Officers, wounded generals, will, of course, receive their pensions “according to rank”, but who is interested in the ordinary private, the former workers, peasant or artisan? Who cares about his fate? Power in the state is not in the hands of the people, but in the hands of the landowners and industrialists, the lords and masters. How much is that? It would hardly pay for one boot for the one leg remaining! She must work for herself and for the “bread-winner”. The wife is trying to do a thousand things at once. The children are ailing war is always accompanied by epidemics, infection. Not a day passes but the cost of living rises. Since when do working people have the time, the leisure, to look after an invalid? Each has his own affairs, his own worries. For a day or two they will fuss around him. He is met with “respect', his mother weeps from both grief and joy: her darling son is still alive, her ageing mother's eyes have beheld him once again. The “hero” who returns to the town fares no better. And the only “respect” the hero gets is to hear his own family reproach him as a parasite who eats the bread of others. Cripple-heroes wander about the village, some with one medal, some with two. They are haggard and starved, worn out with weeping. Taxes must be paid, and there is no one to do the work. The menfolk were dragged off to war, the livestock requisitioned. His village has been reduced to poverty and starvation. The “hero” comes home to his native village or town, and when he arrives he cannot believe his eyes: in place of “respect” and joy he finds waiting for him fresh sufferings and disillusionment. However, in real life things are different. At least now they have won an award! They will be able to walk around wearing their medals! People will respect them! “Heroes,” say those who started a European war, who sent one people out against another, the worker from one country out against his fellow worker from another. Only a few months, weeks, even days later, they were brought back to the infirmaries half dead, crippled. They had set off for the bloody world slaughter-house young, strong, healthy. The war had not yet ended, indeed its end was still not in sight, but the number of cripples was multiplying: the armless, the legless, the blind, the deaf, the mutilated. Scanning, formatting and markup: Christopher Hill and David Walters This edition co-published by International Publishers, New York Printed: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. TsivlinaĬopyright: English translation, introduction, commentary © Progress Publishers 1984 Selected Articles and Speeches, Progress Publishers, 1984 Ĭompiled and commentary: I. Alexandra Kollontai 1915 Who Needs the War?