Burning Beehives
Portrait of Edmond Rostand by Pascaud, 1901 |
In August of
1914, the Germany army invaded Belgium and pushed into France. Almost
immediately there arose French reports of German war atrocities, including accounts
of rapes, massacres, and the burning of villages. These were later published in
Documents Relating to the War, authored
by the French Commission to establish acts committed by the enemy in violation
of the law of nations (1915).* The book
was translated and reprinted numerous times during the war, appearing in English
in The New York Times Current History of
the European War (1917). In Documents,
one eye-witness tells of a curé who was arrested in the village of Fraimbois. Confronting German officers, the village
priest asked why they had burned his beehives and received the reply, “What do
you expect? It is war!”
Edmond Rostand,
best known for his play Cyrano de
Bergerac, shaped the story into a poem that merges history, fable, and patriotic
political commentary.** An excerpt of
the poem appears below; it can be read in its entirety in French
Poems of the Great War, translated by Ian Higgins.
Burning Beehives
How pleasing:
straight away, they burned some beehives…
O bees,
tumbling, buzzing gold in the blue air,
As long as
you’re aloft they haven’t triumphed,
O last little
glimmer from the golden age!
‘But why ever
are you burning my bees?’
The curé of
Fraimbois asked the German brute.
‘That’s war!’
replied the General. – Yes, war as waged
By the horde on
the buzz and pride of freedom.
Why, then, did
they burn this hive of straw?
Because the hive
at work intoned a psalm
As it fashioned
what resembled sunbeams.
And earlier,
remember, on entering Brussels,
The Chiefs had
issued orders to their thugs
As janissaries†
rush to please their vizier,
So the soldiers
joyed to stamp down the flowers.
That they should
blithely now be burning beehives
Is simple logic:
it is but one short step,
One goose-step,
from trampled flowers to bees in flames.
How they flared
and crackled in the blue air,
And dropped! A
fine sight; and the perfumed wax
Streaming black!
And then, burn a beehive,
And up in smoke
go famous names as well—
Plato, Vergil,
La Fontaine, Maeterlinck—
Alongside the
bees, as if to fade away,
A further fading
out of humanism
To mark the
triumph of the feldgrau lout.
The bee is
spirit visible in light,
A drop of honey
risen on two wings!
How might it
ever find forgiveness from
Such clods? The
bee is instant choice, sureness
Of touch and
taste: briefly floating, exploring—
Then aim,
effort, balance, judgement, skill!
And when the
human mind in wonderment
Sees, deep in a
hive, its own destiny
Mysteriously
sketched out by pure instinct,
To serve the Hun
it is disinclined! Rather
This sweet, free
order than their Discipline!
Yes, hives murmur. – All murmuring will
Yes, hives murmur. – All murmuring will
At once be
shriven, purged and burnt alive!
…………………………………………
‘But why,’ the
poor priest asked, ‘why burn my beehives?’
Pleasing, then,
that to the bees’ good shepherd
The Burner of
bees said ‘That’s war.’ –Their war, yes,
But what of
ours?
In those first, tragic days,
When our troops
were moving north to Belgium,
It is told that
French armoured cavalry
Rode through a
Flemish village – I forget
The name – their
horses festooned with roses,
French cavalry, Paris 1914 |
Singing, as they
rode, the Marseillaise –
But through
their teeth, mouths closed, simply humming;
And it was
magnificent. And this hum
Of Latin anger
from across all those flowers,
Wordless, and
gestureless, was the growl
Of mind and soul,
it was conscience, and reason;
The sound of
storm and oratory, pious,
Threatening, and
with a fierce, golden
Calm. Not a single mouth was seen to move,
As though it
were the flowers themselves that hummed.
And those who
heard it, eyes filled with tears, thought
To hear, in the
reddening evening dust,
Some kind of
strange Marseillaise hummed by bees…
Thus, with
purity and purpose, did our men
Transmute their
warlike anthem into a swarm’s hum,
As north they
rode, prepared for ambush, prepared to die
For beehives and
to save the honey of the world!
--Edmond Rostand, trans. Ian Higgins
Opening with the
bitter irony, the poem condemns the German troops for their rush to destroy life and beauty. In maliciously burning the bees, the invading army has killed
the “last little glimmer from the golden age” and launched the world into the
chaos and horror of modern, industrialized war.
French postcard, © Library of International Contemporary Documentation |
Not only has Rostand associated bees with religious martyrs and the enchantment of the natural world
(“the hive…intoned a psalm/ As it fashioned…sunbeams”), but bees are one of the
oldest symbols of French royalty and power, dating from the Merovingian rulers
of the 5th century and adopted by Napoleon as the emblem of his
reign. Repeatedly, the poem links the industrious, selfless bees with
France and its army: both bees and French troops hum with the “buzz and pride
of freedom,” and both are associated with democracy, culture, industriousness, and peace.
Rostand argues
that to burn a hive is to annihilate the ideals expressed by philosophers and
authors who wrote of the winged insects: bees settled on Plato’s lips when he
was a child; Virgil describes his hopes for Rome’s political renewal in “The
Bees”; La Fontaine’s fable “The Hornets and the Bees” praises the bees for their practical approach to conflict resolution, and Maeterlinck’s Life of
the Bee celebrates their “harmonious concord.”
In burning the
hives, the Germans have shown themselves to be opposed to all that the bees
represent. The poem depicts German troops as earth-bound clods and brutes who
joyfully trample flowers and transform all they touch to ugliness. The
grey-clad soldiers blithely watch as perfumed
beeswax rises in black smoke and as the bees themselves, like a “drop of honey
risen on two wings,” flare, crackle, and fall to the ground.
Rostand’s poem does
not object to the war. Instead, it
commends the poilu for their “purity and purpose.” As they hum the Marseillaise, their national anthem, the men of France are “prepared to die/ For beehives and to
save the honey of the world.”††
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*Documents relatifs á la guerre, by
Commission instituée en vue de constater les actes commis par l’ennemi en
violation du droit des gens.
**For other patriotic
and nationalistic war poems, see “Hymn of
Hate,” “New
Year’s Wishes to the German Army,” “Going to
the Front,” “A
Litany in the Desert,” and “America
at War.”
†Elite troops of the Ottoman Sultan - his household bodyguards (dating from 14th
century).
†† Katharine Tynan’s poem “Telling the Bees” is
another poem that relates bees to the Great War.
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