My Favorite French War Poem

Relief

By Charles Vildrac (Trans. Christopher Middleton)

Poilu
Charles Huard

In our place

Fresh Troops have come

Sent up the line

As bait for death

Met face to face.

We needed all night to make our escape

All night and its darkness

Sweating, frozen, to cross

The martyr forest and its swamp 

That shrapnel scourged.

All night in which to crouch,

Then to run line the wind,

Each man picking his moment,

Trusting to nerve and instinct

And his star.

But beyond the last entanglement,

Out of it all, on the firm road,

Met together, with no delays,

In the glow of the first pipes lit,

Then, mates, O lucky winners, 

Then what stumbling voluble joy?

That was the joy of shipwrecked men

With hand and knees upon the shore,

Who laugh with an agonized happiness

As they recover their treasure again;

All the treasure of the vast world,

And of memory unplumbed,

And of the thirst that can be quenched,

And even the pain you feel

In the shoulders since all danger passed.

And the future! Ah, the future!

Now is smiling, in the dawn:

A future of two long weeks ahead,

In a barn at Neuvilly.

All the apple trees in blossom!

I'll put blossoms into my letters.

I'll go and read in the middle of a field.

I'll go and have a wash in the river.

The man who is marching in front of me

Whistles a song that his neighbour sings

A song that is far away from the war:

I hum it too, and savour it.

Yet: to think of those killed yesterday!

But the man who has tripped

Between death's legs and then

Recovers himself and breathe again,

Can only laugh or only weep:

He has not the heart to mourn.

Today's first light makes all too drunk

The man who finds himself alive;

He is weak and is amazed 

To be dawdling so along the the road.

 

And if he dreams it is of the bliss

Of taking off his boots to sleep

In a barn at Neuvilly.

 

________________________ 

Charles Vildrac (1882–1971), born Charles Messager, was a prominent French poet, playwright, and essayist. Before World War I, he was celebrated for his humanistic philosophy and his role in co-founding the Abbaye de Créteil, an utopian community of artists and writers.  Despite his pacifist convictions, Vildrac reported when he was mobilized in August 1914. He was sent to the frontlines as an infantryman and stretcher-bearer and witnessed the horrors of front line combat, while losing close family members, including his cousin.