Will This War Make Us Into Noble Beings?

 by Brett Rutherford

Adapted/Translated from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible

     "To Prince Prince-Cut-Down-A-Size", September 1870.

The emperor makes war on the king.
We told ourselves:
— Wars are the threshold of revolutions. —

We thought: — It’s yet another war.
     Yes, but this is the Big One.

Hell wants a laurel; death craves an offering;
these two kings have sworn to extinguish the sun;
the globe will be covered with blood, vast and ruddy,
and men will be cut down like weeds;
and the winners will be infamous, but superb. —
and we who want a human life in peace, who give
the land to the plow’s furrow,
      and not to the cannon ruts,
sad, but proud nonetheless, in awe we said: —
     just think: France against Prussia!

What does it matter if this flash-in-the-pan Batavian[1]
     attacks this arrogant Borusse![2]
Let the kings do their thing; then God will attend.
And so we dreamt of Vedic clashes, Vishnu against Indra,
an avatar clouded by apocalypse,
with flames from all sides to pierce and eclipse it.
We dreamt of the night’s enormous battles;
of more than one chaos of anger and noise
as when a hurricane attacks the sea, as when an angel,
wrestling a giant, struggles, and spews a mix
of heavenly blood with the dark ichor of Titans;
god upon god, Apollo versus Leviathan.

The shadows we imagined drove us mad.

We hurtled, as in famous battles past,
collided, in the horror of an unquenchable quarrel,
Rosbach[3] against Jena,[4] Rome against Alaric,[5]
the great Napoleon and the great Frederick;

We thought we could see approaching us,
     in haste, with the help of our own wings,
victories a-wing like swallows
and, like the bird run to its nest, go straight
to France, to progress, justice, law.

We thought we were witnessing
     the fatal and final clash of thrones.

At the sinister death of the old Babylons,
the crushed continent, killed and resurrected
would bloom again in dawn and freedom.

One hoped, perhaps,
     that after monstrous disasters,
new worlds would bloom
     from the collapse of stars!

Or so we thought. Either, we said, it will be
like Arbelle, Actium, Trasimene and Zara,
terrible, but grandiose — a chasm with its slope,
and the whole universe at the edge of its tether, as in Lepanto,
as in Tolbiac, in Tyre, in Poitiers.

Anger, Strength and Night, black gatekeepers,
will open the wide grave before us.
The South or the North
     will have to get in line.
One race or the other will have to drop
to the abyss’s bottom
where kings and gods crumble.
And thoughtful, believing that we see glory coming towards us,
we prepared for colossal battle:
shocks as the men of the Loire saw,
thundering Wagram, magnificent and hideous Leipsick,
Cyrus, Sennacherib, Caesar, Frederick the Second,
Nimrod, we shudder at these dark approaches... —

Suddenly we feel a hand in our pockets.
It has come to this, that now we rob our own.
Certainly, we had already told ourselves
     Bonaparte indigent
was a crook, and must have hoped
to loot Germany, having embezzled France;
He stole his throne; he is vile, deceitful and ugly,
that’s all true; but we had this fantasy that he was going
to confront an old king,
     some redemption in his pride in his own old race,
having God as crown and honor as breastplate.
In that scenario he would place before him,
     as in the time of the Dunois,
one of those paladins from ancient tournaments
whose armor we vaguely drew with our eyes
in the clouds full of dawn and portent.

O downfall! Illusion! Swiftly the scenery
is pulled away and replaced with another!
It is a whistle, the sign among bandits,
     and not the militant horn.
The night. You stand in a tawny thicket.
      Sabers swarm around you.
Gun barrels shine among the branches.
Cries come from the shadows.
     “Surprise — an ambush! Stop!”
Some detonation lights the sky in red
and everything flares up around you,
     limned in hell’s crimson skylight.

“You there! On your knees!
     We’ll bash your heads in
          if anyone makes a move.
Face down and no one standing!
Now give us your money — give it all.”

Whether you like it or not
     to be knee-deep in mud and water,
what can you do? So they search you,
     and there is a gun at your back.

“No smart ideas, now! We are ten to one,
     all armed to the teeth,
and if you resist, the worse for you!
Obey!”  These voices seem to come from a cave.
What can one do? we hold out our purse,
     we lie flat on our stomachs,
and while, foreheads on the ground, we submit,
we think of these taken-over countries
     that were formerly called
Frankfurt, Poland, Hanover, Hesse.

