A Cry from Afar

 

April 1871. The Paris Commune has seized power in Paris and is arming the city against the regular French government in Versailles. Paris feels itself betrayed, for while it never surrendered to the Prussians, the new government signed a shameful armistice and royalists will almost certainly be back in power with all their reactionary repressions. While the Prussian Army occupied Paris for only a single day and departed without looting or destruction, Paris is now in a state of civil war. The Commune demands that all able-bodied men enlist in the coming struggle between the national government and the city of Paris. The French are now fighting one another. Hugo publishes this poem in the newspaper Le Rappel, protesting the coming horrors.

IV
A CRY FROM AFAR
by Brett Rutherford
Adapted and translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “April 1871”

Just where is all this taking us?
As this great country crumbles
at every step they take,
can they not feel it happening?
Someone needs punishing —
why punish all of Paris?
The city just wants to be free.
The world hangs in the balance
and Paris is on the scale,
a trembling equilibrium.
We have become the abyss
in which the future broods.

Have we not hurled enough
into the Ocean already?
The bottom of the sea
cannot be punished more
than Europe, which suffers blows
with France at its heart.

Insane combatants,
what do you want?
Set fire to the wheat that feeds you,
cut down with bayonets
the figures of Honor, Reason, Hope!
What have we come to? Enemies
on both sides uttering
the sacred name of France!
Stop it! Each step you take
leaves only weeping in its wake.

French cannons fire
against French targets.
Obeying the command to attack,
you sow death ahead of you
and reap shame behind.
After the double blows of September
and February (defeat
and a dishonored armistice),
we no long know who we are.
We pour out and mix on the paving-stones
the blood of peasants
the blood of workers;
it runs through the streets like rain
cascades from roof and culvert —
even the fountains run red!
It is as incomprehensible to me
as if the Latins turned on Rome
or the Greeks sacked Athens.

In whose name, I dare to ask,
does this slaughter continue?
The priest who says God wants this, lies.
You seem to fight whichever way
the wind is turning. How is this?
No lucid moments guide you,
or give you pause to take account.
For killing your own brother
you find yourself a hero.

Horror! Abasement, blame,
the affronts against humanity
darken the sky and shadow your brows.
What you mistake for a flag,
shroud-black, shroud-white, up there
above your temple of triumph:
Look again! It is only a rag
hung over the bone-yard ossuary.
Amid your downfall, regard it
carefully, the flag of mourning,
the emblem of Prussia.
This insolent cloth has wrapped around you,
and made you its mummy.
You cannot make it out
as it darkly enfolds you,
like Egypt lording it over the Hebrews,
heavy and sinister, a dark glory.
It has come to your house. It reigns.
Civil war, sad once after Austerlitz,
and now, after Sedan’s defeat, so vile!

What hideous adventure,
gambling your own homeland
and its future with a roll of dice.
Have you gone made, to pitch a tent
on your own ramparts, to fight again,
O Paris, you wounded lion
with a bloody spear still in your side.
Warriors with unhealed wounds,
you sally forth to bruise and tear
the stitches from one another.

In that woman darkly bleeding
in the doorway you march on by,
do you not see your own mother?
That widow and child without support,
those workers fainting for lack of bread,
the sum and yield of all the terrible
conditions of war: what are they
to you, the ever-more implacable
rhetorician, soldier, and self-styled Tribune?
You repair nothing,
and make all things the worse.
Where a beacon is needed,
you dig an abyss.
From both sides the same despicable
fanfare sounds, the cry from afar
comes in one common tongue:
come, War — come, Death.
Whose death is demanded?
The answer: Cain.
That some who bowed before Prussia
now turn a haughty face to France,

the deep skies look down in shame.
I call disgrace and infamy upon
the kind of man, whoever they may be,
who safely sit in shadows, on murder’s
bulwark, rising themselves on pedestals
atop the public’s misfortune, whose puffed
cheeks blow out a universal contagion,
imposing a fatal duel on the indignant
people, on the servile rank-and-file,
lighting the hot brands of civil war. Disgrace
on those who put the undying city
in prison yet again (as if starvation
had not been enough!), trampling all rights,
France self-assassinating its own spirit,
Paris dead, its star gone out from the heavens.
And who would be so base as not to shudder
as the real enemy’s laughter bursts out around us?