Poems by Alan Seeger Part 4

A report appeared in the American newspapers that he had been killed in the battle of Champagne. On learning of it, he wrote to his mother:

I am 'navre' to think of your having suffered so.

I should have arranged to cable after the attack, had I known that any such absurd rumours had been started. Here one has a wholesome notion of the unimportance of the individual.

It needs an effort of imagination to conceive of its making any particular difference to anyone or anything if one goes under.

So many better men have gone, and yet the world rolls on just the same.

After Champagne, his regiment pa.s.sed to the rear and did not return to the front until May 1916. On February 1st he writes: "I am in hospital for the first time, not for a wound, unfortunately, but for sickness."

Hitherto his health, since he joined the army, had been superb.

As a youth he had never been robust; but the soldier's life suited him to perfection, and all remnants of any mischief left behind by the illness of his childhood seemed to have vanished.

It was now a sharp attack of bronchitis that sent him to hospital.

On his recovery he obtained two months 'conge de convalescence', part of which he spent at Biarritz and part in Paris. About this time, much to his satisfaction, he once more came into the possession of "Juvenilia". On April 13th he wrote to his mother:

Did I tell you that the Emba.s.sy have managed to get my M.S. for me?

It was very interesting to re-read this work, which I had almost forgotten.

I found much that was good in it, but much that was juvenile too, and am not so anxious to publish it as it stands. I shall probably make extracts from it and join it with what I have done since.

I shall go back to the front on the first of May without regrets.

These visits to the rear only confirm me in my conviction that the work up there on the front is so far the most interesting work a man can be doing at this moment, that nothing else counts in comparison.

On May 13th he wrote to his "marraine", Mrs. Weeks: "The chateau in the grounds of which we are barracked, has a most beautiful name -- Bellinglise. Isn't it pretty? I shall have to write a sonnet to enclose it, as a ring is made express for a jewel. It is a wonderful old seventeenth-century manor, surrounded by a lordly estate.

What is that exquisite stanza in 'Maud' about 'in the evening through the lilacs (or laurels) of the old manorial home'?*

Look it up and send it to me." Ten days later he wrote to the same lady:

* He was doubtless thinking of this:

Alas for her that met me, That heard me softly call, Came glimmering thro' the laurels In the quiet evenfall, In the garden by the turrets Of the old manorial hall.

The week in the trenches was a week of the most beautiful weather. . . .

These days were saddened by the death of poor Colette in the bombardment, and by the suffering of his brother who has now returned after the burial.

They were marked on the other hand by two afternoons of rather memorable emotion. Exasperated by the inactivity of the sector here, and tempted by danger, I stole off twice after guard, and made a patrol all by myself through the wood paths and trails between the lines. In the front of these, at a crossing of paths not far from one of our posts, I found a burnt rocket-stick planted in the ground, and a sc.r.a.p of paper stuck in the top, placed there by the boches to guide their little mischief-making parties when they come to visit us in the night. The sc.r.a.p of paper was nothing else than a bit of the 'Berliner Tageblatt'.

This seemed so interesting to me that I reported it to the captain, though my going out alone this way is a thing strictly forbidden.

He was very decent about it though, and seemed really interested in the information. Yesterday afternoon I repeated this exploit, following another trail, and I went so far that I came clear up to the German barbed wire, where I left a card with my name.

It was very thrilling work, "courting destruction with taunts, with invitations" as Whitman would say. I have never been in a sector like this, where patrols could be made in daylight.

Here the deep forest permits it. It also greatly facilitates ambushes, for one must keep to the paths, owing to the underbrush.

I and a few others are going to try to get permission to go out on 'patrouilles d'embuscade' and bring in some live prisoners.

It would be quite an extraordinary feat if we could pull it off.

In our present existence it is the only way I can think of to get the Croix de Guerre. And to be worthy of my marraine I think that I ought to have the Croix de Guerre.

He had hoped to have been in Paris on Decoration Day, May 30th, to read, before the statue of Lafayette and Was.h.i.+ngton, the "Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France", which he had written at the request of a Committee of American residents; but his "permission" unfortunately did not arrive in time. Completed in two days, during which he was engaged in the hardest sort of labour in the trenches, this Ode is certainly the crown of the poet's achievement.

It is entirely admirable, entirely adequate to the historic occasion.

If the war has produced a n.o.bler utterance, it has not come my way.

On June 24th, he again wrote, giving an account of a march, which was "without exception the hardest he had ever made" -- "20 kilometers through the blazing sun and in a cloud of dust.

Something around 30 kilograms on the back. About 50 per cent dropped by the way. By making a supreme effort, I managed to get in at the finish, with the fifteen men that were all that was left of the section."

He now knew that the great offensive was imminent. "The situation,"

he wrote, "is most interesting and exciting, but I am not at liberty to say anything about it. My greatest preoccupation now is whether this affair is coming off before or after the 4th of July.

The indications are that it is going to break very soon.

In that case nothing doing in the way of permission.

But I still have hopes of getting in."

His hopes of getting to Paris were frustrated, as were all his other hopes save one--the hope of

That rare privilege of dying well.

On July 1st, the great advance began. At six in the evening of July 4th, the Legion was ordered to clear the enemy out of the village of Belloy-en-Santerre. Alan Seeger advanced in the first rush, and his squad was enfiladed by the fire of six German machine guns, concealed in a hollow way. Most of them went down, and Alan among them -- wounded in several places. But the following waves of attack were more fortunate. As his comrades came up to him, Alan cheered them on; and as they left him behind, they heard him singing a marching-song in English: --

Accents of ours were in the fierce melee.

They took the village, they drove the invaders out; but for some reason unknown--perhaps a very good one -- the battlefield was left unvisited that night. Next morning, Alan Seeger lay dead.

There is little to add. He wrote his own best epitaph in the "Ode": --

And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires, When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound, And on the tangled wires The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops, Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers: -- Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops, Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours.

His death was briefly noticed in one or two French papers.

The 'Matin' published a translation of part of the poem, "Champagne, 1914-15", and remarked that "Cyrano de Bergerac would have signed it."

But France had no time, even if she had had the knowledge, to realize the greatness of the sacrifice that had been made for her.

That will come later. One day France will know that this una.s.suming soldier of the Legion,

Who, not unmindful of the antique debt, Came back the generous path of Lafayette,

was one whom even she may be proud to have reckoned among her defenders.

The "Last Poems" speak for themselves. They contain lines which he would doubtless have remodelled had he lived to review them in tranquillity -- perhaps one or two pieces, sprung from a momentary mood, which, on reflection he would have rejected.* But they not only show a great advance on his earlier work: they rank high, or I am much mistaken, among the hitherto not very numerous poems in the English language produced, not in mere memory or imagination of war, but in its actual stress and under its haunting menace.

* Neither in the "Juvenilia" nor in the "Last Poems"

has anything been suppressed that he himself ever thought of publis.h.i.+ng.

Indeed nothing at all has been omitted, except two early poems on which he had written "These are worthless."