The Attack on the Mill, and Other Sketches of War

by Émile Zola

Assuredly, war is accursed. It is a horrible thing that nations should cut each other’s throats. According to our progressive humanitarian ideas, war must disappear on the day when nations come to exchange a kiss of peace. There are exalted minds which, beyond their native country, behold humanity, and prophesy universal concord. But how these theories fall to pieces on the day when the country is threatened! The philosophers themselves snatch a gun and shoot. All declarations of fraternity are over; and only a cry for extermination rises from the breast of the whole nation. For war is a dark necessity, like death. It may be that we must have something of a dungheap to keep civilisation in flower. It is necessary that death should affirm life; and war is like those cataclysms of the antediluvian world which prepared the world of man.

We have grown tender; we make moan over every existence that passes away. And yet, do we know how many existences, more or less, are needed to balance the life of the earth? We yield to the idea that an existence is sacred. Perhaps the fatalism of the ancients, which could behold the massacres of old without leaping to a Utopia of universal brotherhood, had a truer greatness. To keep ourselves manly, to accept the dark work wrought by death in that night wherein none of us can read, to tell ourselves that, after all, people die, and that there are merely hours in which they die more—this, when all is said, is the wise man’s attitude. Those who are angry with war should be angry with all human infirmities. The soft-hearted philosophers who have been loudest in their curses of war, have been obliged to perceive that war will be the weapon of progress until the day when, ideal civilisation being attained, all nations join in the festival of universal peace. But that ideal civilisation lies so remote in the blue future, that there will assuredly be fighting for centuries yet. It is the fashionable thing, just now, to consider war as an old remnant of barbarism, from which the Republic will one day set us free. To declaim against war is one way of setting up as a progressive person. But let a single cry of alarm arise upon the frontier, let a trumpet sound in the street, and we shall all be shouting for arms. War is in the blood of man.

Victor Hugo wrote that only kings desired war, that nations desired only to exchange marks of affection. Alas! that was but a poetic aspiration. The poet has been the high-priest of that dream-peace of which I spoke; he celebrated the United States of Europe, he put forward the brotherhood of nations, and prophesied the new golden age. Nothing could be sweeter or larger. But to be brothers is a trifle; the first thing is to love one another, and the nations do not love one another at all. A falsehood is bad, merely in that it is a falsehood. Undoubtedly, a sovereign, when he sees himself in danger, may try the fortune of war against a neighbour, in the hope of consolidating his throne by victory. But after the first victory, or the first defeat, the nation makes the war its own, and fights for itself. If it were not fighting for itself, it would not go on fighting. And what shall we say of really national wars? Let us suppose that France and Germany some day again find themselves face to face. Republic, empire, or kingdom, the Government will count for nothing; it will be the whole nation which will rise. A great thrill will run from end to end of the land. The bugles will sound of themselves to call the people together. There has been war germinating in our midst, in spite of ourselves, these twenty years, and if ever the hour strikes, it will rise, an overflowing harvest, in every furrow.

Three times in my life, I repeat, have I felt the passage of war over France; and never shall I forget the particular sound made by her wings. First of all comes a far-off murmur, heralding the approach of a great wind. The murmur grows, the tumult bursts, every heart beats: a dizzy enthusiasm, a need of killing and conquering takes hold of the nation. Then, when the men are gone and the noise has sunk, an anxious silence reigns, and every ear is on the stretch for the first cry from the army. Will it be a cry of triumph or of defeat? It is a terrible moment. Contradictory news comes; every tiniest indication is seized, every word is pondered and discussed until the hour when the truth is known. And what an hour that is, of delirious joy or horrible despair!

I.

I was fourteen at the time of the Crimean war. I was a pupil in the College of Aix, shut up with two or three hundred other urchins in an old Benedictine convent, whose long corridors and vast halls retained a great dreariness. But the two courts were cheerful under the spreading blue immensity of that glorious Southern sky. It is a tender memory that I keep of that college, in spite of the sufferings that I endured there.

I was fourteen then; I was no longer a small boy, and yet I feel to-day how complete was the ignorance of the world in which we were living. In that forgotten corner, even the echo of great events hardly reached us. The town, a sad, old, dead capital, slumbered in the midst of its arid landscape; and the college, close to the ramparts, in the deserted quarter of the town, slumbered even more deeply. I do not remember any political catastrophe ever passing its walls while I was cloistered there. The Crimean war alone moved us, and even as to that it is probable that weeks elapsed before the fame of it reached us.

When I recall my memories of that time, I smile to think what war was to us country schoolboys. In the first place, everything was extremely vague. The theatre of the struggle was so distant, so lost in a strange and savage country, that we seemed to be looking on at a story come true out of the “Arabian Nights.” We did not clearly know where the fighting was; and I do not remember that we had at any time curiosity enough to consult the atlases in our hands. It must be said that our teachers kept us in absolute ignorance of modern life. They themselves read the papers and learned the news; but they never opened their mouths to us about such things, and if we had questioned them, they would have dismissed us sternly to our exercises and essays. We knew nothing precise, except that France was fighting in the East, for reasons not within our ken.

Certain points, however, stood out clear. We repeated the classic jokes about the Cossacks. We knew the names of two or three Russian generals, and we were not far from attributing to these generals the heads of child-devouring monsters. Moreover, we did not for one moment admit the possibility that the French could be beaten. That would have appeared to us contrary to the laws of nature. Then there were gaps. As the campaign was prolonged, we would forget, for months at a time, that there was any fighting, until some day some report came to arouse our attention again. I cannot tell whether we knew of the battles as they happened, or whether we felt the thrill which the fall of Sebastopol gave to France. All these things were confused. Virgil and Homer were realities which caused us more concern than the contemporary quarrels of nations.

I only remember that for a time there was a game greatly in favour in our playgrounds. We divided ourselves into two camps. We drew two lines on the ground, and proceeded to fight. It was “prisoners’ base” simplified. One camp represented the Russian and one the French army. Naturally, the Russians ought to have been defeated, but the contrary sometimes occurred; the fury was extraordinary and the riot frightful. At the end of a week the superintendent was obliged to forbid this delightful game: two boys had had to be put on the sick list, with broken heads.