What a lovely war

Oh! What a Lovely War! is best known today as the title of Richard Attenborough’s 1969 film that used popular songs of the First World War to depict the pointless waste of war.  The film’s title came from a song written in 1917 by J. P. Long and Maurice Scott:  “Somewhat satirical it quickly established itself as a soldier’s favourite.”*  In the original music hall tune (which can be heard at this link), a soldier sings,

When does a soldier grumble?  When does he make a fuss?
No one is more contented in all the world than us.
Oh it’s a cushy life, boys, really we love it so:
Once a fellow was sent on leave and simply refused to go.

Chorus:

Oh, oh, oh it’s a lovely war.
Who wouldn’t be a soldier, eh?  Oh it’s a shame to take the pay.
As soon as reveille has gone we feel just as heavy as lead,
but we never get up till the sergeant brings our breakfast up to bed.
Oh, oh, oh, it's a lovely war.

One year before the British music hall song was penned, French poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote the short poem “L’adieu du cavalier.” Its first line, translated in English, reads, “Oh God! What a lovely war.”

The Cavalier’s Farewell	L’adieu du cavalier
Oh God! What a lovely war With its hymns its long leisure hours I have polished and polished this ring The wind with your sighs is mingling Farewell! The trumpet call is sounding He disappeared down the winding road And died far off while she Laughed at fate’s surprises.	Ah Dieu ! que la guerre est jolie Avec ses chants ses longs loisirs Cette bague je l'ai polie Le vent se mêle à vos soupirs Adieu ! voici le boute-selle Il disparut dans un tournant Et mourut là-bas tandis qu'elle Riait au destin surprenant
—Guillaume Apollinaire,                   trans. by Anne Hyde Greet

Martin Sorrell, Emeritus Professor of French at Exeter University, argues unlike the music hall tune, the first line of “A Cavalier’s Farewell” isn’t ironic at all, but rather speaks of “two opposite and simultaneous truths.” Sorrell asks us to recognize that Apollinaire’s “amazing gift was to embrace opposites within a single poem, a single stanza, even a single line.”**

As the soldier says goodbye to his home and his lover, the poem holds in tension the war’s beginning and its aftermath, as well as the widely differing experiences of men and women. War is both hushed and shrill, leisurely and demanding, glorious and tragic – and perhaps above all, entirely unpredictable.

Those wishing to learn more about Apollinaire’s war poetry may enjoy previous posts on this blog:  “Nothing Much” and “Post Card.” (The photo at the right was taken during the war of Apollinaire and Madeleine Pagès.)

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* “Vintage Audio: Oh! It’s a Lovely War,” firstworldwar.com.

** Martin Sorrell, “Ah Dieu! Apollinaire. 9 November 1918” Fortnightly Review, http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2011/11/ah-dieu-apollinaire-9-november-1918/, posted 9 Nov. 2011.

Nothing Much

Apollinaire (wounded)

The French soldier Guillaume Apollinaire was thirty-five when he volunteered for military service in December of 1914. Born as the illegitimate son of a Russo-Polish woman who lived in Rome's Vatican, Apollinaire moved to Paris in his twenties, was arrested (wrongly) for the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, and counted among his artist friends and collaborators Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and Pablo Picasso. In both his life and art, Apollinaire was a freethinking, bohemian adventurer.

In a poem written shortly after war broke out, Apollinaire wrote, “Nations hurled together so they might learn to know one another,” and as poet Tony Hoagland remarks, “Apollinaire's definition of war as a kind of terrible blind date is comic, cosmic, and, on one level, terribly true.”* Restless and intense, Apollinaire's poem “Nothing much” (in French, “Peu de chose”) races from thought to thought with the rapidity of machine-gun fire, mirroring the surreal nature of everyday life in a war zone.

Nothing Much                                                      Peu de chose

How many d’you reckon we’ve killed                    Combien qu’on a pu en tuer
Christ                                                                  Ma foi
It’s weird it doesn’t affect us                                 C’est drôle que ça ne vous fasse rien
Christ                                                                  Ma foi
A slab of chocolate for our German friends Une tablette de chocolat aux Boches
Fire by Christ                                                      Ma foi Feu
A camembert for their gunners                              Un camembert pour le logis aux Boches
Fire by Christ                                                      Ma foi Feu
Each time you say fire! the word                           Chaque fois que tu dis feu! Le mot
      becomes steel that explodes far off                      se change en acier qui éclate là-bas
Christ                                                                 Ma foi
Take cover                                                          Abritez-vous
Christ                                                                 Ma foi
Kra                                                                     Kra
The bastards are answering back                           Ils répondent les salauds
Strange language by Christ                                  Drôle de langage ma foi

