by Brett Rutherford
Adapted/Translated from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible
"To Prince Prince-Cut-Down-A-Size", September 1870.
The emperor makes war on the king.
We told ourselves:
— Wars are the threshold of revolutions. —
We thought: — It’s yet another war.
Yes, but this is the Big One.
Hell wants a laurel; death craves an offering;
these two kings have sworn to extinguish the sun;
the globe will be covered with blood, vast and ruddy,
and men will be cut down like weeds;
and the winners will be infamous, but superb. —
and we who want a human life in peace, who give
the land to the plow’s furrow,
and not to the cannon ruts,
sad, but proud nonetheless, in awe we said: —
just think: France against Prussia!
What does it matter if this flash-in-the-pan Batavian[1]
attacks this arrogant Borusse![2]
Let the kings do their thing; then God will attend.
And so we dreamt of Vedic clashes, Vishnu against Indra,
an avatar clouded by apocalypse,
with flames from all sides to pierce and eclipse it.
We dreamt of the night’s enormous battles;
of more than one chaos of anger and noise
as when a hurricane attacks the sea, as when an angel,
wrestling a giant, struggles, and spews a mix
of heavenly blood with the dark ichor of Titans;
god upon god, Apollo versus Leviathan.
The shadows we imagined drove us mad.
We hurtled, as in famous battles past,
collided, in the horror of an unquenchable quarrel,
Rosbach[3]
against Jena,[4] Rome
against Alaric,[5]
the great Napoleon and the great Frederick;
We thought we could see approaching us,
in haste, with the help of our own wings,
victories a-wing like swallows
and, like the bird run to its nest, go straight
to France, to progress, justice, law.
We thought we were witnessing
the fatal and final clash of thrones.
At the sinister death of the old Babylons,
the crushed continent, killed and resurrected
would bloom again in dawn and freedom.
One hoped, perhaps,
that after monstrous disasters,
new worlds would bloom
from the collapse of stars!
Or so we thought. Either, we said, it will be
like Arbelle, Actium, Trasimene and Zara,
terrible, but grandiose — a chasm with its slope,
and the whole universe at the edge of its tether, as in
Lepanto,
as in Tolbiac, in Tyre, in Poitiers.
Anger, Strength and Night, black gatekeepers,
will open the wide grave before us.
The South or the North
will have to get in line.
One race or the other will have to drop
to the abyss’s bottom
where kings and gods crumble.
And thoughtful, believing that we see glory coming towards us,
we prepared for colossal battle:
shocks as the men of the Loire saw,
thundering Wagram, magnificent and hideous Leipsick,
Cyrus, Sennacherib, Caesar, Frederick the Second,
Nimrod, we shudder at these dark approaches... —
Suddenly we feel a hand in our pockets.
It has come to this, that now we rob our own.
Certainly, we had already told ourselves
Bonaparte indigent
was a crook, and must have hoped
to loot Germany, having embezzled France;
He stole his throne; he is vile, deceitful and ugly,
that’s all true; but we had this fantasy that he was going
to confront an old king,
some redemption in his pride in his own
old race,
having God as crown and honor as breastplate.
In that scenario he would place before him,
as in the time of the Dunois,
one of those paladins from ancient tournaments
whose armor we vaguely drew with our eyes
in the clouds full of dawn and portent.
O downfall! Illusion! Swiftly the scenery
is pulled away and replaced with another!
It is a whistle, the sign among bandits,
and not the militant horn.
The night. You stand in a tawny thicket.
Sabers swarm around you.
Gun barrels shine among the branches.
Cries come from the shadows.
“Surprise — an ambush! Stop!”
Some detonation lights the sky in red
and everything flares up around you,
limned in hell’s crimson skylight.
“You there! On your knees!
We’ll bash your heads in
if anyone makes a move.
Face down and no one standing!
Now give us your money — give it all.”
Whether you like it or not
to be knee-deep in mud and water,
what can you do? So they search you,
and there is a gun
at your back.
“No smart ideas, now! We are ten to one,
all armed to the teeth,
and if you resist, the worse for you!
Obey!” These voices
seem to come from a cave.
What can one do? we hold out our purse,
we lie flat on our stomachs,
and while, foreheads on the ground, we submit,
we think of these taken-over countries
that were formerly called
Frankfurt, Poland, Hanover, Hesse.
They are gone. It’s done! Get up!
So now we find ourselves penniless
in the middle of the Black Forest,
and we think bitterly,
that no one prepared us for such wild betrayals.
We, ignorant in the art of ruling,
and the supposed rules of war
can only curse and swear,
that highway robber Cartouche[6]
had been enlisted here,
to wage a war on one and all,
just like his German counterpart,
the robber Schinderhannes.[7]
[1] Batavian. Napoleon III’s older brother Louis Napoleon was the child-king of Holland for two weeks in 1810.
[2] Borusse. The Latin name for Prussia is Borussus.
[3] The Battle of Rossbach, 5 November 1757 in Saxony, a Prussian victory against France, and a turning point after which the French did not engage the Prussians further.
[4] The Battles of Jena, 14 October, 1806, between the armies of Napoleon I and Frederick the Great, a triumph for the French.
[5] Alaric I, King of the Goths, defeated and sacked Rome in 410 CE.
[6] Cartouche. Nickname for Louis Dominique Bourguignon (1693-1721), a French highway robber. Many ballads were written about his Robin Hood-like exploits.
[7] Schinderhannes. Nickname for Johannes Büchler (1778-1803), a German highway robber, also known as “The Robber of the Rhine.” Schinderhansl, the children’s card game (Black Peter), is named after him.
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