(AA) Canto 37: Titans
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It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it
Robert E. Lee
Stretching Point
God of our fathers, what is man!
That thou towards him with hand so various…
Temper’st thy providence through his short cause
John Milton
Monty’s patience has come to juicy fruit
A well-nourish’d plum swelling on the stem
That fully pluck’d attacking follows suit,
“Kill the Germans wherever you find them!”
None to the wise,
Der Fuhrer’s fav’rite son
Receives his precious prize, the field marshal’s baton!
News breaks, by condor scurries back,
His beleaguer’d Afrikans
Batter’d, attack after attack
Bombards the Devils Gardens,
Thro’ hard-hack’d gaps the British stack,
Th’impervious shermans –
Days & nights & days the tussle flosses,
But Hitler can’t replace Rommel’s losses.
Dam bursts about his last panzers,
Oil starving in the sand,
No more chances, backwards glances
Gazed hopeful for Deutschland –
Such things we ordinary mortals hardly understand.
Egypt
November 2nd
1942
Secret Landing
March to the battle-field,
The foe is now before us ;
Each heart is freedom’s shield
B.E. O’Meara
Tho’ well & good, youth craves not life’s dull calm
In lone felucca, oozing sardine stench
Went Aimee Gardner, Odette from the farms
Of Quimper, now, returns to help the French
Get rid of those
Who dare to act a king
Where Liberty still grows, tho’ with a broken wing
They slipp’d into a silent bay
Splintering Riviera
Into a dinghy heav’d their way
Francois, Hugh, Jack & Sarah
With Aimee, who, in her own way
Never look’d so fairer
The crimson of adventure in her veins
Upon the rising tide she beach obtains
Whose fresh, soft footsteps sunk in sand
Faded, wash’d by waters,
Rushing to land, band after band
Of white surf, her daughters
Forgotten both, thoughts focus’d all on what our train’s taught us…
Cote D’Azore
Nov 2nd
1942
El Alamein
When the bullets came in a hail,
bubbling up in the bare sand,
he remembered Inverkeithing
Sorley Maclean
Stiff-borne by dreams from his fade-worn Fuhrer,
Fraught by an all-expectant Germany,
Ill on the air of the lion-pelt Delta,
The Pyramids in immediacy;
Rommel orders
His neurasthenic men,
“Boys, rev up the panzers, advance them once again.”
Droving North of the Quattara,
These iron-clad caravans
Rode the ridge Alem el Halfa
To the Somuan Shermans,
Hanging tough – from shabby shelter
Shells titubated plans;
He paus’d, the pale moon growing paler still,
Up from the south warm sandstorms shriek & shrill.
Dust settles on a dead terrain,
Enmein’d with armour’d hulk,
Glancing in pain, long lists of slain,
“A tanker has been sunk…”
He took the news heart-sighing, “Call it off!” & left to sulk.
Jabel Kalakh
November 3rd
1942
Into Action
When or where did the ancient world, or ours,
Ever see such lively, ever feel such pure
Light coming out of dark ink
Giambattista Marino
Old masters torn from walls, from old chateaux
To humble huts, invisible hatred
Awaits the reawakening, a cause
Not unforesaken, Amy breaks the bread;
A jug of wine
Sunlight clips the table,
“How are you!” “I’m quite fine…” “My name’s Peter Churchill,”
But here I’m Gaston…” ‘quite pretty,’
Thought he, as she smooth’d lipstick
Oer kissable lips, chemistry
Tingles both… “Listen, the trick
Is act with naturality,”
He gave his fringe a flick,
“From one’s common occurrences transcend,
On tiny details many lives depend.”
The vassal farce of Vichy France
Dissolves that very day
All sides advance in arrogance
The dirty Wehrmacht grey,
“Things might turn out tad tougher now…” smil’d Peter, “you don’t say.”
Cannes
Nov 11th
1943
Problem Solvers
The worst kind of infortune is this, –
A man that hath been in prosperitie,
And it remember whan it passed is
Geoffrey Chaucer
Sinking neath the weight of this fresh burden,
Fork pois’d, flicking thro this fatal cable,
Sate Hitler, that staunch vegetarian,
No vulgar corpse ever graced his table;
He starts to shake,
Meal squashes to the floor
With footsteps in a quake stamps shrieking more & more.
