As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poets’ Corner  

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914 before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed, artists who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other, writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy, writers of not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and the maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets, musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man, that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist, world and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels.

And then the war drums intensified and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for….            

MEN OF VERDUN


There are five men in the moonlight
  That by their shadows stand;
Three hobble humped on crutches,
  And two lack each a hand.

Frogs somewhere near the roadside
  Chorus their chant absorbed:
But a hush breathes out of the dream-light
  That far in heaven is orbed.

It is gentle as sleep falling
  And wide as thought can span,
The ancient peace and wonder
  That brims the heart of man.

Beyond the hills it shines now
  On no peace but the dead,
On reek of trenches thunder-shocked,
Tense fury of wills in wrestle locked,
  A chaos crumbled red!

The five men in the moonlight
  Chat, joke, or gaze apart.
They talk of days and comrades,
  But each one hides his heart.

They wear clean cap and tunic,
  As when they went to war;
A gleam comes where the medal's pinned:
  But they will fight no more.

The shadows, maimed and antic,
  Gesture and shape distort,
Like mockery of a demon dumb
Out of the hell-din whence they come
  That dogs them for his sport:

But as if dead men were risen
  And stood before me there
With a terrible fame about them blown
  In beams of spectral air,

I see them, men transfigured
  As in a dream, dilate
Fabulous with the Titan-throb
  Of battling Europe's fate;

For history's hushed before them,
  And legend flames afresh,--
Verdun, the name of thunder,
  Is written on their flesh.

_Laurence Binyon_