The Day They Surrendered Paris

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “January 1871”

Thus the greatest nations topple and fall!
Your work was used, O people, for this abortion.
What? Was it for this we stood watch all night
till dawn broke on the high bastions?
Was this why we were brave, haughty, invincible,
no more than a target for Prussia’s arrow?
Is it for this our heroes bled, and our martyrs died?
For this we fought more than the defenders of Tyre,
of Sagunto, Byzantium and Corinth?
Is this why we suffered the five-month embrace
of those furtive, black Teutons, having in their eyes
the sinister stupor of the wolf-infested woods?

Is it for this we struggled, and excavated mines,
made broken bridges whole, braved plague and famine,
made ditches and planted stakes, built forts anew?
Did France not see how we filled with the sheaf of the dead
this tomb, this Paris, this dark barn of battles?
Why, day after day did we live under machine-gun fire?

Deep skies! after so many trials, after so many efforts
to take hold of great Paris, where we were bloody, crushed,
and yet content with the august hope, panting
with the immense expectation
that if we were going to be conquered,
we would rush headlong towards the cannons of brass,
gnaw our own walls to get at them
     like the horse its brake.

When increase of pain only made us more virtuous,
when little children, bombarded in the streets,
laughingly picked up spent shells and bullets,
when not one has weakened among the citizens,
when we were there, three hundred thousand strong,
and ready to issue forth — despite all this
a war-council of august men has surrendered this city!

O people, from all your devotion and fury and pride,
and from your courage, too, they made
submission and cowardice. Yet glory will come,
and history will pass with a cold frisson
at what was done on this shameful day.

Paris, 27 January 1871.

 

 

After the Victories of Bapaume, Dijon, and Villersexell

The Battle of Villersexell

  

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “January 1871”

I take the side of men, I really do.
It’s what one ought to do, and I want to do it.
But lately I noted down, and put to good use,
some very honest things a lion said to a bear,
on behalf of the beasts. It sort of goes like this,
as one was set to prevail upon the other:

“Bear! Its not quite right of you
to attack me, your clawed brother,
just in the hope of a small promotion.
Bear! Your home is among the snows,
my home extends from jungle to veldt.
And what is this Nero? A hideous name
blasted out in some trivial bugle-tune.

“If Caesar was a crocodile, this Nero
is nothing but a lizard, low to the ground.
He took a piece of Europe, preceded by
the conch-shell bleating of a hundred heralds.
At first, this killer only won by chance.
One is the big one, the other is the little.
Brother beast, let us despise these humans.
To fight among ourselves? For what!
Rather more fitting it seems that we
should make our way straight to Nero,
and thrusting aside his Ethiopian
     and armed Sicamber guards,
with tooth and claw we should each seize
the trembling tyrant’s members.

“Stripping Nero of his fake lion skin
would please one of us greatly. One kick
from you would send his chariot flying.
Once in a while it might be proper
for a good claw to penetrate a majesty
right down to the heart of his carcass,
and perhaps we will see, while gutting him,
you, that he is without brains, and I,
as I always knew, that no heart is there.
Biting your master is sweet. I think,
if only this catches on, more faces will join,
tongue, tooth, and jaw in common feast.

“Oh, they will come! That heap of beaten animals,
remembering every wrong and murder, crawl,
creep, snarl, growl, howl, groan to join us,
for every whipping past, a tooth in play.
It would be beautiful to see. The good earth,
is it not enough? Is loving one another not enough?
Do as I do! If I am going to set an example for you,
let it be a good one and not a and one.
Here is the tyrant. I am hungry. You too?
I dreamt of this moment — did you not, too?

“Did we just eat Caesar? Did we just eat Nero?
What does it matter to us? Whatever stain he has
whatever crown or laurel upon his head,
brother, my now-awakened appetites does not
distinguish the greater from the lesser food.
Large or small, I shall devour it!”

The bear did not reply. He understood nothing
the other beast explained to him.
The merciful lion scratched his face
and blinded him, so that the bear,
in front of the witness and judge of history,
bore yet more shame with one less eye.