They are gone. It’s done! Get up!
So now we find ourselves penniless
in the middle of the Black Forest,
     and we think bitterly,
that no one prepared us for such wild betrayals.
We, ignorant in the art of ruling,
     and the supposed rules of war
     can only curse and swear,
that highway robber Cartouche[6]
     had been enlisted here,
to wage a war on one and all,
     just like his German counterpart,
          the robber Schinderhannes.[7]

---

[1] Batavian. Napoleon III’s older brother Louis Napoleon was the child-king of Holland for two weeks in 1810.

[2] Borusse. The Latin name for Prussia is Borussus.

[3] The Battle of Rossbach, 5 November 1757 in Saxony, a Prussian victory against France, and a turning point after which the French did not engage the Prussians further.

[4] The Battles of Jena, 14 October, 1806, between the armies of Napoleon I and Frederick the Great, a triumph for the French.

[5] Alaric I, King of the Goths, defeated and sacked Rome in 410 CE.

[6] Cartouche. Nickname for Louis Dominique Bourguignon (1693-1721), a French highway robber. Many ballads were written about his Robin Hood-like exploits.

[7] Schinderhannes. Nickname for Johannes Büchler (1778-1803), a German highway robber, also known as “The Robber of the Rhine.” Schinderhansl, the children’s card game (Black Peter), is named after him.

Worthy of One Another (September 1870)

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible

SEPTEMBER 1870

III.

So look: Here is our simpleton of crime;
And over there, madly served by his oppressed victims,
That ogre of divine right, devout, correct, moral.
Born to be emperor and yet always a corporal,
Here is the Bohemian and there is a Sicambre,[1]
(one the night-idler of the dank taverns,
   the other a crude Clovis chided for his heathen ways)
The cutthroat fights nocturnally,
      as the second of December attests.[2]
The hare on one side, the jackal on the other.
The Ollioule ravine[3] and the Bancal house[4]
seem to have furnished some kings; the Calabrians
had no one more frightening than these saber-draggers;[5]
Looting, extortion, it’s their war; such art
would charm the gods in the upper balcony,
but would disturb some military theorists.[6]
It’s as easy as the night-time arrest of a carriage.[7]

Yes, Bonaparte is vile, but Wilhelm is atrocious,
and nothing is so stupid, as, alas, the challenge-glove
this naïve joker hurls at the feet
     of that black bandit.

One attacks with nothing; the other allows the approach
and suddenly draws lightning from his pocket.
The German thunder, soft and treacherous, concealed itself.
Their emperor took ours by holding out a baby’s rattle.
He laughed: “Come this way, child!”
     and the little one ran,
          his short legs stumbling,
and the trap-door closed over him.

Carnage, heaps of dead, mourning, horror, betrayal,
infamous tumult around a sinister horizon;
and the thinker, faced with these numberless attacks,
is overcome by who knows what dark glare.
What crimes, fair heaven! Oh! the terrible outcome!
O France! one gust of wind in a moment dissipates
this shadow Caesar and his shadow of an army.

War where one was the flame
      and the other was only smoke.

 

 

---

[1] Sicambre. An allusion to Clovis, first king of the Franks, ordered by a bishop to remove his pagan necklaces at his baptism.

[2] Second of December. The date of Napoleon III’s coup.

[3] Ollioule. The gorges at Ollioule near Toulon were settled in Neolithic times, and the town of Ollioule was founded in the sixth century BCE by the Romans as Oppidum de la Courtine.

[4] Bancal. Jean-Louis Bancal de Saint-Julien, French brigadier general 1789-1815, who also fought in the American Revolution.

[5] Calabrians. The Calabrians in Italy offered a surprising peasant resistance to the French invasion of 1806-1807. French soldiers were captured, castrated, and burned alive by peasants whose last food rations the invaders were attempting to confiscate.

[6] Gods in the balcony. Hugo employs “Poulaillier,” literally, a chicken coop, a term used to describe “the gods,” the uppermost cheap seats in a theater. Hugo then mentions the Chevalier de Folard (1669-1752), a French military theorist who studied battlefield tactics.

[7] Arrest of a carriage. Many readers would read this as an allusion to the arrest of the fleeing King Louis XVI in June 1791.

Paris Blockaded, Reborn (September 1870)

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible

September, 1870

IV. 

