Yesterday's hero

Stefan Sauer/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

“Amputation was a daily occurrence in Europe from 1914-18, as modern warfare tore men apart in unprecedented ways,” writes Alex Purcell in “Amputations & Prosthetic Limbs in the First World War.”*  

The Great War tore men apart, both physically and mentally. In France, the military documented over 3.5 million wounded soldiers, an estimated 40% of those who served. Staggeringly, half of those were wounded twice, while an estimated 100,000 French combatants were wounded three or more times.** 

The number of British First World War amputees is estimated to be at least 41,000; German amputees are estimated at 67,000, and French amputees numbered over 70,000.*** 

Marcel Sauvage was a young medical student in Paris when the Great War began. He served as a stretcher bearer, and while tending to the wounded at the Somme, he was seriously injured and gassed. Sauvage’s war poems were written between 1916 and 1920; “The Castigation” (translated from the French by Ian Higgins) describes a war that never ended for thousands who had fought and survived. 

The Castigation
To Frédéric Lefèvre

In the street
The carts
On the cobbles, like clacking rattles,
The taxis racing off,
Red, rear ends smoking.
The tramcars squeal
Under their trolleys.
On the pavements
People walking, walking by, walking on.
Life’s strident bellow.
The city: Paris.

1916 French postcard
"School of Glory"

Bowling along came a posh
Limousine.
A beast of burden,
A man,
A sweating man
Dragging a handcart,
Got in its way.
A gentleman leaned out
From the posh limousine,
An elderly gentleman of means,
And shouted the following observation
At the poor poverty-stricken devil
Trapped in the swirl of the street:
‘You blithering idiot,
Serve you right if you got run over.’

I looked at the man
Who was dragging the handcart.
He said nothing, did nothing.
He had a wooden leg,
He was dragging a heavy handcart,
He was sweating,
He had two medals on his dirty lapel,
The Military Cross,
The Military Medal.
This was yesterday’s hero,
A martyr sweating,
Frightened, resigned—yet another
In the swirl of life.
The posh gentleman of means
Should have done him a favour
And run him over,
Poor b—. 
        —Marcel Sauvage, trans. Ian Higgins

What is the “castigation” referred to in the poem’s title? The elderly gentleman in the limousine harshly rebukes the war amputee, but it is the body of the veteran that silently accuses all who ignore him, the “People walking, walking by, walking on.”

© IWM Art.IWM PST 13211

Those who do notice the man with the wooden leg dismiss him as no better than a “sweating man,” a “beast of burden,” and a “blithering idiot.” Yet the silent, sweating martyr who says nothing and does nothing is imagined in the poem as a Christ-like figure. The prophet Isais said of Christ, “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”****

Sauvage’s poem extends this one veteran’s suffering to hundreds of thousands of amputees, writing that the man with the wooden leg was “yet another / In the swirl of life.” Just one more of the broken survivors. 

The disfigured and mutilated bodies of the war’s soldiers were painful to confront, and the physical and mental agonies of veterans were typically disregarded by even physicians. Soldiers themselves seldom talked about their suffering: “in this sense, pain remained a family taboo .... The amputees explained, ‘We speak only when we know that we will be heard.’”** 

Not only did the war wound soldiers, but it blinded and deafened entire populations to the repercussions of the violence.
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* Alex Purcell, “Amputations & Prosthetic Limbs in the First World War,” Through Veterans Eyes, 18 Sept. 2017,  https://throughveteranseyes.ca/2017/09/18/amputations-prosthetic-limbs-in-the-first-world-war/
** Sophie Delaport, “Mutilation and Disfiguration (France),”1914–1918 Online, updated 24 Feb. 2015, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/mutilation_and_disfiguration_france
*** Source for number of amputees: British and German, French.
**** Isaiah 53:7, New International Version Bible. 

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.

