A photo postcard of a German trench view of barbed wire and a dead patrol. Dated February 22, 1916, and field postmarked the next day, the message is from a soldier to his uncle, and reads in part, 'yesterday we heard that 4 fortresses of Verdun were taken. This have been a lot of shooting . . . Maybe this is the end of Verdun and peace will come soon . . . the barbed wire on the other side of the card is French. You can see dead patrols . . .' (Translation from the German courtesy Thomas Faust.) Evidently the author safely reached the French trench line.

Reverse:

France Feb 22 1916 - Dear Uncle, yesterday we have heard that 4 fortresses of Verdun were taken. This have been a lot of shooting ... Maybe this is the end of Verdun and peace will come soon ... the barbed wire on the other side of the card is French. You can see dead patrols ... (Translation from the German courtesy Thomas Faust (Ebay's Urfaust).)

Other views: Larger, Larger, Back

Tuesday, April 3, 1917

"God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men,

Whose pious poetry blossoms on your graves

As soon as you are in them, nurtured up

By the salt of your corruption, and the tears

Of mothers, local vicars, college deans,

And flanked by prefaces and photographs

From all your minor poet friends — the fools —

Who paint their sentimental elegies

Where sure, no angel treads; and, living, share

The dead's brief immortality."

Quotation Context

Beginning of the poem 'God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men!' by British officer Arthur Graeme West of the 6th Oxford & Bucks Light Infantry, killed by a sniper April 3, 1917 in Bapaume, France. West loathed the kind of poetry that glorified the war and its ugly death. In 'The Night Patrol,' for example, men mark their route to the German wire by committing to memory the bodies they encounter as they crawl along, and the stench off them, so these will bring them safely back to their own line and a ration of rum.

Source

The Lost Voices of World War I, An International Anthology of Writers, Poets and Playwrights by Tim Cross, page 69, copyright © 1989 by The University of Iowa, publisher: University of Iowa Press, publication date: 1989

Tags

1917-04-03, 1917, April, poem, barbed wire dead