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 ….            

Ilya EHRENBURG. Ilya Ehrenburg was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1891. He attended the First Moscow gymnasium, but was arrested in his early teens for revolutionary activities and excluded from the 6th grade. Among his close friends during these years was Nikolai Bukharin, the Russian revolutionary who was shot in 1938 during Stalin's terror. Ehrengburg was imprisoned for five months. After his release he lived for a time in Poltava with his uncle. In 1908 Ehrenburg immigrated to Paris to avoid trial for revolutionary agitation. He frequented Left Bank cafes, became friends with Picasso, Apollinaire, Modigliani, and met Lenin, who questioned him closely regarding the views of his contemporaries in Moscow. Also during this period he began writing poetry under the influence of Verlaine, Jammes, and Balmont. His first collection of verse appeared in 1910. During the war Ehrenburg was a war correspondent at the front. His anti-communist poem, 'Prayer for Russia', appeared in 1917.

Nikolai Stepanovich GUMILEV, 1886-1921. Born in Kronstadt. Husband of the poet Anna Akhmatova, whose reputation would surpass his own. At first a Symbolist, he later rejected its tenets and formed the Acmeists. With outbreak of war, immediately volunteered for active duty. Served in the Leib-guard lancer regiment. He also served in the Gusarsky Alexandrisky regiment, and was honored with two Georgievsky Crosses. He related some of his war tales in "A Cavalryman's Notes", which was printed in the daily newspaper Birzhevy Vedomost from February 1915 to January 1916, and a collection of poems entitled Kolchan in 1915. In 1917 he was sent to France to join Russian Expeditionary Corps, but mostly spent time in Paris & London awaiting assignment. Gumilyov was executed by firing squad in 1921 for counter-revolutionary activities, the first great poet (though not the last) to be executed by the Bolsheviks.