Conversely, there were other poets who from the
very outset hated and denounced war, and yet got out of it something which
was both less and more than hatred. However fiercely they
might condemn it, it exerted a sinister hold over them. A
striking case of this is the Russian Futurist, Victor Khlebnikov, who fought
as a private soldier on the eastern front from early in the war until the
dissolution of the Russian armies. A leading figure in the
It appealed to him by its elemental disorder,
its reduction of life to its lowest terms, its chaotic brutality which made
him believe that the earth had returned to the sway of savage, primeval
gods. His packed, forceful lines and his bold improvisations
in vocabulary reflected his isolation from other men and his imperviousness
to the common claims of humanity. His revolutionary ardour
was perfectly sincere and set him in principle against the war, but in
practice he displayed his feelings largely in his love of rasping shocks and
grim surprises. His imagination was set to work by such themes
as a dead man lying in a pond, soldiers caught in battle as in a mouse-trap,
the merciless torment of rain and snow and wind, the flame and smoke of
bombardments, the burning of villages and the wreck of forests.
In these he feels at home, because he sees in them a reversion to
a distant, disordered past for which his anarchic temperament craves.
He creates his own mythology for the battlefield and likes to see
in its routine survivals from pagan rites. So in
As soldiers stand in silence and
watch the pyre set alight, the smoke which rises from it recalls the flow
of great rivers, the Don and the Irtish, and symbolizes the overpowering
domination of nature when artificial restraints are removed.
In Khlebnikov's love of horrors there is a streak of perversity,
but it is none the less in character in a man who looked forward to the
collapse of his world. For him also war transforms what he
sees, and gives to it a fierce enchantment.
From his knowledge of war as it really is the poet may start
again towards a wider vision of it and try to see it in a fuller perspective
without reverting to the old abstractions. It is impossible
to present its illimitable chaos, but what counts is the poet's selection
from it of what really strikes or stirs him. This is what
Georg Trakl, who died on the eastern front in December 1914, does in
He applies to the whole shapeless panorama of battle his gift
for images which form a centre for a host of associations and must be taken
at their full value as each appears:
A third matter on which the fighting soldier has his own
ideas is his enemy. At home enemies may be denounced as
inhuman barbarians, ready to destroy the hearths and shrines of lands more
civilized than their own. Therefore patriots, safely
ensconced in the rear, fulminate against them, but the average soldier soon
sees that in this there is little truth. Living in his own
isolated world of the trenches, he feels that the enemy are closer to him than
many of his own countrymen, and especially than the invisible commanders who
from a remote security order multitudes to a senseless death.
On no point is there a sharper contrast between home and front,
and in England we may mark the extremes, on one side by Kipling's
and on the other side by Siegfried Sassoon's
In Germany no less pungent a contrast can be found between
one end of the scale with Littauer's So in
He feels that this man is
his brother, and at night he thinks that he hears him crying.
He crawls out to bring him in and bury him, and then he sees
that he is a stranger. He draws his conclusion:
(
In France we find similar contrasts. At one
extreme we may put Claudel's It has its own proud fury when
Claudel elaborates how in the end the Germans will be undone by the very
forces which they have themselves set in action:
but it moves in too exalted and too personal an atmosphere to speak for the
common soldier.