Notes:

Hugo poses Caesar against Nero, and the polar bear against the lion in this poem from January 1871. During that month, Wilhelm of Prussia was crowned as German Emperor. The bear was associated with Berlin in heraldic shields as early as 1280 CE. The polar bear “Eisbar” became a popular obsession in Germany in the 1900s, but it is otherwise not clear that anyone associated Germany with arctic bears. Hugo may have used the polar bear to create a North-South distinction.

The lion, on the other hand, can be associated with several Roman Emperors. Emperor Commodus, emulating Hercules, sometimes wore a lion skin and fought against wild animals in the arena. The degenerate Emperor Nero donned the skin of a lion or panther and leaped from a cage to sexually assault bound captives.

 

In the Battle of Bapaume (3 January 1871), the French sought to relieve the besieged city of Péronne. General Faidherbe’s forces held their own against the Prussians, but as they failed to pursue the defeated enemy, the city surrendered on 10 January 1871. Although this may have encouraged Hugo, it was more a skirmish than a battle.

On 9 January 1871,

The third Battle of Dijon (14 January 1871), led by Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi, was part of the French attempted to liberate Paris by attacking the Prussians from the rear. The main effort led by General Bourbaki, was not successful, but Garibaldi and his troops defended Dijon and defeated 4,000 Prussian troops. Hugo would later make a spirited defense of Garibaldi’s voluntary service to assist France.

 

The Battle of Villersexel (9 January 1871) involved 20,000 French troops of l’Armée de l’Est against 15,000 German soldiers. A daylong fight over the local chateau extended into the night with intense street-fighting. It was a clear victory for General Bourbaki and the Prussians withdrew.

 

The Sortie

 

by Brett Rutherford

Translated from Victor Hugo l’Annee Terrible, “January 1871”

VIII

The cold dawn pales, vaguely appearing.
A crowd marches in line down the street;
I follow, carried along by the great living noise
that human footsteps make, moving forward together.
These are citizens preparing to go to battle.

Pure soldiers! Among the ranks, smaller in size,
but equal in heart, the child keeps up
tugged by the hand of his father;
the woman alongside shoulders her husband's rifle.
It is the tradition of the women of Gaul
to help the man put on their armor,
and to be on hand, ready to taunt a Caesar
or brave an Attila and his Huns.
The child exults and laughs,
and the clear-eyed woman does not cry.
Paris suffered this infamous war;
and Parisians agree on this,
that only through shame is a people
thrown into the shade of night,
that today they will make their ancestors happy,
no matter what happens,
and that Paris will die so that France lives.

We will guard honor, we shall offer it rest.
All are walking in the same direction.
Their eyes are indignant, their foreheads
pale; one reads on these faces:
     Faith, Courage, Famine.

And the troop traverses the crossroads,
heads held high; they raise their flag,
some already tattered to holy rags.
The battalion is always an order of families,
who only part ways at the final barriers.
These tender men, these warrior women sing
of the human race’s glory and triumph.
Paris defends all rights for everyone, after all.

An ambulance passes; we shudder; and we think
of those kings whose whim causes rivers of blood
to flow onto the pavement as the stretchers pass.

The time of the sortie is approaching;
masses of drums beat the march
from deep in the old suburbs.
Everyone hastens — Woe to the besiegers!
They do not fear traps, because the traps
that the valiant encounter,
only make the defeated proud,
and bring shame to the victor
who will not show his face openly.
They arrive at the walls, they join the army
already there awaiting them.

We hear a rumble of voices saying:
Farewell! Farewell! — Our rifles, women!
And the broken-hearted women,
    feigning serenity
    with unruffled eyes and brows,
after a kiss return their rifles to them.

 

 

A Bomb Over the Rue Feuillantines

 

By Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “January 1871”

VI

What are you? what, fallen from somewhere above, you wretch!
What are you made of? Lead, fire, death, the inexorable,
a reptile of war slithering in its own tortuous furrow.
What are you for! you, the cynical and monstrous
assassination that the princes of the depths of the nights
     throw randomly at men,
You, crime, you, ruin and mourning,
     you who call yourself hatred, terror, ambush,
     carnage, horror, wrath,
it is out of the blue that you fall upon us!

