Birth of Our Power by Victor Serge Richard Greeman

is the land of lotteries,” cried Eusebio. “Who wouldn’t play his life on the lottery of the barricades? Double or nothing!” We were certainly neither Germanophiles nor Alliadophiles (another term coined by the newspapers). But with each faraway upheaval of the shell-torn soil on the Somme, the Artois, Champagne, or the Meuse, we were better able to hear the foundations of the world cracking. “What a great Paris Commune there will be after the defeat!” Deserters embroidered on the stories of the April mutinies among the immensely weary horizon-blue armies. “There will be a German revolution,” asserted others, who seemed more daring. Germany and Austria were subsisting on chemically prepared foodstuffs, the newspapers proclaimed daily. A French Commune, a German Commune—after the Russian Commune—we could already make out the red flags waving proudly through the haze of the future. They were necessary to reason, to that vague confidence in the universe without which life becomes unthinkable to anyone with his eyes open. And what if the circle of absurdity were not broken? If, after this war, these millions of dead, this disemboweled Europe, we were to know once again the peace of times past with the old, multicolored flags flying over the bone heaps? This city, this country condemned the war from the depths of its soul. The newspapers kept it quiet, for they all lied (and the propaganda bureaus of the belligerents gave them new reasons for lying on the first of every month), but everyone said it. We lived in expectation of a catastrophe which would be at the same time a retribution and a renascence, a rehabilitation of human energies and a new reason for believing in men. The Russian Revolution, the first sign, had revived that universal expectation.
    Couet sometimes wore a pair of heavy infantryman’s boots which marked him out on the streetcars as a deserter. People would stareat him. Once someone asked him: “Deserter? …” He nodded yes, out of defiance. “Ali, you are quite right, young man,” said a well-dressed old man, putting his arm around his shoulder. Another smiled his approval … When, in order to avoid an unnecessary conversation I gave the same answer (falsely, as it happened) to the butcher while he was cutting meat, he immediately wiped his hand clean and held it out to me, cordially … In the factories, the workers were willing to work short weeks in order to keep management from laying off the deserters: those fugitives who, by withdrawing their own lives from the tempest of the Front, seemed to be defending life itself.
    And this city, this country, peaceful, vigorous, happy, voluptuous, laid out along the edge of the brilliant blue sea, listened to the dulled echoes of the artillery barrages, listened to the beating of the exhausted heart of a wounded Europe, and lived on spilled blood—a profitable pasture! We were all working for the war. We were, in the factories, all of us more or less war workers. Clothes, hides, shoes, canned goods, grenades, machine parts, everything, even fruit—the sweet-smelling Valencia oranges—everything that our hands made, worked, manipulated, embellished” was drained off by the war. The faraway war caused factories to be built in this peaceful country, and filled them with workers who often came from the burning fields of Andalusia, the mountains of Galicia, the barren plains of Castille. The war raised salaries. The war unloosed that fever to live and laugh, to maul women on shabby back-room couches, to see the
bailarínas
flitting about, with their naked breasts, in the cabarets; for after the pressure of work it was necessary, in that constant fever of death and madness,
to feel yourself living.
The avidity of men in shirt sleeves turned loose by the factories in the evening, miserable but muscular, without a place to stay Worth sitting under a lamp in, but with a peseta in