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….            

 TO FELLOW TRAVELLERS IN GREECE MARCH-SEPTEMBER, 1914 'T was in the piping tune of peace We trod the sacred soil of Greece, Nor thought, where the Ilissus runs, Of Teuton craft or Teuton guns; Nor dreamt that, ere the year was spent, Their iron challenge insolent Would round the world's horizons pour, From Europe to the Australian shore. The tides of war had ebb'd away From Trachis and Thermopylae, Long centuries had come and gone Since that fierce day at Marathon; Freedom was firmly based, and we Wall'd by our own encircling sea; The ancient passions dead, and men Battl'd with ledger and with pen. So seem'd it, but to them alone The wisdom of the gods is known; Lest freedom's price decline, from far Zeus hurl'd the thunderbolt of war. And so once more the Persian steel The armies of the Greeks must feel, And once again a Xerxes know The virtue of a Spartan foe. Thus may the cloudy fates unroll'd Retrace the starry circles old, And the recurrent heavens decree A Periclean dynasty. _W. Macneile Dixon_