“Get me Von Paulus on the phone!”
“Fuhrer, we are surrounded!”
“You must stay in that battlezone,
DO NOT BREAK OUT!” astounded,
That Field-Marshall despairs did moan
As his heart’s hopes flounder’d,
“But tell me how my men shall be supplied?”
“By flights of Luftwaffe,” Goering replied.
“Then that is settl’d,” Hitler spake,
Trusting his winner’s sense,
“It’s make or break, don’t fudge or flake,
Conducting the defence,
Move in & hold the city, a relief I’ll send thee hence.”
Wolf’s Lair
November 22nd
1942
Breaking Point
The great Soviet people in a headlong rush
of fiery lave will wipe out the fascist gang.
Wipe them out ! And leave no traces
Boris Shmidt
The River Don, held by Romanians,
Precious protectors of supply’s long lines,
Whose ranks beef’d up by brash Hungarians,
Content to keep out cold with warming wines
& cups of schnapps…
As falls the snowy chrome,
Thoughts frozen under caps, still paintings of a home.
Blustering blizzards start the day
As over the ice floes pitch
Arm’d Russians & their countersway
Twyx stark Serafimovic
& Kletskaya’s russet clay,
Above each Donside ditch
Soldiers appear in an avenging surge
Those silhouetted angels on the verge.
Like gas explosion from a mine
These modern Cossacks spread
Their bulging lines of battle, pine
Fresh widows for the dead
In Bucharest & Budapest, on corpses crows well fed.
Eurasia
November 19th
1942
Nuclear Advent
Marble walls of palaces,
Iron bars of dungeons,
You break through them all
Alter Esselin
Einstein has warn’d Rooseveldt directly,
“The unspeakable fury of the Bomb,”
A project given top priority,
Harnessing the power of the atom;
“No better man
Our vision to protect
Let Oppenheimer man the Manhattan Project.”
He led them to Los Alamos
Transfiguring the future
Fastidious, the uberboss
Of this nuclear sutra
Up flicks a coin upon a toss,
Chancing fate as Teucer
Led from Crete his fleet of Proto-Trojans
Despis’d, denied, by the theologians.
The coin spins upwards on a rise,
Tis simple heads or tails,
To dream, devise, actualise,
Harness the murd’rous gales
Even, perhaps, oblivion if calculation fails.
Chicago
November
1942
Perversions
Who breathe only when allowed
Who talk only when allowed
Who rest only when allowed
Elizabeth L. A. Kamara
Three schweinerei with nothing else to do
Kidnap three sisters skipping down the street
Dresses rip-torn at Gestapo HQ,
Cesspool where evils deeds & demons meet;
The time & place
Recall as World War Two,
Whose bastard Master Race like madness prosper’d thro.
Naked but for his boots & cap,
The Obersturmbannfuhrer
Slams down her strugglings on his lap,
& down her throat pour’d vodka,
Heard all the while the SLAP-SLAP-SLAP
Of thighs, youngest sister
Weeping as she was raped, while the older
Fending off every fondle, grows bolder
To kick & scratch, she bit & claw’d,
Like kitten’d alleycat,
By gunbutt floor’d, the law restor’d
“We’ll have no more of that,”
The Obersturmbannfuhrer hiss’d while spinning off his hat.
Brussels
November
1942
Counter Attack!
I am not strong, no soldier, no hero,
but if I look back, behind me is 1942,
behind me Stalingrad.
Galina Nikolaeva
How brutal when two granite wills collide,
Men kick’d to death defending an ideal,
The Red Army has trawl’d the nation wide
For fodder to feed into Hades’ wheel;
Adolf Hitler
Remains, tho’ devil’s kin,
Pettiest dictator in the times of Stalin.
As winter gales pile up the snow
Still struggle on the soldiers,
Half-frozen far below zero –
Von Paulus, thro’ field-glasses,
Views flares; a sent up, signal glow,
By vital rescuers –
“Achtung!” across the Wehrmacht’s flimsy flanks –
Roar lethal rows, lextalionic tanks!
As PANIC acquires grave station
Spreading her pungent breeze –
Chain reaction, six-months gains gone,
World-conqueror far flees,
But for the Sixth, that wounded Knight, trapp’d on its bleeding knees.
Stalingrad
December 22nd
1942
Mumble Words 