Under a Bloodred Sky

 

Austrian troops advancing in the  Carpathians
(image from Library of Congress)

“How many of you have had the pleasure of seeing your own grave dug?” So begins the first story in Avigor Hameiri’s collection Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry (translated by Peter C. Appelbaum and Dan Hecht).*

Hameiri wrote from the experience of a Jewish soldier fighting for Austria-Hungary on the Eastern Front in the First World War. His poetry is “gruesome and unforgiving” as he documents “the slaughter of an entire generation of Europe’s best and brightest young men,” and his work laments that “nobody in authority seemed to care.”**

Under a Bloodred Sky

Come to me now and caress—
In vain, youth’s song has dried:
Here do I stand, my pale beauty,
Under a bloodred sky.

Come to me now and taunt me—
In vain, here all eyes are blind:
I am occupied here, my pale beauty,
within me millions die.

Come to me now, soft as dew—
In vain, I shall not embrace:
I tread your winepress, my pale beauty,
lest I defile your faded grace.

Come to me now and admonish—
In vain, sanity has escaped my mind;
Here I stand, my pale beauty,
under a bloodred sky.
—Avigdor Feuerstein Hameiri

Almost ballad-like in form, the poem is a lament of loss and despair. The horrors of war have killed the caresses and songs of youth, while men blinded in battle see only death endlessly replayed. God’s judgement is inescapable, as alluded to in the poem's third stanza: “I have trodden the winepress alone, and from the peoples no one was with me; I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my wrath; their lifeblood spattered on my garments, and stained all my apparel” (Isaiah 63:3). Under the bloodred sky of total war, the narrator stands alone and insane, yet still able to recognize that all is hopeless and futile. 

Echoing throughout the collection is the question Hameiri posed in his 1935 speech “On Facism and Its Goal”: “What do you know of the nature of man’s inhumanity to man?”*** In the same address, he challenged his audience, “you cannot even imagine the war that has passed, or the one that is to come.” Hameiri’s war writings are his attempt to address that failure of imagination. Most of the work in Under a Bloodred Sky has not been published since the First World War, and this volume marks the first time Hameiri’s poetry has been translated into English. Chilling and unforgettable, Hameiri’s fiction and poetry is deserving of a much wider audience—those interested in war writing, Jewish literature, and international modernisms.
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* Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry, edited and translated by Peter C. Appelbaum and Daniel Hecht, Academic Studies Press, 2023.
** “Introduction” by Appelbaum and Hecht, Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry, p. 12. 
*** “On Fascism and Its Goal” in Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry, pp. 167 – 173. 

Eastern Front

Austrians on the Eastern Front, Library of Congress

In his history of the First World War, Winston Churchill titled his account of the battles fought on the Eastern Front The Unknown War.  Largely forgotten in English-speaking countries, the war on the Eastern Front was as strategically important and as deadly as the battles waged in the West.  On the Eastern Front, even conservative estimates state that over 3.5 million soldiers died and as many as 2 million civilians.

Just months after the war began in the early autumn of 1914, Georg Trakl, a young Austrian poet and pharmacist, joined the Austro-Hungarian army as a medical officer and was posted to the Austro-Hungarian province of Galacia (what is today part of the Ukraine and Poland). Even before the war, Trakl had battled drug addiction and suicidal tendencies.  What he witnessed on the Eastern Front in Galacia inspired some of the most haunted poetry of the war.

Eastern Front                                                                           Im Osten

The wrath of the people is dark,                                  Den wilden Orgeln des Wintersturms

Like the wild organ notes of winter storm,                  Gleicht der Volkes finstrer Zorn,

The battle’s crimson wave, a naked                             Die purpurne Woge der Schlacht,

Forest of stars.                                                              Entlaubter Sterne.

With ravaged brows, with silver arms                         Mit zerbrochnen Brauen, silbernen Armen

To dying soldiers night comes beckoning.                  Winkt sterbenden Soldaten die Nacht.

In the shade of the autumn ash                                    Im Schatten der herbstlichen Esche

Ghosts of the fallen are sighing.                                  Seufzen die Geister der Erschlagenen.

Thorny wilderness girdles the town about.                 Dornige Wildnis umgürtet die Stadt.

From bloody doorsteps the moon                               Von blutenden Stufen jagt der Mond

Chases terrified women.                                              Die erschrockenen Frauen.

Wild wolves have poured through the gates.              Wilde Wölfe brachen durchs Tor.

            (trans. Christopher Middleton)

In his book on Trakl’s poetry, James Wright says, “patience is the clue to the understanding of Trakl’s poems. One does not so much read them as explore them. They are not objects which he constructed, but quiet places at the edge of a dark forest where one has to sit still for a long time and listen very carefully.”*

Russian hospital on the Eastern Front, Library of Congress

Listening to the poem, one hears the quiet whimper of fear in the “wild organ notes of winter storm.” The world is shot through with dark anger, and the dim light of moon and stars illuminates scenes of horror: towns overrun by predators, bloody doorsteps, the screams of terrified women, and ghosts of the fallen.  Trakl’s poetry speaks of “luminous terror,”† and if “Eastern Front” conveys a nightmarish, dream-like commentary on the war, Trakl was most likely writing from personal experience.   

