sole city of peace and truth and justice
Émile Zola: Prescription for a happy life in the midst of universal peace
Émile Zola: Vulcan in service to Mars
Émile Zola: War’s vast slaughterhouse
Émile Zola: Why armies are maintained
Zuhair: Accursed thing, war will grind you between millstones
Arnold Zweig: Selections on war
Arnold Zweig: Conducting the business of murder with embittered reluctance
Arnold Zweig: Education Before Verdun
Arnold Zweig to Sigmund Freud: Fear has handed the state over to the armed forces
Arnold Zweig: The final trump in the struggle for world markets: the Gun
Arnold Zweig: From the joy of the slayer to being dimly aware of the man on the other side
Arnold Zweig: In the war you’ve lost all the personality you’ve ever had
Arnold Zweig: Keep the war going to the last drop of – other – people’s blood
Arnold Zweig: The meaning, or rather the meaninglessness, of war
Arnold Zweig: Mere existence of armies imposes upon mankind the mentality of the Stone Age
Arnold Zweig: Military strips nation of all that is worthy of defense
Arnold Zweig: Never again! On reading Barbusse
Arnold Zweig: No joy to be born into world of war
Arnold Zweig: Of course, one had to shoot at crowds of civilians, men, women and children
Arnold Zweig: Only the wrong people are killed in a war
Arnold Zweig: The plague has always played a part in war
Arnold Zweig: Pro-war clerks and clerics are Herod’s mercenaries
Arnold Zweig: Reason is the highest patriotism and militarism is evil its very essence
Arnold Zweig to Sigmund Freud: Since 1914 we have had bleeding human bodies before our eyes
Arnold Zweig: They won no more ground than they could cover with their corpses
Arnold Zweig: War a deliberate act, not an unavoidable natural catastrophe
Arnold Zweig: War, a gigantic undertaking on the part of the destruction industry
Arnold Zweig: War of all against all, jaded multitudes of death
Arnold Zweig: War transforms rescue parties into murder parties
Arnold Zweig: War was in the world, and war prevailed
Arnold Zweig: War’s brutality, folly and tyranny practiced even on its own
Arnold Zweig: War’s communion, hideous multiplication of human disasters
Arnold Zweig: War’s hecatomb from the air, on land and at sea
Stefan Zweig: Selections on peace and war
Stefan Zweig: The army of the spirit, not the army of force
Stefan Zweig: The bloody cloud-bank of war will give way to a new dawn
Stefan Zweig: The fear of opposing military hysteria
Stefan Zweig: The fruits of peace, the drive toward war
Stefan Zweig: “How much rottenness there is in war”
Stefan Zweig: I would never have believed such a crime on the part of humanity possible
Stefan Zweig: Idea of human brotherhood buried by the grave-diggers of war
Stefan Zweig: The idealism which sees beyond blood-drenched battlefields
Stefan Zweig: Opposition to war, a higher heroism still
Stefan Zweig: Origin of the Nobel Peace Prize
Stefan Zweig: Propaganda is as much war matériel as arms and planes
Stefan Zweig: Romain Rolland and the campaign against hatred
Stefan Zweig: A single conscience defies the madness of war
Stefan Zweig: Stendhal, in war but not of it
Stefan Zweig: War, the ultimate betrayal of the intellectuals
Stefan Zweig: The whole world of feeling, the whole world of thought, became militarized
Stefan Zweig: World war and Romain Rolland, the conscience of the world
Richard Aldington: In the Trenches
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
Richard Aldington: Selections on war
====
Richard Aldington
In the Trenches
I
Not that we are weary,
Not that we fear,
Not that we are lonely
Though never alone –
Not these, not these destroy us;
But that each rush and crash
Of mortar and shell,
Each cruel bitter shriek of bullet
That tears the wind like a blade.
Each wound on the breast of earth,
Of Demeter, our Mother, –
Wounds us
Severs and rends the fine fabric
Of the wings of our frail souls,
Scatters into dust the bright wings
Of Psyche!
II
Impotent, How impotent is all this clamour,
This destruction and contest…
Night after night comes the moon
Haughty and perfect;
Night after night the Pleiades sing
And Orion swings his belt across the sky.
Night after night the frost
Crumbles the hard earth.
Soon the spring will drop flowers
And patient, creeping stalk and leaf
Along these barren lines
Where the huge rats scuttle
And the hawk shrieks to the carrion crow.
Can you stay them with your noise?
Then kill winter with your cannon,
Hold back Orion with your bayonets
And crush the spring leaf with your armies!
Laura Simmons: Munition Maker
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Women writers on peace and war
====
Laura Simmons
Munition-Maker
‘And in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torment.’
Alone, from your dim cell you shall look forth; behold and see
Your perfect work! How faultless all your engines’ butchery!
Your thirty pieces, what they bought in measure brimming o’er!
Those blackened fields, the shattered slain, where once was Spring before!
Silence – save where the blinded grope; a gasp from shredded lung –
A baby’s wail, a crazy laugh the ghastly heaps among.
That vacant face that mouths at you; see, where the shambles stir –
The quick more dreadful than the dead! Your warplanes lethal whirr –
Rejoice! Was ever bargaining like this since time began?
And all for thirty bits! So well they paid you – every man
Whose flesh still writhes, or sleeps at peace; and does it sate your soul
To clutch your gold? Or would you blot from sight your monstrous toll?
Somewhere too you shall find the dawn. Somewhere you shall not miss
The joys of worlds no longer cursed by deeds the like of this.
Brent Dow Allinson: Two Dreams. Let us wake to peace.
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Brent Dow Allinson: Could warring men perceive this thy perfection
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Brent Dow Allinson
Two Dreams
I fell asleep and dreamed, and dreaming saw
The gold of ripening meadows and the green
Sweet-scented fields of Flanders, and the dunes
That roll, wind-rippled, to the tumbling sea;
I moved with winding streams through verdant dales
Among smooth hills mantled with waving grain
Where poppies flung bright flames among the wheat
And sturdy lads were binding the full sheaves.
I passed through fragrant orchards rich with fruit,
And paused in cottage gardens where the bees
Boomed languidly down long sweet lanes of flowers;
Came then to white-walled villages and towns
By rapid waters where the hum of wheels
Bespoke the wholesome industry of men,
Saw quaint and crowded cities teem by day
And dream by night under the wheeling stars –
Old cities full of wisdom, wealth and years,
With minsters pointing proudly to the skies
From whose great spires chimed melodious bells
Proclaiming: “On earth peace, good-will to men!
Saw cozy chimney-nooks where pipes are lit
And children play at candled evenfall,
And moonlit streets and winding shadowy ways,
Young men and maids and many a tender scene.
Then with this peaceful vision in the mind
I stirred, and smiling, quietly awoke.
The shock of battle rings on Flanders’ plain!
On Brabant’s fields of gold a storm has burst
Like none the troubled earth has seen before:
The rain is hot, the raindrops are of steel,
And from the riven sky and sulphurous night
Red shafts of fire split the ringing gloom;
Unnatural thunder rolls upon the hills,—
The earth groans under greater blows than Thor’s!
In Flanders now the winding streams run red,
Those fertile fields are dyed with tragic blood,
And ripening orchards sweet with lingering fruit,
And rye-fields bright with tangled poppy flame
Are crushed and plundered by rude tramping man;
And up and down a bleeding, broken land
War swaggers in its arrogance and claims
Its blindest, costliest human sacrifice,
While its drab hordes, with dull, unholy zest,
Like hungry locusts feed on all that’s fair –
Profane the shrines of wisdom and of art
And stultify and freeze the human heart!
Behind stalk hungry Death and gaping Ruin;
Beyond the din, beneath the pall of smoke
Starved children weep bereft, disconsolate…
The hiss of flames, the roar of falling walls,
The crimson glare, the sacked and blackened homes –
And Freedom shrieks again as Belgium bleeds!
And in the face of this great holocaust,
This brazen breaking of three nations’ vows,
This bold denial of man’s deep sense of right,
My nation stands bewildered, stung with grief,
Believing not, unwilling to believe!
O, rank and red, unconscionable crime
Born of accursed ignorance and greed,
Nursed by some hooded fear and cult of Might
That fettered Conscience to the iron wheel of State
And drugged her till she knows not what she does,
That conjured up imaginary foes,
That prattled cant, monopolizing God,
That warped the judgment of the common man –
Seducing Science to its damnéd ends, –
And with an oath has crucified mankind!
