Back to Nineteen Hundred and Fourteen

I see myself again, on August 3, 14, on Boulevard Sébastopol, in front of the German store of Salamandre, which was beginning to be pillaged. On the floor, there were already a few beautiful pairs of shoes, one of which I wanted. Young civilians waved a flag and sang. Me, I was Zouave, adorned with culottes which would have allowed me to jump over a stool, no higher. Boys shouted (it has often been said): “To Berlin!” But the day before, at the edge of the suburbs, I had heard: “Long live Germany!” What confusion! We were entering a kind of myth, and we were all curious. A little proud too: it is too natural to find your masters boring, or stupid. Finally, we were going to overtake them. We were going to see what they hadn't expected. It was all done well enough to turn the world upside down. I didn't bring any shoes, despite wanting to. Three months later, in the trenches, I still wore the red skirt.

Those who leave today, how wiser they are — and, I think, more wisely led. Finer, fairer no doubt. Quiet: without cries or curiosity. Without looting. Without much surprise. “This alone is clear,” says one: the sadness of those we leave behind.” And the other: “I seem to be waiting for feelings, which will come to me later.” A third: “I have done what I can so far. I will try to do, starting tomorrow, what I must.”
Where they are, we no longer know. May they all live. Long live our country.

Wiser, of course. But of a strange wisdom, made of emptiness and oblivion. Of ignorance, of starting again. Because the masters, after the war, caught up. Never have fighters been less informed, less taught. We have said “untraceable war” of this war which is still looking for its battlefields and seems to be groping. But the thoughts, even more untraceable than the fields.
Never have the Parties – those Parties that a far-sighted democracy places as intermediaries between the truth and us – been more baffled, or more false. One admits to being stunned, as if by an earthquake. The second seriously investigates whether war would not be, despite appearances, a form of peace. If the last one seems the least surprised, it's because he has never had any ideas and takes things as they come.
Even language is lacking to them, and all science. Who would still dare to believe that Hitler is an invention of international finance? That Chamberlain is just an agent of the City? Above all, it seemed that the whole of Europe and the world were divided into two hostile blocs: but here the great leader of fascism and the master of anti-fascism stand embraced.
We would hardly like to think that all democracy is peaceful. — But Hitler is the elected president of a democracy. That there is Hitler on one side, and the Germans on the other. — But to the Germans at least Hitler never lied. He was elected on the program he applies. Don't talk to me about exchange or capital, economics, class struggle, like a political treatise. It's about greed, fury, lies, like in a novel. Of anguish, of allies, of homeland, like in a song.

Perhaps it will take us time to relearn France. I only pray that we are given this time, that we are not deprived of any reason (however obvious or crude). Let no one hide from us, as in 1914, either the names of the heroes or the details of the victories. Let no one prevent us from thinking about war, if we have been poorly taught to predict it. Let nothing be held sacred - even a law, an institution - which cannot be reconsidered on the basis of it. Let us finally see real men in the warriors, not myths.

I don't know which assouille de Lettres wrote, in 1922, that we “had our backs full of veterans”. Of course. But the whole truth must be told. If the veterans made the pretty post-war world sweat, it is because they had received nothing; it is that they were poor, with their uncertain demands of beggars, in an enriched world. And it is not for nothing that we are in a capitalist democracy. Certainly, since the Revolution invented mass levying and compulsory service, soldiers have not lacked compliments. They have genius, of course. And patience, and greatness. And we would even like to be in their place. And especially at the place of the dead. Hugo told them, and Claudel. Passing through Béranger, and through poor Péguy. Never has the warrior seen himself so revered, flattered, adored.
He has never been so poorly rewarded. The magazines which pay for novels, not poems, generally explain to poets that “it's too good to be valued in money”, that it would be diminishing them, and so on. I suppose the poets protest (silently). I suppose the fighters will protest (or at least we will in their place). To the question: “Why are you fighting?” make each of them able to answer: “It is to be happy and honored one day.” Or fear that your complacency, your mistakes and ours will fall on you. Be careful that this wisdom, for which you praise them, makes them more lucid and more inflexible. I regret, all things considered, not having taken the Salamander shoes with me.

October 1939.
(Jean Paulhan, O.C., Tchou)