If there were guilty men, mankind would have resisted the compulsion to fight heroically for such a shallow cause! There would have been a concerted reaction against those who ordered it. But those men are not tyrants. Their mindset is cut from the same cloth as that of the masses. We are all isolated. We each suffer our own pain and it doesn’t flare up in others. And we don’t flare up at the contrast between our daily sacrifice and the profit — the cruel profit — others gain from it. Tyrants would yield to insurrection. But time after time we would have replaced them with new tyrants from within ourselves. For we all submit to the petty tyranny — not of the autocrat but of the machine. The revolver is powerless against mechanized warfare. Unlike William Tell’s crossbow, which slew the tyrant Gessler, the bullet simply bounces back. We’re trapped by our own inventions, and what threatens our backs is not the machine gun, but the unholy miracle that such a thing exists. Our enterprise loses the name of action because of threats of our own creation.
No single person can reverse the process by commanding us to destroy our weapons! Can I speak in a European forum? Thus you will be forced to go on dying for something to which you attach the name of honour or Bukovina without knowing what is at stake, for the weaponry itself is in command! What did you die for? If your minds had grasped the contrasts, your bodies would have been spared the torments. Contempt for death? Why should you despise what you don’t know? One may well feel contempt for the life one doesn’t know, that’s true. You will only get to know it when a piece of shrapnel fortuitously doesn’t quite kill you, or when the beast in charge, foaming at the mouth, formerly a human being like yourself, comes down on you like a ton of bricks and you are momentarily conscious of standing on the edge of an abyss. And the beast in charge has the nerve to report that you defied death? And that you didn’t use that moment to shout at your superior that he wasn’t superior to God, and couldn’t order Him to unmake His creation. No, you let him drive you out — claiming God on his side — into that breach where mysteries begin beyond the ken of earthly kingdoms! To which each nation sends its heroes, from which no spy returns! If only you had known, at the moment of your sacrifice, about the war profits accumulating in spite of — no, because of—your sacrifice, growing fat on it! For until this still inconclusive war of machines there have never been such ungodly profits, and you, win or lose, will have lost the war from which your murderers will have profited. Your craven, technically sophisticated murderers who can kill, and live, only at a distance from the scene of their crimes.
From my own circle, Franz Grüner, you pure-hearted friend who followed my writings with eyes raised to the heaven of art, softly and studiously listening to its heartbeat. Why, dear Franz, did you too have to die? I saw you on the day you left. Rain and the dirt of our Austrian Fatherland with its strident music marked your departure as they crammed you into the cattle truck! I see your pale face amid the orgy of filth and lies as we parted so painfully at the freight depot used for “human raw materials”, following the cruel command that mobilizes bodies while paralysing minds, transforming condemned men into the hapless victims of cattle drivers. You looked so out of place, you might have died from the shock of this initiation, compared with which Wallenstein’s Camp seemed like the foyer of a Grand Hotel! For the victims of machines become grimy before they are gory. So began that legendary Italian Journey for you, a student of fine art!
And you, Franz Janowitz, with your noble poet’s heart? Amidst the shrieks of mortars and murderers you devoted yourself to the mysterious music of words. As you spent four years of your springtime underground, were you trying out your future abode? What were you looking for? Lice for the Fatherland? Waiting for the shrapnel to arrive? To prove that, faced with the firepower of the Schneider-Creusot factories, your body was more resistant than that of some soldier from Turin faced with the power of Skoda? Are we merely travelling salesmen for arms factories, compelled to advertise their products not by word of mouth, but by using our bodies to demonstrate the inferiority of the competition? When travellers set out, cripples return! It was bad enough to turn export markets into battlefields. But compelling noble spirits to serve as drudges — the Devil himself would never have dared imagine such a consolidation of his domain. For the Devil would have supported a compromise peace, instead of urging childlike nations more fervently to do his bidding — if one had whispered to him that, in the first year of the war alone, a petroleum refinery would achieve a net profit of 137 percent on its total share-capital and David Fanto 73 percent, the Creditanstalt 19.9 million crowns net profit; and that profiteers would be compensated a hundredfold for the losses of other people’s blood by speculating in meat and sugar and alcohol and fruit and potatoes and butter and leather and rubber and coal and iron and wool and soap and oil and ink and weapons. And that is why you lay in mud and slime for four years, that is why letters from home took so long to arrive, and why books sent to comfort you were delayed. They wanted you still alive, for they had not yet stolen enough on their stock markets, lied enough in their newspapers, or chivvied people enough in government offices; they had not yet whipped mankind into utter frenzy, not yet finished using the war as an excuse for the incompetence and sadism of all their doings, hoping the magnitude of their crimes would exonerate them. They had not danced the last dance and begun their fast at the end of this whole tragic carnival, in which men died before the eyes of a female war correspondent and bloodthirsty generals became honorary doctors of philosophy! And so you lay for weeks on end under mortar fire; were threatened by avalanches; suspended from a rope at 3,000 metres between the enemy barrage and equally devastating “friendly fire”—the treachery of that phrase! — exposed a hundred times to the prolonged torments of the condemned man, often enough without the condemned man’s last meal; forced to experience the deadly clash of man and machine in all its guises — high-explosive mines, barbed-wire entanglements, spiked obstacles, dumdum bullets, bombs, flames, and gases and the seven hells of artillery bombardment — and all because those idiots and profiteers had not yet lost their appetite for war! Exposed to such terrors, you were still expected to remain “fit for service”, assuming that mankind had not been inoculated with enough syphilis to compensate for the death of the imagination?
How much longer are you people at the front, like us at home, expected to keep staring into the graves that we had to dig for ourselves on orders from above? Graves like those the old men in Serbia were forced to dig, for the sole reason that they were Serbs and still alive, and hence suspect! Supposing that our bodies were unscathed, though careworn, impoverished, and aged by this adventure — supposing by the magic of divine retribution we could call them individually to account, those irrepressible conspirators of global crimes: then we would lock them in their churches and, just as they did to the old men in Serbia, have every tenth man draw his death sentence by lot! But then not kill them — no, merely slap their faces! And then address them thus: So, you wretches, you didn’t know, didn’t suspect, that among the millions of horrific and ignominious consequences of a declaration of war would be children without milk, horses without oats, and men blinded by methyl alcohol even though far from the front, if it so suited the strategy of the war profiteers? So, you didn’t ever fathom the misery of even one hour for a man held captive for years on end? Of one sigh of longing for a love which has been defiled, torn asunder, and annihilated. Were you not even able to imagine the glimpse of gaping hell as a mother listens, day and night, waiting for years on end for news — of a hero’s death?