War dead

I have mentioned that one of my successes-of-intuition (I call it that, but I feel it within me more as a liberating triumph) was to drive to Mississippi as a reaction/personal solution to 9/11. There my bearings were my own, in the dizzying delight that comes from finding oneself in a place where no one knows your name (Shamrock Texas, Mount Tamalpais, the second deck of an RER train leaving Paris) and I could breathe the air of Clarksdale and Strayhorn, Savage, Sarah, Sledge, Falcon, Darling, Jackson, Tupelo, Hattiesburg, and Greenville indifferent to the ways in which the state was declared repulsive by outlanders, and immune to the ways in which the Civil War was wrung bloodless with sentimentality.

In the Great War, The Battle of Verdun resulted in a quarter-million deaths, with perhaps another 200,000 “missing.” At The Battle of the Somme, also in 1916, on the first day, 19,000 British soldiers were killed. The Battle cost well over 300,000 British German and French lives. There were three engagements at Ypres, a small Belgian town near the coast, the third of which included the Battle of Passchendaele; 600,000 men died.
There are today 137 British cemeteries in the Ypres vicinity.
Beyond these interments, 90,000 bodies were never found.

Ezra Cornell’s brother was a Union soldier. I visited the ravine in Vicksburg he had described. Earlier, in Ithaca, he had fished in the gorges that formed the southern and northern boundaries of his brother’s farm, that is to say, Cornell University, where, one hundred years later, Pynchon, Farina, and Nabokov acted out theatrical exuberances or chased butterflies.

Daniel wrote:
"I received my wound on the 19th of May at the first charge on the works in the rear of Vicksburg, our Brigade charged on what was called Fort Hill. my position was colour bearer and I had to go down a small ravine which was in the hillside. I was struck directly under and about 3/4 of an inch from my left eye --I did not fall, nor did the colours go down. I then went and lay down behind a fallen tree expecting to bleed to death. the ball had apparently struck the limb of a tree and was comeing diagonaly down as it passed through my hat rim over my left temple, it passed through the roof of my mouth cutting an ugly gash on the inside of my right cheek and lodged at the angle of my jaw shattering it severely."

In addition to Thoreau's "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them" the thousands of war dead - boys, mostly, inexperienced, never in love, stillborn, and jetsam - lead to the inevitable conclusion that some persons require long lives to tell their whole story, but many hundreds of thousands of them dying young had no story or song at all, and long life would only have rewritten many times over their epitaph as a neglected wage-slave and brute, loved by no one save their family, which in many cases, was in name only.

Excerpt 2: THE BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BRIFFAULT

Robert Stephen Briffault (1876-1948), British anthropologist and novelist, was born in London and educated privately in Florence, Italy. He later studied medicine at the University of London. After World War I, Briffault began to establish his reputation as an anthropologist. His most notable anthropological work is The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions (1927), a controversial attempt to prove that all simply structured cultures are basically matriarchal. Briffault's other anthropological writings include The Making of Humanity (1919; revised, Rational Evolution, 1930) and Sin and Sex (1931).
Robert Briffault is also the author of The Decline and Fall of the British Empire; Breakdown: The Collapse of Traditional Civilization; Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions; Europa: The Days of Ignorance (novel); Europa in Limbo (novel); Marriage Past and Present; and Troubadors.
Briffault served as a physician at Gallipoli and Passchendaele (Ypres 3rd)

THE BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BRIFFAULT is an iambic dramatic radio play by the current editor of Ulysses' Friezes.
An excerpt:

O! might Callisto pine, and ever hight the microline!
the sheets are washed and washed again, once again, and once again,
to enwrap displacèd gores, misshapen skins,
the flaming rags and bones,
the farting heart which flat plops still,
while other boys wait for the dawning of dawn’s first light,
by which means of transport this one will perish and this one will see supper,
and this one will only know of living throbbing and grief
and the surest grasp of absent clemency,
three sorts of souls afried and poached,
and slurried off the table meal.

The songs came up from Spain,
in which crucible of contested courts of love
black gentlemen pled to sing of blackbirds and blooms,
the merry delights of unsophisticated gathering,
drinking, singing, and joys unnamed.
Night for days, festal feast of visions, bread and wine,
a russeted claret, the croissant,
crescented barged across the Mediterranean Sea.
Now the season leans to dimming,
and the leaves scape to earth;
the slanted sun steals light from sported vespers,
gloom hushes birdsong song and whistles,
we can but rest,
we can but convalesce,
we can but wake to snowy bullets raining.
We muse in gape and stupor,
that they have arms enough and man for drawing to the maelstrom,
for falling in the tempest,
and for laying out the casks of bleaching ire,
wrapped embalming,
bitt’rest blood.