O crime of ages! – youth and youth alone
Can save itself or for our sins atone!
Without thee, Youth, the world’s a barren thing;
Fair Helen’s eyes were worth a thousand ships,
But has the State such eyes? If so, what shade?
What color have they? Has it form or voice?
Can you embrace it? Nay! Then Youth beware!
Old knaves in purple, envying your strength –
The beauty of your body and your brain –
Will trick you to your death, wishing to see
The world grow old and gray and die with them…
Youth eager with a question on your lips,
Why not ask one defiant question now –
Question the mandate of your murderers,
Question and kill the deadlier common foe?
O, German youth of philosophic mind,
O, poilu from Langue d’ Oc or La Vendée, –
From Lyons looms or peaceful Brittany,
And white-cliff’d Albion’s slender blue-eyed sons,
Demand an answer to your thundered “Why?”, –
Or in the name of Life refuse to die!
****
O, God, speak to us! Do we wake or sleep?
It cannot be….This is some troubled dream
That stalks abroad and haunts our tortured minds.
Shall we awake to find the first dream true?…
Dear Lord, be kind; let us soon wake to peace!
Floyd Dell: The good old days have come back. Ah, the smell of blood!
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
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Floyd Dell
A Long Time Ago
THE OLD WOMAN: Why do you sit there, fool, and twang at that harp? There’s no occasion for making music. Nobody has been winning any battles. How long has it been since a great fight was heard of?
THE FOOL: If there had been a battle, old woman, they would have had to get some one besides myself to celebrate the winning of it. I do not like fighting.
THE OLD WOMAN: What does a scrawny little weakling like you know of fighting, and why should you have an opinion?
THE FOOL: The days of fighting are over, and a good thing it is, too. Four kingdoms we have about us, that in the bloody old days we would be for ever marching against, and they against us, killing and burning and destroying the crops till a quiet man would be sick to think of it. But that’s all past. Twenty years we have been at peace with them, and that’s ever since the young queen was born, and I hope it may last as long as she lives.
THE OLD WOMAN: There’s no stopping a fool when he starts to talk. But it is right you are that the good old days are gone. Those were the days of great heroes, like the father of her that is now Queen. They were fine men that stood beside him, and one was my own man. I said to him, “This is the time a brave man is sure to be killed. If you come back to me, I’ll always think you were a coward.” He died along with a thousand of the best men in the kingdom fighting around the King. That was a great day. Four kingdoms at once we fought, and beat them to their knees. Glad enough they were to make peace with the child of that dead king.
THE FOOL: Spare me, woman. I’ve heard that old story often enough. What do you suppose all that fighting was for, if it wasn’t to put an end to quarrelling for all time? If the old King was alive now, he’d sit in his palace and drink his ale and listen to music, and when he saw the young men giving kisses to the young women under the trees he’d be glad enough. But you still go cawing for blood, like an old crow.
***
THE FOOL: (going up to the Queen, and holding out his sword to her, hilt-foremost) I have done your bidding, and slain a brave man. Bid some one take this sword and slay me.
THE OLD WOMAN: What a faint heart you are! The fool’s cap is on you still. Put back your sword in your scabbard. You will make a soldier yet.
THE QUEEN: You are a brave man. Put back your sword in your scabbard, and may it destroy all my enemies from this day forth.
THE FOOL: What shall I do?
THE QUEEN: I have created you, and now I must give you work to do. You can only fight. Very well, then. Take my soldiers, and lead them to the kingdom that thrusts its chief city against our kingdom’s walls. There should be good fighting, and much spoil. When the soldiers have glutted themselves with wine and women, let the city be set on fire. I shall look every night for a light in the sky, and when it comes I shall know it is my bonfire. Perhaps it will light up my heart for a moment. When that is finished, I shall find you other bloody work. Go.
THE FOOL: I understand. You shall have your bonfire. Come, old woman, I want some of your advice.
THE OLD WOMAN: The good old days have come back. Ah, the smell of blood!
[They go out. The queen looks over at the dead man lying on the steps between the torches, and gradually her face softens. She goes over slowly, and kneels by his side, gazing on him. She kisses his mouth, and then rises, goes slowly to the arbour, and sits down. She looks away, and her face becomes hard again.]
[A sound of trumpets and shouting, the menacing prelude of war, is heard outside.]
Hermann Hagedorn: We are your sons and we are ghosts
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Hermann Hagedorn: Selections against war
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Hermann Hagedorn
A Boy in Armor
He Speaks to the Gathered Nations
Tremble, O World! Bow down! Cringe! Be afraid!
You look on ghosts! Not one alone! Ten thousand!
And yet again ten thousand, and again
Ten thousand, and to the bleak rim
Of this dear earth where there could be such living,
Such labor and such climbing of green hills,
Ten thousand times ten thousand shapes with eyes!
Eyes that are living, eyes that are fires! young eyes!
They do not blink; they do not waver; they watch.
Bow down, bow down! Open your hearts! And hear!
We are your sons. You lured us to your homes
With talk of love and mirth and the high music
That the heart makes when it goes out with flutes
Along the highway, celebrating love.
With warmth you lured us, with the hearth-fire blazing,
With open, clean hands, tables cleanly set,
White beds and books and birds and songs and friends,
And mountain-tops to win and seas to conquer,
Green things to marvel at, far isles to long for,
With love you lured us on and with loveliness!
Remember! Now that we are ghosts, remember!
You said no word of hate and slaughter!
Not one!
Of wars you breathed no blighting syllable!
You trumpeted the call of beauty down
The heavenly valleys and we heard and came.
You blew no harsh reveille of guns and battle,
You trapped our unborn innocence with love.
Tremble, for we have eyes!
We are your sons and we are ghosts. We came
To love, to labor, and to know. We died
Before we loved, before we learned to labor,
Before we knew more than the fairy-told tales
You murmured to beguile our puzzled ears.
You cried across the worlds, and called us sons!
We came as sons, but what you made of us
Were bleeding shapes upon an altar, slain
To appease your god Inertia where he sits
Muttering dead words and chewing at old bones.
Because you would not think, we had to die!
We have been loyal. We have fought for you,
And miserably laid our bodies down
Before your idol, while the incense rose.
Weep not for us, but for your own trapped souls.
We died, and there you stand, no step advanced!
And after all, when you have set more millions
Beside our millions, and beside them yet
More millions of brave fellows who die well,
You still will have to wake some day – and think.
Bow down, and hear! You have more sons than these,
And they have fancies and imaginings
And dauntless spirits and hearts made for love,
And clean hands and clean eyes and high desires.
They will go forth and die if you command,
As we have died, since they love liberty
Even as we loved her and would give her cause
The only gift they are aware is theirs.
Wake, dreaming world! Think, O gray world bewitched!
Out through untraveled spaces where no wind
Has dared to venture let your sails be spread!
Remember, world, this is the age of wings!
Beyond the stars the stars are, and the stars
Will not forever vainly wait the aëronaut
Who shall uncover laws to lift men up
More potent than the laws that drag men down.
Seek them, old men! Young men, go forth and find them!
We dead keep watch! You shall not sleep nor rest.
We died. And now you others who must live
Shall do a harder thing than dying is –
For you shall think! And ghosts shall drive you on!
Alexander Posey: The dew, the bird more glorious than the conqueror, the bard of war
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
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Alexander Posey
The Dew and the Bird
There is more glory in a drop of dew,
That shineth only for an hour,
Than there is in the pomp of earth’s great Kings
Within the noonday of their power.
There is more sweetness in a single strain
That falleth from a wild bird’s throat,
At random in the lonely forest’s depths,
Than there’s in all the songs that bards e’er wrote.
Yet men, for aye, rememb’ring Caesar’s name,
Forget the glory in the dew,
And, praising Homer’s epic, let the lark’s
Song fall unheeded from the blue.
***
The Conquerors
The Caesars and the Alexanders were
But men gone mad, who ran about a while
Upsetting kingdoms, and were slain in turn
Like rabid dogs, or died in misery.
Assassins laid in wait for Caesar; wine,
Amid the boasts of victory, cut short
The glory of the Macedonian;
Deception cooled the fever Pompey had;
Death was dealt to Pyrrhus by a woman’s hand;
Themistocles and Hannibal drank
Deep of poison in their desolation.
