6 - The Great War and the European avant-garde

Summary

In 1915, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had enlisted in the cavalry in late 1914, wrote a poem called “Guerre” (”War ”), which begins:

Rameau central de combat

Contact par l’écoute

On tire dans la direction “des bruits entendus”

Les jeunes de la classe 1915

Et ces fils de fer électrisés

Ne pleurez donc pas sur les horreurs de la guerre

Avant elle nous n’avions que la surface

De la terre et des mers

Apres elle nous aurons les abîmes

Le sous-sol et l’espace aviatique . . .

Central combat sector

Contact by sound

We’re firing toward “noises that were heard”

The young men of the class of 1915

And those electrified wires

Then don’t weep for the horrors of war

Before the war we had only the surface

Of the earth and the seas

After it we’ll have the depths

Subterranean and aerial space . . .

To Anglophone readers, whose touchstone for the poetry of the GreatWar is the lyric of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, or Siegfried Sassoon, the apocalyptic sentiments expressed in Apollinaire’s “War” must seem all but incomprehensible. Did les jeunes de la classe 1915 really believe that the war would provide entrance to a Brave New World in which the heights of the heavens and depths of the earth would be sounded?