As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poet’s Corner-German Jewish Poets   

LEO STERNBERG (1876-1937)

OUT OF THE TRENCHES

1 THE BROTHERS

The man has submerged in the great army;

The army has disappeared into the earth; far away lies the sea

Of night-covered forest chains.

Lost breezes pass between home and enemy land,

They meet and fade away.

And patrols rise up from the trenches like ghosts from the grave

A helmet appears large for a moment before the night sky.

Then the whispering troop disappears in the stormy woods.

Only the wind rustles in the tree-tops and a call echoes in the darkness

Patrol meets patrols and stamps like shadows past each another

And one recognizes, from a  voice in the dark, his brother and like a choked cry

Whispers are heard  as they pass: Wilhelm? Heinrich? Mother wrote today?.

“Greetings” Till we meet again!”

And then they disappear in different directions in the darkness

The forest paths gleam brightly lit broadly by a flare

Again sunken in the night: shots from the forward posts

Silence of the hostile world.

 

2 THE RELIEF

We lie snowed in the trenches like snow-covered clods of earth,

Unknowing mirrors of the days and nights that roll over us,

In the foremost trenches, cut off from the help of the world

In front of the gun barrels of the enemies who aim across the level field,

Our breasts, like our raised earth wall, only a defense

Our death cry only a signal for the army

Behind us, We are only the feelers and the nerve cord

On which the burning town in the night and the flare pistols play their song

Every whispered word, heard at the front

Every step, that hisses in the  trenches before us

Until the hour of relief nears, when suddenly out of the foggy night

An unknown person stirs us, who will watch for us and continue the fight.

And we reach our comrade, whom we do not see.

Through the fog we grasp his hand and take up the rifle and start to go.

Then before we leave our post,

A bullet lies before us in the snowy clods atop the trenches edge.

Leo Sternberg  -  Translated by Peter Appelbaum