Watching My Granddaughter, Between Two Bombardments

by Brett Rutherford

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

XI

From your first cry, Jeanne, you excited our pity
as much as our admiration (to be born in such times!)
You were born; you had this omnipotence,
you glowed with grace; yours was like a venerated creche,
where lay the humble divine child
     who does not as yet have eyes,
and whom a star comes to fetch from the heavens.
You were loaned to us six days,
     and then for six weeks,
     and then six months,
a frail glow in our human shadows.

Meanwhile, Jeanne, you kept on getting older,
all that hair now, and even a tooth,
and you are almost a great character, so soon.
So little of the newborn floats there now,
you want to be on the ground with us;
you need adventures and walking about,
and the infant’s jersey seems childish to you.
You perk up as your older brother
marches about to the tune of the Marseillaise,

Two years old; and you, you climb on my chair,
or, fierce on all fours, you crawl behind a screen,
where it is my job to seek and find you.
You want a clever toy, even a living one.
You set up a dolls’ house with a baffled kitten.
The flexible gear of growth has taken you up,
replacing the child who wails with the one who chatters,
the plaintive cry with the one of triumph.
The angels who eats at table now mocks
the memory of the angel at the breast.
You are constantly transfigured; time mixes
the Jeanne I saw yesterday with the one I see today.

With every step she takes, she leaves behind her
several little ghost-trails of herself.
We remember everyone, we mourn them,
we love them, and they would all be dead
     if she were not alive in her turn.
She is already a double-star, well on her way
to becoming a constellation in herself.
It seems that in this enchanted state of being,
to please us, each age in turn makes its own copy.
This little destiny is like a rising sun!

For fate is masked with rays in the morning;
and in the whiteness of dawn,
in a pleasant and chaste celebration,
the sunbeams come one after the other
to surround the child’s head and give to it
an aureole, some pure and crowning effect.
It would seem that life, with charming care,
tries every halo on this little Jesus,
thus preparing itself through soft caresses,
roses, kisses, laughter fresh and quick,
only to later put thorns on her forehead.

 

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.

 

In the Circus Maximus

by Brett Rutherford

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

The lion of the south is lord. What is this?
Something he has never seen before
comes at him — a polar bear!.
The bear runs straight to the lion,
snarling, and full of anger, attacking it,
roaring as loud as a Nubian wind-storm.
And the lion said to him: Fool! Look around!
We are in the circus, and you are making war on me.

For what? Do you see that man over there
     the one with the vulgar forehead?
He calls himself Nero, emperor of the Romans.
You fight for him. If one of us bleeds,
     he laughs, he claps his hands.
We are not in the great outdoors, brother,
the sky above is the only way out of here,
and you see no fewer stars than I do.

What does this master want from us,
sitting on his balcony with banners fluttering?
He is happy; and we die by his command,
     his business is laughter,
     and ours is biting, do you see?
He makes one of us massacre the other;
and, while, brother, my nail-bite waits
for your untender tooth-bite,
he is there on his throne and watches us do it.

Our torments are his games;
he is from another sphere.
Brother, when we shed our blood in streams,
he calls it purple. Innocent, simpleton,
come and attack me. So be it. My claws are ready;
but I think and dare to say, my brother,
that if we are beast enough to kill one another
with such fury, we had better eat the emperor instead.

 

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.

 

 

The Pigeon Post

 

by Brett Rutherford

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

XX

Down there on earth,
he sees an enormous abyss of shadow where nothing shines,
as if some form of molten night had been poured there,
which seems like a black lake;
as a spot in the sky, it is gazing downward.
Strange lake, made up of waters? No,
     it is made of roofs without number,
here bridges like in Memphis,
     over there towers like in Zion.
Some heads turn upward,
     some far-sighted looks lock upon him,
     some voices call, but indistinctly — oh vision!

Whispers rise from this stagnation of darkness,
and this lake lives, an enclosure walls it,
and on it one seems to see the frightful seal of hell.
The dark lake is the city, and he, the black dot, is a mere bird.
Like some heraldic eaglet ripped
     from shield or tapestry,
he flies for the sake of phantom people,
one species come to the aid of the other. An almost nothing,
a mere atom amid the clashing armies, this small one
comes in the shadows to help the colossus.

He may be an ignorant bird, not much of a fighter,
yet through this spacious network of cloud and wind,
ever afloat he flies. He has his goal, the thing he seeks,
the goal which he discerns above rivers,
trees and bushes, his remembered landmarks,
mapped on the roundness of pale horizons.

He thinks of his female, of her sweet brood,
of the nest, his roof-house, down there somewhere,
of the tender cooing, of the charming month of May;
he drops by stealth amid the flying bullets,
and yet, at the bottom of the firmament,
unwittingly, he drags along a human shadow;

And while the instinct toward his roof, that one,
that only, brings him back, and his small soul
shall be devoted to husbanding, he is more
than you think. Beneath his humble pinions,
rolled and rolled into a single quill,
a microfilm with hundreds of messages —a hand
on which he lights will remove it, and oh!
it is all about the black drums and bugles,
the count of grapeshot in many volleys,
the whispers from all of France and Germany,
the battles, the assaults, the vanquished,
     the victors, perhaps, as well,
a few mysterious whispers from heart to heart,
faint ink in microscopic lettering, which eyes
must strain to read beneath a glass.
At stake is the vast future which, fatally,
envelops the destiny of Europe in the fate of Paris.

Oh! vastnesses around us, ever-working!
How is it that some force unknown
makes a seed sprout despite the rock
that presses it down and chokes it?
Who holds and handles and mixes the winds,
the waves, the thunders, the sea
where valiant balloons, aloft,
and weighing almost nothing,
     may lose themselves?;
who brings new life out of dying things,
having infinite time to attend to its business;
who, being all-powerful, fails yet to avert
fault, misery, and evil; who would dig out
a dungeon to torment a swallow;
yet who, with a mysterious tide of force,
creates a lily, or compels a bud to swell,
or pushes a leaf through the armored bark;
who seems indifferent to the melting flood
the shrug of his cold snows abandons,
who holds above all the frost’s dark urn
which is always ready to drown the skies,
letting harvest or hunger depend on how
his whim tips a trembling fulcrum;

who balances all on a reed, a chance,
     an airy breath,
who marches out Titans when a pygmy would do,
exhausting his prodigious energies for naught,
why, god of wrath and anger, spew fire and smoke,
maker of giants, Vesuvius, Etna, Chimborazo;
who in distraction lets a world be saved
by letters carried on the wing of a bird!

 

 

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.