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 4

by Brett Rutherford

     Translated from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible

PART 4

THE CATALOG OF SHAME

 

We can laugh about Agincourt. From now on Ramillies,[1]
Trafalgar[2] provoke, at most a melancholy smile.
When you say “Poitiers,”[3] no one need dab
the corner of an eye with handkerchief.
The mention of Blenheim,[4] one shrug
and never a need for fisticuffs.
We used to bow our heads at Crécy[5] — no more.

Rosbach,[6] where idiot armies failed to find
the right roads and lost their cannons,
seems less a black spot than a missed victory.

 

No, France, here is the unspeakable: Sedan.

This name blots out all other losses.
Spit out these two syllables beneath your breath
and never say that name again!

 

---

[1] In the Battle of Ramillies in Flanders, in the War of Spanish Succession, on May 12, 1706, the French army suffered 13,000 casualties.

[2] At the naval Battle of Trafalgar, October 21, 1805, Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated a combined French and Spanish fleet, a turning point in the Napoleonic Wars.

[3] Battle of Poitiers, September 19, 1356. In this episode of The Hundred Years’ War, thousands of French soldiers, and even nobles, were killed, a calamity to French pride.

[4][4] The Battle of Blenheim on the banks of the Danube, August 13, 1704, in the War of the Spanish Succession, ended the myth of French invincibility. Thousands were killed by locals in the long trek through the Black Forest, and France suffered 27,000 casualties in the final battle.

[5] The Battle of Crécy in The Hundred Years’ War, August 26, 1346, pitted French crossbows against English longbows, and ended in a catastrophic defeat.

[6] The Battle of Rosbach, November 15, 1757. In this battle in the Seven Years’ War, a disorganized Franco-Imperial Army was repeatedly in the wrong place and suffered a humiliating rout.

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.

---

[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.

The Defeat at Sedan, Part 2

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Anneé Terrible

PART 2 – WHERE MADMEN GO

Let Pliny go to Vesuvius, Empedocles to Etna,[1]
from whose craters a new dawn of fire arose.
It is right to be curious, unlike the Brahmin
made in Benares only to be fed to vermin
in search of his own paradise, I understand!

That through Lipari’s[2] perilous sea, riven
with ancient and live lavas purple-clad,
a pearl fisher sails in his tiny coraline,
teased by feline waters that paw its frail deck,
and he sails and comes home, and sails again
from Corsica’s capes to Corfu’s dread rocks!

Let Socrates be wise, and Jesus be mad,
one being rational, the other sublime, but both
subject to the whims of a killing crowd;
let the black prophet wail outside Solime
until a crowd kills him with javelins;

Let Green[3] fly off in his balloons,
and Lapérouse[4] sail ‘round the globe,
whether Alexander goes to Persia
or Trajan takes war to the Dacians,
each knows what he is doing
What each one wishes, he dares to do.
But never in all the centuries past,
has History borne witness to such an insane spectacle,
this vertigo, this dream, a man who himself,
descending from a triumphant and supreme summit,
pulls on the dark thread that brings down death.
Annoyed with the ground, he opens a pit,
and there he places himself beneath the pendulum
and its ever-descending blade. The mystery is
that he does nothing while it swings down,
as if, without a head, he’d better keep his crown!

---

[1] Pliny (the Younger) and Empedocles, two classical writers who left descriptions of volcanic eruptions.

[2] Lipari, a geothermally-active volcanic island off the coast of Sicily. It is between the two volcanos of Etna and Vesuvius.

[3] Charles Green (1785-1870), British balloonist and inventor of the first reliable methods of steering and landing.

[4] Jean-Francois de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse (1741-1788?), French naval officer and explorer who led an around-the-world expedition.