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Albert-Paul Granier was a French heavy
artillery gunner at Verdun and the Somme. His poem “La Fièvre” (translated as “Fever”
by Ian Higgins) is an account of one man’s delirious conversation with his own
heart as he imagines his death.
Fever
“Heartbeat, heartbeat, why the rush?
Whither the headlong dash,
where are you taking me,
where is this punishing mad gallop
dragging my disheveled life?”
My heart is racing off, up through the clouds,
over the mountains, across the plains –
not Pécopin* himself, on Satan’s thoroughbred,
flew as swift through all those haunted years
as me, on this runaway heart
careering like a wild stallion.
“Where are
you rushing me, heart?”
“To a white
hospital, in a quiet garden,
women softly rustling through the wards,
and, at nightfall, distant tranquil bells
murmuring a call to evensong;
to a white hospital, and a peaceful death,
a woman’s white hand on your pale brow,
and precious words of comfort on her lips.”
“No,
rampaging heart! No!”
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| French dead at Verdun |
“Fetch my
horse!
-- Sooner the fierce alarm-cry of guns
announcing torrents of thunder-strikes;
and sooner than the nurses’ soft footsteps,
give me merciless flying splintered steel
whizzing invisible just above our heads!
No, heart…
Let
me die beside rearing guns,
in the mad triumph of this great Epic,
die lying here, in the mud and the blood,
my eyes filled with sky, my heart with stars,
here, soothed by the moon’s affectionate caress,
with a great chunk of steel in my chest!
--Albert-Paul
Granier, translated by Ian Higgins
Listening to the soldier’s inner dialogue, we experience the
terror of his madly pounding heart. His life, already dirty and disordered, is recklessly
dragged forward by the fevered racing of his pulse. Like a powerless rider on a dangerous runaway
horse, the man realizes he has lost all control of his future: “where are you
taking me?” he asks the wild stallion that beats ferociously in his chest.
In his feverish imagination, his heart answers his query: his
journey’s end will be a place of quiet and tranquility, of white stillness and
calm. His runaway heart envisions the soldier’s “peaceful death” in a hospital,
blessed by the comforting touch of a woman’s hand as he quietly breathes his
last.
And then the nightmare vision takes an unexpected turn: the soldier
spurns the headlong gallop towards tranquility, shouting, “No, rampaging heart! No!” Instead, he recklessly embraces
the messiness of death in the front lines of battle. It is here, amid the mud, blood, and deafening roar
of the guns, where the chaos of the Great War is transformed into the mad tragedy
of “this great Epic.” There is an honesty
in this death of mutilation and gore – “with a great chunk of steel in my chest.”
As unnatural as these battle deaths are, it is better that they not be
sanitized. The soldier dies alone, but in his last moments, he is deeply
connected to the natural world, his eyes “filled with sky,” his “heart with
stars.”
In December of 1916, Albert-Paul Granier volunteered for the
air service as a reconnaissance pilot. His book of poems Les Coqs et les Vautours was published in Paris in 1917; he was
killed on August 17, 1917 when his plane was shot down over Verdun. He has no
known grave.
Forgotten for nearly 90 years, his poems were discovered in
2008 at a rummage sale in Brittany. The volume has been masterfully translated into
English by Ian Higgins in Cockerels and
Vultures (2013, Saxon books). In his
Foreword to the book, Higgins attributes the power of Granier’s poetry to its “paradoxical
child-like vulnerability and gritty toughness of a generous mind attempting to
encompass and express the unimagined new sorts of nightmare that the war was
flinging at ordinary people day by day” (9).
* Pécopin, a character in the Victor Hugo novel The Story of the Bold Pécopin, makes a
deal with the Devil in hopes of returning to his lover. The Devil keeps Pécopin from his lover for
one-hundred years, compelling him to race around the world on a ghostly
horse.
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