***
Husse Lotka Enhotulle
(The West Wind)
From o’er the hills it comes to me,
The clouds pursuing,
With song of bird and drone of bee,
So soft and wooing;
From o’er the woods, thro’ shade and sheen,
With fragrance teeming,
From o’er the prairies, wide and green,
And leaves me dreaming.
Across the fields of corn and wheat
In valleys lying,
It seems to sing a message sweet
Of peace undying.
I shout aloud – the wildwoods ring
As they have never –
“Blow, O Wind of the West, and sing
This song forever!”
George Meredith: We pray to be let live peacefully
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
George Meredith: Selections on peace and war
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George Meredith
One of Our Conquerors
Men will fight for almost anything they care to get or call their own, the pork-butcher said; and he praised Old England for avoiding war.
***
Without challengeing it, she had a rebellious rush of sympathy for our evil-fortuned of the world; the creatures in the battle, the wounded, trodden, mud-stained….
***
Dartrey despised effects of oratory, save when soldiers had to be hurled on a mark – or citizens nerved to stand for their country.
***
The roads to Great Britain’s metropolis, and the supplies of forage and provision at every stage of a march on London, are marked in the military offices of these people; and that, with their barking Journals, is a piece of knowledge to justify a belligerent return for it. Only we pray to be let live peacefully.
***
“…meats are more insidious. I say nothing of taking life – of fattening for that express purpose: diseases of animals: bad blood made: cruelty superinduced: it will be seen to be, it will be looked back on, as a form of, a second stage of, cannibalism.”
Robert Frost: War is for everyone, for children too
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
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Robert Frost
The Bonfire
Excerpt
“If it scares you, what will it do to us?”
“Scare you. But if you shrink from being scared,
What would you say to war if it should come?
That’s what for reasons I should like to know –
If you can comfort me by any answer.”
“Oh, but war’s not for children – it’s for men.”
“Now we are digging almost down to China.
My dears, my dears, you thought that – we all thought it.
So your mistake was ours. Haven’t you heard, though,
About the ships where war has found them out
At sea, about the towns where war has come
Through opening clouds at night with droning speed
Further o’erhead than all but stars and angels, –
And children in the ships and in the towns?
Haven’t you heard what we have lived to learn?
Nothing so new – something we had forgotten:
War is for everyone, for children too.
I wasn’t going to tell you and I mustn’t.
The best way is to come up hill with me
And have our fire and laugh and be afraid.”
Brent Dow Allinson: Could warring men perceive this thy perfection
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Brent Dow Allinson: Two Dreams. Let us wake to peace.
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Brent Dow Allinson
Moonlight in Boston
I stand at twilight gazing from my window,
The tall, green-shuttered houses
Of the old quarter – subdued and reticent,
Aloof as those who dwell within,
Stand opposite and steadily
Through downcast eyelids, sleepily
Return my stare. No spark of light
Yet glows in the deep, rounded eyes;
Night has not come.
High up at one small window,
In a gable just beneath the sky,
A pale-faced woman bends laboriously
Upon the glass, and with a cloth
Rubs the thick dust away.
Suddenly, from behind her gable
Glides the full, the white-faced moon, –
So close that she must touch it
Should she turn and reach….She sees it not.
A moment and it clears the housetops,
Brightens on the tinted sky of twilight,
Swims into the pure and deepening heaven!
O, Moon – pale, burnished moon of the soft twilight, –
Most loyal and of all the stars best loved!
Would mortals pause to breathe thy calm benignance,
Could warring men perceive this thy perfection,
Thou, like yonder weary woman in the gable,
Shouldst brush from out their eyes all dust of hate,
And from their cabin’d souls shouldst purge away
All fever, all unkindness, all corruption!
Vachel Lindsay: Strange Easter. I cannot think of the resurrection but of the cannon fodder.
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Vachel Lindsay: Selections on war
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Vachel Lindsay
To Harriet Moody
April 8, 1917
It is as strange an Easter as the world has ever faced, and it is shameful not to realize its irony, and it will be a pity if anyone makes of it a sanctified nominal Easter. It is an Easter in which one holds one’s breath. I cannot think of the resurrection but of the cannon fodder – that is and that may be. I wonder how many that die today can look back happily – and say that they have been cheated.
***
To Katharine Lee Bates
June 30, 1917
I have by me your beautiful poem, “Peace,” and you have said briefly and simply what I have labored at great and complicated length to say in several productions.
***
Springfield, Illinois
April 9, 1917
Miss Jane Addams
Chicago:
My Dear Friend:
What shall I do? This war breaks my heart. Send me what you have written since Bryan enlisted – for instance. Are you with Bryan?
Do you accept President Wilson’s war message on its face value? Is that final with you?
I hate a hyphenated American. I hate war. But I owe no one in Europe a grudge. I would rather be shot than shoot anybody. If I had been in Congress I would have voted with Miss Rankin* and would have considered it a sufficient reason to say: “I will not vote for war till she does.”
Please write me a tract, or send a clipping.
With all respect,
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay.
- Jeanette Rankin, the first women to hold federal office and the first to serve in Congress, elected in 1916. She opposed the U.S. entering the First World War.
David Henry Wright: The Cruiser Philadelphia
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
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David Henry Wright
The Cruiser Philadelphia
A mighty ship of war and named for thee,
Penn’s great city of love. Was thy pure soil
Meant thus? Is all in vain the Quaker’s toil?
Is death the price we pay for liberty?
O City of Love so fair, and can it be
That they have wound thee in a serpent’s coil,
To send forth death amidst the dread turmoil
Of war? O city, where is thy charity?
What have you done with the message of Christ,
Of peace on earth, good will to all mankind?
Shall we in blood keep the most holy tryst
God gave to all? Where is the brooding Dove
Of Peace? Shall we cloy her throat, her wings bind,
With gore? Is it yet true that God is love?
Upton Sinclair: Murder is permitted if perpetrator dons a special uniform
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Upton Sinclair: Selections on war
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Upton Sinclair
The Book of Life
Let us take, for a test, the Ten Commandments. These commandments were graven upon stone tablets some four thousand years ago, and are supposed to have been valid ever since. “Thou shalt not kill,” is one; others phrase it, “Thou shall do no murder”; and in this double version we see at once the beginnings of controversy. If you are a Quaker, you accept the former version, while if you are a member of the military general staff of your country you accept the latter. You maintain the right to kill your fellow men, provided that those who do the killing have been previously clad in a special uniform, indicating their distinctive function as killers of their fellow men. You maintain, in other words, the right of making war; and presently, when you get into making war, you find yourself maintaining the right to kill, not merely by the old established method of the sword and the bullet, but by means of poison gases which destroy the lives of women and children, perhaps a whole city full at a time.
And also, of course, you maintain the right to kill, provided the killing has been formally ordered and sanctioned by a man who sits upon a raised bench and wears a black robe, and perhaps a powdered wig. You consider that by the simple device of putting this man into a black robe and a powdered wig, you endow him with authority to judge and revise the divine law. In other words, you subject this divine law to human reason; and if some religious fanatic refuses to be so subjected, you call him by the dread name “pacifist,” and if he attempts to preach his idea, you send him to prison for ten or twenty years, which means in actual practice that you kill him by the slow effects of malnutrition and tubercular infection. If he is ordered to put on the special costume of killing, and refuses to do so, you call him a “C. O.,” and you bully and beat him, and perhaps administer to him the “water cure” in your dungeons.
***
Or take the law, “Thou shalt not steal.” Surely we can all agree upon that! Let us do so; but our agreement gets us nowhere, because we have to set up a human court to decide what is “stealing.” Is it stealing to seize upon land, and kill the occupants of it, and take the land for your own, and hand it down to your children forever? Yes, of course, that is stealing, you say; but at once you have to revise your statement. It is not stealing if it was done a sufficient number of years ago; in that case the results of it are sanctified by law, and held unchangeable forever. Also, we run up against the fact that it is not stealing, if it is done by the State, by men who have been dressed up in the costume of killers before they commit the act.
Humbert Wolfe: Paused horror, hate and Hell a moment
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
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Humbert Wolfe
A Thrush in the Trenches
Suddenly he sang across the trenches,
vivid in the fleeting hush
as a star-shell through the smashed black branches,
a more than English thrush.
