Everywhere I Looked, Blood Flowed

by Brett Rutherford

 

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

1

Scattered amid the shadows,
an immense massacre occurred.
Everywhere I looked, blood flowed,
and everyone was killing
someone, it seemed. For what?
Oh, just to be in the business
     of murder wholesale.

 

What misery! Like anyone
who witnessed such horrors I raised
     my voice, I spoke;
having no means to snap
the swords, or send the bullets back
into the guns that fired them,
I had only my tongue, my pen.

 

In ages past, men who spoke up
and stood their ground, made history
(Harlay for France in the Elizabethan
court, Bâville whose edicts abolished
torture, even the war-like Mont-Revel, [1, 2, 3]
     but here and now
dark ignorance and cowardice
redouble the darkness already here.

 

All I affirmed was that some thought
should precede the order to shoot someone,
especially when fire is multiplied
against a line of civilians. To spare
the mad, or even the reckless ones,
shows to those we have overcome
that we are still their brothers —
is this not just and wise? To be
one people, we must get along.

 

I remind you that Someone
     is watching what we do
(and note is surely taken!),
and that the future brightens up
when we show to one another
our natural affections. Why sow
the seed of hate when all that sprouts
from its black husk is even worse?

 

I declared that calm could come to us,
impossible as that seemed, by slow degrees.
I said that the antidote
     to assassination
is not to become an assassin,
the sack of guilt round-robining
from one party to another,
that the answer to the murder of one
was not to machine-gun a score
of hapless women and children.

 

Think of the shame we have brought
to the valiant soldiers coming home,
to turn the guns they shouldered out with
into the tools of execution!

 

Sadly, I droop. My pen falls out
of my shaking hand. This shroud —
who ordered one big enough to wrap
a dozen executed men at once?
Was every single captive guilty,
and must all pay for the crimes of a few?

 

No matter, you say. Chastise
all Paris, admonish the people,
     and terrify
the word into heeding orders!
I answer back: hurl no one
    by chance into the abyss.

 

2

So now it is my turn, it seems,
to be the object of public hate.
The pulpit hurls anathema at me,
     shaking their Bibles aloft;
anyone, seeing me pass, feels free
     to grab and hurl a stone;
children assemble mud-pies to throw
    and garden refuse is reserved
          for special insults.
I thought I heard wolves; bad dogs,
      unleashed, were at my heels.
From all those shouts you’d think
     I was some vanquished tyrant.

 

When I have seen fists,
     back-handed, clenched,
with me as their object of anger?

Some friends I spied among the crowd,
     who once drank honest wine
at my table — their backs are turned.

Eyes that once gladly greeted me,
     now turn away.

 

Killers know when to smile, and clowns
     have a ferocious side, too.
Those fawning followers of the triumphal car
      danced for their supper yesterday,
          but now cut throats.
Their fluted champagne glasses
     clot with blood, now.
These fierce, elegant men,
     like Haynan and Tavanne,
raise menacing sticks festooned
      with black flies,
whose larva hatched from open graves.
Judge Lynch, King Bomba, Mingrat the priest
shouted and called me murderer,
and a Judas hissed “Traitor” into my ear.

 

Notes:

1.    Christoph de Harlay (1570-1615) was French ambassador to the court of Britain’s Elizabeth I.

2.    Several generations of Mont-Revels served France as military leaders, and it is not certain which one Hugo had in mind. Claude François de la Baume, comte de Mont-Revel (1619), or Ferdinand de la Baume (1603-1678), comte de Montrevel. More research needed on this note.

3.    Bâville. Wikipedia: “Chrétien François de Lamoignon de Bâville, also written as Chrétien François de Lamoignon de Basville (1735–1789) was a French statesman and magistrate. Lamoignon was the Keeper of the Seals of France from 8 April 1787 to 14 September 1788. In this position, he was responsible for issuing the Edict of Versailles in 1787, which granted civil status and freedom of worship to France's Protestants, and for the abolition of judicial torture.”