You, Paris, shall bring proud History
     to kneel at your feet once more.
O City, whose beauty is in bleeding now,
     whose victory comes from dying:
Cease! No martyrdom here! Rise up!
     Your may be bleeding now,
but those who saw Caesar
     mocking your flacid arms,
will be astonished
      when you walk from the fire.

In the admiration of all peoples,
     and in awakened glory
you shall gain, Paris,
     much more than you have lost.

Those who besiege your
    downcast and mournful state,
those you shall yet overcome.

You were drugged by the slow death
     of low and false prosperity.
You fell down mad and gay,
     mired in your own blood.
You will go forth now,
     who heretofore had lulllaby’d
     the venomed empire to sleep,
you shall cast off that old
     and hideous contentment.
Waking up chaste, you shall shake
from your bedclothes the leering satyr.
The threat of martyrdom
     will make you a warrior maiden,
and in honor and beauty,
     truth, and the sense of right,
the better half of you shall be born again
while the base thing you had nearly become
     withers away and dies.

 

Free, But for What?

by Brett Rutherford

What is the point

of freedom

 

if you do not do

the things

that others frown upon?

October 1870, Part 1

Students enlisting to man the Paris fortifications, October 1870.

 

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted and translated from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible

Part 1

Exiled, I became the ocean’s old prowler,
the sort of specter who haunts the edge
of a maelstrom or a bitter abyss.
I had, amid the winter, in wind
and frost and storm, in foam and shadow,
issued a book whose black hurricane
blown at the orders of the banished
turned each page the moment I wrote it.
They took my nation from me.
I had nothing in me but imperishable honor.

But then I came home.
     I saw again the formidable city.
Faced with her hunger,
     I put my book in her mouth
and I said to this fierce and haughty
     and ardent populace,
to this indignant people,
     fearless, unyoked, unruled;
I said this to Paris, like the defiant
     thief to the eagle[1]:
Eat my heart, and your wings will widen.

When Christ expired, when the great god Pan
     passed into death,
John and Luke in Judea, and far off,
     in India, a wise man
who studied atoms, good, and evil,[2]
registered an obscure anxiety.

Yet when Olympus fell, the earth quaked
from Ophir to Canaan,
     and from Assur to Sheba
as a foundation, breaking,
     topples all columns.
The whole earth trembled when Babylon fell.

The same holy terror infects all today,
and underneath us, the fulcrum bends.
All tremble as a vile hand grips Paris.
Kill this City, and the Universe dies.
This is about more than one people:
the kings would nail
     the whole mournful bloody world
          to a cross.
And so it begins: the frightful torment
     of the human race.

So, bring it on. Greater than Troy or Tyre,
     greater than Numantia,
Paris besieged must set an example.
Tyrants send bandits our way: confront them.
It’s the Huns all over again,
     the way it was told by Fredegar.[3]
Let the machines of war roll towards us.
We, together, stand our ground,
     accepting the labor, alone, betrayed,
in order to save the country.
To fall without fear is still a victory,
to join the immense waking dream of history
in which all who seek the true, the great,
     the beautiful,
place before their lips a silencing finger
     as they pass your tomb.
Each of the great dead brings honor to his people —
Cato would be too much
     if he was greater than Rome.
Rome rose to equal the example of one;
     Rome learned by imitation.
As Rome had to fight in its time and place,
     so, too, must Paris.
Our labors become the sheafs and sprays
     that decorate our gravestones.
Fight on, oh my Paris, watch out! Oh, superb ones,
striding with unstained shields
     yet riddled with arrows,
with the illustrious fury of those
     who will not be defeated.

 

---

[1] Thief … eagle. An allusion to the story of Prometheus, who stole the secret of fire from the gods and gave science to the humans, and was punished to be chained to a rock, where his innards were devoured eternally by an eagle.

[2] A wise man. Hugo says only “d’Inde Epicure.” This obscure allusion comes from the Vedas and Indian philosophy. Charvaka, an apocryphal philosopher, anticipated many of the materialist ideas of Greek philosopher Epicurus. Both figures were condemned, ridiculed, and were subject to attempted erasure from history.

[3] Fredegar. The Chronicle of Fredegar, a 7^th-century Frankish history, a key source for French medieval history.

To the War Criminals

by Brett Rutherford

At the end of your path
is the hangman.

He, too, is only
following orders.