           --Guillaume Apollinaire, trans. Martin Sorrell

The poem begins with a casual question, tossed over the shoulder to a comrade while staring at the enemy’s trenches, or perhaps muttered over a shared cigarette during an artillery barrage. Almost immediately, the conversation is interrupted by the cry of “Christ,” the name both an obscenity and a prayer, its contradictory meanings simultaneously true. Under fire, men experience multiple moments in a heartbeat, and diverse realties clash in sudden violence.

Stereoscopic photo

The tone of the poem is jumpy and uneven, mimicking the jerky movements of soldiers in early silent films and the twitching nerves that come from living under shellfire. The abrupt shifts in thought also reflect the men’s sense of chaos and dislocation. With nearly all punctuation removed from the poem, normal coherence and meaning making are also a struggle. Both the poem and the war have created an uncertain and ever-changing world.

Although constantly interrupted, the French soldiers reflect upon the ways the war is affecting their psyches: even as they kill countless other men, they curiously note that nothing seems to have changed, either in the war or in themselves. The men toy with the idea of offering chocolate and camembert to their German enemies, perhaps recalling the spontaneous exchange of food and drink during the Christmas Truce of 1914. And yet interrupting the consideration of these gift is the order, “Fire, by Christ!”  Any imagined reconciliation with the enemy is disrupted by the sharing of an altogether different kind of gift that is blasted into the lines of the German ‘friends.’ The command – fire! – is itself a weapon as “the word becomes steel that explodes far off.” Each blast of artillery begins with language, and in this war, words are twisted and used to prolong the suffering. It is no wonder that even a casual conversation between soldiers is shot through with uneasy tension.

French war poster

The Germans “answer back” in this strange language of war. Up and down the Front, the guns speak with their own voices, often drowning out the whispers, muttered curses, and talk of the soldiers. Cannons roar, rifles bark, and nothing can be heard above the answering volley of the enemy’s fire. A strange language indeed.

Perhaps most unsettling is the poem’s title, “Nothing much,” or in the French, “Peu de chose.” The title makes light of the horrors of war, proclaiming that they are, after all, “nothing much.” Perhaps the greatest violence done to the men is that they have been made numb to the terror and death that surround them.
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* Tony Hoagland, “I Seem to Be at a Great Feast: The War Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire,” American Poetry Review, July/August 2014.

Fading Post Cards

Postcard from Picasso to Apollinaire, 1918*

 War constantly reminds both soldiers and those who love them that life is short and change is constant.  The brief, six-line poem "Post Card," by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, delicately illustrates the beauty and terror of living moment to moment. 

Post Card

I write to you beneath this tent

A Star Shell, CW Nevinson

While summer day becomes a shade

And startling magnificent

Flowers of the cannonade

Stud the pale blue firmament

And before existing fade.

            Translated from the French by Oliver Bernard

Everything in the poem is fleeting: blink and you might miss the moment when twilight turns to night and the summer day becomes a "shade," a punning play on the two meanings of the word, evoking both evening shadows and ghosts. 

Like fireworks, artillery shells light the sky, startling in their unexpected flashes and in the magnificence of the air-born explosions.  Many soldiers wrote home and described the haunting beauty of the deadly shells; Apollinaire condenses the thought into a single image, comparing the cannonade to flowers in bloom. 

The brief poem doesn't march to a conclusion, but rather gently dies out: the illumination fades before it ever really existed.  Only two rhymes are used in the poem, and the poet is sparing even in his use of syllables:  the first three-lines contain eight syllables each, while the last three lines subside to only seven syllables.  It is as if the scene of the poem appears for only a second in the light of a candle before it is snuffed out.  Life in wartime is ephemeral, and ironically, the postcards written during the First World War have become collectible ephemera. 

Apollinaire mailed the poem "Post Card" to his friend Andre Rouveyre on August 20^th, 1915.  Wounded by shrapnel in March of 1916, Apollinaire never fully recovered, and he died of the Spanish flu on November 9^th, 1918, just two days before the war ended. 

Apollinaire, wounded 1916

*An actual postcard sent from Picasso to Apollinaire in 1918 was sold in June of 2015 for the record amount of $188,000.  Ironically, Apollinaire never received the postcard, and it was marked "return to sender."