![]() May morning, rustle of leaves, sunshine, tranquility. From the forest the sweet call of cuckoos and wood pigeons. air sweet with exhalations from the heavy, dew drenched grass. The men would venture out into a beautiful spring that was replacing a black and white winter. It could be heard at varying distances and degrees of thunder, and it could be seen in the acrobatics of the airplanes in the sky. In the spring, the violence of the fight rose along his portion of the line. The landscape begins to grow visible, the black spots come out in all their innocuous detail.” The daytime sentries arrive and the nighttime sentry returns to safe harbour for a bit of coffee or a bit of wine with sugar, or a measure of sweet rum to acquire “in its fullness of sensual delight the bliss of falling to sleep.” Not long after the green glow of dawn mantles over the east. In the last hours of darkness, amid the summer constellations just beginning to appear, the beautiful planet rises, marvellous, resplendent. The end of the ordeal was “heralded now by the morning star. In the winter, these nights were 14 hours long, and there was no lasting relief from the cold. One could merely suspect that he had heard something of danger, and the sound of broken twig could startle the beat of his heart. Tree trunks could become human forms and dark spots could seem to move. Full darkness, however, was a source of hallucinations. When the night was favoured with the light of the moon or the stars, the sentry could have at least some small sense of what was out there. For the sentinel, musings about the cosmos gave way to a sense of “a grave danger, a terrible responsibility.” The danger was felt most at the petit poste, the most advanced guard against the enemy. The night was a time for patrols hidden in the darkness. Alone under the stars, war in its cosmic rather than its moral aspect reveals itself to him.” The night sentry prayed for the dawn, thus increasing the brevity of his youth, “and the sense of its vanishing opportunities for happiness plagues his heart with a poignancy of regret that at times becomes almost intolerable. Memories of the best of his life were bittersweet, perhaps never to be revisited. In this time of renewal the young soldier had to think of his possible death. THE WINTER WAS over, but all the fruits of spring could be destroyed – literally and poetically – by the shells of war. In the following passage from Chris Dickon’s A Rendezvous with Death: Alan Seeger in Poetry, at War the author lets us join his literary protagonist at the ramparts of No Man’s Land at sunrise. His work was seen, in part, as an appeal to America to enter the war on the side of France. In the spring of 1915, he published an essay in the fledgling progressive magazine The New Republic. ![]() Late in 1914, Seeger began to provide occasional reports from the trenches of France to the New York newspaper The Sun. The 26-year-old Harvard graduate believed that conflict was a natural state of man, though he wished to fight like a chivalrous knight and lamented modernity’s war of machines. The American poet Alan Seeger joined the French Foreign Legion at the start of the war, and would spend nearly a year on the line at Craonnelle, beneath the Chemin des Dames. Unable to break the stalemate, the armies essentially dug downward into the ground, creating a trench line that would last until the final summer of the war. Chris Dickon’s A Rendezvous with Death: Alan Seeger in Poetry, at War. The danger was felt most at the petit poste, the most advanced guard against the enemy.”įor nearly the entire First World War, the opposing sides on the Western Front faced each other along a curving line of fortifications from France’s frontier with Switzerland north through Soissons, Albert, Arras and Ypres, Belgium to the North Sea coast near Ostend. (Image source: WikiCommons) “The night was a time for patrols hidden in the darkness. His poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” which spoke to the grim fatalism shared by many First World War soldiers, was published posthumously. The American poet Alan Seeger volunteered to fight in the French Army in 1914.
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