(AA) Canto 18: Battlelines
Stalemate in the West
My lord, do not go forth to a combat so giant!
Do not raise your arm where weapons clash,
in the festival of young men, the dance of Inanna!
The Lugale
The Phoney War is raging at its height,
Both sides conduct a fierce leaflet campaign,
Sometimes patrols skirmish into the night,
Sometimes a ship slips neath the Spanish Main;
What tensions rise
Each time Hitler aborts!
Unheterlan Allies content to man the forts.
Twisted steps are swiftly taken,
Thro’ Nazi racial doctrine,
A Pole told she is now German
As her Ahnenpass stamp’d clean,
Resisting pacification
Leads to but one mean scene –
Rotting husbands rocking at the gallows,
Bandsmen drowning bays of wailing widows.
Gallant little Belgium proclaims
Her arm’d neutrality,
Sidestepping games, chief of her aims,
Avoid hostility!
But selfishness breeds weakness says the court of history.
Europe
January 15th
1940
Boarding Party
Go thou to England, rest awhile thy brow
Upon her breathing bosom, cool & free
& she shall lay her arms around thee now
Basil Fry
Where running water drains a paradise
Of saw-tooth’d fjords, glacier-goug’d, deep time
In ev’ry crevice, despite the advice
Of neutral countries, a volitive crime
Plays out today
With revirescent haste,
Thro’ rains & icy spray two naval nations fac’d.
Altmark’s bows the Cossack barges –
On running its prey aground,
Tough Marines & tougher Sarges
Leap like elks to eager pound
Metal decks, all whom emerges
Were cut down where them found –
Quite the professional cutlass attack
Went hell for leather & snickety-snack.
Their haubergeons ripp’d up, a row
Of matrosen slain-sneer
As down below, voice loud & slow,
“Any Englishmen here?”
“Yes we’re all British!” “So are we!” uprioted wild cheer.
Jøssingfjord
February 7
1940
Finland’s Fall
Weapons, weapons, weapons
And poets on duty, pulling the trigger
Ready to set the last cigarettes on fire
Léo Ferré
As Russia floods the Reich with oil & grain,
The Reich returns full train-loads right on time;
Munitions, tanks & the modern warplane,
To help them pierce the stalwart Mannerheim;
One million men
Launch a grand offensive –
Tis now not if but when that bastard front must give.
Thick furs fire at fifty paces,
But for ev’ry man they slay,
Five more Ivan took fresh places,
Five fresh men to hold at bay,
Sheer exhaustion etch’d drain’d faces,
Working both night & day…
Desperate Sisu holding grimly on,
But in the end, the brave end, War’s are won.
Yes War! the ancyent arbiter
Of disputing nations,
Whose proud victor may cast censure,
Politic’s extensions,
For battlefield diplomacy drowns converse with it’s guns.
Helsinki
February
1940
Swing Youth
In case you hadn’t noticed,
it has somehow become uncool
to sound like you know what you’re talking about
Taylor Mali
Not every German struts about like Geese,
Some still prefer to swing the jinx away,
That unencumber’d, evergreen release
Teenagers feel when real musicians play;
Eurythmical,
Each gramaphonic scratch
Comblendeth mystical new music without match.
Young Xaver Stemmler caught the drug,
Grew his hair an awfa’ long,
Goes wiggling thro’ the jitterbug
In good English sang along,
When puffing like a paddletug,
Settling himself among
The girls, he curls a cigarette, or two,
Sits back & swoons, impassion’d, at the view.
“In here there is no Nazi yoke,
In here feel liberty,”
He lit a smoke, he bit a toke,
He blew the white rings free,
Facing the floor, lush fraulines laughing with frivolity.
Berlin
March
1940
Lights of Freedom
Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked
Kahlil Gibran
Aghast of life, this living suicide
Of odorous companionship bleeds out,
“As tears by aching patience must be dried,”
The rabbis plead, “you’ll be releas’d, no doubt!”
Hatches the wish,
For one the dark hath ceas’d,
Pretending, “I’m Polish!” Spiegelman’s time releas’d.
