Last sight

Australian soldiers blinded near Villers-Bretonneux 1918

American writer Helen Mackay was in France when the war broke out. Her diary, later published as Journal of Small Things, records “random memories of a sympathetic friend of France… [and] describes what she saw during the opening stages of the war in Paris and in provincial towns.”*  Struck by the human cost of the war, Mackay describes a dépôt d’éclopés (literally translated as a depot for the lame, the term generally applied to men no longer able to fight). 

            The dépôt d’éclopés is just beyond the town, on the Roman road ….. All day long, and every day, as many of the éclopés as can get about, and do not mind that the road see them, and can find space in the shade of the plane tree, sit there, and look up and down the sunshine and the dust.

            Some of them have one leg, and some of them have one arm. There is one of them who is packed into a short box on wheels. He sits up straight in the box, and he can run it about with his hands on the wheels.  There is another in such a little cart, but that one has to lie on his back, and cannot manage the wheels himself. There is one who lies on a long stretcher, that they fix on two hurdles.

            There are two who are blind. The two blind men sit, and stare and stare…. The two blind men at the gate who stare and stare, they cannot see the golden town or the golden mountains. They cannot see the compassion and the kindness that there is for them in the faces of all those who look upon them.** 

Mackay’s poem “Quinze Vingt,” alludes to the name of the National Ophthalmology Hospital in Paris; the expression was used in French to refer to a blind person.

           

Quinze Vingt

Their last sight was the red sight of battle,

and they will see no other thing,

down all their lives.

They sit in darkness,

and are very silent.

They are all young,

and all their lives they must sit still,

in darkness.

At the door of their house is hopelessness.

Hopelessness waits at the door of their house.

Hopelessness is thick and dense.

It has no wet of tears.

One could take hopelessness in one’s hands,

and make a bandage of it

to bind about one’s eyes.

It would be dry and stiff,

and hurt one’s eyes.

They are all young and strong.

They will have long to live,

and to be blind.

            —Helen Mackay

It is not only blindness that the soldiers must endure “down all their lives,” but the hopelessness that hangs like a coat by the door of any man who attempts to venture out into a world he cannot see.  Outside their homes, the blind, though young and strong, must endure dependency and pity. Losing their sight, they have stumbled into lives of paralyzing vulnerability that stretch as far as their eyes cannot see.

Despite publishing both her journal and a volume of war poetry (London, One November) Mackay struggled with the incomprehensibility of the war, explaining, “I try not to write. The only things worth saying are the things I do not know how to say.”†

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* W.L. Courtney, “Preface,” Journal of Small Things, by Helen Mackay, Duffield and Company, 1917.
 ** Helen Mackay, Journal of Small Things, pp. 42-44.

† Mackay, Journal, p. 35.