Not you! Not you again! You frightful fall
of iron, infamous outbreak,
bronze flower burst into petals of flame,
O vile human lightning, O you through whom
bandits are great, through whom the tyrants
call themselves divine, servant of royal crimes,
iron prostitute, sprung from the cloud
by who knows what marvel of science?
What a sinister usurpation of lightning!

How dare you come from heaven, who are born in hell?
(The forge that made you was surely beneath the ground!)
The man whom your bite has just now touched
sat pensive in the corner of a hovel,
minding his own affairs, not yours.
His eyes searched in the shadows
for a dream that shone; he was thinking;
when he was little, he had played there;
the past appeared before him, full of childish voices;
that’s where the Feuillantine nuns were.
Your stupid thunder strikes down a paradise.
Oh! How charming it was! how we used to laugh!

To grow old is to regard the fading light.
A garden once grew green where this street stands.
The ruin that new cobblestones imposed on nature,
alas, the bomb has now completed.
Here sparrows made raids upon the mustard-seed,
and the little birds quarreled to feed;
the wood was full of supernatural glimmerings;
so many trees! what pure air in the trembling branches!

The tow-headed lad has white hair now,
one was a hope, the other a ghost.
Oh! in the shadow of the old dome
we were impossibly young!
Now we are old like him. And so it is.
I day-dream, passing by. Right here,
his soul once flew away singing,
and it was here that to his unfocused eyes
appeared flowers that seemed eternal.

Here life was light; here walked,
beneath the outspread April foliage,
his mother, to whose dress he clung.
Memories! how suddenly everything vanishes!
Dawn opened its corolla to the old man’s gaze,
in this sky where the terrible blossoming bombs
     just go on blazing around him.
O the ineffable dawn where doves flew!
This man, who looks gloomy here, was joyful.
A thousand dazzling wonders filled his eyes.
Spring! in this garden abundant there were
periwinkles, roses, and piles of white daisies,
all of which seemed laugh in the warming sun.
A child among the flowers, he was one of them.

 

No! No! No! (Victor Hugo)

by Brett Rutherford
Adapted and translated from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "January 1871"

IV

No, no, no! What? The King of Prussia,
here and lording it over Paris! No!
Not in this holy place, this forested city,
this giant habitation of big ideas,
a place who glimmer leads souls to it,
this place of tumult teaching scholars science,
this great dawn that all the living dream about,
Paris a phenomenon of law and free will,

Her guidance given to the human avant-garde,
her Louvre, dark and hemmed in by its gravel shore,
her belfries, much hope, much fear inspiring,
roofs, walls, and towers, her strange balance
of those to Notre-Dame’s old will enslaved,
     and those whom the Pantheon sets free.
Such! this infinity, such! this abyss, this pile,
this ideal ship with invisible masts,

Paris, accustomed to reap and prune
     from her own harvest,
her growth commensurate and adding to
     the whole world’s grandeur,
her revolutions, her example, and the noise
of the inventions she spreads from the base of her forge,
What? what she founds and invents, sketches,
     experiments, creates,

Why, with all the future nestled under her sacred wing,
would someone, with a cannon shot, make all that vanish?
What? your dream, oh Paris, would be just a dream!
No. Paris is all about progress and success.

What does it matter that the north has come
to flood us with its black Cocytus,[1]
and that a clot of strangers submerges us today? —
the centuries are for this city,
     even if the present time is against her.

She is unperishing.
Even in this roaring storm,
my friends, I feel a deeper faith;
I feel in the hurricane the duty to shine,
and the affirmation of truth takes root.

Because the growing danger is, for the soul,
     another passing thing,
only a reason to grow in courage, and the cause
makes it more beautiful, and the right, while suffering,
     grows ever stronger,
and we seem more fairer when we are forced to stand tall.
It is very difficult for me, for my part, to grasp
that a wrestler can ever have a cause to surrender;
I have never known the art of despair;
How do I learn, when I must, to retreat,
     to tremble, to cry,
to be a coward, and to divorce my sense of honor,
to take upon myself the pains
     that are beyond my strength?

 

---

[1] Cocytus, the river of wailing and lamentation, one of five rivers circling Hades, the Greek realm of the dead.