The Defeat at Sedan, Part 5

by Brett Rutherford

     Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo's l'Annee Terrible

Part 5

ONE SURRENDERS

 

In plain daylight, a ghastly rendezvous.
They on one side, we on the other.
Two living forests fruited with the heads of men.
Arms, feet, voices, swords, collide with fury,
mingle and trample one another. Horror!

Is this our cannon? Is that a catapult?

The tombs of the earth, sometimes,
     grow restless and hungry,
their swallowing-up we call great deeds
     and mighty exploits.
The worm lifts its head attentively
     to all who flee, to all who fall.

 

The condemnations hurled by kings
are executed, alas! by man on man,
upon whose laurel is inscribed:
Woe, I have killed my brother!

 

What glory Pharsalus, or Hastings, or Jena,
if triumph for one means rubble for the other?

O War! Chance passes unseen in his chariot,
dragged by horses, hideous and invisible.

The fight was fierce. Men strode about,
night-beasts with red eyes the shade
of gleaming embers, intent on carnage.
Rifle against rifle, the Chassepot defied the Dreyse,
while on the horizons the Gorgons screamed,
grating metallic in cloud of spattered blood,
steel snakes and bombards, the machine guns’ rasp.

Crows from afar, rose up above these laborers.

For those who feast upon mass graves,
     a massacre is a banquet.

Rage filled the shadows, and was passed along,
as though nature itself believed in the battle,
so that a quivering tree and a trembling man
shared the same frenzy in the fatal field.

One was pushed back, the other was driven on.

One spot was Germany, and then it was France.
Everyone hope to die a tragic death, or knew
the hideous joy of killing, and not one
was not intoxicated by the acrid smell of blood.
No one let go in this, their supreme hour,

     the sublimity of mass murder.

 

Like seed that some terrible arm has sown
grapeshot rained down on the darkened field,
and while the wounded moaned we tramped
    over and past them, and among
the disheveled winds the cannons roared
and belched out smoke upon the melee.

Amid the blinded fury, rose strong the sense
of honor, duty, devotion, in the heart
the homeland always amid the bitter fight.

 

Out of this fog and cloud came suddenly,
     amid the roar and thunder,
in the vast shrouded silence where laughs
     the specter of the vision of Death,
amid the Chaos if epic shocks, from Hell
somewhere a clapper sounded bell,
copper and brass against the doom of iron,
and the idea of That Which Overthrows
surmounted the idea of That Which Falls.
In a slain beast’s howl, among the dark songs
     of the desolated, despairing bugles,
while French soldiers fought, striving and proud,
in the name of our forebears whom the people revere,

suddenly the haggard banners trembled.
While destiny caught up to the decree,
and everyone bled, fought, resisted, or died,
we heard a monstrous imperial cry, one voice
that trumpeted, I want to live!

 

Stunned, the cannon fell silent, the rage-drunk

Battle was interrupted —

     The Abyss had spoken —

And the black eagle opened its claws and waited.