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 in the time of the supposedly big deal Basle Socialist Conference which got reflected in more circles than just workingmen, small shopkeepers and small farmers, or 1913 for that matter when the big deal European powers were waging "proxy" war, making ominous moves, but most importantly working three shifts in the munitions plants, oh hell, even in the beginning of 1914 before the war clouds got a full head of steam that summer they all profusely professed their undying devotion to peace, to wage no war for any reason. Reasons: artists who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society, freaked out at what humankind had produced, was producing to place everybody in an inescapable box and hence their cubic fascinations from which to run, put the pieces to paint; sculptors who put twisted pieces of scrape metal juxtaposed to each other  to get that same effect, an effect which would be replicated on all those foreboding trenched fronts; writers, not all of them socialists either, some were conservatives that saw empire, their particular empire, in grave danger once the blood started flowing  who saw the v   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 for the sweet nothing maidens to spent their waking hours 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 with all their creative brethren would go to the hells, literary Dante's rings, before touching the hair of another human, that come the war drums they all 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, they who could not resist the call, could not resist those maidens now busy all day strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets for their soldier boys, those poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went sheepishly to the trenches with the rest of the flower of European youth to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for ….            

THE SIGN We are here in a wood of little beeches: And the leaves are like black lace Against a sky of nacre. One bough of clear promise Across the moon. It is in this wise that God speaketh unto me. He layeth hands of healing upon my flesh, Stilling it in an eternal peace, Until my soul reaches out myriad and infinite hands Toward him, And is eased of its hunger. And I know that this passes: This implacable fury and torment of men, As a thing insensate and vain: And the stillness hath said unto me, Over the tumult of sounds and shaken flame, Out of the terrible beauty of wrath, _I alone am eternal._ One bough of clear promise Across the moon. _Frederic Manning_

THE TRENCHES Endless lanes sunken in the clay, Bays, and traverses, fringed with wasted herbage, Seed-pods of blue scabious, and some lingering blooms; And the sky, seen as from a well, Brilliant with frosty stars. We stumble, cursing, on the slippery duck-boards. Goaded like the damned by some invisible wrath, A will stronger than weariness, stronger than animal fear, Implacable and monotonous. Here a shaft, slanting, and below A dusty and flickering light from one feeble candle And prone figures sleeping uneasily, Murmuring, And men who cannot sleep, With faces impassive as masks, Bright, feverish eyes, and drawn lips, Sad, pitiless, terrible faces, Each an incarnate curse. Here in a bay, a helmeted sentry Silent and motionless, watching while two sleep, And he sees before him With indifferent eyes the blasted and torn land Peopled with stiff prone forms, stupidly rigid, As tho' they had not been men. Dead are the lips where love laughed or sang, The hands of youth eager to lay hold of life, Eyes that have laughed to eyes, And these were begotten, O Love, and lived lightly, and burnt With the lust of a man's first strength: ere they were rent. Almost at unawares, savagely; and strewn In bloody fragments, to be the carrion Of rats and crows. And the sentry moves not, searching Night for menace with weary eyes. _Frederic Manning_