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 ….            
 

HILLS OF HOME


Oh! yon hills are filled with sunlight, and the green
      leaves paled to gold,
And the smoking mists of Autumn hanging faintly
      o'er the wold;
I dream of hills of other days whose sides I loved to
      roam
When Spring was dancing through the lanes of those
      distant hills of home.

The winds of heaven gathered there as pure and cold
      as dew;
Wood-sorrel and wild violets along the hedgerows
      grew,
The blossom on the pear-trees was as white as flakes
      of foam
In the orchard 'neath the shadow of those distant
      hills of home.

The first white frost in the meadow will be shining
      there to-day
And the furrowed upland glinting warm beside the
      woodland way;
There, a bright face and a clear hearth will be waiting
      when I come,
And my heart is throbbing wildly for those distant
      hills of home.

_Malcolm Hemphrey_




THE RED CROSS SPIRIT SPEAKS


Wherever war, with its red woes,
Or flood, or fire, or famine goes,
    There, too, go I;
If earth in any quarter quakes
Or pestilence its ravage makes,
    Thither I fly.

I kneel behind the soldier's trench,
I walk 'mid shambles' smear and stench,
    The dead I mourn;
I bear the stretcher and I bend
O'er Fritz and Pierre and Jack to mend
    What shells have torn.

I go wherever men may dare,
I go wherever woman's care
    And love can live,
Wherever strength and skill can bring
Surcease to human suffering,
    Or solace give.

I helped upon Haldora's shore;
With Hospitaller Knights I bore
    The first red cross;
I was the Lady of the Lamp;
I saw in Solferino's camp
    The crimson loss.

I am your pennies and your pounds;
I am your bodies on their rounds
    Of pain afar:
I am _you_, doing what you would
If you were only where you could--
    Your avatar.

The cross which on my arm I wear,
The flag which o'er my breast I bear,
  Is but the sign
Of what you'd sacrifice for him
Who suffers on the hellish rim
    Of war's red line.

_John Finley_