Charles River Review

Provincial town, gray day, a taste of iron

In the air. I ask directions in a pharmacy

Selling soap, candy bars, People magazine in French,

Diet pills and other common things.

I drive;

On the tourist road to storied places

Heavy rain attacks, as often

In this Meuse country (so the natives say).

I recognize the scene

From photographs in histories:

Fort Douamont,

Museum, riddle, tomb.

Upon the glacis, gently sloping killing field,

Grass has grown in eighty-seven years;

Yet easy even now to see

The shell-scarred earth beneath,

Scars of wounds the grass can shield

But never heal.

In the damp bowels of the fort, I walk;

Tunnels arch to dim distance,

Cruel air bites, chills, naked bulbs

Glow pallid, wan above my head, dirty water

Seeps on rust-stained walls, a ghost of blood

To trickle down the concrete floor in gutters.

I make no echoes.

I wonder on the men behind the names

Of Frenchman, German, on the mildewed wall,

Whom they cursed or prayed to as they died,

Whom they loved, whom they left to mourn…

Unease trembles in these halls, my throat is tight.

If I take another step

Into this grim labyrinth

I will be lost; I make retreat.

The rain at least is clean, and I must breathe.

I drive;

There the Ossuary, last unhomely home

To many random tens of thousands unnamed bones.

At night (I’ve read) a great white light above the massive pile

Probes the unquiet silence restlessly—

For consolation, explanation never to be found?

I drive;

More signs, a plaque, a village utterly destroyed,

The single fragment left: A shard of chapel bell.

I drive again; a granite block marks a troop of poilus buried by the shells,

Aligned with bayonets erect, at the ready in this trench

For near a century.

And then I break. Here there is too much

For me; I am burdened by a weight

I cannot see, larger, larger than

This stone, this sanctified obscenity.

Everywhere I look the shelled ground writhes,

Like blasted billows on a frozen sea—

What response could be? Poems? Hymns

Of praise to battle gods? Elegies

To souls anonymous? I cannot compass

Hundred thousands maimed, bodies ground

To dust by blind barrage, blast-vaporized,

Gassed, in rain-filled shell holes drowned,

Or vanished in the suck of mud, or living—

Could you call it that?—condemned to dream

Of steaming viscera in garlands on

The shattered trees, the fouled remains of what

In other days had been whole human beings.

Tired, I have no words to mourn what

Men inflicted,

Men endured, how

Men submitted to the flail of war, implacable

Upon this patch of tortured land

For nothing gained, and still no one can tell us why

Twenty-thousand score or more might die

Unpersoned, in the modern way.

I wish it all undone, this maleficent fancy of a God deranged,

But that is not to be.

It is. It is no fantasy.

The tumor nourished in this place

Still befouls the world, entwines

The lives of myriads who have never heard

The doleful word

“Verdun.”

I, too, was wounded here. And you.

I drive away, past graveyards sown by greater wars.

The gentle dusk is rising in the shallow vales.

Passing of the villages is marked

By toll of vesper-bells,

Vestiges of fire dying,

In a sad twilight.

An endless question hovers in the metalled air

Beneath the steel-cold steady stars, that do not care.