The bannerless, unhating dead

Cerny-en-Laonnois cemeteries
Photo courtesy of Abellio†

Running along an east-west ridge north of Paris, the Chemin des Dames saw some of the bloodiest fighting of the Great War during the First (1914), Second (1917) and Third (1918) Battles of the Aisne. Estimates of the combined casualties suffered by both sides in the Second and Third Battles of the Aisne exceed 600,000 men. 

Situated on the Chemin des Dames, the village of Cerny-en-Laonnois was completely destroyed; a French guide reports that it “no longer existed after the war,” and 53% of the area was designated a “zone rouge,”* an area so environmentally damaged as to be unfit for human habitation. Where the village once stood, thousands of bodies were buried. Today, visitors find one of the most unusual cemetery configurations on the Western Front: a French and a German military cemetery adjoin one another, meeting in one corner where no fences, walls, or boundaries separate the two cities of the dead. 

Here is the final resting place of 5,150 French, 7,526 Germans, and 54 Russians.  Only half of those buried at Cerny-en-Laonnois were able to be identified; the rest lie in mass graves or ossuaries. Nearby, memorials are also dedicated to the 1^st Loyal North Lancashire Regiment (part of the British Army known as the “Old Contemptibles”) and the 38^th African Infantry Division (which included troops from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria).  Following the Second World War, a memorial chapel was privately built at the site “to further the reconciliation of people by the memory of their sons killed on opposing sides of the battlefield.”**

A year after the war ended, French poet René Arcos published Le Sang des autres (The Blood of Others).  His poem “The Dead,” describes enemies joined by shared suffering and loss. 

The Dead

Grave in No Man's Land,
Margaret Hall, 1918-1919
Metropolitan Museum of Art 

The widows’ veils

In the wind

All blow the one way.

And the mingling tears

Of the million sorrows riverwards

All flow the one way.

Rank by rank, shoulder to shoulder

The bannerless, unhating dead,

Hair plastered down with clotted blood,

The dead all lie the one way.

In the single clay, where unendingly

The dying and the coming worlds make one,

The dead today are brothers, brow to brow,

Doing penance for the same defeat.

Oh, go clash, divided sons,

And tear Humanity asunder

Into vain tatters of land—

The dead all lie the one way;

For in the earth there remains

But one homeland and one hope,

Just as for the Universe there is

But one battle and one victory.

            —René Arcos, translated by Ian Higgins

René Arcos

Fighting with the French, René Arcos was injured early in the war, but returned to the Western Front as an anti-war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News.  In 1923, Arcos became editor-in-chief of the newly published literary magazine Europe. In the inaugural issue, he wrote,

We speak of Europe because our vast peninsula, between the East and the New World, is the crossroads where civilisations meet. But it is to all peoples that we address ourselves … in the hope of averting the tragic misunderstandings that currently divide humanity …. It is urgent that we learn to look higher than all the interests, the passions, the selfishness of individuals and ethnic groups. There can be no victory won by man against man.***

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† Further photos and information on Cerny-en-Laonnais and Arcos' "The Dead" can be found at https://theheartthrills.wordpress.com/tag/rene-arcos/. 

* Cerny-en-Laonnois,” Commémoration du Centenaire de la Bataille du Chemin des Dames, Dimanche 16 avril 2017, p. 36, www.chemindesdames.fr/fr/le-chemin-des-dames/visiter/les-lieux-de-memoire/les-principaux-sites/cerny-en-laonnois-la-chapelle, Accessed 2 Mar. 2018.

** Etienne Verkindt, “Cerny-en-Laonnois: la Chapelle-Mémorial et les cimetières français et allemande,” Le Chemin des Dames, www.chemindesdames.fr/fr/le-chemin-des-dames/visiter/les-lieux-de-memoire/les-principaux-sites/cerny-en-laonnois-la-chapelle, Accessed 2 Mar. 2018.

*** René Arcos, “Patrie Européenne,” Europe, No. 1, February 1923, pp. 110, 113, gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5442334h, Accessed 2 Mar. 2018.