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histoireettralala · 2 years

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In Memoriam

First there were the sparkle of a new century; the splendour of the Universal Expositions; the race to progress; the series of calm, serene Sundays; the swaying gait of the Apaches and of the hips of dactylos on a spree in the guinguettes of the banks of the Seine or the Marne. Trips to the mountains or to spa towns, for a sunny Sunday. The trend of sea baths; again and forever, a time of long dresses, hat pins, hat veils and sunshades to protect oneself from the sun; the first fevers of the metropolitan; the magic of tramways. A smell of rail and electricity.

There were the shapes of the Art Nouveau, the fashion of stem-like women with vegetal curves, who were starting to escape and free themselves from their corsets. Parisian ladies had large hats and tiny feet. Men were smoking their first Gauloises. There were of course, riots and strikes: electricians, civil servants, site workers, postmen, bar waiters, taxi drivers. Men wanted to build and shape their destiny. They wanted a better share of the riches of the world.

There was the Montmartre of the painters and the Bateau-Lavoir; the first aerial meetings; the Paris flooding; the comet of Halley passing by; the appearance of the first tangos; the first music halls; the inauguration of the Vél'd'Hiv and the Gaumont Palace; the theft of the Mona Lisa; the end of the Bande à Bonnot; the publication of La Guerre des Boutons; the meeting between Yvonne de Quiévrecourt and Alain-Fournier under the trees of the Cours La Reine, which so narrowly missed the Goncourt prize; the first phone cabins; the electrification of the railway; the first Michelin maps; the fashion of caps et boaters; the invention of esperanto.

It was peace. The promise of a new dawn, the carefree spirit of summer, the peace of fields spattered with cornflowers and poppies which were waiting the sickle of the harvester or the knife of the thrasher.

They were seventeen, twenty-five, or thirty. Many wore their hair short, and moustaches. Many had the rough neck and hands of the worker, a laborer's worn fingers, a turner's or mechanic's broken nails. There were grooms, land surveyors, bakers, butlers, office boys, clerk notaries, butchers, schoolteachers, peddlers, copywriters, cow keepers, porters, shepherds, priests, grinders, cooks, toolmakers, clerks, chauffeurs, footmen, tinsmiths, deliverers, boilermakers, newsboys, barbers, railway workers, waiters, postmen, intellectuals, factory workers, bourgeois, aristocrats and saddlers.

Suddenly there were civilians, career soldiers, conscripts, reservists, artillery men, navy men, infantry men, zouaves, aviators, pioneers, stretcher-bearers, liaison officers, telegraphers, non-commissioned officers, submariners, cooks, adjudtants, generals, lieutenants, chaplains, canteen-workers, cavalry men, bleus, rappelés, permissionnaires, etc… Suddenly, were the Poilus.

Their handwriting was round or sharp; it had the delicacy of the quill or the thick stroke of the ink pen. Their names were Gaston, Jean, Auguste, Marcel, Louis, Alexandre, Edmond, Martin, Antoine, Etienne, Maurice, Albert, Henri, Roger, René… Their wives or their mothers were named Félicie, Léontine, Hortense, Louise, Honorine, Clémence, Marguerite, Berthe, Germaine, Yvonne, Marthe…

All of them travellers without baggage who had to leave their families, their fiancees, their wives, their children. Leave there their office, their lathe, their kneader, their workshop or their stable. Don the poorly cut uniform, the garance trousers, the bumpy képi. Take on the too heavy barda and put on the cleated shoes.

They knew very soon that this war was senseless. From false hopes to false hopes, from last battles to last battles, they ended up unable to project the end of the war whose actors they were, and whose usefulness wasn't so obvious anymore to them.

Out of eight million mobilised between 1914 and 1918, over two million young men never saw again the belltower of their village. Their names are carved in the cold stone of the monuments of our cities and towns. And when the church goes quiet, when the school is closed, when the train station is shut down, when silence reigns over these places that became hamlets, remain these lists of words, these lists of names and surnames keeping the memory of a France whose countryside was so populated.

Over four million men survived only after they suffered grievous wounds, their body broken, amputated, marked, bitten, their flesh torn, when they weren't seriously mutilated. Others got out apparently intact: they still lived with the memory of the horror they had lived for over fifty months, the memory of blood, of the stench of rotting corpses, of the bursting of shells, of stinking mud, of vermin, the memory of the obscene smirk of Death. They had for them the systematic and reoccuring lash of nightmares for the rest of their days and with it the anguished, unanswered cry, the cry for their mothers. They lived with the words reminding them of sights whose horror they would never forget: Galipoli, Verdun, the Chemin des Dames, Arlon-Vitron, the mill of Laffaux, the Somme, Ypres, Péronne, Montmirail, Douaumont, the Fort of Vaux…

Over eight thousand people answered the call of Radio France: eight thousand letters, meaning that many families searching, into a coffer in the attic, between the yellowed pages of family photo albums, for the memory of their fathers', grandfathers', ancestors' lives.

These words written in the mud aren't eighty, or eighty-five years old; they are one day old. They have the whole strength of a life all the more intense since it was so close to the abyss, since it was looking at death every second.

We do not claim to do a historian's work by gathering in a few weeks so many powerful and intense documents: our purpose is before all humanist and literary. We simply meant to let these cries of the soul, entrusted to quill and crayon, be heard, like so many bottles thrown to the sea, which should stimulate for future generations the duty of memory, the duty of vigilance, the duty of humanity.

Jean-Pierre Guéno- Paroles de Poilus- Lettres et carnets du front 1914-1918

#xx #jean-pierre guéno #book: paroles de poilus #la grande guerre #ww1 #i'm sorry the translation is rough and hurried

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histoireettralala · 2 years

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Letters from WW1

René Jacob was killed in Verdun in 1916. He was the son of a wheelwright and was a baker in Bussy-en-Othe (Yonne). He left behind his wife Lucie, and three children, whose eldest was eight.

1915

How could I describe ? Which words could I choose ? Earlier, we crossed Meaux, still frozen in immobility and silence, Meaux with its laundry-boats sunk into the Marne and its wrecked bridge. Then we took the road of Soissons and climbed the slope which brought us on the north plateau.... And then, suddenly, as if a theater curtain went up in front of us, the battlefield appeared in its full horror.

German corpses here on the edge of the road, there in the gulchs and fields, blackish, greenish, decaying corpses around wich, in the sun of September, swarms of flies buzz; corpses of men who maintained strange positions, knees bent in the air, or arm leaning on the bank of the trench; corpses of horses, more painful yet than human corpses, with bowels spread on the ground; corpses covered with lime or straw, soil or sand, to be burnt or buried. A horrifying stench, a stench of mass grave, rises from all this rot. It seizes us by the throat, and won't leave us for four hours. As I am writing these lines I can still smell it around me, turning my stomach. Vainly did the wind, blowing in gusts over the plain, try to sweep it all away; it could chase away the swirls of smoke that rose from all these burning piles; but it couldn't chase away the smell of death. "Battlefield", did I say earlier. Not battlefield, but slaughterfield. Corpses, this isn't nothing. For now, I have forgotten hundreds of wincing faces and contorted bodies. But what I will never forget, is the ruin of things, the abominable ransacking of cottages, the looting of houses....

René Jacob

Jean-Pierre Guéno- Paroles de Poilus- Lettres et carnets du front 1914-1918

#xx #la grande guerre #letters #les poilus #book: paroles de poilus

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