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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
French writers on war and peace
Georges Duhamel: Selections on war
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Georges Duhamel
From The Heart’s Domain (La Possession du monde) (1919)
Translated by Eleanor Stimson Brooks
Georges Duhamel: The demon of war had imprisoned us under his knee
Anti-bellum 
WW1. The Great War. On 30 October, Ernest Makins, a British brigadier, described heavy fighting between his and German troops in the outskirts of Zandvoorde, south-east of Ypres: “A bad day,” he wrote in his diary. “A fearful hell of shelling and we fairly catch it.” Stadler could not add his account of the day: a British shell had killed him in the same skirmish.
He had written in “Der Aufbruch”:
At day’s end, perhaps, paeans for us would play,
Perhaps under the dead somewhere stretched out we lay,
Yet before the stir to arms and before to earth we sink
Full and gleaming our eyes would of the world and sunlight drink.
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