I am currently reading "Journey to the end of the night" – by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
It's my second war book after All Quiet on the Western front
War books always contains brutal truth about life and war and I want to share a paragraph from this book
‘Oh, Ferdinand! Then you’re an absolute coward! You’re as loathsome as a rat…’
‘Yes, an absolute coward, Lola, I reject the war and everything in it… I don’t deplore it… I just plain reject it and all its fighting men. I don’t want to have anything to do with them or it. Even if there were nine hundred and ninety-five million of them and I were all alone, they’d still be wrong and I’d be right. Because I’m the one who knows what I want: I don’t want to die.’
‘But it’s not possible to reject the war, Ferdinand! Only crazy people and cowards reject the war when their country is in danger…’
‘If that’s the case, hurrah for the crazy people and the cowards! Look, Lola, do you remember a single name, for instance, of any of the soldiers killed in the Hundred Years War?… Did you ever try to find outwho any ofthem were?… No!… You see? You never tried… As far as you’re concerned they’re as anonymous, as indifferent, as the last atom of that paperweight, as your morning bowel movement… Get it into your head, Lola, that they died for nothing! For absolutely nothing, the idiots! I say it and I’ll say it again! I’ve proved it! The one thing that counts is life! In ten thousand years, I’ll bet you, this war, remarkable as it may seem to us at present, will be utterly forgotten… Maybe here and there in the world a handful ofscholars will argue about its causes or the dates ofthe principal hecatombs that made it famous… Up until now those are the only things about men that other men have thought worth remembering after a few centuries, a few years, or even a few hours… I don’t believe in the future, Lola…’
What are your thoughts on this?
You can recommend me some great war books also !
by Book_Lover_fiction
1 Comment
I haven’t read the book, but seen the movie ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ and I thought the beginning bit with the uniform washing was the best anti-war representation.
Planning on reading it myself soon.