Suddenly he sang, and those who listened
nor moved nor wondered, but
heard, all bewitched, the sweet unhastened
crystal Magnificat.
One crouched, a muddied rifle clasping,
and one filled grenade,
but little cared they, while he went lisping
the one clear tune he had.
Paused horror, hate and Hell a moment,
(you could almost hear the sigh)
and still he sang to them, and so went
(suddenly) singing by.
John Galsworthy: Is a man only to oppose war when it’s popular?
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
Nobel prize in literature recipients on peace and war
John Galsworthy: Selections on war
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John Galsworthy
The Mob
MORE. I’ve made no secret of my feelings all along. I’m against this war, and against the annexation we all know it will lead to.
MENDIP. My dear fellow! Don’t be so Quixotic! We shall have war within the next twenty-four hours, and nothing you can do will stop it.
HELEN. Oh! No!
MENDIP. I’m afraid so, Mrs. Hubert.
SIR JOHN. Not a doubt of it, Helen.
MENDIP. [TO MORE] And you mean to charge the windmill?
[MORE nods]
MENDIP. ‘C’est magnifique’!
MORE. I’m not out for advertisement.
MENDIP. You will get it!
MORE. Must speak the truth sometimes, even at that risk.
SIR JOHN. It is not the truth.
MENDIP. The greater the truth the greater the libel, and the greater the resentment of the person libelled.
THE DEAN. [Trying to bring matters to a blander level] My dear Stephen, even if you were right – which I deny – about the initial merits, there surely comes a point where the individual conscience must resign it self to the country’s feeling. This has become a question of national honour.
SIR JOHN. Well said, James!
MORE. Nations are bad judges of their honour, Dean.
THE DEAN. I shall not follow you there.
MORE. No. It’s an awkward word.
KATHERINE. [Stopping THE DEAN] Uncle James! Please!
[MORE looks at her intently.]
SIR JOHN. So you’re going to put yourself at the head of the cranks, ruin your career, and make me ashamed that you’re my son-in-law?
MORE. Is a man only to hold beliefs when they’re popular?
M. C. Sinclair: Peace is not upon the winds of spring
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
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M. C. Sinclair
Upon the Wings of Spring
(Written in the form of a Petrarchan sonnet)
I feel the terror in the world tonight –
Unbridled lust of power, and bridled lust
More cold but no less merciless. The dust
Of perished legions drifts upon the bright
And tender wings of spring, a seal, blood-red,
Upon man’s last insanity. Surcease
Of war? Ah, so they thought! To purchase peace
For aye, with their young blood! Ah, so they said!
But peace is not upon the winds of spring,
The nostrils of new wars flare wide, and sniff
The dust of heroes greedily, and fling
An evil breath upon the world – and if
I chance to laugh because the spring is here,
Pain stabs my heart and binds the wound with fear!
John Galsworthy: A Green Hill Far Away. Can wars, then, ever cease?
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
John Galsworthy: Selections on war
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John Galsworthy
A Green Hill Far Away (1919)
Was it indeed only last March, or in another life, that I climbed this green hill on that day of dolor, the Sunday after the last great German offensive began? A beautiful sun-warmed day it was, when the wild thyme on the southern slope smelled sweet, and the distant sea was a glitter of gold. Lying on the grass, pressing my cheek to its warmth, I tried to get solace for that new dread which seemed so cruelly unnatural after four years of war-misery.
‘If only it were all over!’ I said to myself; ‘and I could come here, and to all the lovely places I know, without this awful contraction of the heart, and this knowledge that at every tick of my watch some human body is being mangled or destroyed. Ah, if only I could! Will there never be an end?’
And now there is an end, and I am up on this green hill once more, in December sunlight, with the distant sea a glitter of gold. And there is no cramp in my heart, no miasma clinging to my senses. Peace! It is still incredible. No more to hear with the ears of the nerves the ceaseless roll of gunfire, or see with the eyes of the nerves drowning men, gaping wounds, and the skeleton of hunger. Peace, actually Peace! The war has gone on so long that many of us have forgotten the sense of outrage and amazement we had, those first days of August, 1914, when it all began. But I have not forgotten, nor ever shall.
In some of us – I think in many who could not voice it – the war has left chiefly this feeling: ‘If only I could find a country where men cared less for all that they seem to care for, where they cared more for beauty, for nature, for being kindly to each other. If only I could find that green hill far away!’ Of the songs of Theocritus, of the life of St. Francis, there is no more among the nations than there is of dew on grass in an east wind. If we ever thought otherwise, we are disillusioned now. Yet there is Peace again, and the souls of men fresh-murdered are not flying into our lungs with every breath we draw.
Each day this thought of Peace becomes more real and blessed. I can lie on this green hill and praise Creation that I am alive in a world of beauty. I can go to sleep up here with the coverlet of sunlight warm on my body, and not wake to that old dull misery. I can even dream with a light heart, for my fair dreams will not be spoiled by waking, and my bad dreams will be cured the moment I open my eyes. I can look up at that blue sky without seeing trailed across it a mirage of the long horror, a film picture of all the things that have been done by men to men. At last I can gaze up at it, limpid and blue, without a dogging melancholy; and I can gaze down at that far gleam of sea, knowing that there is no murk of murder on it any more.
And the flight of birds, the gulls and rooks and little brown wavering things which flit out and along the edge of the chalk-pits, is once more refreshment to me, utterly untempered. A merle is singing in a bramble thicket; the dew has not dried off the bramble leaves; there is a feather of a moon floating across the sky; the distance sends forth a homely murmur; the sun warms my cheeks. And all of this is pure joy. No hawk of dread and horror keeps swooping down and bearing off the little birds of happiness. No accusing conscience starts forth and beckons me away from pleasure. Everywhere is supreme and flawless beauty, whether one looks at this tiny snail-shell, marvelously chased and marked, a very elf’s horn whose open mouth is colored rose, or at the flat land between here and the sea, wandering under the smile of the afternoon sunlight, seeming almost to be alive – hedgeless, with its many watching trees, and silver gulls hovering above the mushroom-colored ‘ploughs,’ and fields green in manifold hues. Or if one gazes at that little pink daisy born so out of time, or at that valley of brown-rosegray woods, under the drifting shadows of those low-hanging chalky clouds – all is perfection as only Nature can be perfect on a lovely day, when the mind of him who looks on her is at rest.
On this green hill I am nearer than I have been yet to realization of the difference between war and peace. In our civilian lives hardly anything has been changed – we do not get more butter or more petrol, the garb and machinery of war still swarm around us, journals are still dripping hate; but in our spirits there is all the difference between gradual dying and gradual recovery from sickness.
At the beginning of the war a certain artist, so one heard, shut himself away in his house and garden, taking in no newspaper, receiving no visitors, listening to no breath of the war, seeing no sight of it. So he lived, buried in his work and his flowers – I know not for how long. Was he wise, or did he suffer even more than the rest of us who shut nothing away? Can man, indeed, shut out the very quality of his firmament, or bar himself away from the general misery of his species?
This gradual recovery of the world – this slow reopening of the great flower, Life – is beautiful to feel and see. I press my hand flat and hard down on those blades of grass, then take it away, and watch them slowly, very slowly, raise themselves and shake off the bruise. So it is, and will be, with us for a long time to come. The cramp of war was deep in us, as an iron frost in the earth. Of all the countless millions who have fought and nursed and written and spoken and dug and sewn and worked in a thousand other ways to help on the business of killing, hardly any have labored in real love of war. How ironical that, perhaps, the most beautiful poem written these four years, Julian Grenfell’s ’Into Battle!’ was a song of heartfelt praise of fighting! But if one could gather the heartfelt sighs and curses breathed by man and woman against fighting since the first bugle was blown, the dirge of them could not be contained in the air which wraps this earth.
And yet the ‘green hill,’ where dwell beauty and kindliness, is still far away. Will it ever be nearer ? Men have fought even on this green hill where I am lying. By the rampart markings on its chalk and grass, it has surely served for an encampment. The beauty of day and night, the lark’s song, the sweet-scented growing things, the rapture of health, and of pure air, the majesty of the stars, and the gladness of sunlight, of song and dance and simple friendliness, have never been enough for men. We crave our turbulent fate. Can wars, then, ever cease? Look in men’s faces, read their writings, and beneath masks and hypocrisies note the restless creeping of the tiger spirit! There has never been anything to prevent the millennium except the nature of the human being. There are not enough lovers of beauty among men. It all comes back to that. Not enough who want the green hill far away – who naturally hate disharmony, and the greed, ugliness, restlessness, cruelty, which are its parents and its children.
