The Defeat at Sedan, Part 6

by Brett Rutherford

     Translated from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible

ONCE IT WAS GAUL

Once it was Gaul, then France, then glory.
Once it was Brennus the audacious,[1]
     and that long-haired Celtic titan,
         Clovis the victor[2]

Times past, the proud line of battles, Châlons,[3]
Tolbiac the fierce, Arezzo the cruel,
Bovines, Marignan, Beaugé, Mons-en-Puelle, Tours,
Ravenna, Agnadel on her high palfrey,
Fornoue, Ivry, Coutras, Cérisolles, Rocroy,
Denain and Fontenoy, all these immortals
With the brows of Zeus and the wings of demigods,
Jemmape, Hohenlinden, Lodi, Wagram, Eylau,
The men of the last square of Waterloo,
and all these war leaders, Héristal, Charlemagne,
Charles-Martel, Turenne,
     whose names the Germans dread,
Condé, Villars, famed for such proud success,
this Achilles — Kléber — this Scipio — Desaix —
Napoleon, greater than Caesar and Pompey —
by the hand of a bandit they all surrendered their swords.

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[1] Brennus, a chieftain of Gaul, invaded Rome in 390 BCE.

[2] Clovis (466-511 CE) was the first king to unite all the Franks under one rule. He converted to Christianity in the last year of his reign.

[3] Châlons. The battle in 451 CE that stopped the westward advance of Attila.

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.

 

The Defeat at Sedan, Part 3

 by Brett Rutherford

     Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible

WHEN THEY FALL

When a comet falls into the well of night,
does it have stars as witnesses when it fades out?
Satan cast down remains grandiose;
his crushing retains an air of apotheosis;
and over a proud destiny, vision unshakeable,
the ill star falling shines a final ray.

Once the first Bonaparte fell; his crime,
although immense, did not dishonor the abyss;
God had rejected him, but over this great rejection
something vast and lofty floated;
one side lit, obscured the side in shadow;
so that glory loved this tarnished man,
and human consciousness retained a doubt
about the harm that the colossi do.

To consecrate a crime is evil
and God saw the need to set a new example.

 Once a thief Titan has climbed a peak,

every thief wants to follow him there;

but it is now necessary to show

that a strutting Sbrigani[1] cannot imitate Prometheus;

it is time for the earth to learn in terror

how much the small can surpass the big,

how a polluted stream can worse than a flood,

and stupefied fate finds that its hands are full,

even after Waterloo, even after Saint Helena!

 

God sends the dead of night to discourage his rising.

how fitting and right it was to accomplish

Brumaire for the first Bonaparte in that month of fog,

and this one’s December mist-shrouded coup,[2]

by a smear that blotted the stars themselves

and even effaced the enormous memories

      of yesteryear,

As it is necessary to throw the last weight on the scale,

He who weighs everything wanted to show the world,

after one’s great end, the other’s filthy collapse,

so that mankind might learn a lesson,

to feel contempt instead of the shiver of the sublime,

so that after the epic we have the parody,

and so that we are made to see how a tragedy

may encompass horror, and ash and nothingness

when we witness a dwarf bring down a giant.

 

This man’s existence was itself a crime,

and as the wretched have all the misery,

his statue will have mourning as its pedestal;

the end of this fatal crook had to be

that an ambush could seize his empire,

and the mud of the earth would weep with shame.

 

And this modern-day Caesar,
holding his nose at the smell of dogs,
     stumbled and fell into a storm drain,
and the sewer was offended.

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[1] Sbrigani. A trickster character, akin to Figaro, who uses cleverness and deceit, in Molière’s 1669 comedy-ballet Monsieur de Pourceaugnac.

[2] On 18 Brumaire (a month named after seasonal fog), or 9 November 1799, the first Napoleon accomplished the coup that made him First Consult. Louis Bonaparte’s coup was on December 2, 1851. Therefore these lines are contrasting the two Napoleons and comparing the dates of their respective coups.