Georg Trakl

It is believed that Trakl wrote the poem shortly following the battle of Grodek. In the chaotic aftermath of the carnage, he had been assigned to care for nearly a hundred critically injured soldiers crowded into a barn. Alone with the wounded and dying, as night fell Trakl heard a shot and found that one of the sufferers had shot himself in the head. Seeking to escape the gruesome scene, he fled outside, only to be confronted with the swinging corpses of civilians hanging from the trees.  Shortly after, in early October of 1914, Trakl himself attempted suicide. He was diagnosed with dementia praecox (schizophrenia) and sent to a hospital near Krakow.  Three weeks later, on November 3, 1914, Trakl fatally overdosed on cocaine. 

In a letter written near the end of his short life, Trakl wrote, “It is a nameless unhappiness when one’s world breaks in two.”†† In “Eastern Front” and other poems, Trakl struggles to communicate the unhappiness that cannot be named, the deep sorrows of a world torn apart by war.

*Twenty Poems of George Trakl, James Wright and Robert Bly, p. 4.

†“Review: To the Silenced, Selected Poems of Georg Trakl,” Stephen Watts.

††Quoted in 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance, Thomas Harrison, p. 45

    

Not a pawn

Békássy at Cambridge

Békássy in uniform

Ferenc Békássy is a poet whose name has been all but forgotten outside his native Hungary.  As a student at King’s College, Cambridge before the war, Békássy competed with Rupert Brooke for the affections of Noël Olivier and was a close friend of John Maynard Keynes. When the First World War broke out in August of 1914, it was Keynes who helped Békássy to return to Austria-Hungary, where he enlisted as a Hussar. Battling against Russian troops on the Eastern Front, Békássy was killed on June 25, 1915,  just days after arriving at the front lines (some sources say he died June 22). He was twenty-two years old.  His poetry was published in 1925 by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in the small volume Adriatic and Other Poems. 

Békássy’s poem “1914” recalls Josef Stalin’s quotation, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” Over 17 million died in the First World War, a grim statistic. The tragedy of the war is perhaps better understood in stories and poetry. 

1914

He went without fears, went gaily, since go he must,

And drilled and sweated and sang, and rode in the heat and dust

Of the summer; his fellows were round him, as eager as he,

While over the world the gloomy days of the war dragged heavily.

Victorious Assault, R.A. Höger 

  

He fell without a murmur in the noise of battle; found rest

’Midst the roar of hooves on the grass, a bullet struck through his breast.

Perhaps he drowsily lay; for him alone it was still,

And the blood ran out of his body, it had taken so little to kill.

  

So many thousands lay round him, it would need a poet, maybe,

Or a woman, or one of his kindred, to remember that none were as he;

It would need the mother he followed, or the girl he went beside

When he walked the paths of summer in the flush of his gladness and pride,

To know that he was not a unit, a pawn whose place can be filled;

Not blood, but the beautiful years of his coming life have been spilled,

The days that should have followed, a house and a home, maybe,

For a thousand may love and marry and nest, but so shall not he.

  

Hungary Landscape Faluszélén Laszlo Neogrady

When the fires are alight in the meadow, the stars in the sky,

And the young moon drives its cattle, the clouds graze silently,

When the cowherds answer each other and their horns sound loud and clear,

A thousand will hear them, but he, who alone understood, will not hear.

His pale poor body is weak, his heart is still, and a dream

His longing, his hope, his sadness. He dies, his full years seem

Drooping palely around, they pass with his breath

Softly, as dreams have an end -- it is not a violent death.

My days and the world’s pass dully, our times are ill;

For men with labour are born, and men, without wishing it, kill.

Shadow and sunshine, twist a crown of thorns for my head!

Mourn, O my sisters! Singly, for a hundred thousand dead.*

Repeatedly, the poem asks us to lay aside our preconceptions and stereotypes so that we may better understand and empathize with the individuals whose lives were forever changed by the First World War. From the first stanza, the young recruit who went to war gaily and eagerly is contrasted with the general mood of the time. We are asked to see his personal reactions as distinct from that time when the “gloomy days of the war dragged heavily.”

This recruit, who set off so gaily, died alone, poignantly isolated from the action around him. Almost in wonder, the poem comments on how little it took to kill this one man, even as thousands lay dead around him in the incomprehensible slaughter of industrial warfare. 

How can such a death be understood? Only by perhaps a poet – or someone who knew and loved the uniqueness of this man. His mother, his sweetheart, his family: they alone would remember his lopsided grin, the tenor of his voice, the mannerisms and moods that were particularly his. Only those who loved him are able to defiantly assert that he was not a unit, not a pawn – he was more than cannon fodder; he was an irreplaceable soul. 

Tragically, not only is the uniqueness of the man gone forever, but also lost is the potential of his particular life, “the days that should have followed.” Carol Ann Duffy also laments this heartbreaking loss of potential in her poem “Last Post,” vainly hoping that time might be rewound and all can be restored.

Hungarian prayer for the fallen

But magical thinking will not rewind the war. The last stanza of Békássy’s “1914” has the feel of a Greek chorus: there is an inevitability to the death of this man and the millions like him, for the “times are ill.” Men kill one another “without wishing it,” while women are left to mourn each of the hundreds of thousands of deaths “singly,” each one a scar upon the heart and an emptiness that can never be filled. 

In his own death, Ferenc Békássy has literally been remembered "singly" at King’s College, Cambridge.  Although he died in the same war as his classmates, Békássy fought with the Central Powers, aligning himself with his home country, England’s enemy. In 1920, British families of those who had lost their sons in the war protested Békássy’s inclusion on the King’s College Chapel Roll of Honour. As a compromise in 1921, his name was inscribed on another wall of the chapel, where he is listed simply as a “Pensioner.” 

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 *To view this poem in Hungarian or to read other Bekassy poems, see this link.