Will there ever be more lovers of beauty in proportion to those who are indifferent to beauty? Who shall answer that question? And yet on the answer depends peace. Men may have a mint of sterling qualities – be vigorous, adventurous, brave, upright, and self-sacrificing; be preachers and teachers; keen, cool-headed, just, and industrious, – but if they have not the love of beauty, they will still be making wars. Man is a fighting animal, with sense of the ridiculous enough to know that he is a fool to fight, but not sense of the sublime enough to stop him. Ah, well! we have peace!
It is happiness greater than I have known for four years and four months, to lie here and let that thought go on its wings, quiet and free as the wind stealing soft from the sea, and blessed as the sunlight on this green hill.
Josephine Preston Peabody: Whose strength is this you spill in war?
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Women writers on peace and war
Josephine Preston Peabody: Harvest Moon
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Josephine Preston Peabody
Heritage
“And if that men should cease from war
What surety can there be
Of hardihood and sovereignty
And might, so battled for?
Whence shall a master draw his strength
And splendor, if so be, at length,
The strong man cease from war?”
Oh, some day might he light his mind
With fires that glowed when he lay blind;
The watch-fires of all motherkind –
The ardors that encompassed him
While he lay hid, unmade and dim,
Beleaguered as a bounden thrall,
With her lone body for a wall.
And she, his stronghold for a year
Against the armaments of fear, –
Her arms his wreathèd cherubim,
Fought with the hosts of hell for him,
And smiling in the eyes of Death,
Tore from her heart his gift of breath.
“Yet, Whence shall be their hardihood,
If men forebear to shed men’s blood?”
From her uncounted agony
Through climbling ages all worn by,
Could he not learn the way to die,
Transfigured with some radiant Why?
From the same wells of hero-stuff,
He still might draw duress enough
To dare and suffer, – be, and build;
Till some far flaming dream fulfilled,
Made the loud song in every vein
Sing triumph to her, for her pain;
Triumph, of one more glorious way
Than plunder for a beast of prey;
Triumph at last, against all odds
Set up by the indifferent gods!
Man-child, – the starveling without help,
Less able than a tiger’s whelp, –
Housed only, once, in her embrace,
Weak bud of the destroying race!
O fool and blind, and battled for,
Whose strength is this you spill in war,
But hers? – Who laughed the stars to scorn,
When you were born. –
When you were born.
John Oxenham: “I can imagine a World-Wide Women’s League for Peace”
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
====
John Oxenham
1914
It was Alma who said, out of the fulness of her heart and of much inevitable brooding over the matter:
“You know, if the women of all the world would only say the word, and say it together, and not only say it but mean it with all their souls and lives, there could be no such thing as war in the world.”
Mrs Dare suspended work for a minute and regarded her thoughtfully. Auntie Mitt peered at her over her spectacles in wonder. Lois nodded comprehendingly, with a star in each eye. Honor shook her head doubtfully. Victoria said, “If we had the vote – perhaps.”
“The vote will come all right in time,” said Alma. “But I was thinking larger than that. In all wars the women are the greatest and final sufferers. If they could join hands all over the world and say ‘There shall be no more war!’ – well…there would be no more war.”
“I don’t see why,” said Honor. “The men would make war all the same if they wanted to – as they would.”
“Not if the women meant what they said, and were prepared to stand by it and all its consequences. Ey!” she said, throwing up her arms in a supplicatory gesture, “I wish I could rouse them to it! It could be done. I’m sure it could be done. And just think what it would mean!”
“It would mean new life and new hope, – a new Heaven and a new Earth,” said Mrs Dare impressively. “It would be a Second Advent….My dear, it is a wonderful idea….If only it were possible!”
“It is quite possible,” said Alma, with a quiet confidence which impressed even Vic, who gazed at her in wondering amazement, “The idea came to me in the night, as I lay thinking of Con and Ray and the boys, and all the other men-folk of all the other women in the world. And I saw how it all might be done if it only could be done.”
“How then?” asked Vic, impatiently, as Alma fell silent and sat gazing thoughtfully into the fire.
“Why, – in this way. – All men – except the few in every country who hope to benefit by war – want peace. Peace and happiness are the natural and healthy states of life. War is unnatural and unhealthy. It is a lapse. Women crave peace still more, for they are the greatest sufferers by war. Let them unite all over the world -”
“Women don’t unite,” snapped Vic.
“Even for such a trifling thing as the Vote they have shown that they can unite. But when this war is over…it will leave the heart of womanhood all over the world so sore and bruised that, unless I am mistaken in my sex, the women will be ready to do greater things than we have ever dreamed of to prevent a recurrence of such doings….I can imagine a World-Wide Women’s League for Peace; – membership, every right-thinking woman in the whole world -”
“Phew!” whistled Vic. “How’d you get ’em?”
“Easily, I think. That is a detail. I’ll deal with it presently. Such an organisation, pledged to prevent war, would be all-powerful. And, if it could do this greatest thing of all, it would naturally have its say in all the minor matters which, through men’s mishandling and easily-roused passions, so often lead to war.”
“You’re a suffragette, Alma,” said Vic.
“I detest them and all their ways, as you very well know. But the greater necessarily includes the less. Let women ensure peace, and they will be accorded their rightful voice in all the smaller matters. Be sure of that.”
“And how would they go to work to ensure peace?” asked Mrs Dare.
“Perhaps my vague ideas will seem rather crazy to you. But they are something like this. Imagine the women of the world pledged to keep the peace at risk even of their lives. Two nations verge on war. To the women that means loss in every way – chiefly in the lives that are dearer to them than their own. Very well, – then let them stop it by risking their own lives. It is the smaller risk after all. After exhausting every other means of averting the war, let the women of each such nation rise in their millions and if necessary take their stand between the contending armies and defy their men to fight.”
“Through my heart first!” said Vic.
“Exactly. The Germans, they say, fire on Belgian women and children. Do you think they would mow down their own? Not for all the Kaisers ever heard of. War would stop. But I do not think it would ever come to that final test. Certainly it would never come to it more than once. A thousand women shot down by their own men would create such a revulsion of feeling that wars would end. Telemachus ended the fights in the arena by giving just his single life. Here would be a thousand Telemachuses, – a million if need be!!! If their determination was known, and that it would be persisted in to the very uttermost, – to death itself, – the men would understand that war was impossible, and they would find some other way out. But, mind you, if women had their proper share in the councils of the state their voice would always, on both sides, be for reason and righteousness. It only needs reason and righteousness on both sides to arrive at the proper solution of any
dispute.”
“I wish with all my heart you could bring it about, my dear. It is a grand idea,” said Mrs Dare. “But -”
“How were you thinking of roping all the women of the world in, Al? It’s a mighty big contract,” asked Vic.
“At first it seemed to me that if you could show the militant women how much more likely they were to attain their ends by my ideas than by theirs – they could do it. But I am not sure. They have turned the world against them by their follies. Nobody would trust them. And then, suddenly, I thought of the Salvation Army. I see a good deal of them, you know, round our way. And those gentle-voiced women, with the quiet happy faces and shining eyes – it is just the very work for them. They are in and of every country in the world, and everywhere they are held in esteem. They certainly could do it. Those Salvation Army women could save the world from War.”
“Alma,” said Mrs Dare, with shining eyes and deep conviction. “You lay awake to some purpose, my dear. It is a noble idea. I wish it could be brought about.”
“It could. But whether it can -”
“The Krupps, and all the other war-mongers in every country, would fight you like Death,” said Vic.
“Of course. That is their only raison d’être. But the women could beat the war-mongers.”
E. Merrill Root: We crucify Him still upon a cross of war
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
E. Merrill Root: And they died in what forgotten war?
E. Merrill Root: Drill, like sheep with wolves’ fangs, meek to kill
E. Merrill Root: Military drill. Murder’s witless marionettes.
====
E. Merrill Root
Still the Cross
Cavalry is a continent
Today. America
Is but a vast and terrible
New Golgotha.