On Parsha’s Trauma stepp’d he out
To world of dazzling brightness,
No more the angry clanging shout
Of Nazis in their spiteness,
While all bucolical about
Spring sprung in its spriteness
& now a train to take him homewards bound
An open’d door, a house alive with sound.
His son could not stop hugging him,
& his wife so happy,
Then losing vim her voice grew dim,
“Vladek, the factory,
Was seiz’d & taken off us!” “But at least, my love, we’re free!”
Sosonoweiz
April
1940
Conquest of Norway
Trains clattering coastwards out of sight
along the valley floor in this textbook
twilight provide all the metaphor you need
Steve Xerri
Their native rock gript, from the Skagerak
To the Arctic Circle, by German hands,
Their soldiers withering neath the attack,
Their King harras’d by bombers thro his lands;
Norwegian sires,
Hardiest of races,
Enslaved – Hitler desires all their coastal bases.
Millennial neutrality
Sever’d by Teutonic sword,
Sad King Haakon quits his contree,
Crosses oer the Romsdalsfiord,
At Tromso’s bomb’d-out harbour quay
Hustl’d quickly aboard…
Surrounded by London’s fail’d strategum,
Troops cold & damp who lost him a kingdom.
An eagle dis across the day
Watching destroyers lurch
Beyond the bay, subdued & grey,
The skies became a perch,
A lofty throne from which all Norway felt it’s keen gaze search.
Galdho Peak
May 3rd
1940
Lancashire’s Finest
And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,
Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks,
Reading the Sunday papers – I saw a fox
Alun Lewis
On Belgium’s border barrack’d the East Lancs,
The one word whisper’d in the mess was, “when?”
Amidst the chassis of Matilda tanks,
Captain Andrews reviews his tawny men;
Such hardy bunch
From Pendle’s rugged vale,
When coming to the crunch he knew his lads wunt fail.
Picking their spades up after tea,
Some small subsidence to mend,
Tom Sumner swivels to Billy,
His baby-faced schoolboy friend,
“All this diggin’ is plain silly,
These lines we shan’t defend,
As soon as Gerry turns himself hostile
We’ll leave these bloody trenches for the Dyle!”
They dug awhile & watch’d the sun
Conclude ephemeral,
The digging done, jigging his gun,
Tommy foresaw battle,
“There’s summat funny goin’ on… t’night… I sense trouble.”
St Amand-les-Eux
May 9th
1940
Teutonica
The moon’s rays shiver in the branches.
Forest dark. Silence. Dug-outs.
How wonderful May nights are !
Georgii Suvorov
Racist nations face the decadent West!
Spermatic as the coming of the Spring,
When leafy woods are at their loveliest,
& bowers vibrate with the blossoming,
When golden streams
Sol sends set on the scene,
When gorgeous glinting beams rebound off each machine.
Hitler boards the Amerika,
Under stars he trundles west,
Stirring strains of his dear Wagner
Lull him to a good hours rest,
Whirrs time by… train reaches bunker,
His bomb-proof Felsennest…
Praying before purpuric bloodshed starts,
“O God of Battles steel my soldier’s hearts!”
Facing the tranquil occident,
Rommel reclines with wines,
Cool, calm, content; his regiment
Should thunder thro’ the lines,
Flicking thro’ Sun Tzu, Von Clauswic & Charles DeGaulle’s opines.
Germany
May 9th
1940
Edge of War
This age her whole loveliness maul’d
batter’d & barren from a six year’s bout
so trod & torn, grossness itself defiled
RP Blackmur
Herr Hitler glances nervous at his wrist,
He counted only two hours ’til sunrise,
Ushers in his meteorologist,
“I promise you a week of clear blue skies!”
O happy plan!
The gods smil’d on his plot,
He gives the weatherman a medal on the spot!
Syphilitic abhorrancy
Of imperial desires,
Fuell’d constant by fate’s buoyancy
Oer dreams of epic empires,
Guided by strange clairvoyancy
A single man inspires
World history; its res gestae, whose thought
As truth or falsehood, over now, fierce fought.
Stepping out to view the passage
Of all-auroral dawn,
Sky-blue blank page, a brand new age
Was born this coming morn –
Forever & eternally this day shall be his own.
Bad Münstereifel
May 10th
1940
Mumble Words 