As The 100th
Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars)
Continues ... Some Remembrances-Writers’ Corner
In say 1912, 1913,
hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war
clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed
their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing
business in the world. Yes the artists of every school but the
Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists and
Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements, those
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 saw
that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems;
writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish
theory of progress, humankind had moved
beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would
put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins;
writers of serious and 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, too much sex to harness to denigrate
themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens
strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of
delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of
the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; 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. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not
profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising,
kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would
resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist,
Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes,
words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.
And then the war
drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out
their lusts 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, well, for humankind, of course,
their always fate ….
Tommy's diary. Chronicle of a fallen English man
Book/Diary/Illustration
Information
English
Allegedly the diary of a dead English soldier found on the battlefield, these ‘notes of a fallen Englishman’ tell the story of a naïve working-class youth who joins the army to escape a hard labouring life. When war breaks out he is sent to France where he is wounded and eventually killed in battle. This supposed ‘British Tommy’ produces typical German propagandist sentiments about greedy, warmongering British imperialism and the dauntless courage of the German troops. The British Army by contrast is portrayed as ill-equipped and ill-disciplined, its men lacking commitment to any cause except drinking. The real author, Norbert Willy, wrote a similar work purporting to be the diary of a French soldier who, like ‘Tommy’, comes to recognise the failings of his own country in the face of German superiority.
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