The Legion (not of Rome today)
Jests. The Beatitudes
Are called by our new Pharisees
Sweet platitudes.
We tear the seamless robe of love
With great-guns’ lightning-jets;
We set upon His head a crown
Of bayonets.
“Give us Barabbas!” so they cried
Once in Jerusalem:
In Alcatraz and Leavenworth
We copy them.
With pageants and with soldiers still
We march to Golgotha
And crucify Him still upon
A cross of war.
Oh blasphemous and blind! shall we
Rejoice at Eastertide
When Christ is risen but to be
Recrucified?
Vachel Lindsay: Above the Battle’s Front
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
====
Vachel Lindsay
Above the Battle’s Front
St. Francis, Buddha, Tolstoi, and St. John –
Friends, if you four, as pilgrims, hand in hand,
Returned, the hate of earth once more to dare,
And walked upon the water and the land,
If you, with words celestial, stopped these kings
For sober conclave, ere their battle great,
Would they for one deep instant then discern
Their crime, their heart-rot, and their fiend’s estate?
If you should float above the battle’s front,
Pillars of cloud, of fire that does not slay,
Bearing a fifth within your regal train,
The Son of David in his strange array –
If, in his majesty, he towered toward Heaven,
Would they have hearts to see or understand?
…Nay, for he hovers there to-night we know,
Thorn-crowned above the water and the land.
E. J. Peterson, Jr: What youth discerns his shell-rocked tomb?
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
====
E. J. Peterson, Jr.
Our Dead
We have forgotten them, thank God! They fell,
And were forgotten. Now make way, make room
For others. You know how. While the pale bloom
Of youth is on them. Bands, flags, speeches! Tell
Them their country calls. Young breasts will swell
With pride. Then brilliant parades, and camp! Now groom
Them well. What youth discerns his shell-rocked tomb?
Young men were made for war; and the dead for hell.
We have forgotten them, thank God! They died,
And that was all. Be still – we may need more.
The chaplain sobs, and lifts his arms. “Abide
In peace, ye dead. Ye saints of God…and War!”
Pawns, puppets, and a youngster’s broken toys,
Young men were made for war; God bless our boys!
John Oxenham: “War is the devil,” said the man soberly, and hurried on
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
====
John Oxenham
1914
“Is there going to be another war? How ripping!”
“Honor!” said her mother reprovingly.
“Well, I don’t mean that, of course. But a war does make lively papers, doesn’t it? I’m sick of Ireland and suffragettes.”
“If this war comes you’ll be sicker of it than of anything you ever experienced, before it’s over, my dear,” said Mr Dare gravely.
“Why? – Austria and Servia?”
“And Russia and Germany and France and Italy and possibly England.”
“My Goodness! You don’t mean it, Dad?” and she eyed him keenly. “I believe you’re just – er – pulling my leg, as old No would say?” and she plunged again into the paper.
“Bitter fact, I fear, my dear.”
***
“And you really think there is going to be trouble?”
“Uncle Tony is certain we’re in for a general European war, – in fact for Armageddon foretold of the prophets. And the mere chance of it is more than enough to make us want you home.”
***
One stopped for a moment and asked anxiously, “Is it true, then, Herr? Is it war?”
And Ray answered him, “With Servia, yes! How much more no man knows.”
“War is the devil,” said the man soberly, and hurried on.
***
“He has to go to the army. Do you think it will be a bad war, mein Herr?” she asked anxiously.
“All war is bad, mein Frau,” began Ray.
***
“And your country? What will you do?” asked Stecher.
“I do not know. We certainly don’t want war, but if it comes to a general struggle we may be in it too. It is horrible to think of. In these days – all Europe at one another’s throats! It is almost inconceivable.”
Edward Bulwer-Lytton: Was there no glory to be gained in fields more magnificent than those of war?
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
Edward Bulwer-Lytton: Selections on peace and war
====
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Eugene Aram
“The soldier receives his pay, and murthers, and sleeps sound, and men applaud. But you say he smites not for pay, but glory. Granted – though a sophism. But was there no glory to be gained in fields more magnificent than those of war – no glory to be gained in the knowledge which saves and not destroys? Was I not about to strike for that glory, for the means of earning it? Nay, suppose the soldier struck for patriotism, a better feeling than glory, would not my motive be yet larger than patriotism?”
***
“…here, above all, was a castle vigorously besieged; every spot around was the scene of a sally, a conflict, a flight, a pursuit. Where the slaughtered fell, there were they buried. What place is not burial earth in war? How many bones must still remain in the vicinity of that siege, for futurity to discover!”
***
The peace of 1763 had left Prussia in the quiet enjoyment of the glory she had obtained, and the young Englishman took the advantage it afforded him of seeing as a traveller, not despoiler, the rest of Europe.
***
His conversation had in it something peculiar; generally it assumed a quick, short, abrupt turn, that, retrenching all superfluities of pronoun and conjunction, and marching at once upon the meaning of the sentence, had in it a military and Spartan significance, which betrayed how difficult it often is for a man to forget that he has been a corporal.
Thomas Curtis Clark: Our minds can scarce believe our forefathers strove as very beasts, in blood
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Thomas Curtis Clark: Apparitions
Thomas Curtis Clark: Bugle Song of Peace
Thomas Curtis Clark: Who made war?
====
Thomas Curtis Clark
Prospect
War will not always be.
A time will surely come
When men will pause and say;
“In this, the fair today
Our minds can scarce believe
That our forefathers strove
As very beasts, in blood –
Contemned the way of love!
The world took up the sword
And bathed the land in gore;
At one fell, fateful word
Our nation grimly swore
To give its gold, its life,
In never ceasing strife
To slay its haughty foe! –
But that was long ago.”
And other men will say:
“Yes, ’twas a bloody tale –
More ghastly none can know –
But that was long ago.”
Frederic Manning: “Let them as made the war come an’ fight it, that’s what a say.”
====
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
Frederic Manning: Selections on war
====
Frederic Manning
The Middle Parts of Fortune
“Aye,” said Madeley, bitterly; “an’ what good will all your prayin’ do you? If there were any truth in religion, would there be a war, would God let it go on?”
“Some on us blame God for our own faults,” said Pacey, coolly, “an’ it were men what made the war. It’s no manner o’ use us sittin’ ‘ere pityin’ ourselves, an’ blamin’ God for our own fault. I’ve got nowt to say again Mr Rhys. ‘E talks about liberty, an’ fightin’ for your country, an’ posterity, an’ so on; but what I want to know is what all us’ns are fightin’ for…”
“We’re fightin’ for all we’ve bloody got,” said Madeley, bluntly.
…”A tell thee, that all a want to do is to save me own bloody skin. An’ the first thing a do, when a go into t’ line, is to find out where t’ bloody dressing-stations are; an’ if a can get a nice blighty, chaps, when once me face is turned towards home, I’m laughing. You won’t see me bloody arse for dust. A’m not proud. A tell thee straight. Them as thinks different can ‘ave all the bloody war they want, and me own share of it, too.”
….
“Let them as made the war come an’ fight it, that’s what a say.”
“That’s what I say, too,” said Glazier, a man of about Madeley’s age, with an air of challenge. Short, stocky, and ruddy like Madeley, he was of coarser grain….”Why should us’ns fight an’ be killed for all them bloody slackers at ‘ome? It ain’t right. No matter what they say, it ain’t right. We’re doin’ our duty, an’ they ain’t, an’ they’re coinin’ money while we get ten bloody frong a week. They don’t care a f- about us. Once we’re in the army, they’ve got us by the balls. Talk about discipline! They don’t try disciplinin’ any o’ them f- civvies, do they? We want to put some o’ them bloody politicians in the front line, an’ see ’em shelled to shit. That’d buck their ideas up.”
“I’m not fightin’ for a lot o’ bloody civvies,” said Madeley, reasonably. “I’m fightin’ for myself an’ me own folk. It’s all bloody fine sayin’ let them as made the war fight it. ‘Twere Germany made the war.”
“A tell thee,” said Weeper, positively, “there are thousands o’ poor buggers, over there in the German lines, as don’ know, no more’n we do ourselves, what it’s all about.”
