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….            

THEN AND NOW


      When battles were fought
With a chivalrous sense of should and ought,
      In spirit men said,
      "End we quick or dead,
      Honour is some reward!
Let us fight fair--for our own best or worst;
      So, Gentlemen of the Guard,
          Fire first!"

      In the open they stood,
Man to man in his knightlihood:
      They would not deign
      To profit by a stain
      On the honourable rules,
Knowing that practise perfidy no man durst
      Who in the heroic schools
          Was nurst.

      But now, behold, what
Is war with those where honour is not!
      Rama laments
      Its dead innocents;
      Herod howls: "Sly slaughter
Rules now! Let us, by modes once called accurst,
      Overhead, under water,
          Stab first."

_Thomas Hardy_