When I think of this word, war, I hide away as if talking about witchcraft, about something distant, finite, abominable, monstrous. When we talk about anthropophagy, we smile with pride when we proclaim our superiority over those savages! Who are the savages, the real savages: those who fight to eat the defeated or those who fight to kill? The little soldiers who run there are destined for death like the flocks of sheep pushed on the roads. They will fall upon a plain, their heads slashed with a sword or their chests pierced by a bullet, yet they are young people who could work, produce, be useful. Their fathers are old and poor, and their mothers, who for twenty years loved them as only mothers could, will learn in six months or a year, perhaps, that the son—the child raised with so much pain, with so much love—was thrown into a hole like a dog.
Horror of war
Belgium, October 26, 1939
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