excerpt from THE BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BRIFFAULT

Robert Stephen Briffault (1876-1948), British anthropologist and novelist, was born in London and educated privately in Florence, Italy. He later studied medicine at the University of London. After World War I, Briffault began to establish his reputation as an anthropologist. His most notable anthropological work is The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions (1927), a controversial attempt to prove that all simply structured cultures are basically matriarchal. Briffault's other anthropological writings include The Making of Humanity (1919; revised, Rational Evolution, 1930) and Sin and Sex (1931).
Robert Briffault is also the author of The Decline and Fall of the British Empire; Breakdown: The Collapse of Traditional Civilization; Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions; Europa: The Days of Ignorance (novel); Europa in Limbo (novel); Marriage Past and Present; and Troubadors.

THE BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BRIFFAULT is an iambic dramatic radio play by the current editor of Ulysses' Friezes.
An excerpt:

They had not known death had undone so many.
A marling hook, a rusted spike held pike aloft,
brandished threats for skyward nothing for no men.
How ached the hollow stares cast over flandrin champs,
rods of faces, leagues of worms and rats clutching talis amulets sweat-close,
papers in the muddy brook,
and a word ist spake,
fogged backwards and downwards folded curled,
and lost with skin, lost with eyes, lost with blood will tell,
blood to sing and chant and wail,
how ached the fevers and the dreams,
as Martin called out a hail of supplication,
and knew not dawn from blackest nighttime clots of clay
leavened with the stab’s pour, the rich red draught of breath and breathing,
ye na hafter, childe, there is work to do.

Broken souls in the wrappings screamed,
bloods rushed to lakes, made a mixture rich and gristled,
streaked with bile and renal paste,
then baked by lightning rain and storm,
some afterthought of Judas born,
a modern spirit swells and mashes down the dream of picnics,
cruelly stacks the boys like logs,
bomb-sawed,
swaddled in briny kerosene,
left to brighten and enrich the soil of Ypres,
a long-forgotten stagecraft of primal hells and ever-unpaid debts.

This accident of narcissistic, futile fancy
writ cross flatlands reaching towards the sea,
desert, jungle, woodland, steppe and Transvaal, forest, scapeful cities of the plain;
had not thought but to look up and see the arrows seeking flesh,
had not thought to lay Willie on the charted tables,
or swill his blood from glass bowls.
Threw they spears and hammers, bolts and axes,
swords and daggers, mace and cannon,
lance and pike; pikestaffs, spears, arrows:
throats burst like fountains:
this was the sport of eastern frontmen and western frontmen;
who had milked cows,
and carpentered bridges,
and bartered grapes,
and who had simply minèd other ores.

Rosebushes planted like cemetery crosses in a chosen grove or hillside pierced the ground;
stay fast the dug-men, hold close the walls,
step twelve inches fling the dagger,
keep your own, sump of Manchester, cess of London.
Ripped to pieces by artillery,
shredded like the lamb; mown from grass to chest,
pierced by bullets, sprayed to arching mist gristle red and stringy,
by mortar called home directly true and callous,
in dawnlight Jack and John,
a pink rainbow for your thousand dreams.

Three years here, four seasons thrice.
Only minor improvements in military science improved the campaigning.
British tanks crushed hundreds of German installations,
and provided important cover for French and ANZAC, Brit advances.
Strategic Command ruled these enhancements only marginally effective,
and consequently, efforts were returned in full to the tactic of the gruesome trench stalemate
that had gained nothing and nothing and nothing.

Fetishes and talismen, amulets, and photographs
were assembled in bags for sure return or were lost to grave’s mud,
or the conflagration of ignition.
Casualties displayed themselves as outrageous spectacle:
faces burned off, feet and hands,
all the mash of abandon and pity;
mad slashes through the trunk, scooping gouges scattered cuts.
He had waited every minute for the moment,
and when the moment came, he was unaware of time passing
or the edgèd danger askulk.
Some slime had fastened onto his thigh, and his boot was drying cold within,
Rob is asking for...he didn’t hear couldn’t make it out.
Without surcease, ever standing hard by the holes, palm on the wall unwakened,
ever starved for the claiming attestation,
the clamoring for testimony,
fine e’en a word of grace,
the true grains fired and panned for fest,
visioning a danse chere cheer a danse of murrayed grem,
bestirs a fashion of Solent bread,
the lessening shore and the dimming sun betrothed.

Riven souls in the bandages cried,
torrents of mud slurry and bloods coursed as they would,
forgiven their flooding of the deltas,
merged as by an alchemist’s false formule.
Bereft new oversouls dark in the buttered wounds wept,
unmercied ‘pon the scarrèd lands of Flanders rent and fired with scabrous tears,
and men were dried only in the rains’ feeble counterpane itself.