Ah Dieu! que la guerre est jolie
avec ses chants et ses longs loisirs
and then the shrapnel penetrated his skull and shortened his life.
Those lines of verse have been on my mind a lot lately. Maybe because of people who claim that war is an integral part of the human experience.
Was Apollinaire genuinely keen on the military way of life? Surely his response to war would have been more complex. But I believe he was reported as having been seduced by the ceremonial and the flag-wagging. Maybe those lines are not ironic, though someone is killed in the poem,
... tandis qu'elle
riait au destin surprenant.
"You would feel that after so many centuries
God would give man to repent; yet he can kill
As Cain could, but with multitudinous will.
No farther advanced than his ancient furies."
(Richard Eberhart)
"Bella, horrida bella."
(Virgil)
"War is the health of the state."
(Randolph Bourne)
"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation; the second is war. Both bring temporary prosperity, both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists."
(Ernest Hemingway)
3 comments:
"Ah Dieu! que la guerre est jolie
avec ses chants et ses longs loisirs"
This has been amply discussed and most agree it's irony/cynicism. After all he was the "first" surrealist, having coined the term himself. Besides, it couldn't have escaped him that the war in which he was part of, WW1, was a butchery. He was wounded, yes, but ironically, again, he died of the Spanish flu. Nevertheless, he wrote what must be one of the most beautiful poems written in French: "Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine"..Magic!
The man himself can be heard reciting Le Pont Mirabeau here -
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Apollinaire.php
War, pestilence, disease, poverty, abuse, starvation, tragedy, all part of the human condition.
Geez you liberals love to wax on about how the world SHOULD work. Look at mother nature! Ask the gazelle, the lion, the vulture. Its still eat or be eaten!
Unfortunately Jemmy we have to live in the world we have, not the world we want.
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