The best-known poems of the First World War, such as those
written by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, strongly protest the war as they
describe the senseless horrors of battle. However, among the voices that
have been forgotten are the popular poems of the day that justified the war, poems
that advocated violence so as to balance the scales of justice. Émile
Cammaerts, a Belgian writer who was living in
London, had tried to enlist when he heard of the invasion of his country, but was denied due to his age. In her biography of her father, Cammaerts’
youngest daughter writes that at thirty-six, he “already had a slight academic
stoop, [and] was painfully thin.”*
Cammaerts turned to verse to express his patriotism and to gain
public support for Belgians who had suffered during the German invasion of
their country. His poem “To My Country
in Bondage” (À Ma Patrie Enchaînée”) concludes,
How long, oh how long,
My own country,
Wilt thou stretch out towards
me
Patiently
Thy bruised hands?
Cammaerts’ 1915 volume of World War I verse, Belgian Poems: Patriotic Songs and Other
Poems, was written in French and translated into English by his British
wife.
New Year’s Wishes to the German Army
New Year’s Wishes to the German Army
(Voeux de Nouvel
an á L’Armée Allemande)
I wish that
every hour of life
May wound your heart.
I wish each step
you take in strife
May burn your
feet.
I wish that you
may be both blind and deaf
That you may
walk all day and night
Beneath a sky
bereft of light,
Seeing no
flowers in the fields,
Hearing no word,
no bird’s sweet song
To mind you of
the wives and children left
Alone at home so
long.
I wish the
soil—our country’s soil—
May open and
become
A quicksand
‘neath your ranks,
And that the
streams—our country’s streams—
May overflow
their banks
And drown your
hosts.
I wish your
nights may poisoned be
By all our
martyrs’ ghosts,
That you may
neither watch nor sleep,
But ever breathe
the smell of blood
By our Holy
Innocents shed.
I wish the ruins
of our homes
May crash above
your head,
That your brain
with anguish reel,
That doubt
confound your rage,
That you may
wander like lost beasts
Before the wild
storm flying…
I wish that you
may live to feel
All we have
suffered of late,
So that God may
spare you the punishment supreme—
His eternal
vengeance and hate.
—Émile
Cammaerts
The speaker of
the poem imagines a future in which the enemy’s soldiers are exiles, condemned
to wander “like lost beasts/Before the wild storm flying” in a land of barren
loneliness. As the men of the German
Army are swallowed by quicksand, drowned in rivers, poisoned by ghosts, and
buried in the collapse of the Belgian homes they occupy, German survivors are
doomed to “ever breathe the smell of blood" shed by Belgian innocents. The poem desperately wishes the German Army
to feel the same fear, suffering, and death as Belgians experienced when the
Germans overran their country.
The poem echoes the message of propagandist war posters of the time, but it is also a poem of hope – hope that the Germans will suffer indescribable torments, but also hope that those torments will provoke German doubt about the rightness of their cause, doubts that will call into question the rage that motivates the German military onslaught. The poem deliberately stops short of wishing eternal damnation on the German soldiers, but instead calls down calamity on their heads that may lead to their repentance — and perhaps an end to the war.
The poem echoes the message of propagandist war posters of the time, but it is also a poem of hope – hope that the Germans will suffer indescribable torments, but also hope that those torments will provoke German doubt about the rightness of their cause, doubts that will call into question the rage that motivates the German military onslaught. The poem deliberately stops short of wishing eternal damnation on the German soldiers, but instead calls down calamity on their heads that may lead to their repentance — and perhaps an end to the war.
Cammaert's
volume of World War I verse, Belgian
Poems: Patriotic Songs and Other Poems, was written in French and translated into
English by his British wife. The couple had six children: their son Pieter was killed in
the Second World War while serving with the British Royal Air Force in 1941.
Pieter’s older brother, Francis, was a pacifist and conscientious objector in
the Second World War, but after the death of his brother he joined British
Special Operations, organizing resistance groups in occupied France to sabotage
German military operations. The Cammaerts’ grandson is Michael Morpurgo, the
British Children’s Laureate and author of the novels War Horse and Private
Peaceful.
* Jeanne Lindley, Seeking and Finding: The Life of Émile Cammaerts, S.P.C.K, 1962, p. 100.
* Jeanne Lindley, Seeking and Finding: The Life of Émile Cammaerts, S.P.C.K, 1962, p. 100.
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