E. Merrill Root: And they died in what forgotten war?
====
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
E. Merrill Root: Drill, like sheep with wolves’ fangs, meek to kill
E. Merrill Root: Military drill. Murder’s witless marionettes.
E. Merrill Root: We crucify Him still upon a cross of war
====
E. Merrill Root
The Mountain of Skeletons
A mountain strikes into a clouded sky,
Abrupt and black. Its crags are cold and bare
Like rocks of ice. No voice comes there, no foot;
But the wind wanders there.
The wind walks there and whispers as of old,
And runs like ghostly packs of wolves that wail
And follow forever fleshless thru the dark
Some phantom trail.
Like giant cobwebs on the flinty crags
Bones glint and glimmer palely thru the dark;
Skulls wag and tinkle, stirred by winds whose tread
They have no ears to mark.
A thousand brittle skeletons lie there:
Rust long has eaten the iron of their spears;
The very jackals that once ate their flesh
Are dead a hundred years.
They slowly break beneath the feet of time
Nearer to dust. Some day they’ll gleam no more.
But Oh! what people are they? And they died
In what forgotten war?
Edward Bulwer-Lytton: From the soldier’s mouth
====
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
Edward Bulwer-Lytton: Selections on peace and war
====
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Eugene Aram
As a diplomatist and a statesman, he was of the old and erroneous school of intriguers; but his favourite policy was the science of conciliation. He was one who would so far have suited the present age, that no man could better have steered a nation from the chances of war; James the First could not have been inspired with a greater affection for peace….
***
“Must a man who follows a profession, necessarily cheat, then?”
“Baugh! can your honour ask that? Does not the Lawyer cheat? and the Doctor cheat? and the Parson cheat, more than any? and that’s the reason they all takes so much int’rest in their profession – bother!”
“But the soldier? you say nothing of him.”
“Why, the soldier,” said the Corporal, with dignity, “the private soldier, poor fellow, is only cheated; but when he comes for to get for to be as high as a corp’ral, or a sargent, he comes for to get to bully others, and to cheat. Augh! then ‘tis not for the privates to cheat, – that would be ‘sumpton indeed, save us!”
“The General, then, cheats more than any, I suppose?”
“‘Course, your honour; he talks to the world ‘bout honour an’ glory, and love of his Country, and sich like – augh! that’s proper cheating!”
***
“After all, Bunting, a little skirmish would be no bad sport – eh? – especially to an old soldier like you.”
“Augh, baugh! ‘tis no pleasant work, fighting, without pay, at least; ‘tis not like love and eating, your honour, the better for being, what they calls, ‘gratis!’”
“Yet I have heard you talk of the pleasure of fighting; not for pay, Bunting, but for your King and Country!”
“Augh! and that’s when I wanted to cheat the poor creturs at Grassdale, your honour….”
John Oxenham: The Reaper
====
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
John Oxenham: The Stars’ Accusal
John Oxenham: Thank God For Peace!
====
John Oxenham
The Reaper
All through the blood-red Autumn,
When the harvest came to the full;
When the days were sweet with sunshine,
And the nights were wonderful, –
The Reaper reaped without ceasing.
All through the roaring Winter,
When the skies were black with wrath,
When earth alone slept soundly,
And the seas were white with froth, –
The Reaper reaped without ceasing.
All through the quick of the Spring-time,
When the birds sang cheerily,
When the trees and the flowers were burgeoning,
And men went wearily, –
The Reaper reaped without ceasing.
All through the blazing Summer,
When the year was at its best,
When Earth, subserving God alone,
In her fairest robes was dressed, –
The Reaper reaped without ceasing.
So, through the Seasons’ roundings,
While nature waxed and waned,
And only man by thrall of man
Was scarred and marred and stained, –
The Reaper reaped without ceasing.
How long, O Lord, shall the Reaper
Harry the growing field?
Stretch out Thy Hand and stay him,
Lest the future no fruit yield! –
And the Gleaner find nought for His gleaning.
Thy Might alone can end it, –
This fratricidal strife.
Our souls are sick with the tale of death,
Redeem us back to life! –
That the Gleaner be glad in His gleaning.
Frederic Manning: From tragic heroes to mere derelicts in a wrecked and dilapidated world
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
Frederic Manning: Selections on war
====
Frederic Manning
The Middle Parts of Fortune
He was thinking of his wife and children, of the comparative security in which he had left them, and of what their fate might be in the worst event; but war is a jealous god, destroying ruthlessly his rivals.
***
They had nothing; not even their own bodies, which had become mere implements of warfare. They turned from the wreckage and misery of life to an empty heaven, and from an empty heaven to the silence of their own hearts.
***
In the last couple of days their whole psychological condition had changed: they had behind them no longer the moral impetus which thrust them into action, which carried them forward on a wave of emotional excitement, transfiguring all the circumstances of their life so that these could only be expressed in the terms of heroic tragedy, of some superhuman or even divine conflict with the powers of evil; all that tempest of excitement was spent, and they were now mere derelicts in a wrecked and dilapidated world, with sore and angry nerves sharpening their tempers, or shutting them up in a morose and sullen humour from which it was difficult to move them.
***
Men had reverted to a more primitive stage in their development, and had become nocturnal beasts of prey, hunting each other in packs: this was the uniformity, quite distinct from the effect of military discipline, which their own nature had imposed on them.
***
“You’d think these Frenchies had lived in a war for years, and years, and years,” said Johnson.
“Well, you do get accustomed to it, don’t you?” replied Bourne. “It seems to me sometimes as though we had never known anything different. It doesn’t seem real, somehow; and yet it has wiped out everything that came before it. We sit here and think of England, as a lot of men might sit and think of their childhood. It is all past and irrecoverable, but we sit and think of it to forget the present. There were nine of us practically wiped out by a bomb this morning, just outside our window, and we have already forgotten it.”
Hermann Hagedorn: The Pyres
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Hermann Hagedorn: Selections against war
====
Hermann Hagedorn
The Pyres
Pyres in the night, in the night!
And the roaring yellow and red.
Trooper, trooper, why so white?
We are out to gather our dead.
We have brought dry boughs from the bloody wood
And the torn hill-side;
We have felled great trunks, wet with blood
Of brothers that died;
We have piled them high for a flaming bed,
Hemlock and ash and pine for a bed,
A throne in the night, a throne for a bed —
And we go to gather our dead.
There where the oaks loom, dark and high,
Over the sombre hill,
Body on body, cold and still,
Under the stars they lie.
There where the silver river runs,
Careless and calm as fate,
Mowed, mowed by the terrible guns,
The stricken brothers wait.
There by the smoldering house, and there
Where the red smoke hangs on the heavy air,
Under the ruins, under the hedge,
Cheek by cheek at the forest-edge;
Back to breast, three men deep,
Hearing not bugle or drum,
In the desperate trench they died to keep,
Under the starry dome they sleep,
Murmuring, “Brothers, come!”
This way! I heard a call
Like a stag’s when he dies.
Under the willows I saw him fall.
Under the willows he lies.
Give me your hand. Raise him up.
Lift his head. Strike a light.
This morning we shared a crust and a cup.
He wants no supper to-night.
Take his feet. Here the shells
Broke all day long,
Moaning and shrieking hell’s
Bacchanalian song!
Last night he helped me bear
Men to hell’s fêting.
To-morrow, maybe, somewhere,
We, too, shall lie waiting.
Pyres in the night, in the night!
Weary and sick and dumb,
Under the flickering, faint starlight
The drooping gleaners come.
Out of the darkness, dim
Shadowy shadow-bearers,
Dragging into the bale-fire’s rim
Pallid death-farers.
Pyres in the night, in the night!
In the plain, on the hill.
No volleys for their last rite.
We need our powder – to kill.
High on their golden bed,
Pile up the dead!
Pyres in the night, in the night!
Torches, piercing the gloom!
Look! How the sparks take flight!
Stars, stars, make room!
Smoke, that was bone and blood!
Hark! The deep roar.
It is the souls telling God
The glory of war!
H. M. Tickener: What of the empires that are built on beds of dead men’s bones?
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
====
H. M. Tickener
The Reddened Road
What of the empires that are built on beds of dead men’s bones,
What of the piles of princely pomp, the palaces and thrones?
With none to blow the bugle blast to call the dogs of war,
Who would then mark to murder those they never met before?
One peasant lad, who plows the field where grows the golden corn,
Is nobler breed than all the whelps the wolves of war have borne,
One song sung by some genial soul along some sheltered glade
Shall hush some day the savage shock that warrior’s guns have made.
