April soft and cold: Hearts aghast

One hundred years ago the major European powers had found themselves locked in an excruciatingly slow form of mutually-assured destruction. Trenches gouged farmland across Belgium and Northern France, and across Galicia in Poland and Russia. Men—soldiers—lived like the vermin they shared their patches of filth with. Nothing was certain except the choice between death and misery.

1915 was the year that German Zeppelins began bombing cities in Britain. Deliberately targeting civilians—a first.

1915 was the year that the Germans used poison gas, firing it in shells at Russian positions west of Warsaw. Later in the year they discharged it from more than 5,000 cylinders around Ypres, in Belgium, letting the winds carry it wherever they happened to go. Chemical warfare—a first.

1915 was the year Turks began deporting Armenians in forced marches, murdering thousands and permitting thousands more to die of starvation, exposure and disease. Genocide as a policy—a first.

1915 was the year Germans embarked on their U-Boat campaign of unrestricted attacks on merchant and passenger shipping in the waters around the British Isles. Indiscriminate preying on civilian targets with the new submarine technology—a first.

1915 was the year Britain imposed a total sea blockade on Germany, interdicting all shipping from all countries. Deliberate policy of starving a country, civilian population and all—a first.

1915 was the year Allied troops landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in an attempt to clear the Dardanelles Straits and open shipping lanes to Russia. The campaign was haphazardly planned, hesitantly led and ended a few months later when remnants of the mostly Anzac troops reboarded transports, after never having left the beaches. Amphibious campaigns—a first.

1915 was the year that the Germans introduced the Fokker monoplane, with a synchronized machine gun that fired through the propeller blades, allowing the pilot to attack straight ahead. The Fokker Scourge terrorized ground troops and other aircraft over the Western Front until the Allies caught up with the technology about a year later. Combining machinegun killing capacity with aerial maneuverability—a first.

1915 was the year the British deployed poison gas via cylinders, against the Germans in the Artois. Using technology because the enemy has it it, without considering unintended consequences (or even whether it’s effective at its purpose)—well, no, not a first. But it just shows you what kind of war that was.

And, as you know, the way many people processed this conflagration was through poetry. I’ve given you several before: Akhmatova and cummings, Yeats, Sassoon and, of course, Owen. You’ll see a couple of them again this year. But today let’s look at Isaac Rosenberg.

Rosenberg was the son of Latvian Jews who immigrated to England before he was born. Like William Blake, his formal education ended in his mid-teens and he became an engraver. While working this trade, he took night classes at Birkbeck College’s art school, and then went full-time to attend the Slade School of Fine Art. Chronic bronchitis drove him to try South Africa, where he was when war broke out in 1914.

He was opposed to the war from the beginning, but he saw enlistment as a way to earn a steady income, which he needed to support his mother. He served from October 1915 until April 1918, when he was killed on the Somme. He was 27.

Rosenberg left a stunning body of work, and it’s hard to choose among them. But I’ll give you “Break of Day in the Trenches”, because it reminds me of the description of that life I once heard from an old guy who’d served in the Gordon Highlanders.

“Break of Day in the Trenches”

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet’s poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver—what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe—

Just a little white with the dust.

There are several elements that (in Rilke’s metaphor) pierce my eye and plunge into my heart, but that egalitarian/politically-agnostic rat kind of finishes me off. In the end, it doesn't care whose corpses it feeds on.

Also not a first.