One gleam of love that suckling babe in mother’s eyes beheld,
Shall silence yet the threats of doom that tyrant’s hate has yelled;
One word of brotherhood and peace, one breath of fragrant flowers,
These be the things of truest worth in this old world of ours.
Frederic Manning: Out of one bloody misery into another, until we break
====
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
Frederic Manning: Selections on war
====
Frederic Manning
The Middle Parts of Fortune
…the air was alive with the rush and flutter of wings; it was ripped by screaming shells, hissing like tons of molten metal plunging suddenly into water, there was the blast and concussion of their explosion, men smashed, obliterated in sudden eruptions of earth, rent and strewn in bloody fragments, shells that were like hellcats humped and spitting, little sounds, unpleasantly close, like the plucking of tense strings, and something tangling his feet, tearing at his trousers and puttees as he stumbled over it, and then a face suddenly, an inconceivably distorted face, which raved and sobbed at him as he fell with it into a shell hole.
***
He is, perhaps, the victim of an illusion, like all who, in the words of Paul, are fools for Christ’s sake; but he has seen one man shot cleanly in his tracks and left face downwards, dead, and he has seen another torn into bloody tatters as by some invisible beast, and these experiences had nothing illusory about them: they were actual facts. Death, of course, like chastity, admits of no degree; a man is dead or not dead, and a man is just as dead by one means as by another; but it is infinitely more horrible and revolting to see a man shattered and eviscerated, than to see him shot. And one sees such things; and one suffers vicariously, with the inalienable sympathy of man for man.
***
&A man dies and stiffens into something like a wooden dummy, at which one glances for a second with a furtive curiosity. Suddenly he remembered the dead in Trones Wood, the unburied dead with whom one lived, he might say, cheek by jowl, Briton and Hun impartially confounded, festering, fly-blown corruption, the pasture of rats, blackening in the heat, swollen with distended bellies, or shrivelling away within their mouldering rags; and even when night covered them, one vented in the wind the stench of death. Out of one bloody misery into another, until we break.
Demosthenes: The arithmetic of war and peace
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Greek and Roman writers on war and peace
Demosthenes: When war comes home, the fatal weaknesses of states are revealed
====
Demosthenes
Against Aristocrates
Translated by J. H. Vince
…it is inconceivable that Cersobleptes would ever deliberately provoke your enmity be trying to rob you of the Chersonesus, because, even if he should take it and hold it, it will be of no use to him. Indeed, when that country is not at war, its revenue is no more than thirty talents, and when it is at war, not a single talent. On the other hand, the revenue of his ports, which, in the event supposed, would be blockaded, is more than two hundred talents. They wonder – as they will put it – what he could possibly mean by preferring small revenues and a war with you, when he might get larger returns and be your friend.
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…everybody who attempts improper enterprises for the sake of aggrandizement is apt to look, not to the difficulties of his task, but to what he will achieve if successful.
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You cannot but know how all these mercenary officers seize upon free Hellenic cities, and try to dominate them. They march about through country after country as the common enemies, if the truth must be told, of every man whose wish is to reside constitutionally and as a free man in his own fatherland.
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I say it is not the part of sane men either to put such confidence in a man, whenever they imagine him to be friendly, as to deprive themselves of all defense against possible aggression, or, on the other hand, when they regard anyone as an enemy, to hate him so fiercely that, if he ever wants to reform and be their friend, they have taken it out of his power to do so. But we should, I think, carry both our friendship and our hatred only so far as not to exceed the due measure in either case.
Louis Couperus: “There’s war, injustice. And what do we do? Nothing.”
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Dutch writers on war and peace
Louis Couperus: Peace! The pure, immaculate ideal suddenly streamed like a silver banner.
Louis Couperus: The peace speech
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Louis Couperus
The Twilight of the Souls
Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
“Lord, my dear chap, there’s blood sticking to everything; the world is nothing but mean selfishness and hypocrisy; there’s war, injustice and all sorts of rottenness; and we know it’s there and we condemn it and we feel pity for everything that is trampled underfoot and sucked dry….And what do we do? Nothing. I do just as little as the great powers do. The Tsar does nothing; there’s not a government, not an individual that does a thing. You don’t do anything either….Meanwhile, there is war, there is injustice, not only in South Africa, but everywhere, Gerrit, everywhere: you’ve only to go outside and you’ll come upon injustice in the Hoogstraat; you’ve only to go travelling and get black with grime and dirt…and you’ll find injustice everywhere….And, meanwhile, that idea is stirring in this filthy world of ours: the idea of pity….And, just as I am powerless, everything and everybody is powerless….”
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Such a fiend is an army
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Selections on war
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Thomas Babington Macaulay
A Conversation between Mr Abraham Cowley and Mr John Milton, touching the Great Civil War
“It was believed, of old, that there were some devils easily raised but never to be laid; insomuch that, if a magician called them up, he should be forced to find them always some employment; for, though they would do all his bidding, yet, if he left them but for one moment without some work of evil to perform, they would turn their claws against himself. Such a fiend is an army. They who evoke it cannot dismiss it. They are at once its masters and its slaves. Let them not fail to find for it task after task of blood and rapine. Let them not leave it for a moment in repose, lest it tear them in pieces.”
Upton Sinclair: The real horrors of war didn’t begin until it was over
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Upton Sinclair: Selections on war
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Upton Sinclair
World’s End
The battle of Ypres was opened by the British firing a hundred and ten million dollars’ worth of ammunition.
“Jesse is an out-and-out revolutionist. He blames all the trouble on big financiers trying to grab colonies and trade. He says they use the governments for their own purposes; they start wars when they want something, and stop them when they’ve got it.”
…the head of the European sales department of Budd Gunmakers went on to remind his son that this was a war of profits. “I am making them myself,” he said.
“It’s not too much to say that every man who died at Verdun, and everyone who has died since then, has been a sacrifice to those business men who own the newspapers and the politicians of France….”
It was the first great loss of his life. He had to wrestle it out with himself – and he knew that he hated this war, and all wars, now and for ever; just as Beauty had done in the beginning, and as Robbie still did in the depths of his heart, though he had stopped saying it.
Poor, proud, defiant, impatient aesthete, he was going to be a pitiful, nerve-shaken cripple; his wife would be one of those devoted souls – millions of them all over Europe – who were glad to get even part of a husband back again, and have that much safe from the slaughterman’s axe.
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Mr. Tarbell, the banker, spoke in a slow and heavy voice, “It is being reported that Mr. Baldwin has talked in a way to indicate that he is out of sympathy with the war. Has he said anything of the sort to you?”
“Do you mean privately, or in class?”
“I mean either.”
‘‘In class I have never heard him mention the war. Privately he has sometimes agreed with things I have said to him.”
“What have you said to him?”
“ I have said it’s a war for profits, and that for this reason I find it hard to give it any support.”
‘‘What reason can you have for saying that it’s a war for profits?”
“I have seen the evidence, sir.”
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This summer everybody was supposed to be absorbed in war work. The business men went to their offices early and stayed late. The women spent their spare time rolling bandages, knitting socks and sweaters, or attending committee meetings where such activities were planned. But there were a few whom these efforts did not satisfy; perhaps their hearts were not in the killing of ‘their fellow human beings, or in arousing the killing impulse in others.
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The young lieutenant was asked to what unit he belonged and what service he had seen. When he said that he had been through the Meuse-Argonne – well, it was no great distinction, for more than a million others could say the same, not counting fifty thousand or so who would never speak of that, or anything else. The conversation turned to that six weeks’ blood-bath, hailed as a glory in the press at home. What was the real truth about it?…
After listening to such conversation, Lanny and his friend strolled down the Champs-Élysée, between the mile-long rows of captured cannon, and for the first time and the last the lieutenant was moved to “open up” to his friend. “My God, Lanny!” he exclaimed. “Imagine fifty thousand lives being wiped out because two generals were jealous of each other!”
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There were tears in Beauty’s eyes. The poor soul was sending another man away to death! She was living again the partings with Marcel; and the fact that Kurt was fighting on the other side made no difference whatever. ‘‘Oh, God!” she exclaimed. “Will there never come a time on this earth when men stop killing one another?”
She said that apparently the real horrors of war didn’t begin until it was over.
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For peace, against war: literary selections 
